[Kotaku] Dear AC: Fix Your Damn Controls
http://kotaku.com/dear-assassin-s-creed-fix-your-damn-controls-1740664231
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Dear Assassin's Creed: Fix Your Damn Controls
by Kirk Hamilton
Saying that Assassin’s Creed’s controls are bad is like saying Donald Trump is a boor or San Francisco is too expensive. Everyone agrees it’s a problem, no one’s quite sure what to do about it, and most people either cope as best they can or avoid the situation entirely.
I stand before you today as a person who really likes Assassin’s Creed. I liked Assassin’s Creed II, but I also liked Assassin’s Creed I. I loved Assassin’s Creed IV and I’m very much enjoying the latest one, Assassin’s Creed Syndicate.
I just fundamentally like the series: I like traveling to various historical eras, and I like meeting cartoonish versions of famous historical figures. I like scouring the map for hidden collectibles. I like methodically checking things off of a big list of sidequests. I love leaping off tall buildings and landing in carts full of hay.
I like all of those things enough to accept the apparently immutable fact that Assassin’s Creed’s controls are a jumble of garbage. They were abysmal when the first game launched in 2007, and they have remained abysmal for eight subsequent sequels. I am here today to ask: Must this be the case? Must it be a given that one of the biggest video game series in the world is a complete pain in the ass to play?
Within five minutes of firing up a new Assassin’s Creed, I guarantee that your on-screen avatar will do some shit you didn’t want them to do. Tell him to climb a wall, and he’ll leap to a nearby lamppost. Tell her to sneak past a guard, and she’ll run out into plain sight. Extrapolate those five minutes over the 30-odd hours it takes to complete one of these games, and even the most patient gamer will start to wonder why the hell a multinational, megabucks video game publisher like Ubisoft has allowed this to persist.
If you fired up Syndicate and gave the controller to someone who’d never played an Assassin’s Creed game, they would likely have some pointed questions for you. Questions like, “Why does the right trigger cause me to run? Does that also cause me to climb? What happens if I just hold down the trigger but no buttons? Also, how do I jump?”
That last question, “How do I jump?”, probably should have come first. The fact that a person would have to ask that question about a game that is ostensibly entirely focused on leaping from tall buildings is a problem. The fact that I’ve played hundreds of hours of Assassin’s Creed and I actually sort of can’t answer it off the top of my head is even more of a problem.
The best Assassin’s Creed games haven’t solved the control problem, they’ve just coped as effectively as they can. Assassin’s Creed IV, for example, didn’t actually have good controls, it just had levels that accommodated bad controls. Most of the stealth-focused levels in that game were set in large outdoor areas that gave you lots of room to move around and lots of safe spaces in which to hide. The series’ racecar-like control scheme works okay when players have broad avenues to navigate. When things tighten to a corridor—like, oh, basically every urban environment they’ve ever used—the wheels start to come off.
I love watching Assassin’s Creed evolve and try new things, however small those evolutions may be. Each new creative team brings their own ideas to the mix, and it’s cool watching which ideas stick around and which ideas fade. The fact remains, however, that many of a given AC game’s new ideas are meant in some way to improve or compensate for the controls.
Syndicate implements a bunch of these kinds of ideas, some of which are brand new, some of which are carried over from last year’s AC Unity. You can toggle yourself into “sneaking” mode, which makes your character crouch and take cover more effectively. While running, you can press one button to climb up, and a different button to climb down. You’re shown a white ring around your character that indicates—somehow?—when an enemy is nearby. You’re given a grappling hook that significantly improves the game’s flow by removing a large percentage of the climbing you used to have to do.
As interesting as some of these ideas may be, none of them changes the fact that I’m regularly leaping in the wrong direction, bumping into people and objects, and getting stuck hanging from ledges. At their most effective, they introduce creative ways to bypass that stuff, a la the grappling hook. At their least effective, they add confusion and visual clutter, making it even harder to deal with the fact that I just accidentally walked into a room full of guards and am now stuck running into a corner.
Ubisoft employs approximately seven kajillion talented people. Their various development studios have been responsible for some fantastic third-person control schemes, too. Most of the 3D Prince of Persia games work well, and occasionally brilliantly. Watch Dogs, for all its flaws, had a sturdy control scheme and handled open-world stealth efficiently and intuitively. Splinter Cell has always controlled well and has smartly evolved over the years. Rainbow Six Vegas introduced a hybrid first/third-person control scheme that I still think ranks among the best in any modern shooter.
I can’t tell you why Assassin’s Creed’s control scheme sucked in 2007. Nor can I tell you why it still sucks now, eight years and as many sequels later. I can only lament that this is the case and dream of a day when someone at Ubisoft finally says enough is enough, clears the table, and starts fresh.
