The Assassin's Creed Series: Assassin's Creed Rogue

Context

In terms of Nostalgia, Assassin's Creed Rogue has an odd status for me. Whilst I vividly remembered some of the details of Black Flag before I recently played through it again, with Rogue, all I remember it that I quite enjoyed playing it last time around, but couldn't actually remember any specific detail of the game: who the main character is, the setting and time period, any of the missions, anything!

Therefore, when I started playing through it again, it was somewhat of a voyage of discovery all over again.

The Setting

The "Rogue" reference in the title refers to the fact this time around, you are not actually playing an Assassin, but rather someone who was trained to be an Assassin, but then rebels against them because of what he sees as the Assassin's playing at being God, willingly putting human lives in jeopardy in pursuit of their goals to ensure power stays out of Templar hands.

The fact that Shay Cormac, our hero (or anti-hero) is trained by the Assassins, dispenses with the great curiosity of Black Flag, in that Kenway has the abilities of an assassin and yet received no training at all. So it's nice to get the story back into some kind of logical arrangement.

Irish character + Canadian voice actor = dodgy Irish accent

The location for Rogue is a continuation of AC3 and Black Flag. New York reappears as a location, alongside the other two main maps, which are the North Atlantic and an area called "River Valley". River Valley is essentially like the North Atlantic map, except much more land and more developed settlements. It's a bunch of locations larger than we see in Black Flag, all tied together by sailing through a surrounding river environment. It's a bit of a stretch as far as whether it translates to anything in the real world, but it works very well for the game.

The River Valley map is a hybrid of the open ocean map and large settlements

Time-wise, we have a continuation of sorts from AC3 and Black Flag as well. Rogue is actually set before the events of AC3 and after the events of Black Flag. We get rooted firmly into the timeline when very early on we see a young Achilles (in AC3, Connor's mentor as an old man) and an old Adéwalé talking together. This firmly sets the events of Rogue as being after Black Flag and before Assassin's Creed 3 and effectively sets up Rogue as being the third of a three part series. The difference between this and the Assassin's Creed 2 trilogy is that each episode of this trilogy focuses on a different main character, and really the continuation is more due to convenience than story telling, because the actions of Edward, Connor and Shay don't really affect each other more than setting the background of the world the characters operate in, but to explain what I mean by that is to give away spoilers, so I'll let you work out how it is all stitched together.

The Gameplay

The short version of Rogue's gameplay is that it is a huge copy and paste of the Black Flag game engine, to the extent that even the main character animations are exactly the same, but with the different model for Shay instead of Edward. However, some of the surrounding dynamics of the game are different. For a start, there is a much much bigger focus on "on land" gameplay rather than being at sea, which is hugely welcome because Black Flag massively over-rotated on the seafaring to the point of ad nauseum repetition. There are a few tweaks to the gameplay mechanics as well:

• The "swivel gun" from black Flag is replaced with a "puckle gun", which is essentially an automatic version of the same gun, making it much more useful in a fight.
• A renewed focus on hunting for upgrades, similar to AC3 but not as complicated.
• The "Cormac's Fleet" subgame now relies on standard currency for repairs and docks, rather than the completely unique "precious stones" currency in "Kenway's Fleet" in Black Flag.
• Mission challenges tend to be less random and more relevant. There are not completely manufactured and ridiculous challenges like the "air assassinate from a rope swing" challenge that completely ruined Black Flag's 100% synchronisation efforts.
• The random collectibles on "uncharted" i.e. random strips of land is much reduced. Also, those strips of land are no longer barren featureless landscapes but tend to have their own interesting features.
  

Unfortunately, some things that were crying out for tweaks got no improvements at all. In this case, the elephant in the room is the parkour. It remains completely unchanged from Black Flag and it just as broken. In Black Flag it was forgiveable because there was so little emphasis on climbing around. However, Rogue is somewhat of a return to roots of the series, there is much much more on-land gameplay, which makes the unpredictable and sometimes outright broken parkour the biggest and single most game-destroying aspect of Rogue.

I believe the story for Rogue, the development of Shay as a character, the general balance of gameplay, are all better in Rogue. The potential for these positives to place Rogue as the better game than Black Flag gets completely blown out of the water by the parkour. It is no exageration to say the parkour in Rogue is a constant frustration and annoyance that permeates throughout the entire game. Any element of gameplay which is time based is essentially a fight to try and get Shay to do what you want him to do, and then try again when he doesn't.

