(The first in a hopefully regularly occourring series of articles which should fulfill the “all around rantathon” part of the heading. These editorials can and will be about anything; if they fit a category on the site, they’ll be placed there; otherwise they’ll be under the wombat tab, looking lonely and a little malevolent)
Look, everyone knows I’m a big defender of Ubisoft and Assassin’s Creed; hell, the first article I wrote for this site was an editorial condemning the games media for, well, condemning Assassin’s Creed because it didn’t live up to their preconceived notions of what the game was meant to be.
But even I will admit the game is too damn easy. I applaud the developers for experimenting with a new control system, and indeed the virtual marionette style of controls is comfortable and intuitive to use. In fact, they are so intuitive to use that the term ‘Press X to win’ has begun floating around the interweb in reference to said ease of use, leading to a game where it’s almost impossible to die.
I don’t think that the flaw is necessarily in the idea behind the control system. Rather, I think it came about because Ubisoft had come up with this control system that hadn’t been seen before, and someone in the marketing side of things went “oh crap, hardcore gamers are going destroy us for changing the time-honoured 3rd-person action game controls; better dumb it down so they can’t actually be challenged enough to be angry!” And dumbed down it was.
This attitude isn’t specific to Assassin’s Creed; great ideas like the co-op play in Army of Two, or time powers in TimeShift, have been hit with the dreaded over-simplification ray of doom. Honestly, are gamers such chimps that we can’t decide for ourselves whether we’re trying to jump onto a ledge or fire our gun? Why would you bother designing a game with complex mechanisms like being able to take cover, commando roll around, climb ledges, boost a teammate into hard to reach places, give orders, stop time, rewind time, or whatever the case may be, and then work as hard as possible to take away any chance the player could have of experimenting with these abilities, instead forcing them into doing a specific thing at a specific time? If I am standing next to a ledge, I want to be able to take cover, climb over it, hang off it, or get down on one knee and propose to it if I so choose; why is that so hard?.
I’m not asking for a return to the days of PC games have such a stupid amount of controls that we needed keyboard overlays (although, why not?), but how about, instead of having X be the context-sensitive button to block, we instead have ALL of the buttons be context sensitive to something meaningful; parry with X, lunge with A, attempt to disarm with B, deliver a nasty headbutt with Y, something like that. Why does Assassin’s Creed kill your opponent for you simply because you successfully timed a block, instead of giving you the option to actually, you know, fight? Why can’t I individually order my teammates around in Mass Effect, instead having to rely on the four simple and completely inadequate commands available?
I don’t expect every single game out there to offer the emergent game world capabilities of BioShock or HL2, but when so much effort has gone into establishing a skill set and a world which encourages freedom, it seems mind-bogglingly stupid to put such strict rules in place that said freedom is just a manufactured illusion. Leave the one-button-does-all gameplay to the platformers and stupid titles; we want more than just the illusion of choice in our gaming experiences.
If Psychonauts has taught us anything, it’s that the brain is mightier than the sword.
- The Evil Wombat
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