« Dialogue and Story | Home | I’m Sorry, But the Princess is in Another Castle »
Sloppy Endings
By Corvus | March 20, 2008
You know, a bad ending can ruin an entire narrative experience for me. Like a bottle of wine that has turned just enough that the finish tastes a little of vinegar, the final chapters of Assassin’s Creed (AC) serve to turn my enthusiastic praise into a solid, “Meh.” My first two complaints are the result of the same design decision, but worth looking at separately I think.
Forcing my Hand
One moment I’m using my access to the entire city of Jerusalem to my advantage, sprinting down narrow alleys, working my way to higher ground and only turning to face my opponents in spaces where I can better control the field of action. Or better yet, evading them all together, finding a safe hiding spot and watching the guards decide they had better things to do than hunt for me.
The next moment I’m forced to stay in a relatively small area lest I lose my quarry. Guards surround me, archers snipe at me from areas I cannot easily reach. There is little to no cover. After a particularly tense moment, I settled down and found the one spot that provided cover and took my lumps, using hidden blade defensive moves to kill any who dared attack me.
The next moment after that, I’m trapped in a small bubble of inaccessible memory, fighting for my life against waves of opponents. The barriers, once hovering around the edges of a large area of each city, not impede my ability to position myself to good advantage. Cliff walls prove unscalable, the archers are out of reach. Only by dispatching all of my attackers does the memory barrier fall, allowing me to progress and revealing itself to be a tool the developers can use to force me to play their game, their way.
To add insult to injury, after I am forced to play the game in a manner which completely ignores my play style up to this point, I am treated to a cut scene where Altair tells King Richard that he’s not there to fight. What? Really? I just killed at least 40 of his soldiers… and I’m not here to fight? Why didn’t I have the option of running past them then? I could have pulled it off. I’ve done it before. Why didn’t I have the option of scaling walls or trees and avoiding them altogether? Why, after all this time, do I have to play the game the way you want me to?
Highlighting the Weaker Design
The strengths of AC revolve around the assassin’s relationship to his environment. I spent the entire game learning how best to use this relationship to my advantage. The final moments of the game completely abandon this design strength in favor of combat.
When ringed with too many opponents, Altair does not always respond effectively when instructed to counter attack. As someone who spent most of his combat time using counter attacks, I’d noted this much earlier in the game and taken steps to keep from being completely surrounded by multiple layers of opponents. The final three scenarios offer you no real option, but to allow yourself to be surrounded and hope for the best. To add insult to injury, I found I couldn’t always keep my combat weapon of choice (the hidden blade) equipped, as Altair would often switch back to his sword after getting tossed by a larger opponent. This gave my opponents ample opportunity to strike while I stopped and drew my long sword. It’s possible that I was reflexively squeezing the left trigger and breaking out of and back into combat mode, but it still strikes me as a design flaw. If I select a weapon, don’t override my decision, even if you think I’ve made a bad choice. Perhaps visually suggest I switch, but don’t force me.
Reach a Conclusion
This section may contain spoilers. Read at your own risk!
Cliffhangers end on an emotional highpoint. They build the tension and skip the denouement, abruptly stopping and leaving you wanting more. AC opted to skip all that work and just abruptly stopped. Rather than piquing my interest for the second game, I feel like I’m being strong armed into buying it. In part, I suspect, they chose to end it they way they did so Desmond (the modern day avatar) can go back into the Animus and hunt down the remaining Templars and city flags. That’s probably something I’ll do myself, with the aid of a guide or map. There are also a couple of Informer missions that I skipped in favor of making more rapid progress on my meta-mission. But it still felt anti-climactic and a bit odd to have the baddies allow Desmond free access to expensive technology, computers and email.
I’m not entirely done talking about AC just yet and that’s a good sign. You can expect one or two more posts on it before I’m done. If forced to summarize the game, I’d probably say that it’s an ambitious storytelling effort with some very strong narrative decisions and a fair share of minor gameplay and pacing flaws.
Tagged:assassin's creed, storytelling, videogames. |
March 20th, 2008 at 9:06 am
AC is not the only offender in this category. A lot of games that encourage diverse play styles often force the player to adopt a particular play style at the end game. This annoys me even if the play style required was one I was using, because I feel like these sections ignore the design of the rest of the game.
It almost gives weight to theories some gamers have told me that they don’t really expect players to actually finish games anymore. Not sure I believe that, but when this kind of thing happens I’m wondering how the direction was so badly lost.
On the other hand, I had no intention of buying AC, but after reading your posts I may change my mind. There are a lot of other games I want to play right now, but it’s at least back on my radar.
March 20th, 2008 at 9:10 am
I would almost rather the issue were a misguided need to bring the narrative back under the developer’s control, rather than a belief that no one was going to make it that far anyway.
