The Hidden Blade Assassin's Creed in Depth

Game: Assassin's Creed Syndicate
Evie Memory: A Thorne in the Side (Assassinate Lucy Thorne)
Style: Lethal / Reaper / Stealth Kills

Evie's hunt for the Shroud leads her to the Tower of London, where the Templar known as The Occultist, Lucy Thorne, is conducting a search. Knowing that she is running out of time, Evie brutally cuts down all who make the mistake of standing against her.

***

I love this mission because it has a shorter loading screen than every other mission in the game when you hit Restart Checkpoint. Also, the entire mission pre-Target Kill is one long checkpoint. The reason this is good is that if I mess up later on and want to restart, I don't have to hit Restart Mission, wait through a huge loading screen, then skip all the cutscenes, then wait for another huge loading screen. I can just hit Restart Checkpoint and try again with a very fast iteration time. That's why, despite this mission being one of the tougher ones in the game, I was able to produce this video so fast after the previous one.

In general, I love this mission's design too. It's its own instanced area that you can never reach in the regular open world, which means the entire space is designed from the ground up to be fun to play in, within the rules and contexts of a Main Assassination. Since it's separate from the rest of the game, it also affords the designers the ability to be a lot more creative with the level design, while usually there's always some dissonance between the Open World and the Mission Design that takes place in it. Either a section of Open World is designed first, in which case the Missions that are built on top of it after the fact are less well-designed and well-structured than in a linear, hand-crafted game. Or, the Mission Area is designed first, and it's then slotted into the Open World, which can sometimes feel a bit "off" or like that part of the open world is less natural.

Putting Main Assassinations in a sectioned-off, instanced Level of their own is such a great idea, and I love it a lot. I wouldn't do it for every Main Assassination, just for some of them, especially when it's against a Target that's meant to feel spooky, mysterious, or unknown. If an Assassination is in the Open World, an Assassin and a player would theoretically have more knowledge since they've played in that game-space before, they know what's up. When you set an Assassination in its own map, the player and the Assassin have no idea what to reasonably expect. They're improvising, moving on the fly, and the tension is real because you're definitively in enemy territory.