Nerdtales

Off to Damascus

Assassin’s Creed doesn’t seem to care much about immersion. After the first mission where I had to find the traitor I was pretty much hooked up to the game and the setting and started to feel good. Bam! The game switched back to the laboratory with the scientists talking about some nonsense, nothing of relevance I think. I walked around, not knowing what to do, until I stood next to a bed and a message poped up that I can interact here. Wow! What happened is that my character laid on the bed and slept. Interactivity in the year 2008!

After a couple of more minutes and some chatty with the doctor I was back on the table that brought me into the memories of my ancestor again. My master was pleased with my first mission and sent me to Damascus to kill a weapons dealer. I had to go down from the tower to the town and from there out of the gates. There I picked up a horse and rode to Damascus.

What happened here now was a switch to some sort of overworld. Similar to traditional JRPGs where you switch from towns/ dungeons to a world map on which you travel to the different locations. Just that in Assassin’s Creed the viewpoint doesn’t change. There are no mission objectives on this world map except the possibility to climb up several towers, which serve as outlook points, and collectible flags. On the way to other towns I passed crusader’s outposts and villages. It’s like a walk on the country side.

As this was all new to me it took me 30 minutes to Damascus. In front of the gates I learned about the secondary objectives. These are things like helping people which are harrased by soldiers or getting additional information on the main objective by overhearing or interrogations. I helped the peasant and submerged between monks to get past the soldiers at the town gates.

Once inside the first minutes really overwhelmed me as the scenery was very vibrant and full of life. People walking everywhere doing something, talking to each other, the city was alive. My main goal was to go to a contact of the brotherhood to get the permit to kill this weapons dealer. Before I went there I just walked around, climbed some outlook posts, which gave me additional information about secondary objectives on my map. With every 15 accomplished mission goals - secondary and primary - the gauge on the upper left, that is basically a health bar, fills up with one block. So I ran over the roof of the city and helped some citizens and gathered additional information about my mission. Whenever I was in danger and soldiers were chasing me the game was really fun because it forced me to use my surroundings to my advantage. For example pidgeons sitting on roof edges mark death jumps that help to hide from soldiers. And those death jumps really look astonishing.

But after some of those secondary tasks this all went rather boring as it was the same over and over again. The area I could walk around was limited by blue barriers. When I wanted to pass those the game just told me that the system didn’t have access to that part of the genetic memento. So I was forced to stay in the slums of Damascus. I then headed to the contact person which allowed me to kill the weapons dealer now. That all was rather easy. I approached a small market place where I hid between other citizens overhearing the target person talking to one of his suppliers. Well, not talking. He killed him. Time for me to jump in. I followed the weapons dealer and chose to slaughter him. A small pretty nice cut scene followed which showed the dealer actually passing away and his ghost talking to me.

The mission ended with me running away after a not so subtle assassination. Bam! Back in the laboratory. Only the assistant was around so I tried to talk to her and she gave me some hints why this all was happening, but it didn’t really explain much. So back to bed and the next day started with the doctor talking about the problems of mankind and how humanity lusts for control. This doctor acted like a fascist. Interesting.

Time to head into another part of the memories. I could actually chose the next mission, either in Jerusalem or in Akkon. So again I went down the hill from the tower to the town, out of the gates to the horse and rode to the world map where I started the long travel to Akkon. This is were the game became frustrating for the first time.

In the game I was constantly reminded that I was actually ‘replaying’ memories. This showed sometimes in jumping between different parts of the memories like a fast forward to the next scene of importance. But why the heck wasn’t it possible to fast forward to the next town instead of walking there? It took so long to ride to the next city because you always had to be aware of hostile soldiers and rode slowly past them to not cause a stir.

And then it seems that the whole system of awareness of the soldiers is flawed. On the upper left of the screen there is a sign that shows the awareness level of a soldier. When it is yellow I ride past the crusader and he won’t notice me. When the sign is red I have to push and hold ‘A’ all the time to go slowly and he won’t notice me either. That is what the game told me at least. In fact, it happened so often that still every fucking soldier was chasing me for no reason at all. That is a huge flaw because the game is also built on stealth elements which at least didn’t always work for me.

But I have almost arrived at Akkon, so let’s see what happens there.