The Malibu suite on the seventh floor of Santa Monica's Loews Hotel was the location selected by Ubisoft to show off what is surely one of gaming's most exciting original intellectual properties, and this morning, for sixty engaging minutes, PALGN got to fill the boots of Altaïr, the protagonist in Ubisoft Montreal’s stealth-and-kill hybrid. After a brief wait in one of the Loews' expansive hallways, during which Ubisoft's generous breakfast spread was fully taken advantage of, we were summoned through to a room with half a dozen LCD screens.
Our host for the session was Jean Guesdon, a Project Co-ordinator on the game, who patiently talked us through the finer details of a title which Ubisoft evidently has big hopes for - after all, it's pencilled in for a November release, slap-bang in the middle of the Christmas jam. Ubisoft shareholders needn’t worry, though - based on what we saw and played, this is a title more than capable of creating its own ripples in the packed Yuletide market.
Our Assassin’s experience began from up high, overlooking Jerusalem (there are three cities in the game - Jerusalem, Acre, and Damascus). Swinging the camera around Altaïr with sweeps of the right thumb-stick revealed a handsome landscape, with scores - possibly even hundreds - of rooftops and ledges extending way, way into the distance. This particular map, enthused Jean, is fifteen times the size of the map shown at E3 last year, and it’s not difficult to believe him. Clearly, the newly developed Scimitar graphics engine is up to the job. Still, there was precious little time for sightseeing.
At the worst possible moment, Altaïr realised he hadn't accounted for the fierce headwind.
A leap of faith into a hay cart a hundred feet below kicked things off, and from there, Jean immediately began demonstrating some of the game’s much-vaunted crowd AI. A woman approached us, begging for money, and blocking our path whichever way we turned. A strong shove got rid of her, only for a man who witnessed us swatting her away to reprimand us. Blending in before a bigger ruckus started is probably the best option here, advised Jean, and holding the A button allowed us to do just this, permitting us to go entirely unnoticed in the crowds.
There are several other novel touches when it comes to the crowd. Drawing your sword triggers wary, nervous glances from those around you. You can pickpocket people for extra throwing knives. Guards wave you away and threaten you the moment you get to within a few feet of them. And slaying an innocent civilian is frowned upon by both the in-game crowd and the game itself. This, Jean informs us, is because killing guiltless bystanders goes against the titular creed. As he tells us this, our sword accidentally (no, really) slices the neck of a woman as we’re slashing at guards, killing her on the spot. The game disapprovingly subtracts health points from us as a penalty; there’ll be no mindless, GTA-style slaughtering of innocents here, it may as well say.
But we digress. Our mission in this section of the game was to locate and kill Talal, a nefarious slave trader hidden in a stronghold somewhere in the city. Mercifully, we were spared the needle-in-a-haystack task of finding him ourselves - instead, a flashing marker on the game’s sensibly designed map told us where our target was loitering.
Now all we needed to do was get there, and this is where the fun began. While a great deal of fuss has been kicked up over the behaviour of crowds in Assassin’s Creed (and understandably so, for this aspect is mightily impressive), simply navigating Altaïr through his world is an absolute pleasure. The controls are almost instantly intuitive, and it’s difficult to recall a game with environments that are quite so interactive and unrestricting. Ledges, archways, exposed struts, window frames, statues and (according to Jean) any architectural protrusion that’s bigger than two or three inches can be clung to by Altaïr as he bounds effortlessly through the game’s environments.
Just watching our hooded hero athletically leap from building to building and scramble up walls on his fingernails is vastly satisfying. The animation is elegant and fluid, and the game manages to make even the clumsiest button presses look great on screen. Not many games, it's worth noting, achieve this. Soul Calibur was one that did, as were (more relevantly) Ubisoft Montreal’s own Prince of Persia titles.
Talal in the middle, there. Or Snoop Dogg. Whoever it is, he'll be a goner soon.
In the build-up to the game’s release, it’s been well-documented that there are myriad methods of completing missions. To demonstrate this, Jean opted to get to Talal by creating a diversion, shoving a guard to the ground from a towering rooftop, and in turn causing a disturbance hundreds of feet below. With the fracas still fresh and bystanders crowding around the splattered sentry, a vital stairway leading to our target became unguarded, leaving us free to tiptoe into Talal’s lair. The second time meanwhile, we hid amongst a group of slow-moving monks, our own white robes closely resembling theirs. The odd look from a guard aside, our insertion was flawless.
With our target located, an opportunity arose to try out the game’s combat on Talal’s goons. Essentially, the position of each face button on the pad relates directly to which body part is being controlled. Hence, the A button (the lowest of the four on the Xbox 360 controller) is used to control Altaïr’s feet (for dodging, or leaping). The X and B buttons are reserved for motions involving the hands (shoving, punching, lobbing throwing knives, counter-attacking) and Y (the top button) for actions related to the head. It’s a very deliberate design decision, says Jean, one that is meant to make the game amenable to newcomers.
In fact, perhaps for all-too-obvious reasons, the combat doesn’t feel a million miles away from Prince of Persia’s, with successful scrapping often a matter of timing, of waiting for your enemies to leave themselves open and give you an opportunity to administer that fatal cut-and-thrust counter-attack. Inevitably, comparisons will be made between the two titles - the Ubisoft Montreal connection, the athletic hero, and the not dissimilar combat make the association inevitable.
Often, you’ll need to chase your target before you get to plunge cold steel into them, and this proved to be the case with Talal. As has been demonstrated on previous occasions, the crowd plays its own role in such chases, blocking your path and causing stumbles. Yet once you do reach the marked man and finish him off, the pursuer instantly becomes the pursued, with Altaïr being tracked by guards and sentries down narrow, winding alleys. Here, the aim is to escape the attention of those hunting you, and this can be done in a number of ways - you can outrun them, but simply hiding in a bush works also.
Concealing ourselves in shrubbery is what brought our time with the game to an end, though it won’t be too long before we’re playing the real thing and leaping in hedges all over again - the game launches on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in just four months (Jean was eager to stress how both versions are absolutely identical, and also admitted a later PC version was “very likely”), and we’ll be first in the queue for a copy. Suddenly, Halo 3 and Grand Theft Auto IV have some serious competition for our attention.
Loading...
