Maybe five or ten years ago, everybody was absolutely sick of climbing towers in Ubisoft games. Are we still? I’m not sure. If you’ve never scaled one of these landmarks, possibly because you have recently arrived from Mars, let me start you off on the ground floor. The open world tower mechanic dates back to the original Assassin’s Creed in 2007, and is a simple, perennially gratifying narrative loop. It goes like this: you spy the tower on the horizon, you scuffle and shoulder through the city towards it, you savour the ensuing clamber – all those sinuous parkour animations, the wind around your ears as the urban backdrop fades – and then you get a nice view of Creation that also renders the scenery more consumable, by unfogging your map and populating it with content.
Towers used to be all the rage among the open-worldly, particularly when coupled with region-based design. The tower loop creates a reassuring foundation for exploration, perhaps to the extent that no real exploration happens at all: it gives you an immediate objective whenever you stray into uncharted territory. But tower-climbing’s Ubiquity has inevitably bred contempt. I’ve mocked towers, radio masts and the like myself in many reviews of Ubiworlds from the 2010s. Lately, though, I find myself thinking wistfully of the original Assassin’s Creed’s bygone summits, which are strange in a way the sequels have squandered by minimising Assassin’s Creed’s old metafictional framing in order to lose you in the splendour of each period setting.
It’s easy to forget that Assassin’s Creed is, on some level, supposed to feel not splendid but provocatively fake. The original game depicts controlling your avatar as “puppeteering”, with a controller button layout corresponding to hands, head and legs. For all the fluidity of the parkour, there’s a showy awkwardness to how it thinks about video game embodiment – a sense of strings being yanked that speaks to a larger plot incompatibility of, in essence, choosing to have no choice at all. Assassin’s Creed is all about puppeteers who are also puppets, a Ligottian scenario if ever there was one. It dangles the idea that history is a sandbox in which “nothing is true, everything is permitted”, but also insists that you use this agency to “synchronise” with the given lifestory of another character.
You need to “synchronise” because this isn’t actually a historical simulation. It’s a simulation of a historical simulation. You are plugged into the Animus, a nowadays quaint-seeming VR machine devised by Ubisoft’s authorial surrogate Abstergo to extract and recreate “genetic memories”, passed down by your ancestors. The game’s narrative is one big act of synchronisation: held captive by Abstergo, protagonist Desmond Miles must reenact several days in the life of the 13th century assassin Altaïr Ibn-La’Ahad, chewing through a menu of memories in order to strengthen the Animus connection and eventually, access knowledge desired by the corporation. In the process, staple mechanics such as stealth, killing NPCs or taking damage are reimagined, albeit superficially, as rituals of continuity or discontinuity between Desmond and Altaïr. It’s all in the name of assembling the one, true-and-permitted history that Abstergo require to fulfil their globe-straddling ambitions.
Given that blockbuster games typically want to “immerse” you, persuading you to forget that you’re interacting with a machine in order to inculcate a flow state, I’m charmed by Assassin’s Creed’s insistence that you labour across a gap between player and simulation. It requires you to “play well” not just to make progress, but to stop the world from flaking away to whitebox. In other words, Assassin’s Creed dramatises an interval between acting as the game requires, and the player’s dissatisfying of those expectations – whether through fumbling the inputs or perhaps, through active disobedience.
“Disobedience” against the simulation’s creators isn’t, admittedly, a very coherent ideal in a game that is designed to be “hacked”, offering up QTE “glitches” for you to poke during cutscenes. But this doesn’t, for me, lessen the intrigue of synchronisation as a practice of calibrating a representation “from the inside”. There is so much that other designers could achieve here, I think, if they were offered the rope you don’t generally get from triple-A management. In particular, I’m struck by how synchronisation characterises the tower-climbing loop and, dare I say, lends it a certain poetic complexity. It’s not just about synching up people across different periods, but piecing together facets of symbolism and metaphor.
Climbing towers in Assassin’s Creed is one of the major ways you synchronise. That’s what you’re doing when you unfog the map: consolidating the technology’s grip on the Middle Ages as though driving in a piton. But there’s also a sense that you and the protagonists are engaged in a more open-ended form of synchronisation – that you are organising and unifying these “puppets” as literary devices, rather than clinically retrieving memories from a double-helix.
