Assassin's Creed 3 an American Tale.

I am a huge fan of the Assassin’s Creed games, but after seeing the announcement trailer and reading the accompanying press release for Assassin’s Creed 3 I find myself slightly perturbed.

The first thing that I have issue with, is what seems like a move away from the huge cityscape-type play area towards a more open-world style of game with talk of wide landscapes mixed with towns. For me a major part of the Assassin’s Creed games is the city traversal and although I don’t mind if after four games Ubisoft decides it is time to change things up, I am a little disconcerted that they seem to be moving towards an open-world style game ala GTA and others. These games are great, but I don’t really want to see Assassin’s Creed go down this path as the Creed games have always been sufficiently different, giving me something other games of this nature have not. With this third game I think that Ubisoft might be getting away from what makes Assassin's Creed stand out from the crowd.

The more pressing concern though is the setting. In the past games, you have often been fighting in an historical period during a time where there are no clearly defined historical ‘bad guys.’ What I mean by this is that even though you were fighting against the Templars, in the first game you were involved in the Crusades, but neither side was portrayed as the ‘good’ side with Templars on both the Christian and Muslim sides. In subsequent games the focus was more the time period rather than any specific conflict.

With the choice of the American Revolution I can't help but feel that Ubisoft may end up picking a specific side and portraying them as evil. This fear has been backed up by the trailer they released that was very pro-American and had Washington railing against the ‘evil’ British. Now this may not be representative of the whole game, but it has me worried. With American values dominating the Western development scene I find it hard to see a situation where a game is released that in any way depicts the American Revolutionaries in a bad light. I’m not about to go into the rights and wrongs of the American War of Independence, but it cannot be boiled down to something as simple as the Colonists were the good guys and the British were the bad. 

Entertainment media has a bad track record when it comes to properly depicting history and when it is something as close to American sensibilities as this you very rarely get an unbiased approach. Case in point: The Patriot. The major reason why I didn’t watch that film was because it was terrible reductive history and I don’t want to see that kind of jingoistic nonsense in a video game, especially in one of my favourite video game series. If you are going to tackle a period of history I think it is imperative that you tell the truth and stick to the facts especially when the only history some people get today is from entertainment media. Tell a lie in a film or game and that lie soon becomes accepted fact.

My fears may end up being totally unfounded and Ubisoft may be able to strike a delicate balance with neither side being portrayed as good or bad, but right now I fear that I may be giving Assassin's Creed 3 a miss.