Ghost Razor

Aside from my Achievement addiction, I have a profound love of Magic: The Gathering.  Over the years I have abandoned the game, stayed away for several years, and then come back to it, each time harder than before.  The last time I seriously got into playing Magic was during the Odyssey block, back in 2001.  I played reasonably seriously, going to tournaments occasionally and spending hundreds of dollars on pieces of cardboard.  Just before I began University, I gave up the game, and I haven’t played it since.  Most of my friends at the time sold their collections and bailed out for good, perhaps keeping a couple of really well built decks for posterity.

Last week, a bunch of us got together and decided to do a booster draft - a game where everyone buys three $4.00 packs of 15 cards, and the cards are cycled around in a systematic way so that it’s possible to build a functional (although not very good) deck with a small investment, and play using only those cards.  This has had much the same effect as a bunch of coke addicts deciding to do a line for old time’s sake.  The game is so addictive that with that one brief exposure, most of us are considering getting back into the game, and building real decks once again.

Scott Lynch, in his extremely excellent The Lies of Locke Lamora describes a scene he calls The Shifting Revel.  In order to defray tempers and choke off any uprising before it can gain traction, the Duke of Camor underwrites a giant festival which takes place at regular intervals in the local bay.  It’s called the shifting revel because the festival takes place in the form of hundreds of boats - those of the attendees and local merchants - who lash themselves together in the bay.  The attendance changes from revel to revel, as does the specifics of the entertainment - but there are always keystone features which remain the same and give the revel a grounding.

Magic is a Shifting Revel, and I think this is one of the reasons it’s both so addictive, and that it’s remained so popular over the years when nearly every other collectible card game has sputtered and failed.  There is no specific strategy in Magic that is predominant - there are several major strategies, none of which is better than any other in general.  The game is simple enough that the basics can be grasped in ten minutes, but complex enough that the building of a good deck requires knowledge of statistics.  There are endless combinations of cards that can put together to make a deck, and no two players will use even the same deck in exactly the same way.  The game is very well balanced, but this isn’t what makes it a shifting revel.

Most people who play magic at the tournament level play with what is referred to as “Standard Edition” rules.  Essentially standard play limits the cards you’re allowed to use to the two most recently released blocks of cards, each block containing three sets.  New sets are introduced every roughly 2 to 3 months.  The effect this has on gameplay is profound.  With any given set of cards, in a matter of weeks, tournament play solidifies around several ‘types’ of decks, based around the cards that are legal in the last two blocks.  Each type of deck will revolve around a particular strategy for winning and involve several major strategic cards from these blocks.

The trick is that every time a new block is begun, an old block of cards will no longer be legal in standard tournaments.   This typically has the effect of crippling all deck ‘types’ that are currently used in tournaments - and the scene shifts.  New deck types emerge as players explore the possible combinations of cards from what is left, along with the new cards being slowly filtered in every two months as the new sets emerge - in fact, as each of the new sets in the block emerge, new possibilities emerge as well.  These possibilities are not as severe as the shakeup when a block rotates out of use, but are enough that a fury of new deck styles must be explored.

The business potential of this strategy is huge.  Games are fundamentally about exploring a possibility space, and when that space has been explored to its limit, the game ceases to be interesting.  In Magic this possibility space is expanded at a rate that gives people time to master the space, but not long enough that it becomes uninteresting, and then is grown.  On a yearly basis (or so) the entire space is turned upside down, things you used to know no longer apply, and there are new details to take into account.  This is a shifting revel, and it allows the old to become new again, and again and again.

This is much to the profit of Wizards of the Coast, who have managed to create a game so popular that many pieces of cardboard sell for 500% of the price of a booster pack in the secondary market - some particularly useful cards can go for many times that.  That’s a lot of money for a card that won’t be legal in standard play two years from now.  The thing I find particularly interesting about this is that it hasn’t been done in online play (other than in the online version of MTG of course) for any other game that I know of.

Digital Distribution systems provide a very smooth way of rolling this out.  Any game that contained the addictive hooks of MTG and based around shifting revel - potentially fueled by micro-transactions - that rotated on appropriate basis in line with the exploration curve of the possibility space…  Well my friend, that would a license to print money.  Systems like Xbox Live provide even further hooks such as Achievements (Imagine getting badges for beating someone using only direct damage, by milling their library to depletion, by using only creatures, for using a particular combination of cards, etc.), and if it was done well, might even outstrip the fanfare that Wizards of the Coast has been raking in for nearly the past two decades.  This would allow for a game that is not only highly addictive, but extremely interesting ludologically as well.  In any given year, MTG is recognizable enough as MTG - there are certain rules that never change - but the dynamics of the gameplay are totally different, if you’re willing to pay the price to keep up.  There are very few games that evolve so organically over such a long period of time, and I think it’s time we had another one.

