Is Assassin's Creed 2 dogshit?

The Game Room
1

I picked up Assassin’s Creed 2 (for PS3) out of curiosity the other day after having repeatedly beaten Heavy Rain, MGS4, and somewhat tired of Red Dead Redemption. I have to say, I was pretty disappointed by the game.

Everything looks the same. Tan, brown, brown, tan. Yes there are splashes of color from clothing, but even the clothing looks desaturated and drab. What is this obsession with desaturated color palettes in games? It makes everything look dreary and uninteresting. There was also this annoying blurriness to everything. The character models, even the player character but especially the NPCs, looked…dull, I guess, would be the best way of putting it. There was just a dull, soft look to everything.

Was this obnoxious invasion of super-kewl cybertechno-bullshit really necessary to the game? I don’t understand why they didn’t just make a game set in a historical context without the pretext of being some kind of virtual-reality experience with constant ugly HUD-related stuff constantly popping up? I don’t want to see the historical visuals, drab as they may be, interrupted by bursts of sickly electric-blue-white light, like when you lock onto a character or blend into a crowd. It just looks cheesy, tacky, and pulls me out of the gaming experience. I don’t think that whole cybernetic virtual-hyper-mono-tron vibe mixes well with the old-fashioned, period-piece look of the game. I think the whole game was vastly flawed by the developer’s insistence on mixing these two things instead of choosing one or the other.

Gameplay mechanics are dumb. You can go around pickpocketing everyone and nobody notices? You literally shove your way through a dense crowd of 8 to 10 people on the street, groping all of them with your hands and stealing their money (as an unbelievably obnoxious “money” sound - the jingling and clinking of coins - plays every single time) and nobody actually notices it happen? Until 15 seconds later when they all start saying “I’ve been robbed!” and examining themselves for their missing coins. I guess the people who made this game thought it was extremely clever, unique and intelligent to have this in the game. It isn’t. It’s dumb as hell. Not even the stealthiest assassin can get away with blatantly pickpocketing 10 people all at the same time. Totally cheeseball game mechanic.

You can buy “medicine” from doctors who happen to be randomly standing around in the street - plague doctors wearing beaked masks, even there is no plague going on. But you never need the medicine because you regenerate health very quickly. It’s nearly impossible to be killed in this game, another thing which makes it totally ridiculous and cheesy. Guards will attack you four at a time with their swords, hacking and slashing, and you’ll survive it all, darting off to the rooftops unscathed as if you had not just been slashed in the chest several times with a sword. You can fall from ridiculously high heights and be totally unhurt.

The costumes are all wrong. The game is set in the late 1400s, but everyone is walking around wearing clothes from the late 1500s and early 1600s. Would it have killed them to either do a little research into the clothing of the proper time period? You wouldn’t make a game about the Vietnam War and have the soldiers dressed in puttees and Smokey Bear hats.

Furthermore, Ezio’s costume is totally cheesy. If someone is trying to be inconspicuous and blend into crowds, why would he wear a flamboyant robe and hood that immediately sets him apart from everyone else? The option to don disguises, like in the Hitman series, would have been interesting here, yet instead you traipse around in this absurd looking getup.

The plot is about as interesting to me as the washing instructions on the back of a shirt tag.

I am returning this horrid game tomorrow and getting Alpha Protocol instead.

2

Didn’t you hate the first game too?

3

Yes, and for the same reasons, I believe.

4

So they’ve made a game reconstructing large parts of reneissance Italy and included the ability to stab people in the face, but you feel pickpocketing, clothes and not having to wait for an appointment with doctors are where the real game-breaking flaws of this game is?

If you hadn’t been a long time member, I’d have banned you for a troll. Seriously.

ETA: My troll accusation is out of line. My apologies.

5

It’s OK. But if you were serious when you said “seriously” then your definition of a troll may need some serious re-calibration.

My biggest complaint with the game is the way it looks. Surely you would not argue that a game’s aesthetics constitute a large part of what makes it good or bad (in someone’s subjective opinion.)

The fact that the game re-created Renaissance Italy - if that is indeed what Renaissance Italy looked like - is totally negated for me by the virtual-reality electric-blue-sparkly bullshit that constantly jolts the player out of the historical experience. Could you imagine how bad Red Dead Redemption would have been if it incorporated this same concept? If I’m going to take in the visual presentation of a historic city, I don’t want to be constantly reminded that I’m actually in the future. The game could have spared me the technobabble and the pseudo-sci-fi bullshit and just set the game in 15th century Italy, which would have been fantastic.

I like historical games a lot. And I’m also willing to tolerate some experimentation with alternate history and mixing different eras of technology. I didn’t mind the robotic horse in Onimusha 2 because they went to the trouble of making it look like a robotic horse in 17th century feudal Japan might look, if they actually had robotic horses in 17th century Japan. I didn’t mind the incorporation of weird quasi-Victorian steampunk type technology into the Thief games. But I feel that Assassin’s Creed 2 went over the top with this and also made the technological effects so obnoxious to look at.

My complaint with the healing in the game was not that you don’t have to “wait for an appointment with doctors.” A game is not exciting to me when it’s so hard to die. There’s no tension or sense of panic or desperation when you’re chased by the guards in AC2. You just scramble up the nearest building or conveniently located pile of wooden junk and bingo, you’re out of harm’s way. It’s way too easy to get out of danger.

6

I think maybe you should avoid Assassin’s Creed 3, or you might be stuck thinking about “dogshit” all over again.

