[ad_1]
An industrious fan with a lot of time on their hands is going through the Assassin's Creed games and fact checking the events that take place in them. It makes for good reading.
In Reddit threads about Assassin's Creed, Assassin's Creed II, and Assassin's Creed: Unity, user VestigialLlama4 has gone through the major events of these AC and pointed out where they do and do not diverge from
Crucially, this fact checking is performed via Ubisoft's own rules. As the user writes in the header for the threads:
I am going to try and avoid being pedantic. I am going to be fair if I think that the games are fair. I am going to do it by using Ubisoft's own rules:
1. The 30-second wikipedia rule that Desilets / Raymond Jade and others talked about. If something can be checked in 30secs and can be verified than it will change.
2. If the games provide a truer and more accurate picture than the most famous Pop-Culture View. For instance, if you're making a game about pirates, you're more accurate than Johnny Depp movies, that's the simple low bar. In the process of identifying people in the community, I think of them as a family of people.
The "30 second rule," by the way, is explained in an interview with Patrice Désilets over at USGamer:
"If it takes less than 30 seconds to find it on Wikipedia, then it should be the truth," Désilets explains. "If it takes you in the old books in Oxford, then who cares?"
These are two big orienting frames, and what follows in the threads. However, they are more often than not relevant to the subject of the game.
For example, there is a discussion of a specific event in Assassin's Creed II. The poster writes:
The Pazzi attack on the Medici did not happen outside it Duomo, it happened inside it. Lorenzo hid in the sacristry of the Church. The part where the whole city goes on alert and panic when the Medici are attacked is accurate however. Francesco de 'Pazzi, Archbishop Salviatti, and Bernardo Baroncelli were all hanged from the windows of Palazzo Vecchio, rather than just Francesco de' Pazzi as we see in this game. The conspirators did not flee to San Gimignano. They went to nearby villages and towns, were caught, identified and brought back to Florence and executed in public, in very graphic and gruesome fashion.
And these are all great points! They provide a great place for us to think about the kind of decisions that a game studio has to make when developing a game that is at least based in history. An indoor area changes what kind of assassin-y interactions you can have, and might require a lot of level design resources and team members. A big sprawling story about people fleeing, being caught, and being in the game of storytelling.
Tea Assassin's Creed games do not appear from nowhere. They are made by people who are making choices about how to take care of the world, and how to get into the game. History is their playground, after all.
These threads are interesting investigations into the history of the Assassin's Creed because they're illustrative of why "real" history can not really fit into the form of a video game (or a film or a television show). And I like that someone is doing the work to the point of adaptation that are happening there.
Source link