Tags: Design, Developers, Game Ideas by Morphix
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I meant to post this about 5 months ago, but I’ve had a lot of difficulty coming up with more to say than a strictly emotional impression, nevertheless, I thought I’d punch it out.

In November I was fortunate enough to have some lunch-time conversations with Bill Giese and Korey Krauskopf from Turn 10 studios. While I can’t speak to the specifics of much of the things we talked about, I spent a lot of the time talking to them about what it’s like to work in the studio.

I’ve found that many of the people at Microsoft have a gleam in their eyes, the kind that comes from doing something you love. Turn 10 has this gleam in spades, but moreover they have a tremendous amount of energy.  I’ve never really had the chance before to speak at length with people who have been developing games in full blown professional studios for a large tract of time.  If Turn 10 is my only datapoint, it’s probably a good one.

Turn 10, if you’re not aware, are the developers of the Forza Motorsport series.  This series is essentially Microsoft’s answer to the Grand Turismo series, and they’ve done a pretty amazing job.  Walking around in their studio, you can see why.  Every scrap of wall that isn’t spackled with design plans is brimming with racing gear.  They even have a test setup with full on racing bucket seats.

When Korey and Bill talk about their game, I was struck by how excited they were about it.  I guess on reflection I’ve always seen this happen, in interviews with game developers, even transcripts of those interviews, you can tell from the text how much they love their game.  It’s a spectacular thing to be able to do what you love for a living, and this industry demands it, because that love gets channeled into passion for the game and hopefully into something that will excite gamers just as much.  I think Turn 10 has done a pretty decent job at this so far, and I’m looking forward to their future offerings

If you want the opportunity to talk to Korey, or one of several others at Turn 10, they’re holding a promotion where you can play Forza 2 against them, tomorrow night.  Check it out here.

Tags: Developers by Morphix
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Chris Jones and Aaron Conners?

Backup.  Today’s Zero Punctuation regarding Zack and Wiki features references to several old adventure games (Yahtzee himself being a designer of some very emotive ones).  Among these are two piece of box art that are probably unfamiliar to most people:  Under a Killing Moon and The Pandora Directive.

These two games are are the 3rd and 4th installments in what is generally referred to as the Tex Murphy adventure series.  You play a cynical middle-aged Private Investigator set in post WW3 San Francisco.  The first two games (Mean Streets and Martian Memorandum) are controlled in a reasonably standard side view that we have come to expect of adventure games, with the addition of a flight simulator-esque interface to travel from place to place.  Mean Streets in fact was originally designed as a flight simulator with some adventure elements added in, although the reverse ended up being the result.

The three latter games (Under a Killing Moon, The Pandora Directive, and Overseer) all use live character actors, and most of the game takes place in a first person view of a mostly photo-realistic environment which is accomplished by projecting photographs onto 2D meshes.  These adventure games were hilariously funny, intuitive, and kept you playing until the very end.  The interface was extremely ambitious for the time (Moon came on 4 CDs in 1994, Pandora came on 6, and Overseer on 5 plus an alternate version on DVD, the first game I ever saw do this).  Nevertheless, the game suffered from a variety of mostly technical issues, and were being made during the twilight of adventure game popularity.  Sales were, one can assume, not exemplary.

A year after Overseer was released, the Utah based Studio - Access Software - was acquired by, wouldn’t you know it, my company, Microsoft!  Microsoft was, I assume, primarily interested in Access software’s more lucrative property in Links Golf, because the Tex Murphy series was never heard from again.  This is particularly unfortunate because Overseer ends in a cliff-hanger.  In 2004 Microsoft sold Access Software, now known as Indie Built, to Take Two Interactive, and it became part of the 2K Sports brand, again emphasizing the golf label over the now defunct Tex Murphy series.  Indie Built created a snowboarding game for the launch of the 360, and was then closed by Take Two in 2006, with no public reasons given for the closure.

Chris Jones and Aaron Conners were the designer and writer, respectively, for this phenomenal series, with Jones playing the titular Tex Murphy.  Aaron Conners also made novel versions of Under a Killing Moon and Pandora Directive, which are pretty good for pulp fiction.

