Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag – Part 2-4
With our first actual “target” done and dusted, it’s important that we remind ourselves that we’ve been playing an Assassin’s Creed game this whole time.
Streamed at https://www.twitch.tv/newdarkcloud
A friend of mine in the Twitch chat for this recording mentioned that they would rather have a historical fiction series that wasn’t tied to the fictional baggage that Assassin’s Creed brings to this all other games that came out after the Desmond story line concluded. I’m interested in that point because it’s related to a problem I see in many long-running narratives that span multiple works of fiction like AC.
I described it to a different friend as the “wikification of fiction”. Rather than have a fundamental theme or message it wishes to explore, often so many works of fiction exist mostly to satisfy the twenty to forty people who manage the lore wiki by giving them new entries to speculate over. All too often, these works exist not to present a message or theme they want to explore, but surely as a capitalist product designed to get consumers to mindlessly spend, setting up a theoretically future piece that will in turn set up the next in a cycle of endless consumption: Empty calories and junk food that exist solely to satiate the masses in anticipation of the next meal.
This is what Ubisoft created, deliberately, when they chose to deviate from the original vision Patrice Désilets had for the franchise: A trilogy that would have a discreet and finite end. It’s why after Desmond, the series has been in a state of storytelling stagnancy, with several loose plot threads that never come together into a satisfying crescendo, let alone denouement.
Even the creatives in charge of the series seem unsatisfied by this. Origins was intended to be the start of a few story in the AC world specifically because the team didn’t want to make exactly the same type of Assassin’s Creed game that came before. And despite this, they are once again falling prey to the same problems.
I too want a historical fiction series freed from the baggage of Assassin’s Creed, as do many of the people who work on it, but that’s not what Ubisoft wants. And because of that, it’s not what we get.
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