Xbox: Assassin’s Creed: Unity & Ubisoft’s Woman Problem

Assassin’s Creed is one of my favorite gaming franchises, which isn’t a surprise to anyone really.  However regular readers of this blog will know that I have been critical of the last couple of installments of the franchise.  Black Flag was a thinly disguised sailing sim with pirates and III suffered from frustrated cape crusader complex.  With each iteration of the franchise the story telling and character development has gotten weaker, thereby weakening the franchise as a whole.  Ubisoft has gotten much better at marketing and selling fans stuff but the gameplay and story has suffered.

Unity is their chance to redeem the franchise but can they pull it off?  That us the question I keep asking myself and the E3 coverage and social media responses left me with more questions than answers.

Set in the French Revolution, Unity has all of the potential to tell an amazing story and return to its roots of Altair and Ezio.  Political intrigue, historical characters, and the fight for freedom set amid the violence and romance of Paris. 

But what is once again missing from a AAA Ubisoft release?  The ability to play as a woman.  I’m sorry but let’s be honest, there is absolutely no excuse that Ubisoft cannot seem to tell a story that has a main character that can be either sex.  There might have to be some dialogue changes based on one gender or the other but those are minor and not hard to do.  The franchise makes more than enough money to justify the expenditure for two voice actors and animating both sexes.  Hell, the franchise would make MORE money if the option to play as a woman existed.

The game is based on alternate history so the argument that “well a woman in that time period wouldn’t have done that” is utter crap.  The co-op play doesn’t even feature the ability to play as a woman.  Maybe Ubisoft doesn’t read the latest studies but forty-five percent (45%) of gamers are women and women purchase forty-six percent (46%) of games sold.  So, women aren’t some small minority of the market and I hate to break it but women in general vote with their wallets.  Women buy and play games were they aren’t included and were they are represented. 

I will give Unity a chance but should Ubisoft fail to deliver a story and gameplay worth of Altair and Ezio then it will be the last installment in the franchise for me.

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XBox: Assassin’s Creed: Liberation HD

Assassin’s Creed: Liberation HD is  port from the PS Vita to the Xbox 360 and PS3.  Earlier this week I tweeted that I was undecided with the game being somewhere between utter crap and almost decent.  Now that I’ve completed the game, has my opinion changed?

Actually it is still middle of the road on the fence opinion.  Gut reaction is that the game should have been released on the consoles as a full game and ported to the PS Vita.  There was more than a sufficient  potential story line for a full game but Ubisoft failed to take a risk and release a full Assassin’s Creed game with a female protagonist.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

The ugly first, the graphics are muddy and are very obviously retextured from a much smaller screen.  This is particularly obvious with the sequence involving Connor from Assassin’s Creed III. The game undoubtedly looked much better on a handheld device than it does our large screen television.

Now for the bad and there is a lot of bad to report unfortunately.  The story is all over the place and often times makes no sense.  There is no backstory on how Aveline came to be an assassin and that isn’t remedied as the game progresses either.  Story threads are often poorly written and incomplete.  Don’t get me started on the weird, uncomfortable, and awkward relationship with her “business” partner.

Then there is the whole issue with her triple personas. It is an interesting game play idea and it could have worked but it doesn’t unfortunately.  It forces Aveline into one of three roles in pre-American Revolution New Orleans: Assassin, lady, or slave. 

Time for some brutal honesty, it is incredibly unlikely that given her parentage and complexion Aveline would have been accepted as a lady in New Orleans social circles.  It requires a LARGE suspension of reality to believe acceptance of Aveline as a lady.  Now for the slave persona, really Ubisoft?  Slaves running around New Orleans with weapons visible and not one guard gets suspicious and citizens act like it’s no big deal?  Again, requires a huge suspension of belief to play.

Aveline, our heroine, suffers from the same caped crusader problem that Connor suffers from in AC III.   Game play is often frustrating and often I wanted to throw my controller across the room.  Invisible walls, sticking to stuff for no good reason, jumping when you don’t intend to and incurring notoriety for it, and desynchronizing more often than I ever have an any previous installment in the franchise.  The Assassin persona is always restrained because she can never lose twenty-five percent of her notoriety.  The male characters do not suffer from this same handicap so why does the only female character Ubisoft created? 

Now for the good, Ubisoft gets a lot of credit from me for making a mass market game with a female lead.  Yes, it is a highly flawed game but it is one of the few games with a female lead.  I’m by no means a raging feminist but it is so damn nice to play a female lead on a character not created by me.  There is lot of potential in the Aveline story and I hope the Ubisoft doesn’t relegate her to the dustbin never to be heard from again. The good is mostly potential however.  I wish it were otherwise.

Overall, I give the game a two and a half stars.  It isn’t so horrible that it is a two star game and it is too much of a mess to warrant middle of the road status.

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Assassin’s Creed III: Gorgeous but Extremely Disappointing

Assassin’s Creed quickly became one of my favorite franchises this summer with the quality of the story telling in the Ezio trilogy and thus I was looking forward to Assassin’s Creed III.

The game is stunningly beautiful.  The landscapes are drop dead gorgeous and the weather effects are among the best I’ve ever seen.  However, a game can’t survive on looks alone and this installment doesn’t live up to its potential nor honor its past.