Both Chris and Aaron moved with the acquisition to Microsoft to work on projects there, primarily on the Links series and the Amped snowboarding series.  Aaron seems to have moved to 2K Sports following the second sale, and worked under the 2K label until Indie Built was closed.  He has subsequently left the software industry entirely, and has started a contracting company called WordPlay LLC.

Chris on the other hand appears to have left around the same time Indie Built was sold to Take Two, becoming a partner in an new company called TRUGOLF that makes life-sized golf simulators for what I can only assume to be the “I have a vacation house in the Hampton’s” crowd (One can assume that Chris Jones really, really likes Golf).  Both he and Conners still live in Salt Lake City, Utah.
So what’s to become of Tex? Well, Tex has a sizable following over at James LeMosy’s Unofficial Tex Murphy Site.  Last month Aaron Conners left a note on the forums saying that he and Chris have a new game they’d like to make, and are actively searching for a publisher.  If that goes well, they’ll try to use it as a shoe-horn to make the final chapter of the Tex Murphy series, in some capacity.  The story is finished, apparently, and waiting to be told.  It’s been 10 years since we last heard from Tex Murphy, hopefully it won’t be another 10 before he finishes his tale.

If you’ve been negligent, you should try to get your hands on a copy of Under a Killing Moon and The Pandora Directive.  If you copy the contents of the CDs into folders on your hard-drive, you can get DosBox to mount them as separate CD-ROMs, and you can avoid the interruptions you would have encountered at the time of having to switch CDs constantly because the games natively support putting each CD in it’s own CD drive (if you for some reason had 4 CD-ROMs in your PC in 1994).  There’s a lot to learn - both good and bad - in terms of game design from these games, and the writing is extremely rich in both.  I would highly recommend the investiture.

Tags: Design, Developers, Industry by Morphix
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As previously mentioned, I went on vacation last week, and apparently the world does not stop while I’m laying on the beach.

Big news of the last week.  Apparently it was GDC or something.  I wasn’t there, so if you want juicy GDC goodness, you’ll have to look elsewhere.

Microsoft

• Microsoft, in a new initiative called Dreamspark is making much of its developer software free to students.  This software includes Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server, XNA Game Studio, XNA Creator’s Club Subscription, and Expression Studio.  That should be plenty of tools for would be game developers to muck about in.  Details are here.
• Microsoft is dropping support for HD-DVD with the discontinuation of the add-on for the Xbox 360.  All remaining units are being cleared at firesale for $50.  I would not be surprised if there was a Blu-ray add-on in the future.
• Microsoft announced during the GDC 2008 Keynote a new service, the so-called Xbox Live Community Games.  Under this service, users can build a game using XNA Game Studio, and then upload it directly to a community portal where the game is democratically reviewed.  The reviewing process is intended to look for infringing or objectionable material.  The best of these games get automatically uploaded to Xbox Live for the masses to enjoy.  No specifics on pricing, or if the developer is getting kickbacks (as one would assume they would if Microsoft is collecting on their work).

Sony
On the Sony side of things, Phil Harrison, one of the founding members of Sony Computer Entertainment, and the president of SCE Worldwide Studios, has submitted his resignation.  Changes in leadership often come with widespread changes across the board, but it depends on the size and momentum of the company in question, and Sony is rather largeish, so I would not anticipate a massive change in the direction of their games.

Australia

Australia is talking about finally getting a new rating that will allow more mature titles to be sold there.  Unfortunately, I doubt this will alleviate the massive delays they usually incur before North American/Japanese release, and release to the land down under.

Electronic Arts

EA is offering to buy Take Two!  I would suggest in reaction to the recent Activision/Vivendi merger, EA is looking to add some more meat to its already colossal frame.  EA’s new CEO John Riccitiello has mentioned that he’s extremely unhappy with the scores EA’s games have been getting of late, so there might be some incentive to own some games that are critically acclaimed (which might have fueled the recent acquisition of Bioware as well).  Take Two is brimming with talent, including the developers of the Grand Theft Auto series (Rockstar), Bioshock (2K Games), and Civilization (Firaxis).  While EA’s initial bid is a bit lower than Take Two is looking for, most analysts are expecting this deal to go through eventually at some price point.

