Blog Archives
Assassin’s Creed: Rogue and Good Open-World Collectibles
Assassin’s Creed: Rogue is a curious beast. I don’t think it offers a well-put narrative, main campaign, or a cohesive overall experience. And the implementation of Assassin turned Templar concept is underwhelming at best. It does, however, offer some amazing side-content. It’s an Assassin’s Creed game where you just enjoy travelling around the world, exploring, and completing very well-designed side missions and activities. Including getting quite a lot of collectibles, which is the main topic of my today’s post.
The Disunity of Assassin’s Creed: Unity
I talked quite a bit on the topic of cohesive wholesome open-world experiences on examples of Assassin’s Creed, from the positive examples of Brotherhood and Black Flag, to a somewhat more incoherent example of Revelations. But today I want to talk about an example of cohesiveness lacking at all, which can’t be fixed by removing some elements or features or polishing it up.
There’s some Assassin’s Creed games that I could use as examples. There’s Rogue that’s indecisive about what it wants to be as it mixes the Assassin and Templar experiences in various degrees of success. There’s Assassin’s Creed III which was so ambitious that in the end quite a lot of different parts of the game ended up somewhat lacking. But the game that I want to focus on for this topic is Assassin’s Creed: Unity.
Black Flag’s narrative theming in gameplay
Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag at the moment of writing this post is my most favourite game of the franchise. It’s just so well-crafted, from mission design to narrative, world, how it all connects together. And maybe it doesn’t fix all the flaws inherited from other games (like the still very easy combat system), but as I’ve mentioned a couple times before, it’s not a barrier for some amazing experience and in my opinion Black Flag delivers it. The game is really a ’Best of Assassin’s Creed’ collection, combining all the strengths of previous titles in one cohesive package. But today I want to talk about the narrative themes of the game, as well as how they connect to gameplay.
Assassin’s Creed: Revelations and the Importance of Cutting Features
Most of the time game development is looked at from the perspective of building. A plan is made, foundation is created, then a carcass, then everything is properly put into that carcass. The terminology used is reminiscent of building as well. And in that context, cutting features out is something very undesirable. It’s like we’re constructing a modern top of the line skyscraper but for one reason or another have to build it without proper air conditioning. And whenever features are being brainstormed, most of the time it’s about what to add.
Cohesive open-world experience of Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood
I firmly believe that what we as game developers do is create experiences for our players. And all the different areas of the game, – cool gameplay, technology, narrative, audio – feeds into those experiences. How the wooshing sound of Hearthstone cards when you move them helps with that feeling of a physical card game. How the different sound cues of Left 4 Dead depending on the special zombie nearby influence the teamwork aspect of the game. How controls themselves are used as a narrative tool in Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. And a game is valued best when it all works as a whole.
Creating Emotional Arcs With Weapon Progression
There are many tools we can use to create emotional arcs for the player, as well as the character(s) of the game. The list consists of, but is not limited to, narrative structure, visual design, level design, gameplay mechanics, and many other things. In this particular post, though, I want to explore how weapon progression can play a big role in providing a certain emotional experience, on the example of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. Be warned, there will be spoilers.
How well missions use open-world space in Assassin’s Creed II
Creating and filling open worlds is a tricky thing. On one hand, you want them to be massive, expansive, provide a feeling that you have a whole sandbox to play in, and incentivize exploration. On the other hand, you also don’t want them to feel like there’s nothing to do, you want there to be content. Pretty much every open world game (that is not an RPG, I suppose) tries to mitigate this issue by adding a bunch of collectibles spread all over the world. That’s content that, if the player chooses to complete it, will have them explore every part of the map. But, to be honest, I consider most collectibles to be filler with very little value. What’s much more important is how the world is utilized in missions or other meaty actual content. And a game that I think is a very good example of open world usage in missions is Assassin’s Creed II.
Secrets Design in Rayman Legends
I was so hooked on Rayman Legends the past couple weeks. You know those games that you’ve tried for a bit and know are really good but didn’t play extensively for some reason? Rayman Origins and Legends are some of those games in my case. And not long ago I played Legends for a bit longer and couldn’t let it go. It’s simply stunning. So well-designed, well-tuned, insanely creative and very engaging to play and the whole package is like, woah! And the music levels. Can’t talk about Rayman Legends without mentioning those. They’re amazing. But in this particular post, we’re gonna take a look at how Rayman Legends handles secret areas. It doesn’t take much to mess up with these kinds of things and make the process of finding them really arbitrary or annoying, but Rayman Legends does everything right.
The Curious Case of The Division’s Dark Zone
The Division is an open-world third-person shooter/RPG set in mid-crisis Manhattan, with a focus on co-op and multiplayer. One of the main multiplayer features is the so called Dark Zone. It’s an area of the city where you can find the most powerful NPCs with the best loot, but also the only area where you can kill other players and take their things. And you can’t just leave the Dark Zone and save your progress, you got to call an extraction which will draw attention of NPCs and players alike. In the end, gameplay in the zone is based on trust (or lack of thereof) and shaky alliances. It’s chaotic, intense, you never know what to expect and provides layers upon layers of player interactions… except all that doesn’t work as planned.
Quests in Alto’s Adventure
Alto’s Adventure is an endless runner with a great sense of flow, tight controls, and it’s just very nice to play. What I really like about it, though, is how it handles quests. Quests/challenges are a very important part of an endless runner, because they bring variety and provide you with other goals than just to go as far as possible, thus influencing the way you play. Most of the time, at least in my experience, the quests in endless runners are random. Not in Alto’s Adventure, though, each set of quests for each level is specifically set.
Stanislav Costiuc 