Assassin's Creed: Shadows

 

Neither the Celtics not the Bruins played last night, BU's hockey season is over, the Iditarod's done, and I refuse to cover preseason baseball. So with this little intermission in the sporting schedule, the Sports Desk turns things over to the Gaming Desk for today's post. Video games are e-sports, right?

Having completed full playthroughs of The Outer Worlds 2 twice last month, we've moved on to Assassin's Creed Shadows. We started the game back on February 13 and have played for some 180 hours now, yet feel like we still have a long, long way to go before completing out first playthrough.

The game is another of  the open-world style Assassin's Creed games like Origins and Odyssey, as well as the less successful Valhalla and Mirage, this one set in 16th-Century feudal Japan. Although the trademark hidden blade is still present, as well as fast-travel viewpoints, it has many differences from its predecessors. 

In all four of the previous games, your character had an eagle or some sort of other bird to scout ahead of you and give you an bird's-eye preview of what was ahead. The bird is gone in Shadows, and if you want a high-level perspective on things, you have to climb up something and see for yourself. Which isn't as easy as the previous games, where you could climb virtually any surface and parkour around. In fact, the easy scalability of any wall, cliff, or building in the earlier games was to unrealistically easy it almost broke immersion, but also gave the games some of their unique feel and character. Parkour is still an important element of Shadows, but you often can't climb straight up flat surfaces without using a grappling hook, which feels a little more realistic but takes some getting used to.

The biggest difference, though, is the task list. There isn't one. In all the previous games, you had lists of tasks, sorted as major and side quests, character quests, etc., and there was usually a graphical chart of the major enemies, usually a cabal of conspirators that you needed to assassinate. In Shadows, everything is tracked by a staggering number of those charts, all displayed on one large objective board. There are displays on the board for the primary group of bad guys, the Shinbakufu, displays for various other side-quests, displays for regions, for allies, and some that seemingly randomly appear for no discernible reason. That foe you just killed? Turns out he's member of some renegade cult, and now there's a new display on the objective board of the other ten members of the cult that you now have to hunt down. Every time I start to think I'm making progress toward beating the game, new groups will pop up on the board, indicating many more hours still ahead.

The game throws a lot of new stuff at you early in the game. Not only is there the objective board, but there are separate skill trees for each weapon, and oh, you have two separate playable characters, both of whom have separate sets of skills trees. Plus you're supposed to establish and build up a home base, and recruit and manage allies and separate scouts. It's a little overwhelming and confusing at first, but it eventually starts to make sense as you go along.     

I like the game. Overall, it prioritizes stealth more than any games since the original Assassins-vs-Templars series, and it's stunningly beautiful to look at. I had thought Ghost of Tsushima (the Ghosts games are the obvious parallels to Shadows) had set the standard for cinematic Japanese beauty, but I admit the Ubisoft, the A.C. studio, topped the Ghosts high standard. My F3 button is getting worn down from all the screenshots I keep taking. 

I appreciate many of the innovations and changes made to the games, and while I miss the eagle and the ability to climb sheer walls, I applaud the effort to do new things. My biggest complaint is that the objective board with all its lists and displays can get overwhelming and confusing - after 180 hours of play, I forget NPCs that I had met some weeks ago. "This must be the town Tagoda Matsuoka told me to visit," my character will say as we ride into some new town, but I have no idea who Tagoda Matsuoka was, why I'm was supposed to visit there, or what it is I'm supposed to be doing. It all eventually works itself out, but I feel like that amnesiac character in the film Memento with no idea of why these guys are attacking me, or am I attacking them?

As I said, I like the game. A lot. I wouldn't have stuck with it for 180 hours, I think the longest any single first playthrough has taken me in any game, if I didn't. I'm looking forward to seeing how this all works itself out.