作者：Sranislav Costiuc

我曾经以《刺客信条》为例谈论过许多有关连贯性的整体开放世界体验的内容，即包括像《兄弟会》和《黑旗》这样的正面例子也包括像《启示录》这样较不连贯的例子。而今天我想要讨论的则是缺少连贯性的例子，即那些即使删除了某些元素，功能或进行修改也不可能解决这一问题的游戏内容。

我也将使用一些《刺客信条》游戏为例。例如《叛变》因为以不同程度的成功结合了刺客和圣殿骑士的体验而变得有点摇摆不定。还有《刺客信条3》因为对结局的野心过大而导致许多游戏部分都以零散的方式告终。不过今天我真正想要讨论的游戏则是《刺客信条：大革命》。

说实话，我认为《大革命》并没有像人们所说的那么糟糕。的确，虽然游戏的发行伴随着一些技术问题，但这款游戏却真的很有趣且拥有一些值得我们去追随的内容。不过其中当然不包含连贯性。

Assassin’s Creed Unity(from gamasutra)

在我关于为什么《兄弟会》是一款完整的开放世界游戏的文章中，我提到了如果你分别着眼于每一部分，你也许会注意到各种缺陷与问题，但当你将它们组合在一起时便会获得非常不错的结果。而《大革命》则恰恰相反。当你在分析它的每一部分内容时你会发现它们都是合情合理的，但是当你将这些内容组合在一起时，你便会觉得它们简直一团糟。但是游戏还是蛮有趣的，虽然同时也很混乱。

首先让我们着眼于《大革命》中一些表现不错的内容：

–核心机制。到目前为止的整个系列中，它们都拥有最棒的优化和最佳装置。游戏中的战斗都不会过强，具有策略性，需要群体控制，且具有较高的精确度。潜行是合理的并且能够保持AI的虚假与敏捷性的平衡。而跑酷系统更是该系列中最受欢迎的内容（甚至超越了Syndicate，因为后者禁用不安全的跳跃方式）。

–主要任务是经过精心设计的，暗杀任务更加突出，所以代表的是非常精细且需要深思熟虑的沙盒内容，玩家可以在此投入大量时间并且仍能够发现一些新内容。游戏的主要故事从整体看来还不错，并且其中也包含不少微妙的设置。

–支线任务同样也是经过精心设计的，特别是合作故事任务和抢劫，即不管你是独自游戏还是和朋友一起游戏都能够从中获得不错的体验。

–定制系统非常精细让你能够明确自己的游戏风格。

–经济应该是《刺客信条》系列中唯一能够有效平衡自动收入与手动收入的内容，并且到最后你将不会面对疯狂的收益溢出的情况。

–巴黎看起来似乎非常拥挤。说实话在这款游戏中玩家不会觉得进入了其它《刺客信条》中，因为其它游戏都并未像《大革命》这样拥有这么多人。

所以你会发现这款游戏的游戏机制，任务和系统都是合理的。但是为什么当它们被整合在一起时却显得一切都那么不协调呢？

在游戏中玩家的主要任务与Arno的个人旅程有关，即这里是以法国大革命为背景。我猜这是要扭转像《刺客信条3》将历史作为主要故事线所遭遇的种种批评。但《大革命》似乎做得太过了，因为玩家仍将在不了解故事发生的原因和背景的情况下去经历像九月大屠杀等事件。

而之后我们将迎来支线任务，大多数支线任务都被叫做巴黎故事，即与法国大革命相关。玩家将在每一个或每两个任务中遇到一个或两个历史人物。而因为游戏中出现的历史人物实在太多了所以在某一时候玩家甚至将不再去关心他是谁以及自己做某事的原因，并且游戏也并未明确地告诉玩家在某一时候会出现什么样的任务。同样地几乎所有来自主要故事内容中的角色都未曾出现在支线任务中。而Napoleon则是足够幸运才能参与到所有三角恋情的次要情节中。

然后我们便会遇到天堂谋杀案，而Arno之所以会加入到这一事件中便只是因为它很酷。然后便是来自委员会所分发的随机社交俱乐部任务，但是因为在主要故事中玩家并不会直接与委员会沟通，所以这也是一些不相干的内容。而合作型抢劫虽然看起来更像是Animus模拟，但事实上却与Arno或法国大革命没有太大关系。

