Something, something, “no one is untouchable?” 
IDK which one you’re talking about, but I’m assuming it’s one of those “Thinks they’re too big to fail, fails because hubris”
I think AC2 or AC Rev are my favourites and I will die on this Eagle Perch.
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Unity., Rogue and III. But I think he is paying out Unity especially.
That was what they were going for but it isn’t what you get.
Only made worse by the fact that I think they had the script for the game written during take your kid to work day because despite being made by the French the history in that game is some of the worst.
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The idea is that the history we know is given a candy glaze and the real history was what you see in the game. It’s funny because it’s actually the lower-class Templars who want change and start the Revolution as a schism/rebellion to the elitist Templars who are making truces with the elitist Assassins, so… everyone was fucked up and corrupt by that point, even by each others’ standards.
No, you don’t get to use the artistic license excuse here. Unity is not using artistic license it is simply building off of psudeohistoricisms, apocrypha, incredibly softened conspiracies and, at times, outright works of fiction. There is a difference between being fanciful and being flat out wrong.
No, I mean it’s literally part of how the Assassin’s Creed storyline works. It’s neither the first nor last time that they take a well-documented event and show it happening in a way it totally didn’t happen, with the in-universe explanation being that the historically recorded event was fictionalized by people the Templars had influence over, and the events of the game are the “real story.” Everything that goes against history in these games, whether made up on the spot, or based off of discredited accounts, are done deliberately by the devs to both make the story more fun and to keep that theme going. It’s why the Animus is a thing; otherwise there’d be no need for such a framing device.
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But it isn’t fun if it is based off of complete fiction being depicted as fact because they were to lazy to pact check or write something compelling from real history.
It isn’t fun if they are using monarchist propaganda while also trying tell an anti-monarchy pro-human choice tale.
It isn’t fun if they are using one of the first anti-Semitic conspiracy theories as a basis for their game especially when your series already ignores Jewish history.
It isn’t fun to go your entire previous game banging on about how much Americans lionise their founding fathers only to do the same to your own founders.
It isn’t fun to turn one of the founders of the Committee of Public Safety into some noble freedom fighter when in reality he was a kleptocratic fraudster who fell victim to his own monster.
It isn’t fun to say women are too hard to model a playable rig for in a game where the narrative itself talks about how essential women are in the facilitation of the revolution.
It isn’t fun to sideline, downplay and sometimes gloss over or ignore the agency of the French people in facilitating their own revolution by reducing it to behind the scenes hand-wringing of secret organisations. Egregious when you remember the franchise has a seminal scene where its protagonist tells you to pity the Mad Monk Savonarola but also to use your freewill to live your life on your terms.
It isn’t fun to have a mission where you have to free Thomas Paine after he is arrested for writing a book he had already written and was explicitly invited to France for writing because you were to lazy to check the difference between The Age of Reason and The Rights of Man.
The franchise can take as much artistic liberty where and when necessary but if you are doing it on bad pretense, outdated historical information, straight up monarchist propaganda, passing off the fiction of independently written texts as legit history or even getting shit actually impossibly wrong then I have the right to be pissed off about it.
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I think you’re confusing “this is how we’re gonna present the ‘true’ historical events in the game to show how much history as we know it is distorted in this fictionalized historical adventure series we created,” with “we believe this is how things actually went and so we’re gonna put it in this game as a way of saying this really happened.”
Nobody who made that game thought how they presented it is how it happened, or that it was a better way to think about it, and nobody playing it believes that that’s how it really happened, because anybody playing an AC game knows that what is presented is as real as Jack and Rose’s story in Titanic. The changes were made so extreme because the game is chronologically the next one to follow the game of the American Revolution (itself greatly altered from historical events to an almost comical degree), and the greater narrative across the series as a whole was that the events of this game and its depiction of the “true” way things happened was to show a Revolution so vile and extreme that the world would never want to pursue a Revolution of an entire society again, so the French one played out how it did in this game to follow that narrative, and was “fictionalized” in history to make it more palatable after the fact.
