Assassin's Creed - Pt. 2 (Xbox 360)

I kind of fell down on the job for this one. I completed Assassin's Creed a few days after the last entry, but with Mass Effect the very next Tuesday and not feeling well from personal issues...well it just wasn't high on my to-do list. Knowing for a fact that no one reads these articles also sometimes makes me postpone writing anything. It hit me today however that these posts can easily serve more than one purpose. I hope to create games at some point, whether as a hobby or professionally. These two game journals can double as a free form notebook of sorts, a rambling collection of what can go right and what can go wrong. I have a really bad habit of determining some very important concepts and promptly forgetting them because I didn't jot them down somewhere.

Well, I think it goes without saying that me playing Assassin's Creed non-stop until completing it hints at my impressions remaining positive. The mechanics held up well, I never really felt the missions got all that repetitious, and the story...well, right up until the end it held my attention completely. The journey from irresponsible and arrogant asshole to thoughtful and respectful crusader felt natural, and the progression of events in the "real world" meshed nicely with the game itself. I'm not going to lie; the ending is abrupt and I can easily see how someone might get frustrated with it. I myself do love proper conclusions but I'm also a sucker for a grand, multi-volume plot. My opinion is fairly simple: if they tie up the game itself but break off even sharply for a sequel - I'm fine. The only exception to this rule was the original Soul Reaver. The sudden shift itself from self-contained game to multi-volume story did not bother me, it was the unavoidable fact that I would have to wait for and use the next generation platform to continue. I know for a fact the next Assassin's Creed game(s) will be released on the 360, so more power to Ubisoft.

It's very interesting to me to examine the mechanics of AAA titles like Assassin's Creed in detail. Ubisoft used a home-grown engine called Scimitar, and fuck me running if it doesn't make the latest Unreal Engine (Gears of War, Bioshock) look like an Erector Set. Couple this with the ongoing problems multiple studios are having to even make the Unreal Engine work at a decent framerate and it makes you wonder how hard it really is to do things right. Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying that I could whip up a high-caliber engine in my home office. I'm saying that sometimes high profile companies screw things up all along leading everyone to think that's just how it is, and then suddenly a dark horse comes along and quietly hits a home run without any of the assumed difficulties associated with whatever it is they're doing. A lot of niche techies might use the example of OS X versus Windows, but that's a really tired analogy that's been done more times than I care to think about - and it's not relevant to the industry I'm talking about.

The truly amusing angle to this concept is the fact Ubisoft will probably never license or sell the Scimitar Engine. Epic has been selling evolving versions of the Unreal Engine for years now, enough to make it a go-to standard for a long list of high-profile developers...but they're stomped in one fell swoop by the initial release of an in-house program that wasn't even created with the intent to pitch and sell to others. I could use Renderware (Crackdown, Burnout) as another example of a superior-looking product versus Unreal, but there are a couple of important qualifiers to what's happened there. Renderware was developed in-house by Criterion, and they've always freely admitted it's been a hodge-podge project that can produce beautiful results but can be a bit of a beast to work with. They licensed it to a small number of companies, but when they were purchased by EA it was pulled. It will be used for a few more internal projects and then discontinued completely, so while the results were superior to Epic's product the circumstances surrounding it muddy the waters enough to prevent an honest comparison.

I don't really have a point to make, it's just something that I find fascinating and it gives me hope for my own aspirations as a game developer. With web distribution and XBLA as low-cost outlets for small shops and consolidating and expanding resources for larger shops we're seeing an increasing number of out-of-the-blue technical triumphs. It exposes how clunky certain aspects of the industry have become and how accustomed to it we have become. It also helps remind developers like myself that yes, games are a lot of work...but it's not as hard as some people would have you believe either by word or by deed.