On a side note, Take Two is the current owner of one of my favorite IPs of all time, the Tex Murphy series.  This series was created by Access Software (later renamed to Indie Built) in the 90s.  Microsoft acquired them for the Links Golf series, and then sold the company to Take-Two who then shut it down.  While a revival is not likely at EA, it’s marginally more likely than at the parent who shut them down in the first place.

EA has a habit of killing great teams by using simple business math.  If you have everyone using the same tools and processes, costs are lower.  Unfortunately, this slows down and breaks the dynamic that produced the great team in the first place.  This is something you can do with teams that are having trouble realizing their full potential, perhaps due to infrastructural problems, but when you acquire a really solid team, it’s important that you just leave them alone to do their thing.  Riccitiello seems to be aware of this, so perhaps Take Two’s properties are not going to join the legacies of Westwood, Bullfrog, and Origin.

Havok

Havok is free, to which I say, OMGWTFBBQ.  Well, okay, it’s only free on the PC, but as of May 2008, you at home will be able to download your very own copy of Havok Complete (which includes the Physics and Animation packages).  This is a non-commercial license, but it allows hobbyists to get their hands dirty with the most widely used physics engine in the PC gaming space, which is good for companies looking to hire people who know Havok already.  This theoretically lays some groundwork for Havok’s more specialized products for behavioral animation, deformable solids, and cloth rendering.

And that’s all that happened this week, I’ll be posting on a more semi-regular basis now.

Tags: Conferences, Design, Developers, Industry, Platform, Publishing, Releases by Morphix
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As reported by The Escapist.  Excellent.  Drink it up Ontario, drink long and deep.  If there isn’t a richly flourishing ecosystem of Game Development when I make my return in a few years, I will be gravely disappointed.  Prepare the verdant soil, and let the rivers of cash flow.

While I most definitely support government funding of this type to compete with our friends in B.C. and Quebec, $500,000 bucks apiece between two developers (indeed, the two largest in Ontario), is better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, but it’s not exactly a presumptive basis for a buoyant ecosystem.  This is better seen in the form of tax cuts for developers and grants for the establishment of new companies undertaking this most serious endevour.

Tags: Developers by Morphix
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This is a multi-part post.  Jump to:

Part 1

In a previous post, I discussed a lecture recently given at Microsoft by famed Game Designer, Will Wright. The topic of this lecture was Emergence and Game Design. The first part of this post discussed what emergence is, how it relates to Game Design, and the problems it solves. It also discussed some of the problems it creates, specifically that it’s impossible to predict a priori whether a game will be interesting based on the basic mechanics which form it. It would be useful, nonetheless, to be able to discern particular areas of mechanics which tend to work well together to compose a whole game. That toolkit is the subject of this post.

Will’s toolkit draw many parallels to the concept of game grammar, advocated by such industry tycoons as Raph Koster. There are three independent groups which any given game rule-set will derive from. These sets, called Topologies, Dynamics, and Paradigms roughly correspond to the linguistic concepts of nouns, verbs, and grammar rules. Each of these groups is further broken down into specific techniques. Any game system will draw on a mix of techniques from all three systems, but there is no express order in which the groups must be explored.

Topologies

The first of these, Topologies, is the noun analog. Topologies represent the framework upon which the rules act, and create structure for the game environment. Interestingly, Will considers game communities to be part of topologies. A good example is the advancement progression in most games. Some games have a very linear progression, as you advance through levels and are led from one place to the next (e.g. Gears of War). Others are gated - the possibility space branches outward after each gate, only to collapse to a single node at the next (e.g. Mass Effect).

There are three outlined techniques within Topologies, from most rigid to most flexible: Agents, Networks, and Layers. Agents represent particular objects and beings which perform actions, or have actions performed upon them. In Sim City, individual buildings would be considered agents. Nearly all games make use of agents in some form.

The second, networks, represents the framework that defines interactions between agents. These linkages may be spacial (Buildings can be connected by roads), temporal (an action by one agent causes an event in another), functional (companion cubes can be placed on buttons), or relational (forests and gold mines are resource providers).

The last topology, Layers, is a technique whereby several layers of agent-network graphs can be laid upon each other to create a different facet of the same game. Battle for Middle Earth’s War of the Ring mode is a good example of this, as one game is placed on top of another game, and the outcomes of each affect the other. Different views on information (such as seeing the amount of crime in your city), or statically linked layers of graphs (In Sim City, electrical system, water system and road system) would fall under this as well.

