Why hallo, I have had a weird week, but it’s over now and I can kick back, relax, and play “Siege of Paris.” And maybe I’ll FINALLY get to watching Gunpowder Milkshake on Netflix.
Also expect an update on the Book Diary. It’ll take a while after that because I’m reading Wrath by John Gwynne which is fairly long.
Anyhow.
Saturday Note.
---
Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla and Going All-In
I have been talking some trash about Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla lately and I want to be clear: there ARE things I like about this game, hence why I’m still playing it. And there are a few things it does really well. I considered making this Note for ImpishIdea (and I still might adapt it), but given I’m going to bang on about Plot for a bit, I’m worried that I’d feel the need to explain every single Plot element and I don’t want to do that for a bunch of strangers.
What I really like about Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla is how all-in it is in its approach to telling an Assassin’s Creed story. I’ve complained in the past that many Assassin’s Creed games don’t want to lean too heavily on the overarching mythology and Plot because they want to attract new players. The prequel game that explains the origins of the Assassins, for instance, doesn’t really have that many overt callbacks to previous games in the series or much care about continuity. It’s frustrating. The main writer for that game is actually a newcomer to the series, which seems a bizarre choice in doing an origin story.
Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla doesn’t have that problem. Not only does it have veteran AC writer Darby McDevitt as the lead writer for the game, and so he crams the story with as many callbacks, references, shout-outs, and little bits of backstory and worldbuilding. We find out how the Order of Ancients is taken down and rebuilt into the Templar Order, we find out what that whole ‘Father of Understanding’ business is about, we see SO much First Civilization content in the game, we move the Modern Day Plot along, we meet Juno again...it is ridiculous how much stuff is packed in there for long-time fans. I have been questioning if this storyline is even comprehensible to players who haven’t been following this series for years, because many of the reveals rely on understanding details from previous games.
This game has callbacks to just about every major game release in the series except for Liberation (which is arguably not a major release, sadly) and Syndicate (which is downright bizarre because that one also takes place in England. Unity I think doesn’t get one until the expansion “Siege of Paris” but that kind of makes sense so I’ll count it. There are random bits like the Yggdrasil medallions that the Order of the Ancients wear, similar to the one Shay wears in Rogue. The Sage business from Black Flag. The storylines in London, Winchester, and York are pretty directly homages to the missions in the original game. The puzzles and short video and practice Animus things from the Ezio stories. And so on.
Likewise the mythology segments also have so much material? I didn’t know how they would manage to combine the binding of Fenrir, the building of Asgard’s walls, the Mead of Poetry, and Mimir’s Well into one story that’s coherent, but they did? And it all ties into the First Civilization story by making Ragnarok into a distortion of the Toba Catastrophe. IT’S SO COOL.
This is a series that repeatedly has things happen and mostly hints at bigger things to come, or that it will explain what it’s talking about, but then never actually gets to those things or explanations. It’s immensely frustrating. And then this game comes along and just says, “You know what? It’s time that you got some payoff to all the things we’ve been talking about all along.” I really appreciate that.
The whole ‘Let’s do a slow burn story and by that I mean not do any major reveals for the overarching story for years on end’ is a popular thing with long-running series because, again, they want to attract new viewers, readers, or players in the audience who would get confused by heavy continuity and would rather be comfortable slipping into the thing right in front of them without years of backstory. And that’s understandable. But if you’re telling a story in that format you have to have things moving forward, and you can’t keep delaying every reveal and major story point. Then you get things like Assassin’s Creed: Origins which dumped the series’s main villain and barely explains how it ties into already-established lore, all in hopes of not overwhelming the player.
I’m reminded of a thing, and I want to say that I heard it in a promotional behind-the-scenes video for the PS4 Spider-Man game, in which someone on the team says that in a conversation with Stan the Man, Stan Lee explained that his approach to comic book writing was this: go all-in on every issue. Put as much action, as much drama, as much COOL STUFF as you could in each installment, because you don’t know if this is the first or only installment that your reader is picking up and you want it to be as memorable and cool of an experience for the audience as you can each time. You don’t want people picking up one comic and deciding it was boring, and it was because that was a boring filler episode; you want each one to stand out and be a chance to be someone’s favorite.
And that’s a good approach to comics, and it’s a good approach to long-running series of any medium. And yeah, okay, I get it, sometimes you’re going to have to delay putting in some things for drama so there can be a big reveal later, or not everything you want fits in one installment, or there are budget issues or something. That’s okay. But you do need to make each issue, or game, or webpage, or book or whatever actually feel like it’s worth reading, especially several installments in, so that the audience feels rewarded for sticking with it this far, and newcomers get a sense of what the entire story’s like.
Every part of the story should try to be a reward for having read/watched/played it.
---
No comments:
Post a Comment