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Analysis: Assassin's Vs. Demon's - A Good Place To Die
by Michael Abbott [PC, Console/PC, Exclusive]
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January 18, 2010
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[In a Gamasutra analysis piece, writer/professor Michael Abbott draws from his recent experiences with Assassin's Creed II and Demon's Souls to contrast the effects of realistic environments versus artist-conceived backdrops.]
One moment in Demon's Souls remains planted in my memory deeper than any other, and it has nothing to do with defeating a boss or acquiring a prized weapon.
I was cautiously winding my way through the Valley of Defilement, gingerly traversing rotted planks of wood, peering through a dank mist for poisonous bugs and deranged goblins, and carrying 10,000+ hard-won souls (the game's currency) with me. It was a big mistake.
I should have played it smart and returned to the Nexus, cashed in my souls and leveled up. But curiosity about an unexplored region got the best of me, and soon I found myself knee-deep in a decrepit, plague-ridden swamp with too few healing herbs and no clear idea how to get out.
Health slowly draining and vaguely aware of a sloshing menace in the water ahead of me, I knew that dying would mean losing everything I had worked hours to acquire.
I needed a moment to stop and think, but Demon's Souls offers no pause button. It was then that I noticed my hands - sweating, wrapped in a death grip around my controller. I was scared.
It's been a long time since a video game did that to me. When I reflect on how and why it happened, I realize that the defining component of Demon's Souls isn't its bosses or RPG elements. The thing that makes Demon's Souls such a scintillating experience is its environments.
Environmental Panic
To be sure, the game has its share of nasty creatures, mostly pathetic, moaning wanderers who seem desperate to be relieved of their misery. But in places like the Valley of Defilement, the environment itself challenges the player in more dastardly ways than its inhabitants. One slip, and you're dead. One overlooked hole in the floor, and you're finished.
Mismanage your inventory in the swamp, and the plague will get you. Darkness, disease, and blind leaps to landings you hope will be there - all can lead to your demise. Even Demon's Souls' rats threaten less with their bites than their ability to divert your attention from the ledge you'll fall off trying to kill them.
Worse (or better, if we're measuring clever design), other players can alter your thinking about the game's locales by leaving messages intended to "help" you. If you encounter a player-posted message on a cliff-edge encouraging you to jump, will heeding it yield a valuable prize or plummet you to your death? The uncertainty is unsettling, but also, somehow, deeply alluring.
Discovering ways to turn the game's environments to your advantage (locating safe spots or ideal sniping locations, for example) provokes an impulse to share your knowledge with others, and the game's rating system promotes messages that players consider helpful. But I'd be lying if I didn't admit to leaving a message or two luring other players into an ugly fate. Why should I be the only one who suffers, eh?
It took time for me to fully appreciate the impact of Demon's Souls' environments on my experience as a player. The game's notorious difficulty can stifle analysis. In my own case, the game subverted my natural tendency to stand both inside and outside my gaming experience.
It's hard to be analytical when you're fighting for your life. Demon's Souls also has a way of enveloping you in its systems, luring you into hours of fiddling with your stats and massive inventory, which can be neither sold nor traded.
The Assassin's Environment
The genius of Demon's Souls' environments was finally thrown into stark relief after I finished it and moved on to another game: Assassin's Creed II. Acknowledging the stark differences between the worlds these two games depict, I can't resist comparing them.
When I learned that Florence would serve as one of Assassin's Creed II's major settings, my excitement for the game grew. I know the city well, and I was curious to see how the game would render a 15th century version of it. Having progressed far enough in the game to roam, I did what I'm sure lots of Firenze-philes do: I headed straight to the Duomo.
It's a credit to the game's designers that even in its compressed form, the city is laid out realistically enough to find one's way to the Duomo by relying on familiar landmarks. Along the way, I marveled at the game's colors and textures. Even the sky seemed just the right shade of blue. Arriving at the Duomo, I walked around the Basilica, mouth agape, amazed by the fidelity. I climbed several surrounding buildings for a better view. I handed my wife the controller so she could have a look. We both smiled in amazement.
