Acharky may have fallen victim to the Templar plot, using Daylight Savings Time to make him late for the Let’s Play. But now that he’s here, it’s time to begin the section of Assassin’s Creed 3 that turned me against it back in the day.
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In my memory, the objective for that chase in the original version of the game was to “Kill Thomas Hickey”. Since he was my target, I did what came natural and reflex shot him dead, just like I did this recording. I remember feeling cheated by the game, because I felt like my choice in that moment was the most rational and reasonable solution to the problem of our target escaping. In that moment, my college student self felt almost like he was punished for being smarter than the mission designer. For that reason, I’ve carried it my memory all this time.
I was also, laughably, completely incorrect. Footage from Let’s Plays back when original version came out make it clear that the actual mission was to Chase Thomas Hickey, not to Kill him. Now, I still believe setting up a scenario where the player has to chase a target they, in story, are out to kill when perfectly viable means of assassination are in their toolkit is poor mission design and storytelling. There are ways to engineer this scenario such that the player isn’t in a position to deliver lethal strikes onto the target until the story is ready for them to perform the execution.
Unfortunately, this is fairly typical of GTA-inspired mission structures like this one. If the player doesn’t follow the designers script exactly, the game will fail them until they do, even if they could engineering more interesting or creative solutions than the designer intended. In fairness to Assassin’s Creed, this is a rare example of them falling into this trap, as usually they’re better about signposting and setting up scenarios to avoid this problem. Other games, particularly Rockstar’s work, are far worse about this. Building up such ire about such a small problem feels, in retrospect, foolish on my part.
I also imagine much of my anger regarding the prison break segment that follows is a logical extension of this same fooling indignation. I remember feeling like it went on too long and left Ratonhnhaké꞉ton uncomfortably vulnerable when it didn’t need to.
And again, replaying this game allows me to realize how incorrect I was about this too. Not only is the entire sequence short enough to fit one of my thirty minute episodes, but it’s also fairly important to note that the British soldiers weren’t the one who arrested our protagonist. No, it was his allies who did that too him: The people he’s fighting for.
While that might seem like a small detail, it’s yet another in a string of cruelties inflicting by the seemingly heroic colonists, further building up what is soon to become one of the central pillars of the story. Yet again, these “heroes” who fight for “freedom” trample upon those with less power than them.
It is a bitter irony at the center of the American Revolution.
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