So I recently started playing Assassin’s Creed again. I’m a little more than half way through the game and I am really enjoying it. The significant portion of that statement is that it took me 4 months to say it.
AC has more roadblocks in the way of first time users than I thought was possible. It’s almost like the designed the obtuseness in. “No no, this is too easy… how else can we confuse people?”
The game begins with you dropped into the game with all your weapons and abilities. You get to use them for about 10 minutes before the game stops. In the course of the next hour of game play you are stripped of all your weapons, catapulted into the future where the game play and the narrative have about zero to do with the game you thought you were playing. By the time a player is released into the world they have been playing for an hour and a half and they only vaguely remember something that resembled a tutorial at one point.
There are two things they could have done to fix this.
The first and most import would have been to let the player really play for the first hour. None of this flash forward, flash backward, your weapons: now your see ‘em now you don’t crap. This really cuts back to what I was saying about Lost Odyssey, these games last days, take your time with the content and the story. It really is not vital that you dump everything on the player all at once. The experience should be savored. No one goes out to an expensive dinner and scarfs it down and runs. Take your time, give them a drink, an appetizer to excite the body and then when they are relaxed and happy *bam* you throw the main course down in front of them.
Your game may have a lot of brilliant ideas to get to but trust me, when you hit the reveal, people will be all the happier for it.
The other option they had was to write a different story. The tale they came up with was really heavy on exposition at the front. As a result the player sits around scratching his ass going “why the hell is this game about the middle ages happening in the future?”
To be clear I am not bashing the future thing, but the way the plaer got there was so clunky the story was just not enjoyable.
