The Hidden Blade Assassin's Creed in Depth

After taking a look at Syndicate's fairly standard upgrade system, it started to make me think about what it was trying to represent.

Syndicate takes place over the course of a year, and its protagonists are already shown to be accomplished assassins from the start. The fact that things like double assasinations must be unlocked from a context-free menu rubs me the wrong way, worse than it did with Arno, who was acknowledged as a rookie from the start.

Based on the title of this thread you might think that I'm suggesting that abilities should be unlocked by doing things that belong the the same family of action, such as in GTAV or (more notoriously) Crackdown. However I feel like that also feels like too immediate of a cycle to me. The nature of playtime in a game is such that anything whose progression occurs entirely through in-game means feels small: the longest single player games only keep us meaningfully occupied for a few days of time, total.

There are definitely important things about filmic technique that can be applied to games, and one of those is the general practice of representing slow progression through short scenes, rather than long, unbroken shots.

Equipment and gear can be more easily implemented within contiguous gameplay sessions, but it would be far more interesting for new techniques to be unlocked through the passage of time, and for there to be a cinematic representation of this knowledge being learned, before inviting the player to apply it. To make it feel more important and meaningful when you learn how to manipulate your own self in a new way, more significant than the tools you have acquired.

For a better example of what I'm talking about, I'd imagine the game beginning with an assassination mission, after which you return to your master and are given a choice as to what skill you'd like to develop next, which is accompanied by a training montage and leads directly into the setup for your next mission, months later.

essentially this makes larger-scale progression the true currency/XP of your personal progression, and perhaps ties large increases in money to time-advancing events as well, making the in-game loop less focused on scrounging for cash and more on advancing through your objectives.

I'm thinking about this because to me it feels more like what living through a compressed version of a person's life would feel like. And it puts pressure on the core of the game itself to provide intrinsic gratification rather than relying on quite so many obvious loops of extrinsic motivation. (The story and writing being the only fully remaining one of these)

It's perhaps not realistic to expect exactly that, but I feel like laying this out explains a bit about the kind of internal consistency I look for in progression