I cannot overstate quite how much the bad parkour of Rogue lets the entire game down. If Ubisoft had made any effort to improve it then Rogue would without doubt be considered a better game than Black Flag.

Parkour so bad that it turns fun into frustration throughout the game

As well as the appaling parkour, other bugs creep its way into Rogue as well

• In one mission where I had to protect an ally and his unit of soldiers, after a checkpoint, the soldiers started attacking the main ally, who started fighting back, but none of them were doing any damage. The mission was stuck because the main ally was supposed to lead the way for the next section. I had to restart checkpoint to fix this, which luckily didn't lose any progress at all.
• I finished one mission and then turned invisible during the cutscene, where Shay is talking to another character. When the cutscene ended, Shay died on the spot.
• When exploring a settlement for the first time, I got told the warehouse was emptied like I had abandoned an attempt to raid it, but I was only only on the settlement for 1 minute and nowhere near the warehouse.
• After a fairly large naval battle, I went to board the last of 3 ships, went to the eagle's nest to kill a scout and glitched off the side of the platform and fell to my death, thus undoing the entire effort of the battle.
• I was capturing a fort, where I had to destroy 2 powder stores and kill 2 captains. I destroyed 1 store, killed both captains, went to the marker for the other powder store and it wasn't there. I had to quit and restart and begin the capture mission again.

Summary

Perhaps Rogue isn't as bad as my above focus on the negatives makes out. Even though Rogue is somewhat of a copy and paste of the Black Flag game, there seemed to be a huge focus on building all new original content, which could have made Rogue stand out as a much better installment in the series than Black Flag.

Unfortunately, the focus on genuine content seems to have been at the expense of improving the guts of the game engine, and although there are a few tweaks, these are completely undone by the broken core of the parkour. The other newly introduced bugs aren't great either, but the bad parkour essentially guts the enjoyability of the entire game.

It does strike me that Ubisoft is blatantly starting to "cash cow" the series at this point. They seemed to think they could churn out the same technology and just invest in new content and this would work. Perhaps it's as a result of Rogue's development having a similar timeline to Unity, which I understand was a complete rewrite of the game engine on next generation hardware. Maybe Ubisoft decided to focus most its development resources on Unity as the future, leaving Rogue as a husk for content creators.

The Ubisoft Cash Cow

I don't know what the reasons behind it are, but I do know that Rogue is a potentially good game neutured by technical issues that should have been solved.

Review Score

Rogue is a copy and paste of the Black Flag game engine. The huge plus is that the content is all new and much more complete throughout all the game activities than Black Flag. Side quests are more relevant, tedium is reduced, even the collectibles maintain more interest. If we just had these improvements to consider, the game would definitely deserve an improved score over Black Flag.

However, all the positives are completely gutted by the "worst in the series" parkour, which completely undoes all the positives Rogue brings over the previous game.

Even with the appalling parkour, I still think this game is better than Black Flag. However, it is certainly not as good as Assassin's Creed 3. I don't do half scores, and for me the parkour relegates this to getting round down. Therefore Rogue ends up with the same score as Black Flag, two out of five.

Post Review Thoughts

If you look at the scoring trend, the series has been on a steady decline since the wonderful heights of the Ezio trilogy. Ironically, with the release of the third Ezio game, Ubisoft was accused of churning out just enough content to justify asking gamers to cough up the cash, rather than working on anything truly brilliant. Assassin's Creed 3 went in a whole new direction with a lot of new ideas and yet, somehow, still didn't stack up as well as its predecessors.

Black Flag is the case in point, because the seafaring was truly an epic departure as far as the series gameplay went, and yet Ubisoft completely squandered this by tacking together the basic gameplay elements and then piling hours of tedious repetition on top of it to stack up the game hours.

And then they literally copy and paste the game engine, ironically (again) actually build a better game overall, but gut any positivity by completely ignoring the most basic gameplay element, the parkour, which was badly in need of some care and attention.

So it turns out that the accusations levelled at Ubisoft after Relevations were true, Ubisoft had very much shifted gear into churning out the next episode, putting just enough innovation in to say there were new features and then leaving other parts of the games desperate for improvement.

At this point in the series, the hope had to be that with the switch to the next generation of consoles and a completely new game engine, Ubisoft take the opportunity to do a proper job of making an Assassin's Creed game and move away from taking the approach of just making it good enough to shove it to release.