I read an article recently that pointed out the problems of gendered mechanics in games. Fortunately it isn't done so much these days. In, say, Mass Effect the experience of playing Commander Shepard doesn't change a bit no matter what gender you assign her. You don't get suddenly better with melee and worse at ranged combat if you play a male Shepard, and there's certainly no rainbow heart attack or "only boys can use explosives" for the femshep.
That Aveline is the first female Assassin in the franchise doesn't change a thing about her abilities. What changes is the context. She can run and climb and fight exactly as well as any previous Assassin. But she's doing it as a mixed-race woman in 1700's New Orleans and when she does so she gets noticed.
That utterly changes the experience of play. But it changes it in a way that is oddly consistent with the core gameplay of the series. And by doing this, and the way in which it does this, the game throws a light on gender experience.
The Assassins Creed games have always been about controlling your visibility. This is through a combination of outright stealth, blending into the background, and social invisibility; the last via a mechanism called "notoriety" that reflects a general awareness of the authorities and their agents that someone looking like you has been in the area doing mischief. Guards get suspicious faster and remain suspicious longer, and are quicker to act on their suspicions as well. Get notorious enough, and they will hunt you down.
The social blending is a fun aspect of the games but is also a little weird in later games, where one of the selling points is the badass outfit your avatar gets to wear. A character in Black Flag lampshades this by mentioning, "...the distinctive costume of your Secret Order." At least in Black Flag, everybody dresses weird. Pirates, you know. It looked a lot odder in Assassins Creed III, when Connor was blending into a crowd of Proper Bostonians wearing his great hooded robes crossed with bandoliers.
When Aveline is going incognito she dresses as a slave. In this costume and this persona it makes complete sense she could fade into the background. In one animation she'll actually pick up a loose broom and start sweeping up. Ten feet away from the men she is tailing, she might as well be a piece of the furniture.
Other Assassins Creed games have had segments where you go in disguise. The interesting element Liberation adds is that Aveline basically has three personas. She dresses to one of three roles, and the role she is playing modifies the mix of her options. Dressed as the well-brought up young Lady she is, her social status allows her physical access her other persona are not freely given. But she can't run in those hampering skirts and although she can (and does) fight quite well, such unladylike behavior gets instant attention and quickly raises her notoriety.
As the slave she can run and fight but she is also looked at with suspicion when she does so in the open. Fortunately she also has the easiest option to regain her anonymity; merely tear down a few wanted posters.
The last option is to wear the fancy Assassins kit. And boy it is a gorgeous outfit, but this personae starts with one point of notoriety. Just being a woman dressed in trousers is enough to attract attention. When she does do something illegal it seems the main thing all the witnesses remember is her gender. In any case her notoriety also shoots up fast, and it is difficult to dismiss.
This is almost deconstructive. And it is wonderful and chilling. No matter what Aveline she is being at the moment, you are always aware of the eyes on you, judging you, watching you suspiciously to see if you properly fulfill your gender (and class) role. As the lady dressed to the nines you are particularly constrained, unable to act out lest people take notice; allowed great freedom of movement as long as you stay within those narrow boundaries.
One of the cuter mechanics is that the Lady can flirt with a young gallant who will then follow her around for a while with his sword and musket ready to defend her. When she's dressed as a slave, the same gallant takes not the slightest notice. But of course the invisibility of the slave comes with awareness of your near total lack of any rights or recourse. And as the Assassin, you are outside the bounds of all society. At least you can run and climb -- within reason -- because she starts out so outré her physical activities are just looked on as one more eccentricity.
Just to add an extra layer, the game is presented as a game created by the fictional Abstergo, part of the secret Templar plot to rule the world (a conceit explored in more detail in Black Flag.) There are no distracting "real world" segments in this game. Sort of. Instead the game itself is interrupted by the efforts of a "hacker" who then forces you to replay certain segments with a more truthful version of events than the one that Abstergo had originally presented.
(This conceit is carried so far that among the usual pre-game titles are ones of Abstergo and the Animus.)
