First-Person Shouter

Me at the GDC, gently pushing my way through the nerdthrong so as to avoid them dropping their laptops.

So.  I attended the GDC in San Francisco a couple weeks ago, just for the final day.  It was neat, though most of it was miles above my tiny brain.  I didn’t think I’d get a lot out of seminars titled “Self-Limited Rigging Methodology Used in of God of War” and “Authoring Runtime Animation and Character Physics with Morpheme 2.0″, but I wanted to attend a couple talks on careers in the gaming industry.  Namely, the keynote address given by Fallout 3’s Emil Pagliarulo titled “Unlikely Beginnings: Fallout 3’s Lead Designer on his Path into the Game Industry”. That’s the whole reason I went.

And, well, it wasn’t very good.  It was sort of vague, and he really didn’t seem to have a lot prepared:  it wasn’t so much an address as sort of a general Q&A that mainly wound up covering what it’s like to be a Lead Designer rather than how one becomes a Lead Designer, and not even that information was presented very well.

Luckily, my trip was salvaged by attending “100 Questions, 97 Answers, 56 Minutes”, a presentation given by Brenda Brathwaite.  I’d never actually heard of her before the talk, but she was great — incredibly funny, knowledgeable, interesting, sarcastic, and full of great, useful information.  If you ever get a chance to hear her speak I really recommend it.

It was also nice to meet a reader named Chris, who was volunteering there and tracked me down via Twitter.  Everyone will be glad to know he asked me when I was going to do another Nondrick update.  I guess I can’t escape my responsibility to my Oblivion blog, even while on vacation, so I hereby promise an update sometime in April.  Okay?  OKAY?  You fucking vultures.

Now, to some game stuff!  I bought Assassin’s Creed while it was on sale, and have been playing it in fits and starts.   I haven’t gotten too far in it yet, so this isn’t a review, just some early impressions of what appears to be a beautiful, engrossing game with fantastic design, great game mechanics, and fluid animation — and yet is also one of the most bizarrely uneven and annoying games I’ve played in a while.

Pretty.

First, the story as I understand it so far:  I’m an assassin in the future who some scientists have kidnapped so they can make me relive the memories of an ancestor of mine, named Altair, who was also an assassin.  They bring me to a lab (where they trust me, an assassin, to wander around freely for some reason) and plug me into a machine periodically that lets me access Altair’s memories and walk around in his shoes.

Your first time in the machine, the titular assassin’s creed is explained to you:  don’t kill innocents, don’t stand out from the crowd, don’t betray the brotherhood.  Then, you’re forced to watch as Altair immediately and stupidly breaks all three.   So, right off the bat, you’re a terrible assassin, even though it’s not your fault.  The Boss Assassin (who runs an entire castle full of assassins — seriously, the assassin-to-civilian ratio in this game is like 1:4), gets all pissed off and takes away all the weapons and moves you just started to play with.  Which is weird — the game teaches you all the cool stuff you can do, and then yoinks it all away from you through no fault of your own.

It’s a strange way to start — teaching you a bunch of things and then limiting your access to them.  And for a game that gives you a lot of freedom to run around on your own, it’s annoying to watch as your character fucks up so completely right off the bat.  Did they not trust me to fuck things up myself?  I totally would have.  I suck at games like this.

Stripped of my cool shit through no fault of my own? That's a paddlin'.

Why do it that way at all?  Why not give me the choice at some point — some mission where I could choose to break the rules of the creed based on the events unfolding in front of me, maybe some situation where breaking the rules was simply the best path to take?  Or hell, even some mission where I’m tricked into breaking them by one of the other hundreds of assassins wandering around.  Again, I’m not too far in, so maybe something like this happens.  I just object to having actions forced on me, I guess.

Since you’re technically not living Altair’s life, just experiencing his memories in a machine, the game considerately skips ahead sometimes: for example, after completing a mission in a distant city, it’ll spare you the boredom of having you make the return trip.  It just fast-forwards the memory and you’re back at Assassin Corp.  But then, when you start a new mission, it makes you ride on horseback to whatever city the next mission is in.  Couldn’t they fast-forward that trip, too?  I mean, the horseback riding isn’t awful, it’s just seems entirely pointless.  My current saved game is at the start of a new mission, and the only reason I’m not playing it right now is I don’t feel like riding the goddamn horse to the next goddamn city.

Speaking of starting the game, let’s talk about exiting the game, which is perhaps the most annoying thing of all.  If you’re ready to quit the game for the night, well, pack a lunch.  First, you quit the game:  which means, leaving the memory machine and waking up in the lab.  Then, you quit the lab, meaning you’re back in your profile.  Then, you quit the profile, and you’re back at the main menu.  Then, and only then, do you quit the game.  That’s four friggin’ steps just to get on with your life.  Every time I finally manage to quit a game, I sort of expect the doorbell to ring and a Ubisoft employee to be standing on my porch, wide-eyed with concern, asking if I’m really ready to stop playing.  I am.

This is me, hiding from Ubisoft in a pile of hay after trying to quit the game. They are really insistent that you do no such thing.

Still.  There’s a lot to enjoy in Assassin’s Creed, especially the whole free-running aspect of the game.  Whenever I enter a new city, I just walk around, exploring, icing random guards until someone catches on, then run like hell — the very best part of the game so far.  Fleeing through the crowded streets, guards on my heels, knocking people over, climbing over walls, tightrope-walking over beams, leaping off rooftops, tumbling down stairs, rounding corners, frantically searching for a hiding place, finding one, watching the guards slowly give up, then blending back in with the crowd… it’s just a hell of a lot of fun.  I wish there was more of that directly related to the missions I’ve played so far — I’ve only done a few, but they’ve been mostly the same: track down a dude, eavesdrop on a conversation, beat up someone in an alley for information, find your mark, stab once, return to Assassin-Mart.

BOY WE SURE ARE ALL SCHOLARS AND NOT ASSASSINS HUH FELLAS?

Well, most of that was gripes, but I’m still hanging in there and want to keep playing.  Every game has its little niggles, but the problems I’m finding in Assassin’s Creed are especially regretful because there’s so much to like about the game.  Feels like if they’d put a little more thought into it, it really could have been something great.

My autoaxe is named "Man Opener". It is true to its name.

I also finally picked up The Pitt for Fallout 3 — I imagine I’ll have something to say about it soon.  So far, I’m enjoying it.

Finally, congrats to my pal Zompist, who accomplished a feat in Left 4 Dead that only 3.7% of players have: beating all four campaigns on Expert.  I never in a million years would have pegged Zomp as a hardcore FPS player, but he clearly is.

That’s it for now — sorry about the lack of content this past week, and sorry the comments were locked — they get autolocked after a seven days and I’d forgotten about that.  My bad.