Dodo Blog

For the next couple weeks I’ll be doing a series of posts on the use of interactive animation in a number of notable games…

First up, Assassin’s Creed…

No doubt its movement and environment interaction are a milestone in game animation, weaving elegantly through crowds and running effortlessly across rooftops… but there is another aspect of this game worth noting: the guards.

If you turn off the HUD, you may notice that you can tell the guards’ alertness by their posture alone. If all is well, they stand and patrol normally… You can quite literally almost get away with murder. If something suspicious has set them on edge, they clutch their swords nervously. You should NOT at this point do something stupid to draw their attention.

When you hear cries of “WHO did this?” and see them patrol with swords unsheathed, the slightest provocation will cause them to notice you.

CLARITY

It’s a simple thing, but extremely effective… conveying the same information as the HUD indicator, only without breaking immersion. Recognizing their behaviour allows you to adapt yours.

Now I may be alone in this, but I would argue it’s actually kind of a cop-out to include a HUD at all. If you have something that communicates by itself, adding competing channels to say the same only serves to clutter up the message…

WALKING THE STREETS

Another interesting aspect of Assassin’s Creed is its “social stealth”.

To blend in and move anonymously through these urban crowds, you must act as if you were just another citizen…

Drawing a weapon, running around and climbing on things will almost certainly blow your cover and send the guards chasing after you. As long as you haven’t been spotted, you keep your cool and resist the urge to run.

Movement is literally separated into “low-” and “high-profile”. While the latter gives you the most freedom, the former is crucial to staying out of sight.

High-profile movement is fast, agile and violent, while low is soft and discreet. You switch instantly between modes – a more gradual transition with ‘degrees of rudeness’ could have been interesting, but it seems the developers decided against this as it “started to explode” in terms of complexity. Perhaps just as well for the sake of clarity (if not to avoid an obscene amount of extra animation)…

The game is making you think about your own body language.

You can even pretend to be a monk by walking among the faithful with your head down and hands clasped together in prayer. The designers made an odd choice here by forcing an automatic walk when tagging along with groups of monks, which makes the player feel less clever for doing so… but the idea remains a strong one.

For whatever faults it may have Assassin’s Creed is a groundbreaking title, with inventive use of NPC and player body language as a key part of gameplay, which I hope the developers will continue to build on in future…

Next up: Outcast