“Ladders are a socially acceptable way to reach a roof” – Assassin’s Creed

**Assassin’s Creed** (Ubisoft, Xbox 360, 2007)

Up to this point in the Super Chart Island story, Ubisoft have been a company with one successful imperialist brand and some moderate publishing deals. Assassin’s Creed became the UK’s fastest-selling non-sequel since The Getaway, and marks the point where Ubisoft turned into major players. How they did so says something about the company and the industry.

If it wasn’t already clear that coming up with ways to develop the open world concept was going to be a big theme of the generation, Assassin’s Creed removes any doubt. Its big promise to players is the chance to roam the historic Holy Land at will, exploring the streets and roofs of its cities, apparently recreated in detail. And that is where the game works, to a sometimes breathtaking extent. As its main character Altaïr you can run around its densely populated streets, spot a couple of helpfully placed boxes forming steps, and launch yourself up to a roof. Then, seamlessly, you can begin dancing your way across a similarly dense landscape of beams and canopies and tops of buildings.

Assassin’s Creed owes some obvious debts to previous assassination games. It is clearly made by people who have played the Hitman series, not least in order to come to the (excellent) decision to hire their composer Jesper Kyd for a similarly grandiose and crunchy soundtrack. The stealth elements and tension are a mere light smattering in comparison to those games though; unless being actively chased it’s generally simple to put Altaïr’s head down, put his hands together and blend in to escape suspicion. The biggest success, instead, is in taking the stylish joy of movement and tricksy architecture from Tenchu: Wrath of Heaven and realising it on a far grander scale.

Much of the climbing and rooftop-navigating is done just by holding down RT and A and pointing the way you want to go. This sometimes has unfortunate results, but there is just enough other input needed to make finding your way upwards an enjoyable challenge. That’s reflected in the signature mechanic which Ubisoft would take with them into the future, that of climbing up towers to fill in activities on your map. Reaching the top gets you a triple award: you manage to reach somewhere you’ve been seeing and wondering about for a while, you get a lovely view over all that meticulous creation, and you get the mechanical reward. Plus Altaïr does a lovely swan dive from a carefully marked spot onto a convenient pile of hay on the ground far below.

In between the joyful climbing and leaping over the heads of guards, you also have to do some assassinating. Superstar assassin prodigy Altaïr has been a bad boy, failing to follow the assassin’s creed of his order, and so he’s been bumped down to having to ask permission for everything. Not only that but he has to do the basic legwork of picking people’s pockets and beating confessions out of suspects to identify how he can reach his targets. If we’re meant to be resenting it along with him then good job, because these are the least interesting bits of the game. Once you get to the actual killing it improves slightly, though usually this involves little stealth and lots of having to fight your way through sword combat which plays exactly like a more competent (and therefore less fun) version of that in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End.

Who are these people that you are killing? Well, for a start, probably not just your official targets or their unfortunate guards. One of the regular activities in the cities is saving citizens from being harassed by guards, which means killing them all and being rewarded by one of a small range of repetitive speeches. Plus, when trying to make your way unsuspected to vantage points, pushing any potentially suspicious guards off roofs to their doom is just the obvious thing to do. You’re meant to be sparing unnecessary or unplanned killing (kind of the point of Altaïr’s fall from grace at the beginning) but never mind, no one will know.

Anyway, the actual targets. With the backdrop of the Crusades, you are asked to destroy a handful of arms dealers, slave traders and the like, not limited to one side of the conflict but all unsavoury men whose “power and influence corrupts the land”. There are obvious parallels to the kidnapping and forced experiments of the modern-day corporation in the game’s framing device. Which feels like a good moment to highlight the other parallels, to this game being made by a company whose employees have made statements about its own powerful and influential men having made it a place of “systemic discrimination, harrassment and bullying”. A year later, two years later, its employee group reports that nothing has changed. Systemic power is difficult to dismantle, not least when the same people have been in charge reaping its rewards the entire time.

Assassin’s Creed actually has something to say about the employees of Ubisoft Montréal, in one of the first things you see when you turn it on. They are a multicultural team, it says. It’s all a little bit ‘My “this work of fiction was designed, developed and produced by a multicultural team of various religious beliefs and faiths” disclaimer has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my disclaimer’. But it’s only the start of one of the more bizarre aspects of the game and Ubisoft more broadly.

During your explorations of the ‘Poor District of Damascus’ and the ‘Rich District of Jerusalem’ and other places named with such nuance, you clamber over mosques and churches, but while people discuss the conflict, evidence of their beliefs and faiths at the individual level is rather absent. Altaïr, is by implication, at least culturally Muslim, but the game doesn’t do a lot to make that more explicit. He does not offer much of a view on anything beyond frustration at his own circumstances. In-world, the framing device of the game is that you are in fact continually playing as Desmond Miles, modern day American, forced into playing through a DNA-activated simulation of his ancestor’s memories.

Back when space trading game Elite set new standards for open worlds in the ’80s, its manual made clear that the limited lines and shapes you could see were on a screen which your character was viewing inside their spaceship. That theoretical screen formed an extra barrier between its world and reality. In Assassin’s Creed, that distancing is brought in-game and made pervasive. There are constant hi-tech looking gauges, and regular ‘glitches’ and bits of molecular diagrams to remind you that what you are looking at is a simulation of a simulation. Plus Desmond-as-Altaïr’s accent. More than that, the modern day sequences make a point of making things even more obvious. Desmond gets told to “expect a few anachronisms” and there is a sardonic comment about noticing that “English has become the official language of the Holy Land”.

Assassin’s Creed is set in a real historical time and place, and eventually has you assassinating real historical figures. But it goes to ridiculous, sometimes lengths to hedge its presentation of any of it, to offer plausible deniability to offering any viewpoint that might be applied outside of its specific simulation-of-a-simulation setting. In-game, you are told to watch your movements carefully and consider their social acceptability. Playing it, it sometimes feels like Ubisoft are treading their own careful social line, trying to maintain their ludicrous claims to be completely apolitical. Apparently, while they could happily pump out poisonous American security state propaganda, commiting to any stance on a millennium-old invasion would be too much.