493 Words About: Escaping Abstergo Assassin’s Creed II
Desmond Miles, the protagonist of the first five Assassin’s Creed videogames, provides a quick summary of the previous game in the series and discovers the wall in his bedroom is covered in various symbols and script written in blood. Lucy (an Abstergo employee) appears with blood on her shirt saying they need to leave, they run a quick simulation in the Animus of a character named Ezio Auditore, and then the pair of them fight their way through the security guards and escape the facility with Desmond hiding in the trunk of Lucy’s car.
From there the rest of the game begins.
I’ve played this opening sequence more times than I’ve actually completed Assassin’s Creed II, in fact I’ve only completed the main narrative twice in my life. I’ve completed the main narrative of the sequel Brotherhood at least five times, but that’s because I was obsessed with that game.
And I’m a boy, so Ancient Rome…or whatever the meme is.
Escaping Abstergo is a first level, but it also isn’t. By that I mean, the sequence is the start of the game and it does provide some introduction to control mechanics the player will use regularly while playing the rest of the game. Desmond runs, fights, and uses eagle vision during this escape, but all of it is employed clumsily. When he and Lucy encounter close to 15 security guards in the parking garage, she is able to beat most of them, meanwhile players are lucky if they are able to defeat two guards. Desmond’s controls are imprecise, and he’s frankly pretty weak.
But narratively speaking this works.
Desmond is a man who’s been kidnapped, psychologically manipulated, and forced to endure days of virtual reality and social isolation. It makes absolute sense that the controls for this character are sluggish, and also that he has difficulty in one-on-one combat. It’s also important to note that most of the actions players have in this section are quick-time events. Players are given directions to push specific buttons or to push any button in a particular moment to trigger some new development. There’s minimal control over Desmond’s avatar, and looking at this contextually, this is as much a part of a cinematic interactive design movement that was popular to numerous Playstation 3 games of the era.
The escape from Abstergo is narrative driven design; it’s story focused. But it does manage, in denying players agency to show how far Desmond will eventually grow.
Controls are minimal because players are just starting this game, and because Desmond has had no control over his own life up to this point. This sequence is, much like the birth of Ezio Auditore, about establishing Desmond’s avatar as a new structure and giving players a perception of establishing a foundation for growth.
By the end of the game Desmond can fight a whole squad of guards, but at the start he’ll be lucky if he can even land one punch.
Joshua “Jammer” Smith
9.26.2024
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