Years Apart

Warning! This post contains minor spoilers for Assassin’s Creed.

I finally got around to finishing Assassin’s Creed for the first time. Nice game, spectacular visuals, top-notch voice acting (which is something that Ubisoft is very good at, apparently). However, the game ends abruptly, leaving the story as open-ended as it gets. Assassin’s Creed was released in 2007. The sequel is due to be released in the second half of 2009, two years after the release of the first game.

Jerusalem, 1000 years ago. When the sequel is released, this is what we will call today’s Jerusalem…

I’m not sure how I feel about open-ended games. It seems to me that games, which take years to develop, leave the player in suspense for too long with open endings. This also applies to movies which usually take years to create. The problem is that suspense wears off after a while. How much can I care about a story, however interesting and engaging it was, 2-3 years after I read/play/watch it?

Of course, this does not apply to the recent epidemic of trilogies in films. Trilogies (such as Lord of the Rings) are usually created together as a single movie and are then released on a yearly basis. In this way a story can be told over a longer period of time, sometimes surpassing the story depth that is possible in a single movie. But what happens when the time between each chapter is longer than a year? Even longer than two years? For video games this is usually the case. Quality video games take years to develop. A trilogy cannot be developed as a whole and then released yearly, because each year the technical expectations grow and by the time the series would hit the third chapter it might not be good enough for the audience.

Will he win the sword fight? Stick around for a few years to find out.

One could say that episodic gaming was invented to answer these problems. However, episodic games are usually very short, making the collection of episodes as a whole the length of a single game. Episodic gaming is just an excuse for companies to break the development of their games into smaller segments, allowing them to charge for these segments separately. Other than the obvious economic benefit, I cannot really say that episodic gaming can solve the problem with open endings in video games. What’s more, some companies can’t even get episodic games to be released quickly enough (Half-Life 2: Episode 3, where art thou?!).

I think that as long as the time between the development of games in a series is longer than, say, a year, games should not be cut short as with Assassin’s Creed’s ending. It is reasonable to end a story with a small twist, leaving it open for a continuation. However, cutting the story right in the thick of it with absolutely no conclusion just doesn’t make sense to me. By the time Assassin’s Creed 2 is released, I probably won’t feel the suspense I am feeling now, which is a shame, because if a sequel would have been able to arrive in a shorter time, its impact would have been much more satisfying for me.