It was not being presented to give actual legitimacy to any of its depictions.
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Fucking damn it! I had a tweet from Pizza Hut telling us how much they missed Desmond Miles apropos of nothing but I deleted it thinking I would never get to use it.
Maybe I can dumb this down.
The “real” events in Unity are fake, the fake events in Unity are faker. The “real” events in Unity are fake because they are based on false things or not quite true things, sometimes those false things and half-truths are bad. Those bad things might make people think bad things and those bad things are taking away from the faker parts (also known as this games story).
There is no excuse for it.
A) I guarantee you that nobody who played this game came away from it thinking or believing bad things shown in it that they didn’t already believe if they did, and
B) The same must then also be said about the rest of the series as well, especially 3.
Yes, those fake things in Unity are based on false things; that’s the point. They used the things that real people know were not true about these events to say it really happened this way, in the context of the in-universe lore, to make it seem worse than it actually was so the game could fit a standard good vs bad narrative.
There has to be a name for people who are too good at discerning fiction from reality. Like your belief that someone might not see the value of this borderline outright anti-revolution story is borderline solipsistic. It is like you have forgotten how bad people can be with this shit or for people like me who think the inaccuracies detract from the story overall even if you forget the broader impact.
It is the French Revolution, Heis. This isn’t your year three history class on World War II. You can’t hamfist this huge unprecedented societal upheaval neatly into an Us and Them paradigm
There was no Good or Bad. Those people in the game, a lot of them were real people who wanted things. Some went on to codify human rights others wanted to simply carry on with a king. Some were irrepressible whirlwinds of violence and others were men of great mercy and humble clemency. Some of them were the first feminists and some of them Europe’s first abolitionists. Some were hideously paranoid. Some had never had bread in weeks others would have though bread grew from trees. Some showed supreme cowardice and others unfathomable bravery. Some people made scientific breakthroughs and others wrote masterworks.
They were all people though and they deserve, warts and all, to have their story told and told properly. And yes the French are real people even if they make that impossible to see.
I’m sure their stories are told. Maybe not in fictional video games. Assassins Creed has never claimed to be historical fact. Quite the contrary.
You are welcome to dislike it, but you can’t really fault fiction for being fiction.
Yes, but you’re forgetting that that doesn’t sell well in a video game about rebels bringing down the establishment. This isn’t teaching history; this is selling a video game, where you play a mass murderer jumping across rooftops to save the world, while set to the backdrop of the French Revolution. It is not meant to be accurate, or even an actual telling of how the revolution happened, anymore than this series has done an actual retelling or accurate representation of the Third Crusade, the Renaissance, the American Revolution, the Haitian revolt, the Golden Age of Piracy, Victorian England, Ptolemaic Egypt, the Peloponnesian war, the Viking Invasion, the Golden Age of Islam, Feudal Japan, and so on. It is deliberately invoking debunked historical inaccuracies, folklore, urban legends and just plain throwing in crap that they think might look cool, for the purposes of an adventure game that solves every complex social issue with murder, to a degree even Hitman doesn’t try to fool with. You’re acting angry over it as if it sold as a documentary, when it was never pitched as anything of the sort.
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I mean I can if the fiction is predicated on bad history.
This entire game literally begins with showing you how wrong it is that the Templars are rewriting history by gamifying it, whitewashing it and then commodifying as pop culture. Then Ubisoft goes on to whitewash or blackwash most every single major player of the revolution and then present it in a shallow matter as a part of their two decades old series.
They even make basic historical errors and that lack of basic care is just inexcusable.
It sold well enough for III which presents a balanced tone with the American Revolution.
And yet the last three games have all had a historical tourism mode. Also a game can do both, it can present a fair look at history and be fun like every other game in the series.
I am not asking for a painfully accurate representation just a fair one that doesn’t read like pro-monarchy propaganda at times.
And does so uncritically and at times not even engaging with them when not outright agree with what has been historically accepted as pro-monarchy fabrication. It is further proof that this game was allergic to actually being interesting or daring.
