Transcription
One of the most common questions you'd often hear around the Assassin's Creed franchise is what exactly led to the decline of the quality. I think there are many different answers. The storytelling definitely feels weaker. The lore got pretty messy to the point where it doesn't even feel mysterious anymore, and the games feel more bloated.
But one real thing that stands out right away is the presentation. More specifically, the cutscenes. All you really have to do is put a game such as Assassin's Creed Unity from 2014 on one side and then put the most recent game Assassin's Creed Shadows on the other side and the difference will hit you in seconds. The older games have a presentation style that simply looks like real performances. The newer games look like, um, I don't know. Unity especially still kind of amazes me every time I rewatch certain scenes. For example, Arno as a child looking down at his dead father in complete shock. You can feel the quiet emotion in what he's just seen. Another example could be, you know, when Arno and Elise secretly meet up at the start of the game. You can feel that romantic tension. The smirks, the eyebrow raises, all of that stuff makes a cut scene look real. These are real actual actors performing.
You can even go as far back to Assassin's Creed 3 from 2012. Look at the ending scene where Charles Lee and Connor finally end their long chase. Charles Lee's expressions of realization that his time has come to an end. Connor's expressions of finally catching up to the man he's been chasing for a very long time. If anything, hearing Noah Watts talk about his experience doing mocap for Assassin's Creed 3 makes Ubisoft's decline on this certain aspect even more frustrating. This was once a studio that poured serious effort, money, and workforce into building proper cinematic performances. Noah Watts, or rather Connor Kenway on this podcast, straight up said the early sessions were awkward and weird. In fact, he did not like, you know, the tight wetsuit, the helmet camera strapped to his head, the giant cables hanging off him, and somebody literally walking behind him holding the wire so he would not trip. That alone shows you how committed Ubisoft used to be. They put actors through absolute hell just to get authentic performances.
So, when you remember Ubisoft once put this level of effort into performance capture and then you look at the RPG era with stiff automated conversations and, you know, the same three or four repeated animations all over again, it's ridiculous. Now, yes, these games are old, but the cutscenes, in my opinion, still feel more alive than any Assassin's Creed game post 2017. In fact, I would say Origins was the last game that still held on to that high standard. A lot of people tend to forget how strong that game's performances were, especially in the main story. Bayek's scenes are some of my most memorable scenes in this franchise simply because there was real performance capture behind them. For me, the one specific scene that always comes to my mind is in the Hidden Ones DLC, which by the way, a DLC, not even the base game. Oh, how the standards have absolutely the bed. But in the DLC, it's when Bayek questions if he and Aya have done right. Just look at the worry in Bayek's face. "Have we done good?" [music] That's the most real human emotion you'd expect. When a cut scene goes so hard in Origins, it sticks with you. Plain and simple. You don't really think about the animations. You just think about the characters and the feelings.
Then everything after Assassin's Creed Origins feels like Ubisoft unplugged something. You play a game like Odyssey and suddenly you're seeing the same animations every 10 seconds. And that's not an exaggeration, by the way. You literally do the same elbow touch, the same shrug, the same stiff nod, the same, you know, dead stare. And this is in the main story, by the way. This is not inside content or random dialogue. It's main story stuff. Valhalla does the exact same thing, too. Even Shadows, the most recent game, and I would argue Assassin's Creed Shadows has it the worst, which if you think about it, is actually a very crazy thing to say, considering that game came out less than 1 year ago. So, you would expect the technology of now to outperform the technology of like, um, I don't know, 2014. I'll get into what caused that shift in a bit. But for now, just keep in mind that my problem is not that motion capture is gone. There is motion capture in the newer games, but only a few. The real issue is how little of it there is. When you're playing a video game that takes 50 to 60 hours or even more to complete, and maybe five or six cutscenes feel cinematic with motion capture, whilst everything else looks like a PlayStation 3 era side quest, it's impossible not to notice. It completely breaks the story flow. You go from this sudden cinematic, you know, emotional moment to something that just puts you in a state of disgust. And what makes it even worse is that the visuals around the cut scenes are actually pretty great. The character details are great, such as, you know, the hair, the lighting, and, um, yeah, that's about it. Then the characters start talking, and the illusion collapses because the cutscene quality just is not there. I'm not going to lie, some early 2010 games handle facial work way better. Even Assassin's Creed 1 from 2007 had some parts that outperform newer games, which is crazy to say because Assassin's Creed 1 is the only game in the franchise without motion capture whatsoever. Explain how that makes sense.