And there my love affair with AC2's virtual Florence ended. I returned to playing the game, and the city receded into its role as a backdrop. To be sure, it's a beautiful, astonishingly faithful (and climbable) backdrop...but as game environments go, it's hardly more than that. One can walk its streets full of people, visit vendors, and pick up side missions, but the experience feels scripted and automatronic.
Progressing to Venice and other locales feels like a cut-and-paste operation; aside from city-specific features, it's more of the same ambling groups of monks, prostitutes, citizens, and vendors. The opportunity here - imbuing a vibrant Italian city with life and bringing that energy to bear on the player - takes a back seat to a conveyor belt experience with map marker missions. Beauty, in this case, is truly only skin deep.
Postcards Vs. Immersion
Of course, one might suggest that dynamic environments simply aren't necessary in a game like AC2. It is, after all, a third-person action-adventure game, and exotic locales need only function as backdrops in such games. But such thinking is needlessly self-limiting. Demon's Souls, an action-RPG similarly situated in a fixed set of genre conventions, demonstrates the value of upending such conventions by creating a game world that outshines even its most outrageously fiendish bosses.
By designing all of its five environments as dynamic, self-contained worlds, each visually and sonically distinctive and each requiring different strategies from the player, Demon's Souls jettisons the notion that an RPG (particularly a Japanese RPG like Demon's Souls) must place all its genre chips on bosses, quests, and stats.
Assassin's Creed II seems to want to deliver an open-world experience to the player, but for the most part that world is look, but don't touch. The game offers two awkwardly implemented city tours (the first carrying a box through Florence for Leonardo Da Vinci; the second a walking tour of Venice courtesy of Alvise da Vilandino).
But these introductions serve little meaningful purpose since the only real rewards for exploring are locating hidden chests, feathers, glyphs, and other collection-oriented gameplay add-ons. Despite their extraordinary visual presentation, these great Italian cities usually function as little more than labyrinths for acrobatic chase sequences.
Imaginative artist-conceived game worlds can draw players in and entice them to explore the unknown, accentuating discovery of a landscape unbound by the limits of verisimilitude. Demon's Souls' crumbling derelict world visually reinforces the sense of despair and moral decay that defines the player's experience in Boletaria. The world itself feels alive and unfixed, a hostile force to overcome.
Assassin's Creed II's Florence, Venice, and Rome aren't meant to convey menace, and they exist to serve a very different game. But aside from provoking astonishment at the power of a game engine to render accurate re-creations of real places, it's hard for me to feel connected to these virtual places. I can appreciate the technical achievement, but I'm hard-pressed to understand how that achievement serves Assassin's Creed II as a game, aside from offering the player a lovely set of postcards and a birds-eye view.
[Michael Abbott is writer and host of the Brainy Gamer blog and podcast. He teaches theater and film at Wabash College, as well as a seminar course devoted to the art and history of video games.]
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I have to admit that Assassin's Creed 2 is also a showstopper graphically, and there was a certain thrill with each 'discovery' of true to life historical buildings. But after a while it felt like the same trick over and over. It's not a bad game, but it didn't generate those moments I won't soon forget that you so vividly describe in your article. Shout out to Valley of Defilement! Not the most beautiful of worlds, but truly one with the most creeping dread - and souls twice lost and forever gone *sniffle*.
Seeing it running towards me, cleaver poised, was consistently terrifying.
Thanks for the article Michael.
I'm still unsure, because it was so completely unlike everything else. It was also balls hard. I made a character that I was going to make a Faith fighter, using the Large Sword of Moonlight for with a compliment array of Miracles. As soon as that character was fresh out of 1-1 after Phalanx, I went straight for Leechmonger so I could get my sword.
Let me tell you... the Valley of Defilement is not easy on New Game+. It is equally challenging when your character is level 5 with a stock weapon and no Royal or Widow Lotus. The final boss of the Valley was also unlike any others... Never before did I feel hesitant to kill a boss in any game for any reason other than the fact I'd get my face wrecked.
The Valley of Defilement, as dreadful of a place as it is, truly is one of the best levels of any game ever. It accomplishes its goal in spades.
