Assassin’s Creed was one of the reasons I bought a 360 (the other was Bioshock, which red-ringed my system). The game had its flaws (quite a few, in fact) but I loved it in spite of them. It was like heist-movie lite: send me on a series of missions to plan an assassination, gathering information and dealing with potential obstacles, and I’ll be as happy as a criminal mastermind clam. I lovedlovedloved Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, and I was expecting something more like that and less like “Sly Cooper with a stabby-hidden-blade instead of a giant hook”. Once I realized it wasn’t about timing and following a set path past obstacles, but about keeping momentum and creating that path, I was hooked (stabby-hidden-bladed?). I preordered Assassin’s Creed II as part of a Best Buy sale (before they were excluded from the deal) earlier this fall.
And then release day rolls around and I don’t want to pick it up.
Personality trait: avoidant tendencies. When I’m faced with a situation that has negative consequences, my first reaction is to avoid it. I also tend to set myself up for disappointment (either so I’ll always be pleasantly surprised, or so I can maintain a sense of control over a situation – depends on who you ask); these two default reactions to situations do not combine well. In order to avoid the fulfillment of this irrational expectation, I attempt to nap.
Thoughts while not napping: I didn’t pay much attention to the game’s prerelease marketing – I had already made up my mind to buy the game. I knew the developers had acknowledged the repetitive nature of the first game’s missions and that 1up.com‘s David Ellis flew to Italy for a preview event (I can’t remember my mother’s birthday; I don’t want to think too much about why my brain chooses to store information that has no bearing on me over information about the woman responsible for bearing me). And they said they dealt with the repetition; maybe if all that pickpocketing and eavesdropping and weren’t required, but were optional side-quests, they’d seem less irritating?
It takes two popped collars to contain this amount of style.
I think I mean “side quest” as “formulaic mission that I can do over and over again to boost some stat or acquire some resource that will aid in the main quest” (use “quest” when the primary weapons are blades – if they are guns, use “missions”). You’re not supposed to do all of them at once. Unless you’ve been trained by years of video games that don’t let you go back after certain points, in which case you will do all side quests available before taking on the quest that will move the story forward (which you can tell has happened because all of the side quests are gone and now you have to reload a save but you don’t have a save to reload). Since that’s how I play games, I saw those Assassin’s Creed missions as side quests that I was compelling myself to complete, not that the game was requiring of me (even though it was), I was ok with the repetition.
I didn’t articulate this definition of “side quest” until the previous weekend, when I played and completed Brutal Legend (an enjoyable twenty five minutes, definitely – and not as difficult on normal as I had heard). Its design assists the checklist approach to side quests: the main quest’s map icon is different from the side quests, so it was very easy to plot my course around the map to take care of them all. It was odd, though – there were one-off side missions. In one, I had to mosh with a group of headbangers to keep bassists from interrupting a pick-up attempt. I expected to repeat that mission multiple times with increasing numbers of bassists, but I never saw it again. Was it a reject from the main story missions (many of which have a similar mechanic of having you team up with the different units, teaching you how to use them in stage battles)? Is Brutal Legend actually a clever comment on the design standards of “open-world” games? Why don’t more games with races have markers that move to the next spot when you get near them, so you can see where to go next more easily?
A pigeon lands outside my bedroom window, makes a lot of noise. Why can’t these things fly south for the winter? Why do they only roost above giant piles of hay? Why, in Grand Theft Auto 4, do they just lie around the city, glowing slightly, encouraging me to pick them up? And why didn’t I care about them? Like the flags in Assassin’s Creed, these collectibles would grab my eye but I couldn’t be bothered to go after them. I wasn’t going to commit to getting all of them, so why bother? I liked running around in that game a lot, so you’d think I could use collecting the flags as something to direct my play. Except the play itself was the reward there – no need for collectibles.
Come on, Schaefer. The stage battles in this game are RTS missions – there’s no shame in admitting it.
A little different than Brutal Legend, where I found myself running off the path mid-mission so that I could free one of the bound serpents. First time I freed one and it told me I had 119 more to go, it was intimidating and I was ready to dismiss is as open-world collectible-hunt padding. Then I saw that it was granular – a reward promised for freeing ten serpents. This, I thought, was worth going out of my way a little bit whenever I saw them. If I was one or two away from the next power-up, I found myself willing to see freeing another two as part of my preparation for the next story quest. I ultimately ended up with around forty, far more than the pigeons I collected in GTA4 (about three), or the twenty or so flags I found in Assassin’s Creed. As a player, I need feedback. I don’t think this is because I was born after 1980 and received trophies just for showing up (or whatever is supposed to characterize we post-Gen X kids). I only have one of those trophies. The rest of the time I didn’t bother to show up.
The pigeon’s right. It’s time for my own real-life collect-a-thon. With one object to collect and a very tangible reward. Down the stairs, into the car. The Best Buy is three miles from my apartment, as the Google maps (the last three quarters of which are part of the giant shopping center complex parking lot). It shouldn’t take me very long to get there and back. Funny thing about Pittsburgh infrastructure, though – due to the geography, pretty much anywhere you go is going to involve at least one bridge. Also, hilly terrain makes for constricted roads and tunnels (the main highways into the city are reduced to two lanes in either direction because of this). Driving down the hill towards the bridge that will take me to the shopping center, I hit traffic. There’s construction to, funny enough, widen the road by a lane. That lane’s location was, until recently, a large hillside. The road has been narrowed to one lane in either direction so that particular hillside can be removed. It takes almost twenty five minutes to get to the store.
Waiting at the best buy store pickup line, I watch a guy talking on his cell phone, pushing his daughter in a combination shopping cart/Geek Squad car. He bangs the cart off a Chickenfoot endcap. What the hell is Chickenfoot?
On the pickup counter I can see the copy of my game sitting next to a couple of copies of Modern Warfare 2, stacked on top of two large Gone with the Wind boxes. Higher brain functions fried from the eight-times-too-long drive here, I suffer a fit of academic recidivism. My mind plays with a comparison between the two pieces: American identity and gender and war and violence and media blockbusters and history and burning plantations and burning White Houses. And then Geek Squad Cart Man shakes me out of my reverie by nearly knocking over a Chickenfoot display with his daughter. It tilts, but not far enough to spill skullcaps or CDs across the floor. Crises averted.
Another twenty five minute drive and I am home. I don’t want to start playing the game. I look for excuses. I’ll make dinner. I’ll watch Co-Op. I’ll do some reading.
I put the disc in the tray.
Here goes nothing.