July 31, 2009
Even a bad ending would have been better
Video game rant here. I finished Assassin's Creed last night, and was disappointed with the ending. (Yeah yeah, I know, not exactly the newest game. It's been sitting here for months...) Rant below the fold for spoiler purposes.
First, let me say that the ACTUAL GAME was quite fun, with what was quite possibly the finest free-form platforming I've ever seen anywhere. Running along and across the rooftops with Altair was a painless and joyous experience, leaping from timber to timber, across narrow alleys, vaulting across wide expanses... Beautifully executed, no pun intended.
The actual fighting, meh, but I'll forgive it that.
The -basic- story of the game wasn't bad either. Assassins, Crusaders, Templars, betrayal, mystic artifact, it worked out pretty well even if it was telegraphed far in advance. The meta plot, though, where you're actually a guy being forced to recall all this stuff through racial memory because you've been captured by modern-day Templars who have launched a mind-control satellite... aargh. I was hoping for a payoff final level where I took all the skills I learned in the rest of the game, and the pen I pickpocketed earlier, and slaughtered my way free. Nope. I got to use my "special vision" to see some phantom bloody images on the floor, some cryptic references to obvious sequel bait, and nothing after that.
Even Halo has more of an ending than that!
My real problem is that the Desmond sequences are boring and banal. You slowly walk between your room and a device. You listen to the scientist and the assistant talk about stuff that's important to the meta-plot which never gets resolved. You can freely roam around and interact with almost nothing, because there's almost nothing THERE to interact with and you can't interact with any of it anyway. If I put all this time into listening to it, don't I get a little payoff? I would have been satisfied with snapping the doctor's neck and escaping with the girl! But nooo, I get to look at a half-dozen cryptic e-mails, and that's it...
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First, let me say that the ACTUAL GAME was quite fun, with what was quite possibly the finest free-form platforming I've ever seen anywhere. Running along and across the rooftops with Altair was a painless and joyous experience, leaping from timber to timber, across narrow alleys, vaulting across wide expanses... Beautifully executed, no pun intended.
The actual fighting, meh, but I'll forgive it that.
The -basic- story of the game wasn't bad either. Assassins, Crusaders, Templars, betrayal, mystic artifact, it worked out pretty well even if it was telegraphed far in advance. The meta plot, though, where you're actually a guy being forced to recall all this stuff through racial memory because you've been captured by modern-day Templars who have launched a mind-control satellite... aargh. I was hoping for a payoff final level where I took all the skills I learned in the rest of the game, and the pen I pickpocketed earlier, and slaughtered my way free. Nope. I got to use my "special vision" to see some phantom bloody images on the floor, some cryptic references to obvious sequel bait, and nothing after that.
Even Halo has more of an ending than that!
My real problem is that the Desmond sequences are boring and banal. You slowly walk between your room and a device. You listen to the scientist and the assistant talk about stuff that's important to the meta-plot which never gets resolved. You can freely roam around and interact with almost nothing, because there's almost nothing THERE to interact with and you can't interact with any of it anyway. If I put all this time into listening to it, don't I get a little payoff? I would have been satisfied with snapping the doctor's neck and escaping with the girl! But nooo, I get to look at a half-dozen cryptic e-mails, and that's it...
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at
03:09 PM
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It can't be as bad as Fallout 3. That ending was such a downer that I never cared enough to visit all the spots I'd yet to explore and just uninstalled the game (admittedly after viewing the nuclear explosion a couple more times).
Posted by: Daran at August 06, 2009 07:53 AM (Efoiw)
2
The biggest problem with Fallout 3's ending is that it's so plainly a railroad to doom. "Oh, someone has to go into the radiation-flooded room to stop the disaster!" (you turn to your radiation-proof mutant buddy, who did exactly the same thing a couple missions ago) "Oh, no, I couldn't possibly take this away from you." Yeah, hey, thanks loads, jerk.
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at August 06, 2009 02:18 PM (pWQz4)
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