而我觉得其中最大的不一致性是来自游戏中的第二大部分，即合作故事人物。1793年Arno逃离了Assassin Order，在那之后他前往了Versailles并在那喝醉了。在1794年6月的时候他重新回到了巴黎。然而在游戏中75%的合作任务中玩家都是作为Arno参与其中，而这是发生在1793年1月至1794年6月之间。在其中一个任务中一个被捕的刺客甚至提到了Arno的名字。

当我最初看到《大革命》在E3中的预告片时我便意识到他们在一个开放世界中添加了毫无意义的合作模式，我认为其他玩家应该是主要故事中的其他角色。所以玩家将在个人游戏中与这些角色进行交流，并在一个合作故事中与这些角色执行不同的《兄弟会》任务。所以当玩家与朋友进行合作任务时，不管是玩家自己还是Arno都在这么做。这一原则能够更有效将主要故事与支线故事联系在一起。

但是游戏玩法和系统却接受了故事默认所有的一切不能有效地整合在一起的情况。故事和游戏系统不应该是独立的个体，它们应该真正联系起来。它们需要互相影响并对彼此做出反应。

我在有关《启示录》的文章中我提到了删减功能是如何完善整体的，而在这里我想谈谈它对于平衡在整体游戏中删减与添加内容的重要性（不管是故事部分还是游戏玩法部分）。

《刺客信条：大革命》并不能通过改变故事或删掉那些不适合故事的功能而变成一款真正连贯的完整游戏。它需要从头开始进行创造，而开发者需要不断问自己像为什么这一内容不能和我们所提供的故事相匹配以及这一内容将如何匹配故事？

也许我们自己的大本营Cafe Theatre可以删掉，但之后Arno将以角色的姿态开始对自己在主要故事线中的经历感到好奇。也许在支线任务中不应该添加太多历史人物，反而应该添加能够以有效方式将支线任务传达给玩家的游戏系统。

我并不只是在谈论全局系统，同时我也涉及了一些较小的内容。

如果你从未玩过游戏，你可能在之后的某个地方会认为那是Arno在《大革命》中第一次经历信仰之跃（游戏邦注：即游戏主角会从高处俯冲到地面的干草堆，并帅气地继续潜行，而不论多高他都不会受伤）。但事实却并非如此。不仅在游戏一开始他便经历了信仰之跃，在Versailles序列的一开始你也将看到一个强制性的教程。这是非常让人惊讶的内容，因为这本是用于教授控制机制的好时机，但游戏却将其用于信仰之跃上。

虽然对于资深硬核玩家来说，信仰之跃已经不是什么新鲜内容了，但《大革命》却应该是作为新玩家的起步点而诞生的。游戏中的首次信仰之跃应该是庄严且重要的。但其中的游戏玩法和任务设计却破坏了它。即当玩家到达那个点时，Arno表示“这是不可能的事”，但是作为玩家的你已经做过许多次信仰之跃了。所以你知道这是可能的。游戏让Arno能够进行跑酷，因为这是游戏的核心机制并且符合他那蛮勇的态度，但游戏同时也将信仰之跃禁锢着直至其对玩家真正有帮助的时候才将其释放出来。而这便是游戏玩法和故事之间的矛盾。

我希望通过一个我最近从游戏中所获得的最印象深刻的时刻去结束这篇文章。这是一个名为“Marianne Returns Home”的小小支线任务。它突出了一个一次性的人历史人物。我甚至不记得这个人物的名字了，直至我在谷歌上搜索这个任务名称时才想起来。而相反地这个任务本身却深深刻在我的脑海中长达2年的时间。

在这个任务中我们发现Marianne在谷仓外练剑。Arno问她在做什么，她便讲述了自己的父母在大革命中被错判并且被赶离故乡的故事，所以她决定苦训自己以夺回被抢走的一切。而作为Arno的玩家需要做的便是帮助她去训练自己然后与她一起回到故乡并将其夺回。最终，该任务是以Marianne回想起自己在这里的所有记忆而结束。

