I've Been To London, Paris, Rome, and Boston?
I've donebackflips in the Parthenon and assassinated George Washington
Assassin’s Creed, like most AAA video games, is stupid. Before the hordes of rampant gamers come for my throat, I don’t mean this as an insult. As I’ve written about before, I live for stupid and fun things. You might even say it’s the whole ethos of Dang Dude. Assassin’s Creed, both as a series, and with regards to the most recent game in said series, Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla fall squarely into that “stupid, but fun” camp. And I love them for it.
But first, for my readers who either don’t consider themselves “gamers,” or even know what “gamers” means, a little explication. Assassin’s Creed is a series of video games made by Ubisoft. First released in 2007, they have gone on to become one of the best-selling titles of all time. Generally – with a few exceptions – Ubisoft releases new games in the series once a year. Other smaller side projects, or DLC (look it up!) get released on varying schedules. I’ve, and this is not something I am particularly proud of, have played all but one of the mainline games. These are AAA games, meaning that hundreds, if not thousands of people spend hundreds of thousands of hours making them. The price point of these games reflects the amount of work hours put into them. Each new game in the series is usually one of the highest selling video games of the year, selling millions of copies. While the games have evolved over the years, they’re best described as open-world role playing games, or RPGs. That is, you the player, control the movement and development of a specific in-game character, making choices and taking actions based on what you think is the best way to complete a certain mission.
I’m sure many people reading this are wondering out loud to themselves, with more and more consternation as this newsletter goes on, “But what the heck is the game about? How can something this successful be stupid?” As to the first question, I will get there, I promise. If you’re asking that second question, this must be your first time reading Dang Dude, either that or you’re a newborn baby, not yet fully capable of understanding the world around them. Lots of things in this world are both successful and stupid. Probably even most things.
Explication over. Let’s get to the stupid.
One of the reasons why Assassins Creed is so successful is its simple pitch. You play as an assassin living during a famous time period. Gameplay largely involves sneaking around exactingly detailed famous European (sometimes non-European) historical locations – think Il Duomo during the Renaissance, or Notre Dame during the French Revolution – and killing people. These two bits of gameplay have resonated with people and helped make Ubisoft a very rich company. This is not why Assassins Creed is stupid, however. What’s stupid is everything else they tacked onto the game.
Assassin’s Creed has a lore problem. In the previous paragraph I mentioned that you play as an assassin. This is only half-accurate. In the terminology of the game, it would be more correct to say that you play as an Assassin. That is, as a member of the centuries-old, globe spanning shadowy organization known as the Assassins. It would be even more accurate, and my mind is slowly turning into a prion-rich mush as I type this, to say that you play not as an Assassin living during a famous time period, but as a modern ancestor of a historical Assassin, who is accessing their ancestor’s memories through a device known as an Animus in order to uncover secrets about an ancient race known as the Isu. You are doing this in order to do three things; stop the modern-day Templars – the greatest enemies of the Assassin – save the world from physical destruction, and prevent the Isu from taking power once again. Got all that? Yeah, I don’t really either. I’m probably wrong on one or two points. I hate that I know this much about it.
None of this is particularly stupid for a video game. Each individual can have up to 60+ hours of narrative gameplay, and filling that time isn’t exactly easy. Video games aren’t even the worst offenders when it comes to overcomplicated plots. Just take a look at the X-men movies. The reason that Assassin’s Creed is dumb, is that they’ve refused to get rid of all of it. They made some creative decisions over a decade ago and stuck with them, despite a complete lack of interest from all but their most dedicated fans. It’s not like Ubisoft is anti-change either. The gameplay of the series has evolved in recent years, as has the narrative style. They just refuse to get rid of one of the least liked, and most ignored, parts of their game. Frankly, it rules. The fact that a multi-billion-dollar company keeps making the same decision over and over again, largely to their detriment, is awesome.
There are other reasons Assassin’s Creed is stupid outside of its nonsensical narrative decisions. The biggest one of those is how it deals with ethical considerations. It’s somewhat of a cliché in the gaming world that Ubisoft games like to think of themselves as gaming company that asks big questions. Their other games like Watch Dogs and Far Cry all purport to ask big ethical questions, like what is the correct response to fascism, or how do you resist dictators. The purport to offer players the chance to decide how they want to answer those questions, in a sandbox setting. Of course, those are massive oversells. Due, in part to the limits of technology, but mostly to both capitalism and the and unwillingness to alienate players, these games make milquetoast political statements at best. There have also been several high-profile firings of company execs due to sexual harassment and misconduct claims in recent months. Assassin’s Creed as a series takes a stupid approach to these ethical considerations as well. Take the most recent entry, Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla. Set during the Dane invasion of England, you play as a Viking attempting to take over part of England. Forcing the player to act as a colonizer of one of the greatest colonizing nations of all time seems like a perfect set up to ask some of those difficult questions Ubisoft prides itself in asking. Outside of a few easily missed cut-scenes or bits of dialogue AC: Valhalla doesn’t address those questions at all. Instead, it largely sticks to trying to let players kill various English soldiers in as cool of a way as possible. The titular Assassin’s Creed, “nothing is true, everything is permitted,” also invites some sort of discussion about morality, but it never occurs, or at least not in any in-depth fashion.
It might be a bit much to expect a thesis on ethics from a video game that at one point has you assassinate a Pope, but the game teases them so much, it’s hard not to. While they certainly have shaded several interesting narrative choices like questioning if the Assassins are really good, and making George Washington a bad guy, but it’s largely come to nothing. Basically, a know-it-all freshman in a Philosophy 101 class. That’s stupid.
So why do I play these games if they’re so dumb? Well for one, it’s cool to explore something like Westminster Palace or the Great Pyramids, even if it is through a digital render. It’s fun to trade barbs with Socrates, Robespierre, and Marx, all while doing cool parkour flips through various Western European locales I’ll never get to visit. Trying to figure out what the hell is going on when it comes to all the baroque narrative embelishments is just an added bonus.