Ubisoft— Past, Present, and Future

An analytical retrospective of Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, and Watch_Dogs

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During 2007’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (better known as E3) gaming convention, Ubisoft Montreal unveiled their new IP in the form of “Assassin’s Creed”. Starring an Assassin named Altair and set in the crusades with the promise of exploring three unique cities in a historically inspired context— Few games have gone to the 12th century for the History— Assassin’s Creed promised to transport players into a whole new world with a novel form of traversal: parkour. The games’ three core pillars were: Navigation, Combat, and Social Stealth. Those pillars have defined the games through the past 6 iterations, and will likely continue to define the brand moving forward. Assassin’s Creed also featured the kingdom, an open countryside area that connected Jerusalem, Damascus, Acre, and the Assassin citadel Masyaf. Developer Jade Raymond described the openness of Assassin’s Creed by highlighting that if a player sees a mountain in the distance, they can leave the city, ride through the kingdom, and find that exact mountain. The game also was very grounded in history, centering the plot on the conflict between the Assassins and the Templars, two factions fighting for their ideals of freedom and order. Assassin’s Creed was a design marvel as well as a technical feat because the main plot of the game involved assassinating nine important targets on both sides of the Saracen-Crusader conflict— all of whom died in the year 1911, as shown in the game. From the beginning, Assassin’s Creed stood to be a powerful contender in the new PS3/Xbox360 generation of consoles. Upon the game’s release in November of 2007, the game unfortunately fell short of some expectations. While universally lauded for innovations in open world game design, high-caliber philosophical discussions never before seen in videogames, and player agency, critics were also disappointed in the game’s repetitive and dull mission design, and overwhelmingly bland color palate. Players were united in their opinions of what was good and bad about Assassin’s Creed, but were divided on whether or not the good (the game’s innovative vision for the future of open world experiences) outweighed the bad (the game’s execution).

In E3 of 2009, Ubisoft set out to expand on their original vision for Assassin’s Creed and fix what was wrong with the first installment. With a cinematic trailer following a chase through the streets and canals of Venice and a gameplay demo that highlighted new gameplay innovations and hinted at story elements, Assassin’s Creed II was seen as what the original Assassin’s Creed wanted to be and was meant to be. Following the life of Ezio Auditore da Firenze, a young Florentine noble, Assassin’s Creed II told a story of betrayal, revenge, and brotherhood. While the original Assassin’s Creed had a large focus on the conflicting Assassin/Templar philosophies, Assassin’s Creed II put a premium on Ezio’s personal story. The game featured a lofty cast of characters, including Leonardo Da Vinci, Lorenzo Di Medici, Niccolo Machiavelli, and Pope Alexander VI, as well as Savonarola, Caterina Sforza, the Pazzi family, and the Barbarigo family as minor characters. The teams at Ubisoft quickly developed a history for getting the most out of history and their setting. Assassin’s Creed II was by all accounts a massively improved game, and won many Game of the Year awards in 2009. Ubisoft has the vision from Assassin’s Creed, and executed it nearly flawlessly in Assassin’s Creed II.

From there, Ubisoft continued with Ezio’s story in Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood. The third game in the franchise took place primarily in Rome and followed Ezio’s conflict with Cesare Borgia, son of the Templar Rodrigo Borgia (better known as Pope Alexander VI). Brotherhood’s main innovations were a total revamp of the combat mechanics to allow for chained attacks and better flow, and the introduction of the Brotherhood system which allowed Ezio to call on recruited assassins to help him any time and anywhere in the streets of Rome. In addition to new gameplay, Brotherhood returned to form with a renewed focus of philosophy. Niccolo Machiavelli, introduced in Assassin’s Creed II, becomes Ezio’s foil, making Ezio think critically about his own actions and goals, and ultimately shaping Ezio to become the Assassin Mentor. Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood was received well, and considered to be a thick coat of polish on the Assassin’s Creed II formula.