而这一任务之所以深深留在我的心里是因为这并非像Royal Jewels等之后会变得有名或巫师等清楚谁会杀了Marianne等历史琐事的支线任务。相反地这只是一个有关我们偶然发现并去帮助一个普通人在混乱中寻求和平的简单任务。这会让我觉得更加人性化。

（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转发，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

The Disunity of Assassin’s Creed: Unity

by Stanislav Costiuc

I talked quite a bit on the topic of cohesive wholesome open-world experiences on examples of Assassin’s Creed, from the positive examples of Brotherhood and Black Flag, to a somewhat more incoherent example of Revelations. But today I want to talk about an example of cohesiveness lacking at all, which can’t be fixed by removing some elements or features or polishing it up.

There’s some Assassin’s Creed games that I could use as examples. There’s Rogue that’s indecisive about what it wants to be as it mixes the Assassin and Templar experiences in various degrees of success. There’s Assassin’s Creed III which was so ambitious that in the end quite a lot of different parts of the game ended up somewhat lacking. But the game that I want to focus on for this topic is Assassin’s Creed: Unity.

To be honest, I think Unity gets quite a lot of undeserved bad reputation as a game. Yes, it’s launch was a technical mess, but the game is enjoyable and has quite a few things going for it. Cohesive experience, though, is not one of those things.

In my post about why Brotherhood is such a wholesome open-world game, I’ve mentioned that if you look at its parts separately, it’s got quite a bit of flaws and wrinkles, but when put all together it creates something great. Unity is the opposite. When you analyze its different parts, they all make sense, but when everything is put together, it’s quite a mess. It still can be enjoyable, but it’s a mess.

The Disunity of Assassin’s Creed: Unity

Let’s first take a look at some of the things that Unity does right:

- The core mechanics. So far out of the whole series, they’re the most polished and the most fitting. Combat is not overpowered, it’s strategic, requires crowd control, precision. Stealth makes sense and strikes the balance between AI’s fake stupidity and smartness (although they do have an issue with doors when you’re behind corners…) And the parkour system is the most enjoyable in the series (more than Syndicate because Syndicate disables unsafe jumps).

- Main missions are very well-designed, assassination missions even more so as they represent very detailed and thought out sandboxes which you can play a bunch of times and still figure out something new. The main story is overall fine for the amount of main missions there are and actually has quite a lot of subtleties in it.

- Side-missions are also generally speaking well-designed, especially co-op story missions and heists as they provide great experience to play both solo and with your friends.
- The customization system is detailed and allows you to define your playstyle.

- The economy is probably the only one from the Assassin’s Creed series that properly balances automatic income with manual income and where you don’t have an insane overflow of money by the end.

- Paris looks amazing, and the crowds… Honestly, it just doesn’t feel the same getting into other Assassin’s Creed games as they don’t have the massive crowds of Unity.

So, you look at the list, and it’s all very sensible. The mechanics, the missions, the systems. But let’s examine why, when put together, it doesn’t gel well.

The main missions are about Arno’s personal journey, with the French Revolution being more of a backdrop. My guess is to address the criticisms of something like Assassin’s Creed III utilizing too much history in its main storyline. Perhaps Unity goes a bit too far though, as you still go through things like September Massacres but without absolutely any context why or what’s happening in the background.

But then we have the side-missions, most of which are called Paris Stories, and they’re all about the French Revolution. You meet one or two new historical characters every one or two missions. There’s SO many historical characters that at some point you stop caring who is who and why you’re doing what, and there’s no clear indication which mission happens at which point of the chronology because there were plenty of times when I’ve completed some assignments that apparently should’ve happened before some other ones. Almost no characters from the main story are utilized in side-missions, they’re not fleshed out additionally in any way. Though Napoleon gets the honor to participate in the most cringeworthy love triangle subplot ever.

Then we have the Murder Mysteries, which are cool and all, but Arno is essentially doing them just because. And then a bunch of random Social Club missions which are mostly assignments from the Council, but as you don’t talk to the Council at all beyond some instances in the main story it’s a bit irrelevant. The co-op heists seem to be more of an Animus simulation, there’s also the time anomalies which are cool but don’t have anything to do with Arno or French Revolution as well.