This is where Assassin's Creed lost a big part of its identity for me. I mean, why do you think we remember old cutscenes so clearly? It's not nostalgia. New fans who get into this franchise with Odyssey or Valhalla will say stuff like, "The older games are just nostalgia." And to me, that's so infuriating to hear, especially as a longtime fan. The reason the old cutscenes are so good is because they were well presented. When we watch Ezio and Altaïr meeting in the library, we get goosebumps because of the presentation. The way the camera pans behind the chair and changes scenes, it's super well done. The ending of Black Flag, another great example. Connor and Charles Lee at the end, those earlier game scenes.
Now, here's why the cutscenes since Odyssey have gotten so bad. So, essentially, starting in 2018, Ubisoft basically changed the way cutscenes work and replaced it with a literal machine process. And that's not a lie, a literal machine process. They went all-in on a procedural dialogue system. Now, the goal Ubisoft intended wasn't, "Let's make the best cutscenes we can." It was more like, "How do we cover a thousand scenes and 30 hours of dialogue without drowning?" So, naturally, instead of building most scenes by hand, they have a tool where they drop the characters in. They would give it the lines, press a generate button, and the system sets everything up for you. It's all explained in the GDC presentation that they held in 2019. I'm not making any of this up, but to basically summarize that long video in a very simple way, this procedurally generated system picks where characters would stand. It would pick which camera angle to use. It would determine how the characters move, even how they were lit. If it looked somewhat decent, not even great, just eh, okay, they keep it. If it looks a bit off, a cinematic designer comes in and, you know, adds a few extra touches. That's how automated this is. For side quests or random dialogue moments, they don't even touch it. The generated version just comes out.
Now, in a way, I kind of get it that they do this because it's a clever practice from Ubisoft's point of view as a business. But the problem is that you notice the difference so clearly. And now with how badly the state of Ubisoft is, they can't be doing this no more. They got away with mediocrity for a very long time, and it's biting them in the bum. The more hours you play in Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Valhalla, Mirage, and Shadows, you realize, wait, all these characters are standing in the same kind of spots. The same little idle movements pop up. That same, you know, safe camera language is used over and over. It doesn't feel like somebody staged a performance anymore. This feels like a template being filled. And yes, I get that these games are massive now, but bigger does not suddenly mean better when the story feels like it's been pushed to a machine. The old games had cutscenes that were literally handcrafted. The RPG era most of the time feels processed. And for a franchise that built its reputation on strong cinematic moments, that's a huge downgrade.
And before I talk about how Valhalla's Memory proves that motion capture is super efficient, we need to start with this. Assassin's Creed changed the way it tells stories. And the loss of consistent motion capture is at the very core of that drop in quality. And it's quite depressing when you think about it because here's the thing that always blows my mind. And it's something that should never be the case. Ubisoft is not a small company with a tiny budget. Some people tend to forget that. Regardless of how their stock is doing or regardless of how the public perceives them, this is still one of the biggest game companies in the world with one of the biggest franchises in gaming. Assassin's Creed prints the money. Rainbow Six prints the money. Far Cry prints the money. The microtransactions for how predatory and terrible they are, prints the money. They have the budgets for motion capture and pouring resources into this department. So, when I look at how these cutscenes turned out in the RPG games and I compare them to what other video game studios are doing, it makes the whole situation look even worse.
Let's take CD Projekt Red for example. This is my favorite video game studio of all time, hands down. Cyberpunk 2077 had a bad launch. We all know this. But one thing nobody can deny is that the cutscene quality is very impressive. Instead of what Ubisoft did with their horrendous procedural system, CD Projekt Red has a kind of similar approach, but it's a lot better. They use a different system called Jali, or J-A-L-I. And in my opinion, it's one of the most impressive things a studio has ever used when it comes to facial animation. It basically auto-animates everything. The lip sync, the eye movement, the brows, literally everything down to the tiniest micro-twitches in the face, and it works so well because you don't even notice it. Good facial animation disappears into the performance. Bad facial animation stands out instantly. In Cyberpunk, even the characters from the side quest look more alive than any main story character in modern Assassin's Creed. Take Judy, take River, Cla, and so on. All of these side characters feel real because the Jali system reacts to the tone of the line, the pitch of the voice, the emotion behind the delivery. If a character whispers, the animation matches that. If the character shouts, the animation changes. It will sell every moment without you even thinking about it.