Assassin’s Creed Revelations was the final game in the Ezio trilogy. Revelations, led by Creative Director Alex Amancio and written by Darby McDevitt, left Italy for Constantinople, and experimented with new types of gameplay that would later factor into the gameplay of Assassin’s Creed Unity (also led by Alex Amancio). In Revelations, Ezio’s story concludes with his search for Altair’s library in the former Assassin citadel Masyaf. Revelations is considered by many to be a primarily story-driven game with what was perceived by the player base to be fairly small gameplay innovations. New gameplay included a much-hated tower-defense minigame, two militarized factions (instead of the generic universal “city guard” faction found in all of the previous games), and bombs. What Ubisoft set out to do with Revelations was give the players the feeling of experimenting with a chemistry set. The variety of bomb options available to the player (lure and repel effects, and explosions), plus the addition of a second faction (that will fight with the first when they come in contact) allowed the player to take greater control of the game space in which they played. It is worth noting that Assassin’s Creed I-Revelations all ran on the proprietary Anvil game engine, although the modifications to the code were non drastic throughout the Ezio trilogy. The Anvil engine was replaced in the following year.

The next year brought Assassin’s Creed III, in which players take the role of Connor Kenway, a Native-American Assassin during the American Revolution. While since Assassin’s Creed II the franchise had been on an annual release schedule, each game took several studios and generally two years to develop. Assassin’s Creed III took three years to develop, due to the added necessity to develop the AnvilNext engine— a complete revamp from the previous engine. From the very beginning, Assassin’s Creed III set out to be a massive technological overhaul for the series. In the months between the game’s announcement and its release, fans were hyping the game to incredible levels, getting excited about the new and massive Frontier open forest, the two sprawling colonial cities of Boston and New York, and the inclusion of naval warfare gameplay. As was the case with Assassin’s Creed, Assassin’s Creed III was highly anticipated, but ultimately a disappointment to many who expected a total revolution in gameplay and design— despite being the best selling Assassin’s Creed game in the series to date.

Following the general disappointment surrounding Assassin’s Creed III, Ubisoft announced it’s next entry into the series, Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, set in the early 18th century West-Indies in the golden age of Caribbean piracy. IV expanded on the naval mechanics teased in III, by creating an open world Caribbean that stretched from Kingston to Nassau to Havana. Where the development of III was primarily concerned with creating new technology, the development of IV was focused on using that technology to its fullest potential. Assassin’s Creed IV was reviewed quite favorably, and was praised for being a far better executed than, more immersive than, far better written than and a logical progression of Assassin’s Creed III.

At E3 2014 Ubisoft ended many months of increasing hype and player speculation by unveiling Assassin’s Creed Unity, an Assassin’s Creed game re-invented from the ground up and set in Paris during the French Revolution— exclusively for new-gen consoles (PS4, Xbox One) and PC. Unity adds seamless four-player co-operative gameplay to the usual Assassin’s Creed formula, drastically overhauls the existing AnvilNext engine (and adding more technical capabilities such as 5,000+ NPC crowds, all of whom are controlled by unique and dynamic AI), and innovates on the gameplay behind the three core pillars of the brand (Combat, Navigation, and Social Stealth). Unity, also led by creative director Alex Amancio, aims to re-integrate mechanics that play to the “chemistry-set” feeling of Revelations. Unity is poised to fall into the category of a half-technology-half-design-centric game. While Unity required that four million of the AnvilNext’s eight million lines of code be altered to best take advantage of the power of the new-gen consoles and high-end PCs, Unity’s most significant advancements are in the formula of the gameplay— a matter of creative design. Ubisoft wants Assassin’s Creed Unity to be a revitalization and complete re-invention of the franchise, and objectively looking at the history of Assassin’s Creed, Unity has a very good chance of doing just that. The leap from Assassin’s Creed to Assassin’s Creed II is a good representation of what players can expect from the leap between Assassin’s Creed III and Assassin’s Creed Unity. If Ubisoft do two things right, it’s that they learn and prepare for the future. Each Assassin’s Creed game either exemplifies lessons learned in previous games, or sets the groundwork for future ones— as the series progresses, there is refinement as well as evolution. Unity looks to be a good mix of both. As history is prone to rhyme, Assassin’s Creed isn’t the only game franchise to follow this type of history— Far Cry has experienced this type of history, and the newly-released Watch_Dogs will almost inevitable experience a similar trajectory.