You are just putting words in my mouth now. I never expected a documentary of course I wouldn’t. I had played every single one of those game at release (I still have my Edward from a collector;s edition pre-order) until that point so I know what I thought I was getting. But I still expected something in the same style as III’s most balanced look at the Revolutionary War and even IV’s sobering and at times eye-opening look at the Flying Gang and the Nassau colony.
I am not interested in a documentary, I am interested in something interesting and nuanced. You know, history!
Well, that’s not what they were presenting here. AC has always been about parts of history, not the whole or the accurate history.
What the last three games had with historical tourism is irrelevant; they were made for different purposes after a major shift in the series. Unity was at a point where it was thoroughly good guys vs bad guys while they tried to figure out where they wanted to take it.
And 3’s historical fiction was hardly balanced. The whole thing was very clearly an us vs them narrative with a few clumsy beats thrown in to show that, yeah, even the “good guys” in this still own slaves and still slaughter natives. This is given cursory attention at best.
I’m not putting words in your mouth. I said “as if,” and I was careful to phrase it that way, meaning that your behavior regarding this matter is implying something; that’s not me saying that that’s what you said.
But, related to that, the way you are criticizing the decisions made toward how the game approaches the fictionalization of its historical aspects implies that you believe somehow that the devs are advocating for the version told in the game to be considered true. There is no indication of any sort that this is the case. In fact, they made so many errors and inaccuracies, it was evident to me that they set about making things inaccurate deliberately because it would be clear right off the bat to any half-asses historian that everything was wrong. Right from the beginning in the Bastille, which resembled the actual building in no way, was clearly done in such an obvious way that they practically had a neon sign, “this isn’t how it really was.”
Now, if you want to chalk that up to another of the poor, directionless decisions Ubisoft made regarding the games during this era of the series, that’s an easy conclusion to draw. They were cranking out these massive things once a year by that point, they probably didn’t have time to develop anything more nuanced. The game suffers from bugs, glitches, a dull main character, bad accents, and awful parkour, but the choices made of where and how to fictionalized the events doesn’t even rank the top ten issues with this game.
How can you write this and not give it a side-eye? I saw less coping in my morning playthrough of THPS1+2.
Like we have clearly gotten to the point where your argument has become so wrapped up in your solipsism that there is just no convincing you even if I went point by point what was wrong with the game historically.
I suspect if I asked you who Georges Dalton was you would tell me he played Bond twice in the 80s,. If I asked you to tell me who said “let them eat cake” you would tell me it was Marie Antoinette. If I asked you what the final result to the vote to kill the king was you would say it was 53-47.
Five hours. FIVE HOURS. No, I won’t chalk it up to anything! I don’t walk to talk about this fucking shitty game anymore. Or it’s shitty history. Or shitty texture tearing. Or your facile grasp of historical communication and storytelling.
NO MORE.
I don’t want to even think about the fucking French for the rest of my fucking week. I don’t even want to think about you for the rest of the day at the very least!
As Thomas-Alexandre Dumas once wrote: “Mon Dieu, comment quelqu’un qui a si peur de sa propre mortalité peut-il perdre autant de son temps libre ? Utilisez tout ce temps libre dont vous disposez pour ouvrir un livre de temps en temps. Bozo!”
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There’s more.
I know what’s wrong with this game historically. And it doesn’t matter. Once again, it is wrong by design, and not to push some kind of agenda.
And no, my responses to those questions wouldn’t be those.
Have you broken?
You wasted five hours of my life and you think it is a game. So no, I am just walking away from another one of your intellectual endurance races.
Five fucking hours. Fuck you, dickhead.
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A) You didn’t have to respond back.
B) A large reason why it went on so long was because of the extreme lengths of time you took writing out responses.
C) I’m asking seriously. You are being uncharacteristically hostile over something as run of the mill as a debate on the merits of a game. From all the disagreements we’ve had, I find it difficult to believe that in one evening, this would be the subject that went too far for you, when we’ve had some go on for days. Therefore, I’m wondering if there’s some other issue.