Now, compare that to the Attack on Titan collab in Assassin's Creed Shadows, which again is also automated. Look at when Yasuke shouts at the Titan. Just take a look. [screaming and groaning] Notice how his mouth doesn't match the tone. Notice how his eyes are not moving. Nothing is moving. It's just very stiff. This is Ubisoft's procedural system. And this is one of the worst things I've ever had to witness. And that's what blows my mind. CD Projekt Red licensed this Jali system so that it makes the whole game feel mocapped even when a lot of it really isn't, which you might be surprised by. They basically solved the problem that Ubisoft claims is "quote unquote too big for an open world." And that's why the drop in Assassin's Creed hurts so much as a longtime fan. Ubisoft has the money. I mean, they literally have an entire whole-ass building in Montreal dedicated to motion capture that not many people realize exists. A developer told me that. So instead of pushing forward like every other AAA studio is doing with their cinematics, they went so far backwards that it's biting them in the ass. They went with a pipeline that values quantity over quality, and the storytelling paid the price.
I can keep, you know, going on and on listing other comparisons like Rockstar with Red Dead Redemption 2, Guerilla Games with the Horizon franchise, Naughty Dog, Larian Studios, Warhorse. I can genuinely keep going on and on, but I don't need to. You get the point, right? Some of these studios with better cutscene quality are literally smaller than Ubisoft with less resources. So when you deep it, that just baffles you at how bad it's become.
But not all is lost. There is hope. Assassin's Creed Mirage recently released a DLC named "Valhalla's Memory," which was free. And it's the first time in years, in fact, the first time since 2017, where I sat through Assassin's Creed story content and thought, "Yep, this is what it's supposed to feel like." I haven't felt this in ages. After everything I've talked about in this video with the RPG era and the procedural cutscenes, this DLC hits even harder because suddenly you've got a smaller, focused, linear story again. You've got proper motion capture back in the cutscenes. And the crazy part is it's a free expansion that embarrasses most of the full-price stuff that they put out recently. Now, if you have played "Valhalla's Memory," you would immediately feel that presentation changed straight away, which is quite bizarre considering this game is built on Valhalla's existing engine and the base game of Mirage has some of the worst cutscenes in the franchise. I think this DLC is an anomaly because it's exactly what Ubisoft are capable of. I did not really see much animations. I felt like they were being tossed into some dialogue tool in this DLC. Maybe there's a few, but you don't notice it. You can see it in the way Basim reacts when his father is brought up, when he talks to Niml at the start of the game. The cut scene with his father at the end. All of these cut scenes are presented very, very well. The public reception towards this DLC is overwhelmingly positive, and that's not a coincidence. I've spoken to many people about this DLC, and they said it made them tear up, and I'd even say it's a top three Assassin's Creed DLC in the entire franchise. That's simply what happens when you bring back performance capture-driven scenes. This DLC exposes how empty a lot of the RPG era felt by comparison. In Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Valhalla, and Shadows, you can have 10 times the amount of dialogue, but if everything is driven by a system and canned animations, it just washes over you. You forget half the conversations the second that they're done. With "Valhalla's Memory," however, I never felt that once. I remember all these specific moments. I remember specific lines, not because the writing suddenly became good, but because the delivery finally supported it.
And this is what I think the future of Assassin's Creed should be doing. Motion capture your goddamn story cutscenes. Every single one of them. Stop cheapening out. Stop cutting costs. Stop saving resources because Ubisoft, you can't do that anymore. You can't afford to do that. All those rushed releases, all those low-effort content that you put out, it's finally biting you guys in the ass. If Assassin's Creed Hexa, the next mainline Assassin's Creed game, does not have every main story cut scene motion captured, then we've regressed once again because that game is supposed to be a shorter, linear-focused game, not an open-world massive RPG. They have no excuses anymore, especially considering Hexa will have the longest development cycle in the entire franchise. As well as it being a Ubisoft Montreal game, and what did I say earlier about Montreal? They have a whole-ass motion capture building at their disposal. Now, I do have a lot of faith in that game, and maybe it will bite me in the ass, but everything points towards Assassin's Creed Hexa being cinematically well done. Here's to hoping, right?