The synchronisation point itself is typically a little beam jutting from the tower’s summit, with an eagle perched on it. Synchronise, and the view launches outward, mimicking the disturbed eagle’s flight around the tower. “Altaïr” is an Arabic name derived from “al-tair” meaning “bird” – I’ve read that it refers specifically to birds of prey. So in a sense, when you climb to the synchronisation point you are Altaïr synchronising with al-tair. You are performing the poetics of Altaïr’s name, reconciling the assassin with his archetype.
You are doing all this, again, as Desmond synchronising with Altaïr. The name “Desmond” doesn’t have any avian resonance, as far as I can tell – Ubisoft Montreal’s writers could have plucked it from the air during a lunchbreak. But I find “synchronisation” as I’ve here redefined it such an inviting process that it’s hard to resist expanding the Animus bandwidth – remember, “everything is permitted” – and straining to incorporate more data. In the process, synchronisation again becomes something more than a rhythmic unlocking of map content, more like stringing together stars into constellations.
As a proper noun, “Desmond” can be traced to Mór Muman, a Gaelic mother goddess held to personify the Irish province of Munster. According to legend, Mór Muman once strode to the summit of Sliabh an Iolair, the Irish for “eagle mountain”, to view the surrounding landscape. Perhaps Desmond is another such regional sovereign deity, not just a man climbing into the body of another man climbing into the body of an eagle, but the very architecture and geography of the open world trampled and revealed by Altaïr’s ascent.
Among the things spoiling the poetry here is that, according to that folk tale I’ve just fished from the wikipool, Mór Muman didn’t just behold the view from Eagle Mountain, but lingered for an absolutely monstrous piss, carving great ravines through the terrain. It’s hard to think of an Assassin’s Creed parallel there, but perhaps we can rescue the decaying synchronisation by hand-waving some allusions to streaming textures and the yellow straw of the haystacks that wait to intercept Altaïr’s fall.
Those haystacks are, of course, the hidden heroes of the AssCreed tower loop. Supplanted in later open worlds by ziplines and gliders, they’re vital shortcuts in a game that makes an absolute dog’s dinner out of climbing down, with handholds forever grabbing at your gluey fingers. Falling from a tower in Assassin’s Creed is an irresistible crescendo, and it’s all thanks to those haystacks, which are always there to catch you providing you dive from ledges haunted by birds, and which always negate your fall damage no matter how far you tumble.
Those miraculous “eagle dives” are designed to be “believable” rather than “realistic”, according to original AC animation director Alex Drouin. I find the reference to “belief” apt here, in that eagle dives are referred to in-game as a “leap of faith”. Invoking “faith” suggests that this is Assassin’s Creed at its least “true” and most “permissive”, inasmuch as acting on faith is acting with no sure outcome. But if there’s one thing Assassin’s Creed guarantees it’s that when you leap from a synchronisation point, you’ll find a haystack beneath. In the process, the sense of ethereal, networked possibility I’ve just identified as a component of the climb collapses into plodding, designerly certainty.
To be fair, one early scene does feature a leap of faith ending in disaster. During the prologue, you and two other assassins plunge from a tower simultaneously to show an invading Templar general that the brotherhood hold no fear of death. One of your brothers surfaces screaming with a broken leg, but this is simply a level scripter’s excuse for Altaïr proceeding unaccompanied: from that point on, the Animus interface drums home the lesson that you will always emerge from the straw unscathed.
Imagine if you were told in advance that there was a 1% chance of any tower climb and “leap of faith” going wrong. How many percentage points would they need to add, before “faith” became a meaningful element of tower-loop synchronisation? And what might that bring to the idea of “synchronisation” as imaginative and interpretative, rather than extractive – a constellating of artistic and historical potentials? I wonder if Ubisoft/Abstergo could have designed Assassin’s Creed in such a way as to make operating the Animus less about obedient content consumption, and more of a risky process of tinkering with a fretful simulation and pursuing its eccentricities – going beyond gimmicks like “hacking” cutscenes, and fleshing out synchronisation as a form of play.
I don’t think the forthcoming Assassin’s Creed Shadows or any other contemporary Ubiworld has much appetite for such shenanigans. It’s not the kind of pie-eyed nonsense shareholders appreciate, especially right now, though Shadows does aim to reboot the series’ Animus storyline. But perhaps this is a haystack that another, less inhibited development team might hurl themselves into, 17 years on.
