The Hidden Blade Assassin's Creed in Depth

So I watched a video of AC1's assassination of William. That mission defines a lot of what I find interesting about AC. The target is making a public appearance, vulnerable but surrounded by security, and you sneak right over top of them. Normally youve been mixing it up in the streets, running from the cops and overhearing stuff. The rooftops have been there, but they don't feel as though thry serve essential purpose: they're just somewhere you can be that is separate from the chaos below.

But now they feel connected to what happens below. They are your shield: suspicion is high, and no-one so clearly armed as you could possibly evade that suspicion for long on the streets. Of course, this feeling doesn't last long, you don'thave far to go and rooftop guards present an obvious threat. Navigating your environment is a matter of simple observation, pathways clearly defined. Said guards are similarly tuned to provide openings to slip past or silence them.

The sense of superior positioning is weakened. It starts to feel a little too convenient, like rooftops are not an unexpected angle, but something long-planned for. If only that guard's patrol were imbued with any sort of human boredom or creativity, you would be spotted for sure. And you start to wonder if Altair really knows what he's doing. If this really is a good idea in any shape or form. If this is why the real Assassins didn't plan to get out alive after their work was done.

What if the archers were on the ground? What if they didnt expect anyone to be crazy enough to climb and jump across unsafe support beams and cracking stone.What if that was rereinforced by the act of navigation on this plane being dangerous and dependent on mastery of the oldest trick in the video game book: platforming. Only when you fall, you dont fall into an endless pit. You fall into an overwhelming number of enemies, and instead of entering combat as you did countless times when scurrying around the city in search of the knowledge thst ledyou here, instead of that, you are beaten to the ground and hauled off, or killed, as may be appropriate depending on what enemies you face. Desynchronization.

This sounds a lot like a setpiece. Assassination missions should be setpieces. Setpieces shouldn't be chases after balloons or senseless destruction of landmarks. They should feel distinct and heavy on theming, not just like playgrounds for mechanics on a larger scale than usual. Of course there should still be stealth elements, but the consequence and reward of stealth should be magnified and exaggerated compared to the time you snuck into a gang's hideout to steal the key to their secret sewer entrance that allowed you to get into the parade grounds on Alexander's speech day, memory 3 of sequence 6.

Look, what I'm saying is that most of these games should feel like work. It should feel like you're slinking around a city shanking fools and finding secrets, but Assassinations too often feel like they're just another part of it. In Hitman, the assassination is work. Agent 47 is the guy they hire when there's no time to prepare and the level of security and lethality in the modern world demands an assassin who can improvise when handed a rubber duck, a dude literally born to do the impossible. In Assassin's Creed, you are for all intents and purposes a normal person. You live in a time where there are no guns or metal detectors or cameras and most everyone's got a blade down their boot anyways. Impossible is not the purview of any Assassin: planning is. Everything you've done leading up to this moment needs to come into play, and you need to feel like you have a good shot at this. It doesn't need to be easy, and it doesn't need to be linear, but there needs to be a well-defined rule of engagement: a strategy that turns the environment into a playground, and an escape plan that is foolproof enough.

I think these games too often present rote obstacles at climaxes, as though players cannot appreciate a simple moment of peace and security, or freedom of expression. You should still be able to kill your target multiple ways, and you should still need to be clever to figure some of them out, but I desire a more atmospheric and minimalist approach to executing the finale, even if that comes at the cost of the dynamism that can still find a home elsewhere in the game.

TL;DR: why not think of assassination missions more like a telltale game with a more complex method to input your choice? Where failure is based not on timing but on mastery of one simple aspect of the game. Maybe this is just reverse-engineering what the developers of every game try to do! Maybe it's stupid! But I had fun thinking about it this way.