Assassin's Creed III Retrospective

[surgeworks]

Assassin's Creed I
Assassin's Creed II
Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood
Assassin's Creed: Revelations

Pros:

• You can kill a bear, I guess? That's pretty cool.
• Your hatchet/axe has a blade designed in the shape of an Assassin 'A', so that's cool.
• This marks the first time you get to genuinely free-run and infiltrate locations in the modern world as Desmond. It's incredibly fun and breathtaking.
• Eventually, Connor tiptoes his way into my good graces by expressing impatience with the "Sons of Liberty" aka the white men who are concerned with white suffering and not for black slaves or native victims. And also by expressing impatience with anyone's "Oh I'll help you out...eventually..." attitude. How it's worked for the past few Assassin's Creed games is that you have a main target (ex. Rodrigo Borgia, Cesare Borgia), and to get to him you have to take out several mini-targets (i.e the Barbarigo and Pazzi conspirators, the Borgia captains under Cesare). Connor still has to go through that, but he gives the people around him shit for slowing him down on his way to William Johnson when lives are at stake.
  
  • `Actually, strike that. I like Connor. Everybody talks down to him for no reason, and he barks right back at them. He has no patience for everyone else's bullshit or going around anyone's ass to get to their elbow 100% of the time, and I am so with him for it. He tears Achilles a new heel over his bullshit. Everyone criticizes him as trying to be some hero who wants to save the world, but Connor himself never expresses anything of the sort--only a desire to do the morally upright, logical action in front of him.

Cons:

• Oh look. More crafting. No thank you.
• This game's screens alternate between very dark blue and very bright white whenever you navigate anything from the pause screen, which will be any time you want to check the database, the manual, or any other function--which is HELL on the eyes. No, seriously, this is bad. This is actually damaging to my eyes and literally hurts every time I do it. Which fucking hack was in charge of the design on this game?
• The controls have completely been altered from AC:Revelations, leaving me in utter confusion for the largest part of the game. Why all of these changes were made, I have no idea. Combat is especially bad--the button combos I was pressing to execute hordes of enemies yesterday now have me flailing ineffectually. The game throws way too much information at you too fast to memorize and utilize properly. And on top of being very bad at teaching you how to play, the controls themselves are just weird. You can't shoot anything unless your reticle--that tiny-ass pinprick Ezio's-dick-sized thing that's barely visible half the time and not at all in the wrong times--is directly on an enemy. The map has  been changed too, as has the free-running. It almost seems designed to frustrate players of previous AC games.
  
  • The free-running cited by Rebecca as "fixed" has actually been downgraded. I already mentioned in Revelations how Ezio was no longer magnetized to surfaces, which Rebecca says she's here fixed--but it's not, it's been screwed up. Free-running now only requires the right shoulder button, not the A button, which means that when you want to walk a rail or a rope at anything beyond a snail's pace, you will end up jumping off or climbing something. There is no more "run through the streets" button.
  • Who fucking designed this shooting mechanic? I want them strung up over Hell's furnace. The way the game works is that you aim your reticle over a target, draw the bow or pistol, and then fire. NOBODY FUCKING SHOOTS IN VIDEO GAMES THAT WAY. The way I and most gamers actually shoot when playing any other video game would be draw, aim, then fire, NOT aim, then draw, then fire. You cannot physically do things in that order in real life, either. You draw your bow back, then you aim the arrow carefully, then you fire. That's how it happens in real life, which is why it's done that way in video games, too!!! Who fucked this up??? The way you do it in ACIII makes it fucking impossible to shoot anything that moves even a little--which is indeed required at one point.
  • You almost never actually use Eagle Vision in this game. Instead you "analyze clues", which just seems like a subpar and boring substitute for Eagle Vision every time it happens.
• The restrictions applied to how we go about our missions are getting worse. Take the first real solo mission as Connor, which requires you to hunt a few animals. Specifically, you have only 5 animals to kill. There are three ways that you have to do it for full sync--kill at least three different types, air assassinate at least two, and you have to kill at least one with a combo of snare and bait. This is absurd. This was bad in Brotherhood, it was bad in Revelations, but now it's just gotten absurd. They're stripping down and removing every bit of freedom from these games bit by bit by fucking bit. If you want another example of how this gets ridiculous, there's a mission in Sequence 9 where you are tasked with eavesdropping on a couple of men riding a hay cart. The mission requirement is to not jump in the hay cart, even though it's right in front of you, keeps you in range of the conversation without having to press any buttons, and is no different than if you had just walked along behind their vehicle.
  