But the biggest contradiction I feel comes from the second-biggest (in comparison to the main story) section in the game – co-op story missions. You see, and there will be spoilers for Unity here, in January 1793 Arno gets exiled from the Assassin Order, after which he goes to Versailles to get drunk. He comes back to Paris only June 1794. Yet 75% of the co-op missions, in which you play as Arno participating in them, take place between January 1793 and June 1794. In one of the missions a captured Assassin even mentions Arno by name.

And the presence of co-op players in general feels disconnected from the experience. Everybody sees themselves as Arno, which I think is the correct principle to go by in a narrative-driven open-world game, but everybody else in the team is some random Assassin from their perspective.

When I first saw the E3 trailer for Unity and learned that it would have seamless co-op mode in the open-world, I thought that the other players would be characters from the main story. So you communicate with those characters during single-player, and go on different Brotherhood assignments alongside them in the co-op story. So when you’re playing co-op missions with friends, both you and Arno are doing so. And this principle would already connect the main and side narrative more.

But it’s very easy to say that since gameplay and systems are generally fine that it’s the narrative’s fault everything is not connected well together, and I think that’s a wrong way to look at this. Narrative and gameplay systems aren’t their own thing, they’re interconnected. They play and bounce off each other. They complete each other.

So, while in the post about Revelations I talked about how cutting features can improve the overall experience, here I want to talk about how it can be important to strike balance between cutting and adding something across the whole game – both narrative and gameplay parts.

Assassin’s Creed: Unity can’t be transformed into a wholesome game by changing the narrative, or cutting some of the features that don’t fit the narrative. It needs to be rebuilt from ground up, constantly asking questions like why and how does this fit the fantasy that we’re providing?

Maybe the Cafe Theatre, our personal home base, should be cut, but then Arno as a character should be a little bit more interested in what’s going around him in the main storyline. Maybe there should be less historical side characters in side missions and more narrative interconnectivity, but then there should be added gameplay systems that channel the side missions to the player in a structured way.

And I’m not talking just about global systems, but the little things as well. For example, take a look at this cutscene:

If you haven’t played the game, you might think that it’s the very first time Arno does a leap of faith in Unity. It says so in the video name even. Well, you’d be wrong. Not only leap of faith is unlocked from the very beginning of the game, which to me doesn’t make sense as it would be perfect to have the ability locked until that moment when escaping Bastille to add significance to the scene, but there’s a mandatory tutorial for it at the very beginning of the Versailles sequence. And it’s surprising too, because that would be the perfect moment to teach the controlled descent mechanic, and yet it was used for a leap of faith.

Yeah, for old-time hardcore fans leap of faith is nothing new, but Unity was supposed to act as a start-off point for newcomers. The first Leap of Faith needs to have gravitas, grandeur, importance. And that cutscene has it. But gameplay and mission design waste it. You get to that point, Arno says that ‘it’s impossible’, but you as a player already have done a bunch of leap of faiths. You know it’s possible. Allow Arno to parkour because that’s a core mechanic and it makes sense with his daredevil attitude, but lock the leap of faith until it adds significance. This would be gameplay and narrative playing off each other.

And I would like to end this post with a little story about what happened to be my most memorable moment from the whole game. It was a little side mission, called ‘Marianne Returns Home’. It features a non-historical one-off character, I didn’t even remember her name until I googled how the mission is called, but the mission itself has stuck in my memory for almost two years now.

In it, we find Marianne training with a sword outside of a barn. Arno asks what she is doing, and she tells a story of how her parents were wrongly executed in the chaos of the Revolution and her family home was taken away, so she trains to get it back. So what we do as Arno is that we help her train, and then go together to her home to liberate it from the extremists. After that, the mission ends with Marianne reminiscing of all the memories she had of this place.

The reason why this mission stuck with me so much is because it’s not a side mission about historical trivia like some Royal Jewels or papers that would be famous later or a psychic who knows who will kill her (by the way, why did we believe her?). It’s just a simple mission about us stumbling upon and helping a simple person to find some peace amidst all the chaos that surrounds us. And that feels very human.(source:gamasutra)