Topologies are the most straightforward of the three concepts, and a similar concept is covered in nearly all books on game design. The next concept, dynamics, brings these simple structures to life. Dynamics will be covered in part 3.

Tags: Design, Developers by Morphix
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I’m now home from Seattle after my internship with Microsoft this past fall.  I thought a good way to back into things, now that I have access to my server again, would be to run the best of query against 2007, and see what we pull up.

While we often hear about the best games, or the best publishers, rarely do we hear about the people who make those games possible.  Go check out the top ten overall game developers of 2007.

Tags: Developers by Morphix
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This is a multi-part post.  Jump to:

Part 2

One of the lovely things about working for Microsoft is that really cool people show up from time to time. Last week Microsoft Research brought Will Wright in to talk about Emergence, Dynamics, and Design. Unfortunately the talk is Microsoft internal, so I can’t post the slides or any video clips. I did however obtain Will’s permission to write whatever I like about his talk and to use “head shots” from the video, so without further ado…

There was an article put on Gamasutra a few weeks ago on Design Cognition, and on the concept of bottom-up vs. top-down design cognition. While Gilliard and Rafael are trying to touch on things on the meta-design level - how we think about game design - it’s interesting to note that few are the number of games actually produced in a bottom up manner. While the example of Doom is cognitively bottom up in the sense that the entire game exists as an exhibition for the features, I highly doubt it was actually designed in a bottom-up manner.

In fact, I doubt there are very many games designed in a bottom-up manner, Will Wright really being the only designer that comes to mind who does this on a regular basis. Will’s design philosophy stems greatly from emergence - a concept he claimed to learn primarily from playing Go, playing with cellular automata, and ants. This really struck a chord with me, being something of an Evolutionary Biology fan myself.

The concept behind emergence is that by creating some very simple rules and letting them interact with each other, you can get very complex pheonmena to emerge from this.

Ants are an excellent example of this, and much of the first half of Will’s talk focused on some of the particulars of the way ants behave, and how each individual ant obeys very stupid, simple rules, but these rules cause the colony as a whole to act in an intelligent manner. An example of this Will used was that ant larva need to be fed different things at different stages of their growth. To do this efficiently, they need to be sorted. Sorting is a rather advanced concept, but an emergent sorting algorithm occurs in ant colonies by the following mechanism. At the different stages, larva produce a different smell. When an ant comes upon a larvae, if the smell it emits is different than the surrounding area, the ant will pick the larva up. The ant will then wander around essentially randomly until it comes upon an area that smells the same as that larvae, where it will drop it. This simple rule applied across each individual ant in the colony will result in the larva being sorted into like piles.

This is just one example of an emergent phenomenon of several he gave (and if you’re interested in more, you should certainly read up on the fascinating little creatures). The question then is how does this come into play in game design. If you view a game as a possibility space, the act of playing the game is centered on the exploration of this space. Once the space has been explored to the extent the player is willing to spend their time on, they will burn-out on the game and cease to play. It has been incumbent upon designers over time to enlarge the possibility space as much as possible while retaining a high quality experience. This drive for high quality content has ballooned development budgets and staff requirements by orders of magnitude over the last several years causing relatively little increase in the size of that possibility space, and in many cases a shrinkage. Will views what I’ll refer to as Emergent Design as a method for creating extremely large possibility spaces without a comparable development cost.

The major problem with emergence is that it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to design for with any accuracy. The designer brings to bear several game mechanics and allows them to interact in various ways. For example, in conway’s game of life, there are only four rules:

1. Any cell with less than 2 neighbours alive dies
2. Any cell with more than 3 neighbours alive dies
3. Any living cell with 2 or 3 neighbours stays alive
4. Any dead cell with exactly 3 neighbours comes to life

From just looking at these rulesets, it’s nearly impossible to tell whether this game will be fun, what the emergent strategies or phenomena will be, or anything else about it. It behooves us to find a mechanism to determine this. In nature, successful genes are those that are able to maintain their existence in a competitive environment. There are no rules that apply to genetics to determine fitness, no fitness function. The only way to determine fitness in life is by allowing it to occur.

The hard part then becomes what the best way is to go about doing this. Upon asking him about this, Will said there were two key components: Smart Interns, and creating many prototypes. The interns create and playtest many, many prototypes in the possibility space of the games they could make. When making Spore, approximately 200 prototypes were made, 60% of which were complete garbage.

