If you have the same kind of debauched search history that I do then you might have noticed some of Assassins' Creed Mirage's marketing and developer interviews rolling out ahead of its release in October. Now, usually this kind of corporate bumf slides off me like water off the world's most bitterly disinterested duck but, on this occasion, I noticed a few shiny corn kernels mixed in with the turds that I felt were interesting.
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First amongst these tidbits is the odd stink of shame that this game gives off like a teenager with poor hygiene. There's a lot of talk about wanting to take the series back to its roots after a few years in the RPG wilderness with Origins, Odyssey and Valhalla. In fact, Ubisoft's own site makes a big deal of the game being, 'a modern take on the features and gameplay that have defined a franchise for 15 years,' carefully ignoring the fact that for the most recent 5 of those 15 years, the series has had a completely different style of gameplay.
So far, so Ubisoft, you're probably thinking. The video game corporate playbook is always adapting but the policy of "talk big first, apologise later" continues to be a classic. However, this embarrassed crawling back to the old Assassins' Creed model got me thinking about this whole idea of series revamps. Like how Assassins' Creed became an RPG and then a stealth-action game again, many series have attempted to transition to a new style of core gameplay.
Thus, today I'm going to explore a couple of case studies of series that have undergone this kind of identity shift in terms of how it works and in terms of the issues surrounding the practice to see if I can understand this phenomenon a little better and hopefully explain why, in some cases, these changes just don't stick.
Spoilers for the ending of God of War: Ragnarok.
What causes a game's identity crisis?
Surprisingly, games go through identity shifts for a whole multitude of reasons but, as ever in the Triple-A development sphere, the most common reason is financial. Assassins' Creed is a good case study for this point. While good old Ubisoft gets pretty shifty with regards to sales figures, most sources agree that the series peaked around Assassins' Creed 3 and 4 before seeing a steady decline through the Parisian bug-fest of Assassins' Creed Unity and hitting rock bottom, as many things do, in the UK with Syndicate in 2015.
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Naturally, a change was necessary if Ubisoft wanted to turn sales around and keep up their mortgage payments to Satan or whoever runs the games industry. This led to them taking a year off outside the headmasters' office where they were encouraged to think about what they'd done before releasing Assassins' Creed Origins in 2017. Origins introduced a more RPG-like gameplay loop to mix things up. This was probably decided upon because A) The Witcher 3 was popular and B) RPGs have gear systems based around improving your equipment which meant that Ubisoft could introduce the invasive species of micro-transactions and eek more money out of gullible players who wanted to buy new gear rather than actually play the game for it.
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However, not every identity shift of recent years has been purely about financial benefits. My other two case studies, God of War (2018) and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild reinvented themselves for reasons beyond just sales. For Breath of the Wild, it was Nintendo's stated intention to develop the theme of exploration that has always run through the Zelda series and the transition to the open world sandbox format with more organic design elements made sense for achieving that goal. As for God of War, the developers wanted to focus more on Kratos as a character and, for that, a third-person over the shoulder camera setup worked better. Additionally, the gameplay was a bit slower and less like a visceral cyclone of blood and teeth because Kratos was older and trying to mellow out a bit. Thus, in some cases, there is a need to alter the gameplay to fit in with what you want to achieve.
Overall, developers change their games' identities for a variety of reasons, sometimes financial and sometimes creative. However, while all three of my examples did pull off the transition, I would argue that each one is now facing problems that show why this whole idea of completely revamping your game's identity might not be all it's cracked up to be.
"But I liked the old one..."
This is the problem that Assassins' Creed, like a couple having another child to keep the marriage alive, is attempting to resolve with Mirage. You don't have to look very far into the wretched depths of the internet to discover a whole subset of Assassins' Creed fans who have spent the last five years clamouring for a return to classic Assassins' Creed. Even amongst critics and game journalists, while many of the RPG Assassins' Creeds have reviewed well, they haven't reached the same heights as games like Assassins' Creed 2 AKA The Adventures of Everyone's Favourite Italian Sex-Pest.
As such, Mirage has very clearly been conceived in response to an outcry for the old model of Assassins' Creed games. Make no mistake though, Ubisoft still likes having its Scrooge McDuck money pit, so the gear-grinding RPG Assassins' Creeds are continuing as well, but this is at least an attempt to satisfy audiences at the same time.
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By contrast, this issue of wanting to go back to the old style of gameplay is yet to face Zelda. Both Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom released to massive commercial and critical success and, even if there was a backlash, Nintendo has a habit of being about as tone-deaf as an ostrich with its head stuck half a mile under the Sahara, so they probably wouldn't listen anyway. That said, there are rumblings amongst many Zelda fans saying that they miss the old style of Zelda games. There were more than a few members of the Zelda fan community who registered disappointment at the news that the Breath of the Wild format will be the template for all upcoming Zelda games (via Game Informer). It might be that, in the future, Nintendo, like Ubisoft, sees a gap in its release lineup for this more retro Zelda gameplay.