But what about the idea that "environment" is more than just terrain and buildings?
What about the *things* in the gameworld? Can't those be understood as environmental assets as well? In fact, shouldn't they be understood and designed as such?
To my mind there's been a shift in the past ten years or so away from environmental depth and toward defining all gameplay actions as character powers. The original reason for this was probably to simplify for consoles already-complex gameworlds. But I suspect that the more recent justification has been because more designers are deciding that the only way to insure their game is "fun" is to try to utterly control the play experience by deliberately limiting the possible gameplay interactions.
When gameplay is carefully defined in terms of specific character actions on a very few targets, it's less difficult to balance the immediate and overall play experience. That's not necessarily a Bad Thing. It minimizes bugs from unexpected (i.e., untested) interactions, and it allows the intended play experience to be refined and heightened through iteration.
But I think it's a problem when it takes over most game designs, as I believe it has. Between console-driven simplification and MMORPG play balance requirements, there just aren't many games any more that create a rich environment (including things) and then encourage players to -- you know -- *play* in that environment.
Instead of games being about what any gamer might enjoy, they're now all about what the developer expects every player to enjoy. Why? By defining every gameplay possibility to try to perfectly satisfy one "typical" player, rather than creating deep environments where gamers with different definitions of fun can satisfy themselves, aren't game designers unnecessarily limiting the potential commercial success of their game?
It is possible to give players some choice without risking disaster. Half-Life 2, for example, makes an effort in this direction with the gravity gun. It at least allows the player to use a few specifically defined objects (e.g., gas cans, saw blades) in the local environment. (Multiple useful objects can't be stored in the player's inventory, however.)
But probably the best recent example of environmental gameplay comes from Fallout 3. To begin with, the environment (as normally understood as landscapes and buildings) is artfully designed to support the feeling of post-apocalyptic devastation (my blog post "The Melancholy of Lost Civilizations in RPGs" at flatfingers-theory.blogspot.com/2009/11/melancholy-of-lost-civilizations-in.html goes deeper into this). Even more valuably, however, the world of Fallout 3 is chock-full of useful objects.
In fact, so deep is the integration of these small objects with the gameplay opportunities in Fallout 3 that there is actually a weapon -- the Rock-It Launcher -- that can fire these random objects as missiles. One of the signature moments from E3 2008 was the use of the Rock-It Launcher to kill enemies by firing scavenged teddy bears at them.
And when you consider that the Rock-It Launcher itself is constructed by players from objects found in the environment of the gameworld... that is what I call a proper step toward environment-as-active-gameplay.
So where are more of those games? Why aren't more developers taking the approach of giving their players interesting choices by designing the gameworld's environment to be full of interactive objects?
Or is it OK to keep heading in the direction of defining environments as merely terrain and buildings whose one or two passive effects are predetermined by a game developer?
What do you mean by the following?
"AC2 sets the table for other 3rd person games that are period pieces."
So what is it that made me love Demon's Souls that's missing in a game like Assassin's Creed 2? I've thought quite a bit about it and I do agree with this article, but I think I'd go further. Everything in the Assassin's Creed 2 - the platforming, the exploration, the treasure hunting, the combat (largely the combat) and the environment as a whole fail to convince me that my actions have any weight. Why should I avoid the city guards when I can dispense 10-15 of them easily by simply hammering a single button? Why should I spend time collecting money and treasure to upgrade my weapons/armor when they simply don't matter - every weapon dispatches enemies with similar ease and more armor on an already invincible character makes no difference. The platforming, mostly due to the soft controls, removes almost all risk. Ezio can leap from a chandelier to a 6" beam with utter easy. Traversing a temple becomes a simple matter of finding the path and following it. No skill or practice is required and thus the sense of reward is diminished.
So I find myself wandering through the beautiful cities in Assassin's Creed 2 (and they are beautiful) doing all the 'stuff' the game presents (and there is a lot of stuff) thinking - "man, this game could have been epic". Maybe Assassin's Creed 3 will take more risks.
