Assassin’s Creed 3

The ambition of Assassin’s Creed 3 is both its strength and its Achilles heel. The scope of its world and the number of activities available can certainly impress players, since at one instant they will be bombarding ships in a storm on the high seas and, in the next, they will be hunting foxes with traps in a forest. With so much diversity, it is at least understandable that the developers have been unable to craft such moments with the complexity they deserved.

Finally abandoning the Renaissance aesthetic, the franchise here moves on to the period of the American Revolution. The premise of Assassin’s Creed, after all, has always allowed a huge change of setting. Desmond, the protagonist, uses the Animus machine to relive the memories of his ancestors with the intention of discovering the secrets that they kept. That is, nothing prevents each new title from featuring a new hero in a different period of time. Who is to blame for the franchise having stagnated for three titles in the same character is quite clear: it is Ubisoft itself and its policy of releasing a game per year.

The American Revolution, with all its political battles (“No taxation without representation!“), important figures, armed confrontations, and wasted tea, fits the franchise like a glove. The Assassin’s Creed series has always been about conspiratorial plots, emphasizing an atmosphere of mystery by focusing on the existence of secret societies that manipulate the major events in the history of mankind. Desmond and his ancestor Connor are Assassins, a sect that preaches the appreciation of free will (“Nothing is true, everything is permitted“) and stands for freedom. The Templars, on the other hand, advocate that freedom is an invitation to chaos; that without a strong and rational hand controlling the fate of ordinary people, they would inevitably be manipulated by other smaller forces or go to war.

The main conflict in Connor’s plot is directly related to this opposition of ideologies. He is an Indian who has watched his village being burned by the Templars and so sets out on a journey of revenge through Revolutionary America. He is then converted into an Assassin and begins to interfere in the events that led to the independence of the Thirteen Colonies.

Wisely, the writers do not give in to the temptation of only positioning Connor among the revolutionaries and the Templars alongside the English, which would have created an easily identifiable good and evil. Both societies, in fact, strive for the same end – peace – but are based on distinct ideals. In this scenario, Connor is a considerably different character from his predecessor, the Italian Ezio, who was a charming, passionate man. Ezio’s mission seemed fair, for it really was: his enemies, the Borgia, were horrible people thirsting for power and capable of committing horrible atrocities. In Connor’s case, it is easy to see that it is the circumstances that make him a completely different individual. Unlike Ezio – whose tragedies only struck him when he was practically an adult – Connor is consumed by revenge since he was a child. His enemies are not unidimensional and evil as were the Borgia; on the contrary, they are so reasonable and rational that they make the protagonist look like a religious fanatic who prefers to bring war to the people even when there are better alternatives – all in the name of his beliefs. Connor is an unusual protagonist in the gaming industry not because he is closer to being the villain of the story than a hero, but because he does so in the name of a theoretically noble cause: Connor believes that complete and total freedom is the most primordial right and attacks his enemies with an axe only because they dare think differently.

Assassin’s Creed 3, however, despite having a great story, suffers from serious narrative problems. Connor’s journey is so marked by the major events of the American Revolution that it practically turns him into the Forrest Gump of the era – a comparison that certainly does not fit the tone of the story or the character’s nature. In addition, it is customary to say that very large prologues are detrimental to any story, but when one lasts more than four hours, authorities on the subject no longer call it a prologue but a tumor. The duration of the one present in Assassin’s Creed 3 is absurd: the player will begin the game by following the journey of a mysterious and pragmatic Englishman named Haytham Kenway and will only control the true protagonist when the story of Haytham finally reaches an interesting point (after four hours, which can still be extended for much more if the player is meticulous).

This transition is also easily noticeable in the gameplay department. The beginning with Haytham doesn’t present anything new to the franchise. His missions are uninspired copies of those shown in previous games and take place in a considerably uninteresting environment. Playing the prologue and exploring the wide streets of Boston, outlined by a few small houses and churches, the player will have to reflect if this change of environment was actually harmful to the game, since the Assassin’s Creed always cherished the exploration of the verticality of their environments and, in the case of Boston, such verticality is nowhere to be found.

However, when Connor appears in the narrative as an indigenous boy and the player has the opportunity to climb trees and mountains on the Boston border, observing the fauna and flora of the forests and marshes, as well as hunting animals and ambushing caravans of soldiers, the change is suddenly justified and the exploration becomes fun again. The difference in quality is so noticeable that it is astonishing that the prologue was not completely scrapped during development.

Walking through the canopy and tree branches feels special because the gameplay changes subtly. The layout of the elements that can be used during parkour in the forest is drastically different from the ones used in cities: while the roof of houses is easily visible from a distance, which allows players to prepare their path in advance, the trees are extremely closed together, forcing them to adopt a different approach, based on instinct. Now there are even mountains and rivers blocking the path, demanding improvisation during intense escapes. Modifying the geometric structure of the environment also amplifies the sense of novelty: while the Italian cities were almost completely flat with vertical structures, the Frontier presents thousands of small hills and curvatures in the ground – and it is certainly interesting to note that an evolution of level design that occurred in 2D Mario games twenty years ago is only taking place in one of the most famous franchises in the game industry in its fifth entry.