Bugs and holes are predominate throughout the game.  It isn’t like the game released last week, it is almost a year post release and the amount of bugs that exist in the game are mind boggling.  How is it possible that Ubisoft’s quality control department, and I use that term loosely here, let a game release with a bug that doesn’t update the protagonist's (Connor) outfit, in a cut scene, based on what the player has the character wearing at the time of any particular cut scene?  It isn’t like there are only one or two cut scenes in the game, the game is filled with cut scenes which makes this bug so infuriating and disconcerting.  After all, they managed to NOT have the bug in previous installments of the franchise.

Connor can fly through trees like a howler monkey with very little thought on the part of a player, but by god a group of three pine trees encountered on the forest floor completely baffles him and he stands there hands in the air helpless.  Connor also has the habit of getting stuck on every little obstacle he encounters on the ground, a situation made worse when he is on horseback. Seriously, these bug me almost as much as the bug above.  Controls are more fluid yes, but fluidity comes at too high a price when a pebble is enough to hang up a horse.  Hubby spent the weekend growling, at various volume levels, about “stupid gummy bear, care bear controls” as Connor would stick to anything and everything he ran into or across during a fight, chase, or tail. 

Whoever designed the crafting interface and game should be sent back to design school immediately.  Poorly implemented is a compliment, highly frustrating is an understatement.  And how did something so vital and new to the franchise make it into the game without a tutorial?  I liked the homestead missions and the interaction with the people Connor collects.  However, the implementation of crafting is so troublesome and frustrating it isn’t worth doing in my opinion.  Yes it is nice your crafters can craft upgrade but good luck understanding the stats on anything they craft because that information isn’t present.  Convoy got attacked?  Good, defend it yourself or send your assassin recruits.  Wait you did that but now your convoy is permanently attacked and nothing you try resolves the situation?  Again, another bug that should have never made it through quality assurance controls.

Now for the story, it is full of so many holes it looks like the practice target at the shooting range.  Random important people appear at the appropriate moment, Connor has a conversation and you are led to believe they have know each other for years.  Marquis de Lafayette case in point.  He appears in the story and greets Connor like an old friend and the player has never seen Lafayette in game before.  Where did they meet?  How?  And then we get to the players first view of Connor and his father, Haytham Kenway, meeting for the first time.  Somehow Haytham knows Connor is his son and knows him by sight.  Huh?  What?  How?  Gapping holes in the story you present in a video game are unforgiveable.  I don’t care that you have third party media out there they may or may not explain the holes, your holes in the media I purchased are glaring and wide enough for a herd of angry cattle to stampede through comfortably.  And this is coming from an individual that doesn’t mind reading books derived from video games!

Then we come to the game breaking bug husband ran into last night, one that Ubisoft has no solution for on it’s forums and no patch for months later.  Hubby began playing the Tyranny of King Washington Episode One: Infamy when he encountered the bug.  On the mission to Stalk the Guard Dogs at Benedict Arnold’s camp in Valley Forge, he couldn’t toss bait, run, or avoid detection.  He was unable to progress the story because of the bug.  This isn’t a minor or annoying bug, this is game breaking and it should have a response and fix from Ubisoft.  It happens across platforms and apparently only happened post release of Episode Two: Betrayal.

Connor is a very likeable and loveable character but is he truly as Assassin worthy of the Brotherhood?  I don’t think so to be honest.  He is brash, most of the time thinking with his heart and not his head and he has no ability to take long term views of his actions.  Case in point, his decision to inform Washington about the Templar plot to kill him.  Connor exhibits no understanding that his role is to work behind the scenes to counter plots and schemes of his Templar counterparts.  He is much less an assassin and much more of a caped crusader without a cape.

Overall, disappointment reigns in our house despite the games beauty and the love of the franchise.  We’ve been having the discussion about whether or not to invest time, energy and money into Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag.  I’m willing to give Ubisoft the benefit of the doubt and play the game on the XboxOne when it arrives later this Fall.  However, if they screw it up and don’t honestly return to what made the franchise great in previous games then I’m done.  I want to play Assassin’s Creed games that are based on assassinations and honoring what Altair and Ezio established for the fan base.  I want an Assassin’s Creed game where there has been quality control done by competent individuals and no gaping holes in the story.  DO NOT DISAPPOINT AGAIN UBISOFT.

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Assassin’s Creed III

Assassin’s Creed III is amazing.  No seriously, it is amazing.  It is beautiful, the soundtrack is haunting, and the quality of the story telling is equal to that of the best in the industry.

We have burned through the franchise in the last couple of weeks, well ok hubby more than I, and have enjoyed the stories immensely.  I’ve skipped finishing Brotherhood and Revelations because I know how Ezio’s story concludes through hubby’s games.  I’m sure I will go back and finish them if time permits. 

The alternative and imaginative history telling is fascinating.  There have been many a sparked conversation around here about whether or not Sam Adams is a Templar or not.  I will also admit that there are all kinds of comments and discussions about parallels to modern day issues. 

Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag releases October 29, 2013 in the US and we are both looking forward to it immensely.  We will be getting it for the XboxOne.  It will be worth the slight wait for the release on the new console. 

Now, excuse me, I need to go back to playing Assassin’s Creed III so I can do more homestead missions and find Daniel Boone.

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