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How Older Games Showed Me Whats Wrong With Modern Gaming
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this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2024
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This video really activates the Morrowind cells in my brain haha.
Wish it was longer, though. I could listen to discussions about older games all day. Some days I do lol. I agree with the points but it’s too bad the video doesn’t get real gritty with the details (tech limitations, development details, different visions/expectations, etc.) Although obviously it wasn’t trying to be that kind of video.
Now to hijack this reply for my own discussion lol:
He brings up Assassin’s Creed a bunch, which reminds me that I’ve wanted to do an effort post on the series’s inspirations and how Ubisoft both helped and squandered its potential.
The very first Assassin’s Creed game takes heavy influence from the 1938 Slovenian/Italian novel Alamut (which I’ve yet to read). It’s kind of like the novel The Crucible, which uses a historical narrative (in this case, the story of Hasan-i Sabbah and the Hashshashin) to tell a meta-narrative about anti-fascist movements in Italy that opposed Benito Mussolini.
The original idea of the first game seemed to apply some of these concepts of radical opposition of fascist control to a story about modern day Assassins that are opposed to the capitalist control over the modern world.
Obviously, we now get, well, Assassin’s Creed as it is today. I’ve been meaning to do some research because I’m really curious. I want to do a leftist reading of the first couple of games, plus the novel and other inspirations.
Assassin's creed was never good
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Yeah but counterpoint: the Assassin aesthetic was the only thing that kept the 2007-2013 military bro shooters at bay. Plus social stealth is a genre that really needs to come back because I love stealth games.
Boy, shouldn't we be so thankful that Assassin's Creed "kept the bro shooters at bay" so that Ubisoft could refine the vomitous open-world sandbox slop in time so that the industry could pivot to that after Far Cry became massive. As far as games that were an antidote to modern military shooters, I'd have picked the Bioshock games, Saint's Row or Stalker myself.
Assassins Creed has only ever come close to being a stealth game with Unity, which is really weird. That's the closest the series ever got to the Hitman-style closed playground though, plus the climbing mechanics actually sort of worked. I am forever baffled that Unity is the only good one
The difference is that Bioshock, Saint's Row, and Stalker are all actually good games.
Ubisoft has no intention of churning out anything but hot garbage, so I'd rather my hot garbage look like Assassin's Creed than Tom Clancy. I was busy playing Metal Gear Solid and Ace Combat anyway, so I just liked seeing the cool Assassin coats. Plus I'll take "you fistfight the pope" over "the Russians and Chinese have teamed up to declare war on freedom because they're evil."
Also, Unity is only a decent stealth game imo because it added a crouch button and actually tried to make the level layout promote stealth and hiding. I miss the AC era where they tried to put an emphasis on hiding in crowds and using distractions, even if it was complete dogshit because the games were ass.
Idk, I like Bioshock as a setting and for dunking on Ayn Rand, but as a game it's kind of an offensively poor facsimile of the first System shock =)
They used to make good games though, like I enjoyed the reboot Prince of Persias and all, but Assassin's Creed kind of layed the groundwork for their open world trash era. I'd also rather have a game that looks like Chaos Theory or Double Agent than the first Assassin's Creed's goofy blue filter all over it. AC does at least have better politics than a chud shooter, and I can appreciate some Fuck The Church sentiment.
Crouch was so desperately needed, why did that take them so long? I really liked Unity's big crowds that would panic and disperse, it felt like more of a challenge than just hiring courtesans or monks in AC 1 or 2. I really felt that Unity is the only time they did any of this right, and then they ditched it a year later because lol
nuclear take incoming, defcon 5: assassin's creed 3 was the best in the series and the entire series is pretty ok, like 7/10.
meltdown take contained behind spoiler
assassin's creed 4 was the worst one of the series, the parkour is worse than AC3 for trees and wilderness and every city is like a tiny town with 20 buildings. dual wielding 2 long-ish swords of the same length is stupid, the boats were boring and grindy despite being kinda interesting at first, and despite the fact that the cover shows this you cannot wield both a sword and a flintlock like a real poirate.I didn't finish 3 but it didn't strike me as dramatically different from the others?
And counterpoint: being a pirate is funny. The climbing is worse but it also hadn't ever been good to that point; it was kind of okay in AC1 and it declined in quality over the next few games as it moved toward a "just hold right trigger to climb" philosophy. I understand that climbing needed to change from the Prince of Persia method because that kind of system was designed for linear levels and AC needed open worlds, but they started badly and fucked it up worse lol.
The boats are kind of grindy but I liked them anyway, it was way more interesting than the mandatory side mission bs in the first couple AC games or having to run/horseride across the world to get to it. AC4 was goofy but I was in full support of AC not being its usual dogshit self, tbh.
eh the first assassin's creed was boring as hell. It was not that much more than a tech demo.
I really enjoyed the setting and general vibes of the first Assassin's Creed, but I hated the stupid overarching sci-fi plot, though that criticism goes for the entire series. Drop the Animus, Assassins, Templars and the ancient aliens and just make an anthology of historical games about an Italian man makes it his life's mission to punch the pope or whatever
AC2 does this thing where the guy (I forget his name) actually does some stuff in the real world, and I think if they had paid that off in AC3 by having it set in a future dystopian city it would have worked. That may have originally been the plan too, since AC 2 ends with a scene where you fight mooks in the real world and there's some shit with the apple and the female lead character dies and it's all dramatic.
But I think the Ubisoft execs got cold feet and put the kibosh on anything interesting that might have happened, leading to essentially an entire series that just has to keep recreating the AC 2-based games over and over in slightly different settings. Now they're trapped in limbo, forced to put a modern day plot on every game but unable to do anything interesting with it since that would change the formula and we can't have that.
AC3 did actually have more bits with Desmond Miles, aka the most boring Nolan North character ever. There were even combat sections and I distinctly remember an underwhelming chase sequence where you kill the bearded Templar scientist who was the main villain of the modern day plotline in the Altair and Ezio games.
The female lead didn't die in AC2, but the next game, AC Brotherhood. I seem to recall hearing somewhere that the actress playing her was contracted for 3 games and intended to have a pivotal role in the originally envisioned trilogy, but then AC2 was a huge hit so Ubisoft turned Assassin's Creed into a yearly franchise, starting with the two Ezio spinoffs in between 2 and 3. Her contract was up so they just killed the character off in a filler episode
Oh yeah I 100% agree. I’ve played a little and it’s bland as all hell. But I think the writing and ideas had plenty of potential, whether or not Ubisoft followed up with it lol