Even if it’s not possible to determine the end result in an emergent system, throwing darts at the wall randomly is not an incredibly efficient system. In his many years of experience, Will has noticed certain patterns that he’s adapted into a toolkit to refine the ’search space’ of possible games he wants to make, thus making the likelihood of any given prototype revealing fun gameplay more likely. I’ll share some of these insights in part two.

Tags: Design, Developers by Morphix
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Gamasutra reports Eidos is making a new Deus Ex game. It’s still at the proof of concept phase, and is being developed by Eidos’s new studio in Montreal. A teaser trailer is available here.  For those who are interested, the Montreal studio presently has about 80 people, and wants to be at 350 by 2009. Deus Ex (The first one) was a groundbreaking game that established new heights in what’s possible for interactive storytelling. Unfortunately the second game tended more to the “Let’s make pretty graphics” side of things and ended up creating an experience that was both frustrating and confusing. Hopefully the third game will combine the best of both its predeccesors.

Who’s currently at that studio? I would certainly expect that both Harvey Smith and Warren Spector are working on other projects at the moment, but I wonder if anyone from the original Deus Ex games have moved up north? If you’re interested in applying for a position at the Montreal studio, you can find the information here.

Tags: Developers, Releases by Morphix
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I finished playing Assassin’s Creed last night at about 4 am, and I feel decidedly lukewarm about the whole thing.

Marketing

I’ve been waiting for this game for what seems like forever. From the first moment I saw the game, I thought to myself that this was going to be a game that was truely groundbreaking. Taking the lessons Ubisoft learned with Splinter Cell and spinning them off into some wild combination of Hitman and Prince of Persia. You know the feeling you get when you see a commercial for a comedy, and it’s really funny, but when you go to watch the movie, you find out that every single funny moment in the movie was in the commercial, thus making the movie not only rarely good to begin with, but now even those moments are ruined for you?

Ubisoft could have done that, but they didn’t. Superb marketing, Grape job. Big A+ Sticker

Parkour

The whole Parkour thing is awesome. The sandbox thing was very appropriate for this game and the sheer ability to climb up nearly everything was done in an exemplary fashion. Unlike say, Spiderman, who can climb up pretty much any surface, Altair needs handholds - but can make handholds out of pretty much anything. What this means is that when he’s climbing, he’s climbing the way a real human climbs. The walls aren’t just a big sheet of chain-link fence that game be translated across. I can’t imagine how much time they must of spent on this, but it’s really, really awesome, and I don’t think I’m going to be able to deal with stealth games that don’t allow you to do this ever again. The freerunning is also awesome, and it’s a lot of fun to try to lose guards chasing you by doing your thing. The weird part about this is that it doesn’t seem to just be your thing… guards in full armor are almost as manuverable as you are. This kind of takes the wind out of my sails as a bad-ass assassin, but cool nonetheless. The major complaint I would have with the freerunning is the controls. When you’re trying to jump towards a pole, if the direction you’re aiming with an analog stick is more than about 5 degrees off, Altair decides that what you really wanted to do was jump four stories down to the ground. The section of the game in the docks is especially annoying due to this problem, as instead of nearly killing yourself from a four storey drop, you land in the water 2 feet below you and drown. What kind of asshole can scale massive buildings, is a Parkour master, and can’t fucking swim?

Social Stealth

I was really excited about this idea. The idea that you’re hidden when you’re doing things that are socially acceptable is really neat, I just would have liked to see it explored more. There are exactly four ways to hide from the guards - You can hide in these weird little huts that are on the roof and stand out like an eyesore (how do the guards not poke their head in?). You can hide in a pile of hay. You can sit down on a bench and blend in with other people, or you can fall in with some wander scholars. Now, I would note that only two of the above are actually social stealth conditions. The other two are real, I’m hiding somewhere you can’t see me conditions. Scholars appear so rarely and benches hard to pick out that I almost always ended up in a pile of hay or the hut anyway. To make any significant distance (because the cities are massive, you have to freerun like a mofo. While people comment about this, it doesn’t seem to actually bother anyone - other than the guards I inevitably end up throwing off the roof. You’re either sword out in the streets, or just walking along doing nothing in particular. I suppose when Ubisoft said they were doing this big social stealth thing I expected it to be a little more elaborate.

Fighting and AI

Some of the reviews for this game make complaints about the AI. If that’s your opinion… wow, you’re retarded. In my view, the AI is very REALISTIC, which is kind of the whole point of AI in the first place. Yeah, the guards on the roofs don’t immediately kill you for being on the roof. You know those ladders that are everywhere, that would indicate to me that theoretically citizens can get up here too. Ever been in a building at night when you’re not supposed to be there? Does the security guard draw and open fire the second he sees you?

