Mobility as a strength of a video game: Assassin's Creed Unity

November 20, 2021

Without agreeing on how Ubisoft has managed the franchise - there were fantastic concepts that have been mistreated and abandoned along the way to become something that has little or nothing to do with the first titles - it is undeniable that it is one of the best ideas in the industry.

A game that moves between the past and the future and that allows you to change scenery, characters and plot from one installment to another without abandoning its mechanics and gameplay base. It is new, but also the same. A trump card that bad luck and the wrong hands ended up burning before its time.

With the debacle of Assassin's Creed Unity and its well-known bugs, the poor reception of Assassin's Creed Syndicate (which did not always innovate where it should and ended up paying the price of its big brother) dynamited the chances of improvement in favor of a radical change that no fan had asked for.

Revolutionary battle in Paris' streets

While it is true that sequels like Origins, Odyssey and Valhalla have been able to provide the franchise with other styles and mechanics that are just as valid, the essence of what Assassin's Creed was was completely buried under horseback and boat trips through scenarios that made it impossible to keep intact the Rosetta Stone that had guided the franchise up to that point. In short, parkour was lost, and with it one of the best mobility systems that have passed through our hands.

MOBILITY AS A MEANS OF EXPRESSION

Assassin's Creed was not a game where you just happened to do parkour.

Assassin's Creed was parkour. And, despite not having a place in its name, it had even more importance than the fact of being an assassin. Exploring the scenery, looking for clues to help us finish our target, follow him without being discovered, approach him, escape from our pursuers... Nothing of what Ubisoft's saga proposed at a playable level made sense without its mobility.

Roof view of Paris

Its creators knew how to find a control formula that elevated agility and made it easier to do stunts compared to other titles that opted for more technical strategies. If in Mirror's Edge the skill and knowledge of the scenery provided depth to its parkour, here they opted for a much more simplified system in which the challenge was not to move, but to know how to take advantage of this paradigm shift.

What once was once safe and the most logical path, the ground, in Assassin's Creed is a nest of passersby to constantly collide with and get stuck when you least expect and want it. The street is a secondary road in the middle of summer, with no air conditioning and truck traffic. An uncomfortable option (in good conscience) focused on making you look up to the sky and choose the path that previous open world games had denied you.

UI/UX while moving above streets

Running on the rooftops is to go on the highway without radars or tolls. A path marked with breadcrumbs that, in the form of boxes, mounds and grips on the windows, the game puts on a plate for you in the easiest and most agile way possible. With lines that always go upwards, never downwards, its designers showed you which was the right way.

If at the control level it was excellent, in terms of level design the work was also exemplary. Through a strategy designed to make it easy for you to always have a new roof to move to, the stage became a sort of neural network in which there were no limits to your mobility. Jumping from here to there was only limited when, in search of further elevating parkour and climbing, the game made it a challenge to access the peak of a watchtower.

Streets of Paris

Even more incredible was how the masterminds behind it created out of thin air a language in which to easily show the player what and what not to do. A collection of objects and details focused on making reading your next jump a matter of seconds, whether it was to grab onto an exquisitely well-measured ledge or to fearlessly launch yourself into the void with a leap of faith for having seen four pigeon turds.

WHO LOVES THE SAGA

What for many is still the crown jewel of the Assassin's Creed franchise, the Ezio trilogy, is also known for being the one that offered the greatest depth when it came to moving around the world. But while the ever-increasing success of the series pushed Ubisoft to simplify its parkour system to satisfy a different kind of audience, more concerned with spectacle and automatisms than possibilities, a man with his face upside down ended up overshadowing the conversation about the strategy pursued in Unity. There, while the automatisms like those of Assassin's Creed 3 and Black Flag were maintained to overcome obstacles without too many problems, the inclusion of a button to parkour up and another to go down made it possible to move around the city of Paris could maintain that spectacularity by giving us control.

Roof view of Notre Dame cathedral

In addition, as depending on the situation and the inclination, one movement or another was performed, the feeling of showing off without falling into scripted cinematic cutscenes (such as crossing the interior of a building by entering through one window and exiting through the other) was most satisfying. The best of both worlds, which also allowed for the bouncing off the wall or the diagonal jumps that looked so good in front of any chase.

The mobility of Assassin's Creed Unity is one of those video game designs that anyone with the intention of developing an "open world" title should study thoroughly. In its jumps and rooftops there are countless details and strategies destined to be discovered and enjoyed, and reviewing them today is the perfect way to check to what extent current games have drunk from them.