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Tuesday 15 January, 2008
GAMEPLAY
My second hour (more like 45 minutes, really) was a little stressful: I was meeting a old friend for dinner and I knew that I hadn't even really finished the tutorial yet and why didn't I go over to my brother's an hour or two before that and blah blah blah. Thankfully my brother and his friend had gone for a walk for the first 30 minutes, so I didn't have that "performance" anxiety. But then they came back.
Combined with my frazzled state, I felt a little like I didn't get enough instruction from the game. First there were the fives tries to successfully pickpocket and not get shoved by the basket-weaver. Then there was the practice fight. I couldn't read which buttons to press (an issue of the TV, to be sure, but it's not like that sucker was small. Is it necessary to either know the Xbox 360 symbols *that* well or have a wide-screen TV to play?), so trying to execute the moves was painful. Also, with two on one, I just kept getting hit. Then, and this is a slight matter, there was the jumping off of the view tower, not realizing I needed to jump off of the conveniently placed log into the cart filled with nice, soft hay. I realize that a lot of this can probably be boiled down to the fact that I am not a hardcore gamer, and that of all kinds of games, excluding FPSs & war games, this is perhaps the least likely I am to usually pick up. But I do wish that some certain things had been more explicitly explained. That said, I *did* love riding the horse. Pretty horsie!
GAME DESIGN
So, one of the best things about Assassin's Creed is that the biometrics of the game are amazing. Altair moves so fluidly and well that it's just fun to watch and play. When he climbs, he grabs a handhold every time, he walks like a person, albeit a kind of sketchy person, like an assassin (why doesn't anybody notice this but meeee?). The horse moved beautifully as well. I just rode around in circles, admiring the horse and the way Altair's robe billowed. Along with that goes the game environments are awesome. The cities look like maybe the game designers studied actual real cities, maybe even modeled them, and based the cities in the game off of them. There's just this organic, real feel to them that is lacking in most video games I've played.
Ideas for gameplay: The organic city: odd overall shape (also odd interior shapes), curving windy streets, lots and lots of people (why do video game towns always look so deserted?). One great (and standard) way to introduce exposition is always to have the "newborn" character. AC twists that cliche a little in that 'you' are Desmond, experiencing Altair's memories for the first time. Time to brainstorm other twists for the amnesiac/newcomer cliche! Gameplay-wise, I love the focus of investigation and not out-and-out slash-n-bash. I'm not sure I would want to do a stealth/investigation type-game, but definitely taking the focus away from fighting. That's not to say that there will be no fighting, but it won't be the main point or method of gameplay, I think.
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