• This would normally be the part where I complained that ACIII gave me no incentive to do any of its non-critical missions or sidequests. Forget incentive, I don't even know what most of them are, much less how to do them. This game is full of extraneous shit I didn't feel like doing simply because the main storyline was going so damn slow and I wanted to get a move on with it.
  • But honestly, why should I? The game for some reason doesn't give you map markers for your objectives when you start an optional mission, like the last FOUR games did. Keep up that excellent game design, Ubisoft.
• For all that I relate to Connor getting impatient with everyone's bullshit, I can't relate with this game dangling my enemies in front of my face and then refusing to let me kill them. Not only do they do this with Charles Lee, you even ally with Haytham Kenway late in the game! "I can kill you now if you like" shut the fuck up Haytham, Connor is brutal as fuck and would snap you in half. There's even a part of that memory where he, in all his oh-so-stealthy expertise, gets caught and captured, and you have to save him from guards that are holding him down and beating him. I gleefully sat there in the grass letting them wham on him until his health was nearly gone before intervening. Letting him die like that in-story would've solved a lot of problems for me and Connor both.
• The intro cinematic is lengthy and dramatic and gives the impression that Desmond and team will finally be doing something. A few minutes after it ends, Juno knocks Desmond unconscious, they put him in the Animus, and you descend into Haytham Kenway's memories. Only this time it's just "idk let's find out what Juno wants from us" and they don't have a reason to just play out irrelevant memories at all. With Altair, it was because Desmond was inexperienced with the Animus and needed to be eased into the important memory. With Ezio, it was because Desmond needed to live out as much of his combat experiences as possible to absorb his skills from the Bleeding Effect. There is no given reason why we are with Haytham and Connor for this much time doing so much irrelevant shit. Things don't start to actually relate to Assassins until Sequence 5, when Juno sends Connor on a quest. The out-of-story reason is obviously to tell a complete tale about Haytham, Ziio, and Connor--but the in-story reason for that doesn't exist.
• Man, they just dropped Lucy like a hot potato, didn't they? "Yeah this chick's a traitor, stab her." And then you stabbed her and nobody cared. In Revelations it was kind of excusable, since obviously you couldn't leave the Animus, but we're in III now and there's still nobody talking about her even though she was the first friendly face Desmond saw since getting kidnapped by Abstergo. After a while, they eventually acknowledge her as a traitor...and that's it. Just "she was going to take the Apple back to Abstergo"--even though if that was her goal, it didn't need to take three damn games to do!
• Because they tried to squeeze so much (unnecessary) story into one game, a lot of things are done offscreen or end up narrated. Ziio's entire romance with Haytham happened offscreen, or so I'm told, because as far as I saw they only met thrice over a three-month period with no real bonding between them before they held hands, kissed, and fucked. This is Altair and Maria all over again, which as pointed out in the Revelations retrospective, is especially annoying given Ezio and Sofia's very visible and compatible romantic buildup. But then you also have Ziio narrating in a memory corridor about how she fucked Haytham, got pregnant, realized he was a Templar, left him, and had Connor, which was kind of jarring, and then had Connor narrating how he feels while travelling through the wilderness. People....don't usually narrate in Assassin's Creed games, which is a good thing. Telling and showing, and all.
  