It is a shame, therefore, to notice that one of Assassin’s Creed’s main mechanics continues to have its potential deterred by the developer’s dogma of “offering too much, simplifying everything.” In other words, the player will cross the entire Frontier and observe its magnificent sights but will do so almost without thinking, holding two buttons and the analog stick.

The combat also continues to be one of the most recurring flaws in the franchise. It is absolutely “broken” in the sense that it is ridiculously easy to kill over four hundred enemies together without taking any damage. Half of the enemy force dies with one block and one counter-attack, and the other half must receive two or three disarming blows to fall to the ground. In fact, the first half would also succumb to this strategy, but doing so would make the fights even more boring. Connor, then, becomes an immortal superhero capable of decimating the entire English army without sweating. The combat has negative implications on the mission design, as players will wonder why they need to bother to quietly invade places and plan ambushes if they can just walk through the front door and kill everyone.

These forced stealth sequences remain extremely problematic since the rules by which they are governed are one of the game’s greatest mysteries. Players will simply not know why certain actions make them be discovered by the enemy while other extremely extravagant ones do not. Besides that, the same action taken under the same circumstances can have different results – something clearly frustrating in any game based on stealth. In a certain mission that Connor needed to kill the crew of a whole ship without being noticed, throwing a guard that was in the edge of the boat in the water sometimes made two guards who were standing with their backs to the protagonist see him, and sometimes not. This lack of certainty about the consequences of your actions is the main crime that a game based on stealth can commit since its mechanics only make sense and work if players can plan ahead or understand why they failed.

Assassin’s Creed 3, however, also decides to stage naval battles. Connor will be able to command vessels on the high seas and approach other ships. The clashes provide an incredible visual spectacle: seeing your crew setting sail and racing across the deck in the middle of a storm, while cannonballs fly overhead is thrilling. The gameplay in these segments is undoubtedly simple: you just have to align the ship with the enemy’s and order your crew to open fire. While this mechanic could have been easily developed by adding more different types of ammunition, for example, the sea battles remain a good diversion.

At the other end of the action is hunting. Connor will be able to hide in shrubs and put baits to lure the animals to the slaughter, plant traps on the ground, hit them from trees, or even kill larger animals, like bears, with quick-time events. There is diversity, but little consequence. Hunting animals, in theory, would generate resources to be used to build new weapons, but since the combat is too easy, players will never need them, making the activity irrelevant.

In the same vein, completing the missions regarding Connor’s farm is also useless since they only unlock more sophisticated equipment to be forged. Recruiting Assassins also becomes an exercise in futility for the same reasons. The combat being broken is a huge problem precisely because of all this: in a snowball effect, it infects all systems related to it. And the developers, instead of fixing it, add more and more useless systems.

You can explore underground labyrinths, for example, but their design runs counter to the game’s primary mechanic – parkour – as narrow aisles and dead ends limit Connor’s movement. Delivering letters provides no challenge whatsoever and is an even more irrelevant task. There are still challenges that involve brawling, board games, missions to unravel the myths of the time, forts to be liberated, and dozens of feathers and pages of almanacs scattered around the environment waiting to be collected. Assassin’s Creed 3 offers many things to do, but little real content.

The developers get it right sometimes, though. The recruitment of assassins, for example, remains useless, but far less than it was before: the ten generic recruits are gone in favor of specific ones, each possessing their own ability – one pretends to make Connor prisoner in order to go unnoticed by guards, another hits them at a distance with a firearm, and a third can be used to distract them – thus opening up new strategies. And the missions’ optional objectives have become more varied, often encouraging the player to analyze the level design and strategize.

Regarding its presentation, the game is consistent with the franchise’s history. It has a sweeping art direction, great graphics, a competent soundtrack – although consisted of only three or four different melodies –, and a universe of bugs and glitches greater even than one would expect: characters get stuck in objects, horses get stuck in everything, sometimes Connor will fly instead of jumping, change direction in the air, and cross a wall only to assassinate two guards that the player was not even aware of, among many other problems.

It is worth noting, however, that the missions in the present in which the player controls Desmond don’t appear to have been developed by the same team from the rest of the game, lacking both logic and care. On one mission, for example, Desmond will climb the structures on top of a fighting ring, without anyone seeing him. In another, he may take more than ten gunshots and remain alive. Even the art direction is absurd, as the “Wanted” posters in English on a subway in Brazil prove. To make matters worse, his ending is too sudden and should have been better developed.

In the end, Assassin’s Creed 3 is an unquestionably huge game. While running from one point to another in the city to activate a mission, players are likely to be distracted by all the markers on the map and see themselves two hours later sinking ships on the high seas with seven feathers and eight pages more collected without remembering what they were supposed to do in the first place. The story discusses great themes, and the efficient art direction faithfully recreates the period of the American Revolution. However, in trying to live up to its great scope, the game offers so many irrelevant tasks that it forgets to perfect its main mechanics, becoming a curious case in which the secondary activities, instead of being a complement, become the main activity.

December 06, 2018.

Originally published in Portuguese on March 12, 2015.