7

You know, I really like the whole “ancestral flashback” and the attendant visual flourishes in the game. Generally, I agree that games that try to incorporate some sort of virtual reality into their plots tend to fall flat - The VR sims in Fallout 3, particularly the Anchorage expansion pack, were among the weakest parts of the game. I couldn’t get over the idea that I was playing a guy sitting in a pod, and not the character running around in Alaska. However, I think it really works in the Assassin’s Creed games. Largely, I think, because they’re not really VR, but flashbacks to events that actually happened. Lots of other games have used similar framing devices - most of the action in Eternal Darkness, for example, is technically your character sitting around reading books about her ancestors. When it’s done well, it can do some interesting things with the conventions of the medium - and I think AC does it pretty well. I don’t feel like I’m playing Desmond pretending to be Enzio, I feel like I’m playing Enzio, and there’s this Desmond guy looking over my shoulder. The fact that I really like the aesthetics of the “VR” flourishes helps, too. Overall, I thought AC2 was a gorgeous game. I saw what you meant about the first one being too drab, although I still thought it looked good. This one, though - the cities are plenty colorful. They do desaturate things a lot, but the game is very far from colorless.

I’m also starting to really dig the meta-story. Global conspiracies, generational conflicts, pre-Edenic human civilizations, strange artifacts that straddle the border between magic and super-science. That’s some pretty good shit right there.

Anyway, aside from the game’s difficulty (it is fairly easy) most of your other complaints seem to be pretty standard for a lot of video games. I mean, when have you ever played any game that used a remotely realistic healing mechanic? Protagonists in games always stand out, even when they shouldn’t. Remember Sam Fisher’s brightly glowing green screen that he always wore taped to his back? And Agent 47 didn’t exactly blend, even when he was wearing a disguise. And historical accuracy? For real? Hell, the fact that they got the costumes correct to within a couple hundred years is pretty impressive, by any media’s standard. For a video game, it’s fucking astounding.

And I have to ask, after the way you reacted to the first game, why on Earth would you ever buy the second?

8

I thought maybe the second one would be better.

I don’t understand why game makers so are so in love with the desaturated look. I think it looks like trash. Mafia, one of my all-time favorites, had such vivid, bold, rich colors. I can still enjoy playing that game now. I honestly think I might be able to squeeze some enjoyment out of AC2 even with all the other issues I mentioned if the colors were juicier. I just don’t get it. What do they have to lose by making the colors deeper and more vibrant?

I wouldn’t mind if they were just flashbacks to previous generations - however, I find the aesthetics of the VR system too invasive and obnoxious. It would have been boss if they could have somehow made the VR interface fit visually with the Renaissance setting. Old fashioned printing-press type or something like that for the menus. Or illuminated manuscripts. That would look absolutely ingenious and visually beautiful. I’ve seen illuminated manuscripts that look more psychedelic and interesting than any Matrix-aping crap that these hacks come up with.

Within a couple hundred years? Why would anyone find it impressive? They could have paid a historical consultant $100 to show them the right kinds of costumes to use. Or - oh my God - actually looked on Wikipedia for ten minutes about costumes of the Italian Renaissance? How hard would that be? What on earth is their excuse for not doing it? I don’t understand this mentality of forgiving these people for everything. What exactly was standing in the way of them making it historically-accurate?

They shouldn’t just make games historically accurate for the benefit of the people like me who already know about history. They should also do it for the people who will be inspired by the game to do some research into the Renaissance. So these people can read about how it really was and then say, hey, the game got it right. Instead of…wow, they really were off the mark.

9

OMG, I fucking loved this game. I tried playing AC I but couldn’t get into it. 2 was phenomenal and I really enjoyed it.

I don’t give two whits about historical accuracy, actually! Not in my games. :slight_smile:

10

After your vitriolic description of how bad the first game was, you thought the second would be improved enough to purchase? On what basis?

My hope is you rented it. If not, please continue…

The art direction seems like a major focus for you. Why didn’t you investigate it prior to purchasing? Screenshots, reviews and gameplay videos are out there for a reason; it seems likely they would’ve steered you away from this game and the damage it’s inflicted on your sense of aesthetics.

11

When I was a kid playing a pickup game of baseball, the kid in the on deck circle accidentally got too close to me and hit in the balls with his bat.

Oddly enough, I never went out and paid him to do it again.

12

This is what Gameflyis for, my friend.

13

Wow, with everyone saying how easy the game was I’m feeling like such a noob. Now, it wasn’t the hardest game for me but there were a couple of puzzles where I had to go look at a walk-through.

But yeah, I couldn’t finish the first AC but I loved the second, and am stoked for the third. Renaissance clothing accuracy: don’t really care.

14

And whats with every Madden being only about football!?!?!

Only a fool would buy Assassin’s Creed II and be surprised that it’s similar to Assassin’s Creed.

15

I’m willing to bet that they spent a hell of a lot more time and money on historical research than ten minutes or a $100. Probably on the order of tens of thousands of dollars and hundreds of man-hours. The amount of study that went into the game is self-evident. Yes, there are anachronisms. Why? Because the ultimate goal is to create an exciting and visually interesting video game, not to make a text book about Renaissance clothing. Why are Enzio’s clothes two centuries out of date for the setting? I’d wager its because they liked the way those clothes looked better than the historically accurate stuff. Virtually no one who plays the game would even notice the difference, and of those who notice, almost none of them would particularly care, because this sort of minor historical inaccuracy is standard in fiction with historical settings.

But they’ll have still done the research, right? So how is this an argument against these minor historical anachronisms? They won’t know its wrong until they’ve done the research, so why does it matter if the source of their inspiration is correct or not? Hell, if inspiring people to research the period is a serious goal, doesn’t it make more sense to introduce historical inaccuracies that make the game more visually interesting, and therefore, more enticing as a field of study?

16

“There’s an old saying in Renaissance Florence— I know it’s in 12th century Jerusalem, probably in Florence— that says, ‘fool me once, shame on… shame on you’…”