  • Which becomes especially bad when it comes time for Connor to actually become an Assassin. Sure, we have all the time in the world to play hide and seek and hunt animals out in the woods, but actually training to become a killer of Templars? At a moment, where shock of shocks, a person might have a chance to actually learn these controls? Nah. Offscreen. Just hear about all the training Connor did while he talks.
• At the end of the fifth sequence (itself as long as the first four) we finally don some Assassin's robes--having done no actual training with Connor, only hearing about it, and having killed no one but a nameless Templar whose death didn't even impact anything. But we had all the time in the world to move lumber, kill animals, and figure out how to steer a ship!
• The message from Juno to Connor from the Apple is quite literally, both in-story and out of it, the only reason for Connor ever becoming an Assassin. This is the first time the Precursor race has ever displayed a Templar-Assassin side, and Connor being Haytham's son factors into making him one (eagle vision and all). And yet, it eventually turns out after THAT that Juno's plan was to mind-rape the whole planet and control them into wishing the solar flare away--quite the Templar goal. Her emails end up deliberately sounding more and more like she's a token traitor.
  
• The Connor side of the story again tries for Assassin's Creed's usual "moral grey" area with "maybe the Templars have a point" and whatnot, but we've been through this song and dance before. Brotherhood literally had them giving Hitler the Apple of Eden explicitly so he could cause the Holocaust and start World War II. William Johnson can't keep people safe by taking their land out from under them, John Pitcairn can't prevent a war by shooting first, etc. etc.
• The Apple of Eden, or enough people under the Apple's control wishing for the same thing, apparently has the power to just...change reality. Make or unmake it at will. That doesn't jive at all with established lore. Never has Assassin's Creed gone so far as to just say "fuck it, the Apple really CAN do literally anything". It feels like a cheap corner-cut.
• The game lets you play as Haytham for a full four sequences and then as a young child and teen Connor for a fifth, the last of which has you see the Templars you go to know as Haytham--William Johnson, John Pitcairn, Thomas Hickey, and Charles Lee, who you freed slaves and natives with, by the way--talk down you you, the ugly, savage, ignorant native, and burn down your village and the people in it for no damn reason. The moral grey area that could've been introduced is gone just as swiftly. Which I'm not complaining about--I'm complaining about the fact that if they were such horrid villains, why bother getting to interact with them at all? They're awful people. At the end of sequence 5, you finally get to don the Assassin's robes and start hunting them down. That's about three or four hours into the game? Maybe five or six? Yeah--you know what? You could (and should) cut the entire first half of the game. None of it matters. None of it ends up impacting what happens to Connor and what he later does except the villainous parts. Haytham only matters in relation to Connor, and the Templars only matter as Connor's kill targets. Haytham himself is unnecessary! The twist with him being a Templar only happens for there to be a twist, not because the player needs to know him or see his actions. They could've just had Connor's dad be an Assassin, make love to a native, and raise a mixed-race Assassin. Would've been damn quicker and not required Connor to touch a mystical object that tells him "go be an Assassin".
• Speaking of, the last parts of the game take forever to play out. The hunt for Charles Lee takes up all of Sequences 9, 10, 11, and 12!! Jesus, it's exhausting.
• Like with Brotherhood, the familial elements of this game are....not good. Putting Connor and Haytham to one side for a bit (since they never knew each other anyway), the game's cutscenes show you William Miles being an absolute piece of shit and an abysmal, abusive father...and neither Rebecca nor Shaun calls him out on it, and neither does the story. It's left up to you to talk to him, and hear his shitty excuses and generic parent I'm-Sorry-Ish apologies. And it's not very convincing at that. You'd think that William would've learned the first time around that being a dick to his son was a bad idea, since it directly led to Desmond running away and getting caught by Abstergo and thus every game in the series is sort of his fault. But no.
• For all of the bullshit William throws Desmond's way, Desmond has a point--William could be doing this whole Animus thing just as well as he could with the same results. He could be the one finding out all about the keys and the Pieces of Eden and the Templars. And he should be! That way, we'd spend less time dealing with Connor and Haytham's drama, and more time doing cool Desmond sections of the game.
• The Desmond sections of the game, joyous as they are to play, are severe disappointments in their own way. All you do is look for keys for the Temple, just more mystic Juno and Eden shit. Not fight and kill key Templars, not strike back at Abstergo, no. Just infiltrate, maybe free-run a bit, and then you're done. You can complete them in under eight minutes, which is a tragedy--and the same mistake made in the previous game with the Altair sections. For something that supposedly matters so much, it sure is repetitive, dull, and not at all the modern-day Assassin experience I was hoping this series was building up to.
• As expected of a character introduced in this game with little to no seeming purpose, Daniel Cross fails to be very compelling. He's taken down with pathetic ease in all three encounters, the last of which uses an unexplained ass pull to keep him from killing you. Something wrong with his mind? Who knows. We never will. Of course when you finally kill him, it's with no fanfare at all and Vidic screams at you how horrible you are for taking his like-a-son-to-me Cross away from him. It feels like he was just a stand-in for what was originally intended to be Lucy, but they had already killed her off since her voice actress left. We never even find out why he's here, what he does, or how William knows him.
  
