The Revenant, Assassin’s Creed and the question of fun versus functional

As I sat in the theatre watching The Revenant, I found my thoughts drifting around through a number of topics. At first it was about the representation of people from the first nations, and how often they seem to be portrayed as either angry savages, yelling their way across the screen, or as mystic sages, remarking on the nature of spirits and generally teaching the white man how to save them. While I braced myself in preparation of the movie’s opening scene, it was quickly apparent that we were seeing real people, not something out of some Adam Sandler movie.

Then came the now infamous bear scene, in which Leonoardo DiCaprio’s character is viciously mauled by a grizzly bear in a way that can only be described as harrowing. And while I would spend a good portion of the movie joking with my movie-viewing companion, this scene immediately triggered a memory from Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed III, which I’ll get to later. As the film progressed, I couldn’t help myself from making links between the movie itself, and what could have been in the game had it been released some time after The Revenant’s release.

Let’s get a few things out of the way: I generally liked Assassin’s Creed III. Generally. The game’s new engine made everything gorgeous. When the seasons change, and snow falls, it really looked and felt like winter. The new animations were as fluid as they were brutal in their execution. The soundtrack was engaging and had a war-music quality that fit the theme perfectly. And while maybe bland in contrast to the “over the top […] womanizer and a braggart” that we saw in Ezio, Ratonhnhaké:ton was still a very interesting character. He was grounded, had respect for his people’s traditions as well as other people’s cultures, so long as they didn’t impede on others’ freedom. He was a skilled hunter, who respected nature and its creatures.

But he was a powerhouse.

Put Ratonhnhaké:ton in a room with twelve armed men, and watch him take them down with relative ease. Even as more enemies make their way, he’s very much likely to pick them out one or even two at a time, at the press of one or two buttons. This is because Ratonhnhaké:ton is a power fantasy. He’s made to make the player feel powerful. Even when overpowered and surrounded, it takes a few presses to either re-gain the upper hand, or to flee, heal up and start the offensive once more.

As Vander Caballero stated in the Physical Attribute segment of his GDC 2012 talk: “we are creating perfect athletes”. Mario is a prime example of a perfect athlete-type character. His jumps can reach far and high, and are perfectly precise in their landings. The only times he messes up is on player input. Alternatively, the protagonists in the Assassin’s Creed franchise rarely fail. This is because the player has even less input over the character’s motion and attacks.

With each new instalment in the series, we notice a trend of making things easier on the player. In the first games, it took two button inputs to fight and counter attack, one of which must be held at all times. From Assassin’s Creed III onwards, it takes one button for counter attacks. Parkouring, arguably the series’ signature feature (since stealth and assassinations are throwaways nowadays anyway), also went from a two button affair, to a one button trick. Except that the one button method is presented as “safely free running”. While this can be overridden by the use of the feet button, it’s hard to ignore when the game tells you to hold one button only if you want safety while performing your death defying stunts.

While some might see this as a gateway to fun, it unfortunately reveals a deep flaw in the games industry’s current design metaphors with regards to challenge.

Take a quick look at revered games like Ico or Shadow of the Colossus, and you quickly realize that these characters are inherently flawed. And those flaws elaborated on the characters’ origins and personalities without them ever having to utter a single word. In Ico, the titular character was not a warrior, or an acrobat. He was just a boy with a stick. There were no weapons upgrades, he couldn’t wall run, or jump ten meters onto a platform the size of a small pizza. In Shadow of the Colossus, Wander is similarly skilled, except he has a sword, a bow and a horse that’s clearly too big for him. You can gather that he’s an okay hunter, since he’s fairly decent with the bow. But he trips over, he flails his sword inaccurately. He’s not a perfect athlete, and neither was Ico before him.

In both those games, the tension was created by how imprecise the characters and the controls were. Early survival horror games were built around imperfect controls with imperfect characters, and the stronger ones were those that found that right balance between playable and vulnerable. There’s a reason the original Silent Hill games still stand strong today, in spite of their questionable acting, while Resident Evil has found itself turning into Dead Space.

Going back to The Revenant (or Leo’s Terribly Bad Day), one can’t help but feel like Assassin’s Creed III could have made use of survival elements in its gameplay. In The Revenant, guns need cleaning to avoid failure. Knives need sharpening to remain useful. Wounds can’t just brushed off , they need to be patched up, in order to avoid dying from an infection. Broken bones need to be braced, to avoid being slowed down by a limp. And while you could kill animals in ACIII, you couldn’t actually use them for anything other than crafting a pre-existing list of items or selling them to buy the aforementioned items.

Now you might be thinking that this is unfair, as the game was released in 2012. And while I would like to agree with you, I can easily point that Assassin’s Creed III could have taken a few notes from Metal Gear Solid 3 : Snake Eater (also a game with a perfect athlete protagonist who must make his way in a forested area without being spotted by armed enemies), which was released in 2004, also featured survival elements.