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Regardless of whether it is an issue now or in the future, there is a real danger to completely transforming a series that is already popular. While some fan bases are prone to whinging about anything new or different being introduced to a series, plenty would be on pretty firm ground complaining that the developers have completely changed what made the series good to begin with. This is the first issue with re-designing your series's identity; the fact that the series was popular for a reason and that plenty of people were probably fairly attached to the existing core gameplay. However, this is not necessarily an issue as Zelda has shown that people won't complain too loudly so long as the new game you produce is a masterpiece. So simple, I know.
"What even is this anymore?"
This leads me onto my second issue with this fair-weather attitude towards identity. Let me ask you this: What is God of War? Is it a fixed-camera hand-and-slash? A third-person action game? Well, that depends if you're talking about the Greek games (1-3) or the Norse ones (2018 and Ragnarok). Some would argue God of War is the series that follows Kratos as a character, to which I would point to the end of Ragnarok where Kratos's arc seems pretty much finished and it's implied that the next game will follow his son, Atreus. The fact of the matter is, because of its shifting identity, God of War has lost any claim to a unique flavour.
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| (Image property of Santa Monica Studio and Sony Interactive Entertainment) |
To illustrate my point, allow me to pitch a scenario to you: the next God of War game will follow Atreus and his girlfriend in a different mythology, exploring the land and building a little adventuring party full of many varied characters that will make up your party in a turn-based combat system. Would that still be a God of War game? Technically yes, but only in the biological sense like Chet Hanks's relationship with Tom Hanks. By mixing up the series's identity, it becomes harder to tell what God of War is even meant to be and, in this scenario, you'd have to wonder why they even bothered making it a God of War game.
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| (Image property of Santa Monica Studio and Sony Interactive Entertainment) |
The point I'm getting at here in my usual roundabout way is this; if you want to make something new and different, why not make something new and different? Undoubtedly, a lot of effort went into making the most recent God of War games different to the original trilogy. My problem is that, if you are going to all of that effort to change an existing series, why not just make it something new entirely?
If Breath of the Wild was a new IP, it would've been celebrated all the same and arguably it would've allowed for more creativity in what could be done with its world. Equally, nobody was stopping Ubisoft from creating a new IP for their RPG gameplay that wasn't Assassins' Creed. Hell, at this point, if Ubisoft did announce a new IP that wasn't somehow linked to Assassins' Creed or Far Cry, people would probably assume that the world was ending.
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Look at it this way; Breath of the Wild, Assassins' Creed: Origins and God of War (2018) all stand on their own two feet. Some are a little shaky and need some crutches but they all do it. All of them were able to sell well and review well because of their own innovations and gameplay design. Brand recognition was good for sales but name recognition alone does not win you the kind of awards that God of War and Zelda received. To my mind, if you have gameplay that is strong enough to stand up to scrutiny on its own, then it probably would've worked just as well if it was an original IP.
This is a lesson that, at the very least, Ubisoft should've learnt by now. After all, Assassins' Creed started life as a prototype for a Prince of Persia game. However, as creativity took hold and ideas grew and developed, it became clear that it would work better as its own project. Despite it starting life as a new IP that needed room to breathe, Assassins' Creed doesn't seem to appreciate that some of its own ideas could benefit from the same treatment.
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Herein lies the rub for me. I don't mind games reinventing themselves to capture new audiences and sales. On principle, as long as I'm getting good games, I don't care. What confuses me though, is that developers would put all of this effort into creating entirely new worlds and gameplay systems, only to hold it back with the restrictive stories and expectant fans of a pre-established series. Fans can't feel like you've urinated in their cereal bowls if you make something original rather than messing with an established franchise. What's more, the public would have a much greater choice in what they wanted to play if developers pursued new ideas rather than trying to cram them into a franchise that already existed.
Conclusion
As I've said, I have nothing against developers for reinventing their series' identities for creative, or even financial, reasons. My feelings are that, in the long run, this kind of seismic shift in a game's identity is likely to cause a whole range of problems from disappointing established audiences, as with Assassins' Creed and Zelda, to muddying a game's uniqueness, like with God of War. For me, all of this could easily be avoided by refusing to go down that road to begin with.
Allowing new ideas and gameplay systems to blossom rather than tacking them onto something that already exists gets around fan expectations and allows series to maintain their own unique identities rather than clouding them with disjointed new elements. The only problem is money. Despite the massive success of new-IPs in both indie and triple-A spaces, publishers are too risk-averse to invest in something new and so developers are stuck shipping new ideas under established titles to get them past publishers. So, without a significant attitude shift, I guess we'd better buckle up for a few more years of franchises reinventing themselves like Breath of the Wild. Let's hope more of them turn out like that and less like Chet Hanks.
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