I am almost at 100 books for this year on Goodreads, and I am super stoked because at this rate I will surpass last year’s total. And that would be cool! But I can’t keep reading more and more books every year, I think, so I don’t know how to approach this going forward.
Also, uh, don’t be surprised if I’m not on Facebook much in the next few days.
Anyhow.
Last weekend was the free weekend of Assassin’s Creed: Origins and I played it! And I had fun. But I was reminded of things I had thoughts about. So I thought I should go ahead and start writing about it!
I also considered talking about Assassin’s Creed and uchronia, but, hm, maybe next time? Or another time. I can’t keep constantly talking about AC, or else my readership (all three of you) will tune out.
Assassin’s Creed: Origins Should Not Have Been a Revenge Story
So all of last weekend, when Assassin’s Creed: Origins was free to play, it was also for sale at 85% off. I heavily considered buying the game, for the sake of being able to say I played through every single main release of the series, but then I remembered that I don’t actually like the story of Origins very much, and though I would have fun, I have enough games as it is.
Assassin’s Creed, if you don’t know, is the story of the struggle between two secret societies throughout history: the Templars, who want to take over the world, and the Assassins, who think people should make their own decisions (I’m simplifying significantly, because you probably don’t care about the rest). It’s asked at several points what these two groups were called before the Crusades, but there wasn’t a significant, in-game answer, though the games reveal that the groups’ backstory predates those eras significantly. One puzzle implies that the feud goes back to Cain and Abel.
Assassin’s Creed: Origins goes: nah, brah, it just goes back to the 40’s BC, back when Cleopatra was gaining power. All those Assassins from before then? Those weren’t actually Assassins, they weren’t part of the group, those were just guys who stabbed people for Freedom or something.
The actual main story of Origins isn’t about the freedom of mankind, or rising up against those in power because they’re trying to control you–although those themes are present, especially in the rushed ending the game has. For most of the story, the reason the pre-Assassins (Bayek and Aya) are trying to kill the pre-Templars (a group called the Order of the Ancients) because they killed their son and they’re mad about it. There’s political intrigue and side stories, but for the most part they’re trying to kill these guys for revenge, because they don’t think that their son Khemu will have peace
[I want it noted that the Order of the Ancients was written so differently in their motivations and aims from the Templars of later games that Valhalla later retconned them into not being the Templars’ immediate precursors, just a group that was wiped out and the structure was copied for what would become the Templar Order.]
And yes, their son is named ‘Khemu’ after ‘Khemet’, the Egyptian name for Egypt, and the one who actually did kill him was a Roman official, so the game has the heavy-handed SYMBOLISM!!! of “Rome killed Egypt!” So there ya go.
Alright, moving aside from all the problems I have with the origin story being this late in the game, let’s move to the meat of the matter. There is a lot that needs to go on in this story. There’s the civil war between Ptolemy and Cleopatra, there are all the siblings not mentioned in the game at all who are mixed in there (I think there are two other sisters?), there’s the founding of the Assassins, there’s the ideological struggle about freedom and control, and instead of doing any of that, the writers went with… a revenge plot. The politics don’t really play into it until the end of the story.
Oi. How original.
And I get that in Assassin’s Creed, revenge plots are a really easy bet to get the player invested. For a LOT of video games involving violence, I suppose. How else do you get your player to feel sympathetic for a character who is going around killing a lot of people? Well they’re killing people who killed someone the character loved, of course. It’s the easy path, and it’s one that’s worked well for the series in the past.
But it’s also more than a little silly. Well no, not ‘silly’ because it’s a serious topic, and Abubakar Salim, the voice actor who plays Bayek, does a fantastic job of showing his character’s angst, pain, and despair. But we’re told over and over again throughout the series that what separates the Assassins and Templars is philosophy about how humanity should be governed. Templars believe that while world peace is an admirable goal, average people can’t be trusted to rule themselves. Assassins believe that people should choose their own destinies. It’s pointed out more than once that Templars have good goals, and can make a lot of good changes happen, but are hampered by their methods and desire for power. Likewise, the Assassins spend more time stabbing bad guys than actually fixing the problems of the world, and this often causes more issues as a result, especially since Templars usually put themselves in charge of industry and infrastructure.
That conflict was essentially tossed aside for making a very simplistic “Here are the bad guys, they killed your son, now go stab them,” story. I get that it’s also in part because this was meant to draw in a lot of new players, and they wanted to streamline a lot–so much story discarded as a result. You don’t want to scare off new players with a complicated story about the fate of humanity when you could just get them hooked with a basic story.
But couldn’t they have built up that complex story over time? Couldn’t they have started somewhere simple and then had the story evolve into one that showed the complexities of the struggle between these two groups?
In short, was a revenge plot really the best they could do? There’s so much to talk about, so much to do, with this kind of story in this setting at this point in history. And instead the writers made the most basic ploy for sympathy that they could, ignoring a decade of previously-built themes right there for the taking.
This should not have been a revenge story.
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