March 20th, 2008 at 9:36 am
I kind of wanted to express something along the lines of what Jason O said. But being a cynical being, I would have to go with the idea of developers working heavily on the start of the game to sell it to the publishers. The ending suffers because suddenly time and money are spent, and the publishers want to have [the game] out the doors as early as possible.
One game I felt that heavily on was Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines. The beginning was good, great, free form and let you play as you wanted. Later it was guns blazing and swinging of sharp implements if you wanted it or not.
I cut my losses at that time. Someday I need to pick it down again and play it with all the fan-patches installed.
AC - would’ve liked to try it - but there is no “next-gen” console in my home. :/
March 20th, 2008 at 9:55 am
Man, bad, abrupt endings really annoy me. The best games are those which start development and the beginning and end, at the same time, then work towards the middle!
Seriously, Bioshock had a weak way of ending (removing the possibility of further exploration at the same time) as well as having the 2 last levels (one being a boss fight) be completely different to every fight before. That escort mission was pain.
Another example; Oblivion simply…stopped? The main character did bugger all in the last “frantic, against a huge evil” mission, and then, afterwards, gets to talk to one guy, who says “Thanks” then gives you some armour, and a statue I think. Wow…no parades, no glorious final battle, no nice cutscene of hellish worlds collapsing, or even a decent reward (like, uh, gold?). Terribly tacked on ending. Most of the sidequests ended a similar way - when you become the head mage after all the mage guild rubbish, there’s no real change, and certainly no ceremony pronouncing you the lead mage…hmm.
Unreal Tournament 3 is another big offender. The only time you do a 1v1 is at the start of the game, in the tutorial level. The game puts you, in the final level, against a tough bot 1v1 - I had an okay time on “Normal”, despite the bots insane accuracies, but this was too much since I had no backup. I had to tune it down to easy, and even then it took me 5 or more attempts. Then the ending cutscene simply had your crew, who you’d seen respawn dozens of time, killed, and abruptly end. (Not that the story was any good really, oh well).
None of these makes me want to go back to play again, or get sequels to see what happens after, or even gives me the possibility of seeing the changes (save Oblivion, who’s changes amount to a few new statues).
Deus Ex 2 offends highly - the last few levels, instead of allowing sneaking, basically require you to kill everything. Every-damn-thing. I gave up, never finished it, despite persevering to that point. (The last levels had these rocket-throwing, heavy-duty dudes, which could seemingly see a mile off too…gah!)
Offenders are all AAA games, fancy that…very annoying! Not the reason I’d be playing them again (no reason to try and get to the end if the end sucks!).
Plenty of games do it well of course - the endings of most GTA games are cinematic bossfests using your standarad guns, and RPG’s usually have a standard (but hard) enough battle at the end which is fun.
March 20th, 2008 at 1:18 pm
It seems like all those games that give you a bunch of alternatives through the whole game tend to reduce them severely by the ending. But thankfully, like Andrew Armstrong said, GTA is an counter-example of this (to some extent).
Let’s see, in GTA for example, the developers don’t want the player to be able to kill the “last boss” with an effective snipe to the nogging. Of course not, they want you to have a 1v1 confrontation with as much dialog, fanfarre and epic feel as possible. That’s understandable, but this line of thinking applied badly (among other things) is what’s causing this crappy ending designs.
How can this idea be applied badly? Oh, let’s see, perhaps relating “epicness” with “2796235 annoying enemies coming at you with chainsaws”? Sounds cool and epic (from the mouth of a 12 year old) but in practice… not so much.
I just feel like some storytellers and game designers never grew up, and are fullfiling their childish fantasies through their jobs. Or perhaps they think that they are giving the audience what they want: action movie like stories.
This is my jaded speculation of course.
March 20th, 2008 at 1:50 pm
Having played AC it seems like Ubisoft Montreal did exactly what they did with the ending of PoP: Sands of Time. They said, “Okay, you’ve learned to do awesome acrobatics. Now here’s a hundred bad guys to kill, followed by a boss battle straight out of the 1987 NES Playbook.”
“But it still felt anti-climactic and a bit odd to have the baddies allow Desmond free access to expensive technology, computers and email.”
I think this was justified story-wise by having what’s-her-face actually be on your side.
March 20th, 2008 at 6:34 pm
I never made it through Sands of Time, but that is pretty much the feel of AC.
Yeah, it explained it. And it makes sense as they want you to go back and shoot for 100% completion. But it still leaves everything feeling very unresolved.
March 24th, 2008 at 2:40 pm
[...] a bad cliffhanger ending. Even Corvus, who was playing through the game for the same week I was remarks on this, a few days after I finished. And I am finished. After that, the desire to complete everything went [...]