  • Which reminds me, remember that dude that had the amulet at the start of the game that Haytham kills for it? And that weird secretive conversation dripping with interpersonal drama they had? Completely forgotten.
• And of course, you still don't get to kill the final fucking boss. In fact, there isn't a final boss. There's a final chase, and then you injure him in a cutscene. And then you kill him in a cutscene. By walking up to him at a bar and stabbing him. Not an exaggeration, literally. The closest thing to a genuine final boss the game has is Haytham--who dies a full two sequences before Charles Lee.

Ohohohoh, but the real kickers? They come late in the game.

Really bad cons:

• There's a late-game part, specifically the third and final Desmond infiltration mission, where your oh-so-competent father is captured (history can't help repeating itself, I guess) and you have to go rescue him. Desmond's exact words are "I might be risking my life for an asshole... But what do I do? That asshole is my father."
  
  • Here's an idea: Let Abstergo have at him. We as a player barely know this dude, you as a character haven't seen him in nine years, and his behavior onscreen has so far been nothing but contemptible. Leave him for Abstergo to kill. I have no desire whatsoever to rescue him. The game seems to expect "we're family" to be a good enough reason to want him rescued. It isn't.
• Despite Minerva literally arriving and info-dumping about how Juno is untrustworthy and essentially a Templar, essentially playing the Assassin side of freedom, Desmond still touches the device, sides with Juno, and gives up his life. As triumphant music plays, Desmond dies to save the world, and the credits roll. While they do, Juno announces he played his part well and now it's time for her to move onto the scene. Yeah. The culmination of the series that taught you to value freedom above all else since the first game, it's the player character being killed off in unclear means to provide an unclear defense for a threat we pretty much never saw, while a she-Templar from before the dawn of civilization is free to conquer the world.
  
  • Poof. He's gone. Like that. Some pre-history bitches argue, he places his hand on the device, and he's dead. No weight is given to it at all.
    
• Fucking.
  
• Thanks.
  
• Ubisoft.

Final thoughts:

• This game is a mess. An absolute mess. It's like a steadily-increasing pile of bricks being laid over your back one by one. The first one isn't so heavy, and neither is the second, and the third isn't so bad but you can definitely feel it. And by the time the game is done, there's so many bricks that it's crushing you and you can't even make the slightest movement. And for this to be the culmination of the series? Oh, no, wait, I'm sorry--it's just the culmination of the Desmond arc. My apologies for thinking he actually mattered. 
• Because he doesn't. In-story, he sort of matters. But as far as Ubisoft was concerned? Bye Desmond.
• This is just depressing now. I didn't deserve this. Fans of this series didn't deserve this.