The original Far Cry was among the earliest open-world first-person-shooter games ever made, and much like the original Assassin’s Creed, it did a lot of things right, but needed work in key areas. Far Cry’s plot was plagued by the advent of monsters midway through the game, despite being praised for very novel gameplay. Far Cry 2 experienced no monster-related complains, as it set the series in a far more grounded direction. Lessons learned. Far Cry 2 added dynamic wildlife to the mix, which could either help or hinder the player’s quest depending on which side of the tiger was facing them. Still, Far Cry as a franchise was by no means a big-player in Ubisoft’s lineups. Far Cry 3 was the series’ breakout hit, vastly out-performing expectations and selling more than eight million units since the game’s release. Far Cry 3 is a standout example of Ubisoft’s capacity to refine and evolve subsequent games in a franchise. What made Far Cry 3 such a success was how the systems in the franchise that had existed since Far Cry 1 finally clicked in a way that made exploring the open world, interacting with animals, traversing the island, raiding outposts, and hacking radio towers both seamless and fun (so much so that most players viewed the game’s campaign as constricting and weak by comparison). Ubisoft games have a tendency to share systems and gameplay loops that work. Most Ubisoft games are open-world. Take Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry, two games that are very different. One is a third person, parkour-heavy, game set in a city that emphasizes social stealth; the other is a first person shooter set in non-urban, exotic, fictional locations. However, both feature a system of liberating areas of the explorable world through attacking outposts, both place a premium on evaluating the environment and carefully planning a stealthy approach, but when stealth fails, both allow the player to take a “guns blazing” approach. This points to another thing that makes Ubisoft truly great, since it develops and publishes its games, developers shift from project to project, and the games adopt features that worked particularly well in other games (for instance, Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood’s Borgia Towers)

When it comes to Ubisoft’s track record of refinement, evolution, and ideological synthesis, Watch_Dogs stays the course. Announced at E3 2012 and soon after praised as the coming herald of the new-generation of videogames, Watch_Dogs places players in the role of Aiden Pearce, a hacker-vigilante who uses the entire city of Chicago as a weapon, controlled from only his smartphone. Watch_Dogs promised systemic, dynamic gameplay in which the player can see the varied effects of their actions in the actions of the citizens of Chicago— whose names, incomes, jobs, and interesting information Aiden can access as the touch of a button. Watch_Dogs was the result of Ubisoft asking its teams for an “open-city” game, with little other instructions. Until that point, Ubisoft had never made a proper open-city game, (Assassin’s Creed doesn’t count given the historical aspect and the distinct lack of cars) so it would stand to reason that Watch_Dogs was a massive departure from everything Ubisoft had done in the past, right? As was the case in the comparison between Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry, this isn’t exactly the case, as Watch_Dogs borrows many of it’s fundamental systems from other Ubisoft games. For instance, Watch_Dogs features ctOS control centers that resemble the gameplay loops of Assassin’s Creed’s towers and Far Cry 3’s outposts. Watch_Dogs, like Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry, places a premium on stealth as a first option, but when caught out of the corner of a guard’s eye, the entire flow of gameplay quickens as bullets start flying. Watch_Dogs also borrows from Splinter Cell’s stealth mechanics. Also, while each Ubisoft game has its own pillars, Ubisoft games in general modify one central idea from franchise to franchise: openness. Openness refers to the game world itself, and a lack of limitations on gameplay style. Ubisoft games like to offer the player a way to play that fits what they want, wether its stealth, action, or anything in-between. Empowering the player to solve problems in new and different ways is part of what makes Ubisoft great. While Watch_Dogs lived up to this promise in many ways, it was not without shortfalls.