Then there's a probably unintentional layer. There is a lot of overheard conversation in the streets and a lot of names and history being discussed and most of it is in French. One wonders if the experience at the Canadian developers and with their playtesters was different from that of a typical monoglot American player (like me, for instance). The past is another country, all right. In this case, a rather alien and even confusing one.
There is one thing that as of game four Ubisoft hasn't gotten right. And that's making the history accessible. What I mean is, when you pass a historic building or meet a historic character you have a brief moment to click a control that takes you to the right page in the growing "Animus Database" where there is a tiny paragraph on the thing. And then you have to back out of the database with a half-dozen keystrokes and hope you didn't leave the game paused in some awkward moment.
It really should be a one key pop in, pop out -- or better yet, an overlay; something that keeps the person or building or whatever in frame and you in the world and in the moment.
Liberation is basically a re-skin of Assassins Creed III (the one set during the American Revolution), even though it was released at the same time. It is a shorter game, like an expansion pack released as an individual game. So the work Ubisoft did on ACIII is carried over; the counter-centric fighting style, the free-running with the particularly helpful tree highways, and the lovely vegetation and weather effects.
As with the other two games in the series I've played, Liberation messes with the control options and gets a hit-or-miss with that. Not all of the controls can be remapped, either; the aiming system for the blow dart is particularly inconvenient in this regard. It also has the twin flaws of insistent tutorialization one moment, and throwing brand-new mechanics at you in the middle of a fight.
I think the latter is actually a philosophy of play at Ubisoft. I think they are making a point about the way goals change and the way situations develop. So the game will throw a tailing mission at you in the middle of a dialog, and just as you've finally settled into the groove of tailing, suddenly change it up and insist you switch to fighting or something.
I end up with a lot of restarts from last save point when they do this. And that is another annoying peculiarity of the series. Most games save a snapshot of where everything is and restore you to that. The Assassins Creed series "restores" you to where the game thinks you should have been at that moment. Which is really annoying when you managed to climb to a nice vantage point, but the game sticks you in a bush and just to add insult to injury doesn't take into account you'd restocked on all your special sleep darts just for this mission.
(Actually, it does make internal sense; you are supposed to be reliving a set of genetic memories, and to die is to "desynchronize"; to have failed to reproduce the original's experience.)
The tutorials are annoying, though. And inconsistent. Sometimes the game will pop-up a reminder about a special action each and every time that action is possible. Other times it will only mention once (at a moment when you are too busy to pay attention) something you'd really want to be using later. I actually got stuck in the first five minutes of the game because it assumed I'd patiently wait to be shown how the counter/parry control works and I'd already killed the first two bad guys. The game basically froze in the middle of the fight, with the other bad guys waving ineffectually like martial arts movies background fighters, waiting their turn for a button press that had already happened.)
But more on that in my Black Flag interview. All I really wanted to touch on here is how breaking the rules worked for this one. Whether you play a game in first or third person (the over-the-shoulder camera) you begin to identify with the avatar you are controlling. Games have experimented and philosophized for decades about whether allowing the player to customize their avatar, or whether to make them voiced or voiceless, effects the depth of the player's identification.
My opinion is it doesn't. With one big caveat; you don't need to be playing a character that is of your gender, race, or species. But it helps to know that your gender, race, or species is represented; if not in this game, or in this avatar, at least somewhere. If every single avatar option is a buff white guy with crew cut you start to feel like the games weren't written with you in mind.
I'm not a woman like Aveline. But I'm not an N7 rated Space Marine like Commander Shepard, either. And I can't shoot lightning from my hands like my latest Skyrim character. Thing is, being in Aveline's skin, and being in a world that reacts to that skin, is a sobering experience. And what I find most elegant about this game is it isn't something extraneous. In the same way Shep's reputation and the intimidating figure she strikes gives you actual play options in how to win through, Aveline's visibility and social constraints give her both obstacles and options that actually matter in play....and feel organic to the game experience.
No comments:
Post a Comment