Let’s look at some examples of good AI. Contrary to what you might think, climbing up the side of a building onto a rooftop rarely buys you an escape right away from the guards. Because they follow you up the side of the building. If it’s too hard for them, they’ve usually found another route anyway, so you’re still not out of the woods. If you get somewhere they really can’t get to, they start throwing rocks at you to knock you down.

The fighting system is awesome. Unlike many games which are a huge festival of hack and slash, Altair fights the way a skilled swordsman should fight when outnumbered. Likewise the enemies don’t swing at you all at once, but look for opportunities to break your guard. The sheer number of animations (all of which are beautiful) are astounding.

Now the problem with this is that it’s way, way too easy. Altair can take a ridiculous number of hits, while each soldier, even the ones who are generally on a similar level to Altair are getting their throats slashed and stomachs impaled. In an earlier preview of the game it was indicated that Altair was not supposed to be a tank who could take lots of damage. These fights are in fact easy enough that it’s generally simpler to kill all the guards after you instead of run and hide from them.

This is a bad design decision. The two main pillars for this game are social stealth and freerunning. The latter is usually a means to break the line of sight with your persuers so you can do the former. Allowing Altair to get into massive brawls in which he sweeps the floor is completely at odds with this model.

Story

I’m not even going to discuss it, other than to say it’s terrific, one of the most intricate and crafted plots seen in a video game yet. My only real gripe is that Altair starts the game as an arrogant jerk, and as he progresses becomes more and more wise and lucid… by killing people?  Nevertheless, they’ve got some cool order-vs-chaos-nothing-is-black-or-white stuff going on, so points for that.

Overall Gameplay

Okay, I’ve sung my praises. I had to make myself finish this game, and I largely did so because Penny-Arcade told me I had to. This game had so much potential, and the things they did right were really innovative and well polished. Unfortunately, the rest of the game is just paste around these mechanics. Here is an outline of how the entire game will go:

1. Get mission from boss, go to appropriate city
2. Find Assassin’s Bureau, go talk to dude in there.
3. Spend the next 45 minutes climbing up to the top of the 12 or so towers in area, some of which seem to be replicas of each other
4. Spend the next 45 minutes doing exciting investigation activities such as “Sitting on a bench and targeting that guy”, “Walking behind someone and pushing a button”, or the classic favorite “Finding 20 flags in 3 minutes”. What is up with that, why do these assassin’s keep losing their flags all over hell’s half acre and requiring that they be cleaned up in less than 3 minutes?
5. Find every single citizen being mugged and save them. They will utter one of 3 or 4 lines of dialog. There are somewhere between 6 and 15 of these guys in every mission.
6. Go back to the Assassin’s Bureau, get authorization to kill
7. Wander over to your target, listen to him talk for a while, use ’social stealth’ (read: scholars) to get near him and shove a knife in his back
8. Run away, or just kill every guard you see

The information you obtain in the investigations is rarely useful, and extremely tedious. You’ll be bored of doing it before the end of the first mission. Tidbits like “Hey, there’s some scholars nearby that you can probably use to get close” are really inane. What’s really disappointing though is that there’s very little differentiation between the scenarios for killing the target. One has to make the comparison to Hitman at this point. In Hitman, every single kill is a unique experience, the whole level exists to provide many different ways to execute the hit, some of which are better than others. In Assassin’s Creed, you basically just have to run up and kill the guy (since you’re going to alert the guards anyway), and the ’stealthy’ solution is almost always hiding with some scholars to get close and then kill him, and otherwise involves jumping down off a wall behind the guy.

Overall I’m disappointed with the title. Ubisoft clearly made some very costly investments into getting the engine for the fighting and parkour down well. This game was not really a safe bet, they’re doing some new and unique things here. I feel bad that they did take a unique take at the stealth action genre but completely fouled up the execution on the gameplay part of things. And really the crux of it is that it’s a game, and the gameplay should be more important than anything else. Everything but the gameplay experience is absolutely top knotch in Assassin’s Creed, and perhaps for the second one they can take the engine they’ve built and build an assassination experience that is not a tedious chore. Major points for unique ways of killing or approaching each individual target.

Tags: Design, Developers, Game Ideas, Releases by Morphix
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