In fact, in addition to sneaking around, CQC (Close Quarters Combat), and the arsenal you pick up during the mission; survival, which included hunting and healing, was a central element of the game’s play. In it, Naked Snake had a stamina bar, which could affect targeting, or make his stomach growl, alerting enemies to his location. It might sound silly, but in a game centred around the idea that you shouldn’t be seen or heard, it made grabbing a random mushroom just not to feel the hunger vital. The food could, however, be poisonous. You could use medicine to heal up, or induce vomiting. You could also plant the food as trap, for the wildlife, or for some of the patrolling enemies.

The healing system, while not as gruesome as the scenes from The Revenant, or even some of the game’s cinematic sequences, was simple to use, and allowed Snake to recover bits of the health bar that are otherwise permanently affected by an injury or poison.

If this system had one specific flaw, it’s that the healing could be performed even in the heat of battle. But it’s still better than healing bullet and stab wounds by standing in a corner away from battle.

Considering Ubisoft were at one point implementing scalping as a gameplay mechanic, they could have implemented such a system. They could have removed a few of the ultimately useless side elements, and provided us with a more focused take on the game. But this would have taken away from the power fantasy. It would have made Ratonhnhaké:ton ultimately human, able to have his bones broken by enemies or taking a leap of faith into a pile of pine branches lying around in the forest.

Let’s go back to the bear scene, which I remind was brutal to the point of feeling interminable. You look at it, and you will dread encountering any grizzly bear in your life. Contrast this with Assassin’s Creed III, in which it takes two QTE sequences to take down a fully grown bear. Three button presses, in two sequences, equals dead grizzly. Which leads us to the memory mentioned earlier in the article.

At one point, during one of the many ultimately useless treasure hunting moments, I find myself attacked by a bear. I do the obvious thing of taking it down, and then skinning it. Because not skinning it causes a message to tell me that he never killed an animal purposelessly. As soon as I’m done with the bear, another one attacks. And then another. And another. Before I can decimate the entire grizzly population of the area, I decide to just flee the area entirely, causing the game to remind me that I shouldn’t kill animals without skinning them, because it’s disrespectful.

Note here that I didn’t leave the area because I feared getting mauled. I fled the area because I didn’t want to be responsible for the genocide of a digital grizzly bear population.

In a more survival-focused game, I wouldn’t have QTEs to save me. I wouldn’t be able to take down a grizzly bear using nothing but a hidden blade. Or I could have, but not without difficulty. I should come out of those kinds of encounters with wounds to heal, unless I wanted the blood to attract more predatorial animals. I could have been forced to gather the necessary herbs to heal up in the frontier, or use the pelts to to build a makeshift tent.

Truth be told, when I first saw the target gameplay footage for Assassin’s Creed III, I was hoping to live through an ultimately trying experience. I was hoping I’d have to actively survive through the wilderness of the frontier. Instead we had the pleasure of having a few time wasters like treasure hunting, trade, or retrieving Benjamin Franklin’s frankly satanic almanac pages. And I couldn’t help but think that this is a result of Ubisoft not having enough trust in their multi-million selling franchise to actually take any risks, no matter how much stronger the franchise’s legacy would have been.

The safe bet, apparently, was to stuff the game with more stuff to do around the game’s central premise, since it allowed it to pad out the game’s life span. But the game could have stood strong on its own on the premise alone. In my review of the game, which I did for the French-Canadian site Geekbecois, I asked “It’s not enough to just be a Ninja-Assassin-Native from the United States war of independence?”. Seriously, re-read that sentence, and tell me you needed more stuff to add to it. Hell, most of the praise Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag garnered was centered around the notion that it’s a mainly pirate game. Sure, it still suffers from a case of having a powerhouse of a character as the protagonist, but apparently “yo ho ho and a bottle of rum” was more than enough to sway most people.

What I’m trying to get at is this: As game developers (and even as players), what is the mechanic’s purpose? Does it add something to the game? Does it inform us on the character or the game’s world in some way? Does it empower, or de-empower the player? These are questions I’m very certain a number of AAA developers are asking themselves, but can’t implement because of financial risk factors. The irony here being that reducing the amount of fluff would likely also reduce development costs.

Assassin’s Creed III had enough going for it to make it memorable, in spite of troublesome bugs and inherent design flaws. But in the end, the game’s most gruelling moments didn’t come from having to fight off the elements. They came from the painfully stupid ending to Desmond Miles’ story, the forced stealth elements, as well as the twenty-minute long credits sequence.

I only wished I had someone next to me to joke about Lead Best Man Grip or surprise shallow water great white sharks to make the pain pass.