Yes, well put on all points. I hardly felt the need to operate in a stealthy way in AC 2 when I was always confident in my ability to overpower 10+ guards with any old dagger and smoke bomb, etc. Similarly, the platforming is dumbed down to the point that every single protrusion or scrap of detail on a building's face can be grabbed. This does enable a certain amount of necessary platforming momentum, but it negates the need for intelligent interaction with the environment. Similarly, because the treasure chests are found literally everywhere, this effectively zeroes out the thrill of finding them (after the first 20 or so). The game is rife with boring repetition, and the whitewashed color palette applied to its entirety doesn't help.
Am I the only one surprised at how little time was spent in the present day environment? They went to all that trouble for what amounts to a grand total of 20-30 minutes of present day narrative. And the colors there were much more interesting.
Yea, that guy(girl?) tore me a new one on my first playthrough. I had my shield up, saw the phantom running towards me, saw the meat cleaver being raised over the phantoms head, quickly hit my roll button trying to dodge out of the way of the large jagged steel construct that was about to give me the closet shave I've ever had - only to see my character lunge but not move, instead my character looked at his feet and was desperately trying to pull himself out of the muck. It was at that moment my mouth dropped open and the meat cleaver did what it was born to do - cleave me in half.
Best. Game. Ever.
The crux of Assassin’s Creed II is that the entire world is literally tactile and can be climbed, traversed, and even used in combat. Every inch of Italy can be mounted and explored, something you certainly can’t do in Demon Souls.
Demon Souls is a completely separate entity based on an entirely fictional world. Respectively, what it and Assassin’s Creed II are delivering to the player could not be more disparate and yet the author has the audacity to fault Assassin’s Creed II for not delivering an environment as effectively as found in a purely mythical RPG?
Apples and Oranges.
Assassin’s Creed II offers a vast world filled with people who respond to your actions. It’s also a game where you can explore it horizontally or vertically; attack and complete missions on your own terms; buy and display works of art while restoring the financial integrity of an entire town and various other activities. As game environments go, it’s one of the most expansive I’ve dabbled in and offers a far higher level of functionality than Demon Souls.
And while I think Demon Souls is an amazing experience worthy of every bit of praise heaped upon it, let’s be honest that a significant part of the game’s tension comes from the structure of the play mechanics, which essentially foists death upon the player repeatedly. In a game where every single step could be your last while also relieving you of your current bounty, the tension level is a given and makes every sound and every misty environment that much more menacing and effective.
Also, as amazing as the game looks, let’s not pretend the environments and enemies aren’t merely an assembly of various tropes spanning Lord of the Rings and Dungeons and Dragons. By contrast, Assassin’s Creed II is using the Italian Renaissance as the backdrop, a radically original concept both in theory and execution. It’s a bright, vivid game that must rely on more than groans and fantastical denizens to promote the tension of its construct.
Again, these are two very different games offering two vastly different experiences and it’s unfortunate that something as innovative and well executed as Assassin’s Creed II needs to be torn down merely to venerate a game (Demon Souls) that has already received plenty of accolades. They are both exceptional games and both deliver unparalleled environments for the gamer to navigate and experience.
This idea of detail by iteration - or quantity in place of quality - applies as well to the weapons (any choice tends to lead to the same approach to fighting), armor (no effect other than adding more points to health or 'resistance')... and etc.
That being said, I hope no one thinks AC 2 is being trashed here; it's a fantastic achievement and certainly one of the best I played last year. But its flaws (and it does have them) serve to make good talking points for some strengths of Demon's Souls. That being said, you're quite right BB, these games are both excellent and neither needs to be more like any other game to stand tall on its own.
The environmental interactions in Demon's Souls are fewer, but very meaningful.
e.g., In DS: don't use a two-handed sword in corridors, it will hit the walls and you'll die.
I beat both AC2 and DS last night. I'll be getting the last few paintings in AC2 and setting it aside until I want to look at Venice again. I'll be returning to DS night after night for NG+
I think that if you want an example of a highly polished game with similar focus to AC2, look at Batman: Arkham Asylum. It has many of the same features but turns them into a truly fantastic game, forget about GOTY 2009, it's on my list for top 10 games ever.