PAX and Assassin’s Creed
Face it, Assassin’s Creed looks awesome. Sure, you can joke that Jade Raymond also looks awesome and that’s why you watch all the press videos for it, but the game itself also just looks fantastic. One thing stands out to me though after seeing the live demo of it at PAX this weekend, they really nailed movement.
I have this idea that’s been stuck in my head for a long time when it comes to action games: “If the player movement itself is fun and simple, the game will be much better for it.” It seems like a basic rule, but lots of games seem to lose track of the fact that the character is your little cursor of pain. Moving around in the world is the most basic part of interacting with the world, and should have the most care taken when working on it. The Assassin’s Creed team definitely seems to realize that.
What is so special about their movement? (Mind you, these observations are from the back of an auditorium) Well, it’s a combination of two inputs at most. To move you use the left stick, to move quickly, you hold the A button while using the left stick. The simplicity is amazing. That means if you’re walking, you don’t run up walls, you don’t jump, you just walk. Pressing A immediately makes the world a contextual playground, as you run to a wall, you run up it, if you run to a ledge, you jump across from it. The cool moves that the assassin can do don’t require the player to remember button combos or result in you having to awkwardly solve jump puzzles, instead it’s immediately accessible to do something cool by pressing two buttons.
By doing this, Assassin’s Creed frees up the buttons on the controller to be used for different things, like attacks and such. It also gives the player rewarding “cool factor” without having to ramp up to it so much. The player is immediately bad ass and can more easily incorporate the world in their tactical decisions of the encounters, instead of having to fight with the world as well as the enemies.
An argument to this could be, but how cool is it to me if a game plays itself? Well, the extreme end of that argument could be a mini-game in which the player runs along a pre-determined path and his success or failure is based only on hitting the button prompt or combination there-in with no actual decisions to make. Heavenly Sword’s demo is an example of this. Instead of this being the case though, the player is never locked in from the demo I saw. The player is given the freedom of exploring and that freedom is given with a very easy cost to entry, two simultaneous inputs at once.
Most of the presentation that Assassin’s Creed had at PAX was spent going over fundamental movement and how they approached it. When making an action game, I really think close attention to movement is paramount to a successful experience. This really frees up the options of what you can do with your controller input and in my opinion is a great decision in making the game elegant and accessible. Build off of a foundation of movement and everything else will fall in to place.