Leo's Thoughts:
- Objectively, I cannot disagree with him. Assassin's Creed has a pretty bad control scheme. It is a clever one, but it has not worked in its execution as well as it's grasped me with its idea. I am good at Assassin's Creed games. Everyone on this site can claim to be pretty good at Assassin's Creed games - just by sheer virtue of how many we've played. I've gotten used to the quirks of the janky control scheme, and I can play just fine with it, just like the rest of us here. That means that looking at this issue super subjectively is always going to have the discussion fall on its face, if we try to do so on TheHiddenBlade. We can bring in some subjectivity (as I have, in my honest admission) but I'm sure most of us will agree that rather than AC having beautiful controls, we just know how to deal with them. This is a big part of the charm of these games for me, so I can understand not wanting the controls changed. I do, however, look forward to the day when I get to Master a whole new Assassin's Creed control scheme, and re-become a rogue again, from the ground up, just like I did in AC1 all those years ago.
The problems he points out are completely due to the control scheme trying to take work out of the hands of the player. Doing this effectively requires the console, a computer, to predict what the player, a human, wants. This is extremely difficult in and of itself, even with one player. Then if you have different players you have different ways of thinking and you can't make a universal control scheme.
The more you automate, the more these problems crop up. This is why the AC1 and AC2 control schemes kinda suck, and then AC3 and AC4 suck hard (in terms of freerunning). I haven't played Unity or Syndicate so I can't comment on those, but I'd expect Unity's freerunning to be better than AC4's.
The issue with trying to solve this is that you can't not automate anything. It would take hours and hours to get somewhat proficient at freerunning, and only then would you be able to climb a viewpoint. Even Mirror's Edge automates a bunch of shit and that's about as pure a movement game as you're going to get.
The goal, then, is to find a balance between automation and player control. I feel that an ability to jump whenever and wherever is pretty essential. That and distinguishing between running and climbing would go a long way towards improving player agency.
One alternate method that could either be a complete and total disaster or a huge revolutionary success is to apply machine learning techniques to get the controls to adapt to the player's playstyle. Think about it: right now getting good at Assassin's Creed requires you to work with the controls quirks; it requires you to find out precisely where all the angles are that make the game do different things. You are adapting to the controls in this scenario, but the controls aren't budging. If they also adapt to what you are doing, you could potentially reach a state where the number of fuckups is minimal. The game would know what the player is trying to do in a certain situation because it has learned from previous experiences.
The flipside of this is that the player might change his actions according to the results of the game, so if you don't tweak this just right, the player will adapt and the game will adapt, leading to overadaptation which will make it even more annoying since there is no fixed point provided by the game.
It would be a very interesting project to work on, and the required expertise can probably be found in the AI department. Certainly something to try out, I would think.
I haven't played Unity or Syndicate so I can't comment on those, but I'd expect Unity's freerunning to be better than AC4's.
They're not.
They are different, but not necessarily better. You can't manually jump, for example. Something that would be better is to have Unity/Syndicate's no auto jump off buildings causing death thing, but if you release then press again the button that used to be jump, then you can manually jump.
I don't like not having grab-break.
I don't like not having manual jump.
I don't like being told when I can and cannot do something just because the game knows. Let me find out how far I can jump before dying. Let me find out that I can't make a gap that large. Give the me opportunity to push the limits if I want. Don't just disallow it because most people will die doing it.
That and distinguishing between running and climbing would go a long way towards improving player agency.
THIS would help a lot. Why must running and climbing be the same button? You go to swerve around a person, and end up climbing a lamp post instead... argh.
Another thing that they introduced then got rid of is the fluid running over fences and other objects. More often than not with the new system, I now have to "free run up" to jump onto the small box/fence/balcony rail/whatever, then have to "free run down" to get off of it. Why can I not just get to the edge of the balcony and hit "free run down" and have the game know that this means to hop the railing then descend rather then seeing it at that point as a wall.
(Sorry that wasn't articulated as well as it could have been).
“Force has no place where there is need of skill." Herodotus
Backing up Cheese here, on all points.
I think machine-learning, or an adaptive control system might be an interesting idea, but I would rather have consistent controls that could be mastered. Every game has automation to an extent, as Phi mentioned, but Assassin's Creed feels like it goes way overboard with it. Now they're even removing our ability to Fail outright. The only times I truly Failed in Syndicate were because of an arbitrary fail-state - like detection or killing a certain NPC - that a game like MGSV or Dishonored would never in a million years dare try to pull.
I'm REALLY sorry for constantly bringing up those two games in relation to Assassin's Creed (I can FEEL Jermaine coming to kill me already) but like... There are things those games do that are applicable to Assassin's Creed in healthy ways, even to its Formula if you want to stick with it, and not Failing the player for actions other than Death or an outright Story-Dependent Character dying is just one of them. Their approach to controls is another. They really asked themselves what controls would work best for their game, and used those.
I haven't really felt Assassin's Creed do something so wholesome in a while.
I don't think anyone minds having to re-learn controls for a new game in a franchise. We did it with AC3, and we did it again in Unity/Syndicate. In fact, relearning a tidbit or two might actually be worse than having to relearn an entire control-scheme, because of Damn You Muscle Memory!
Even casual gamers are not nearly so inept as people would like to think they are. They'd appreciate a skillful, Masterable control scheme as much as the rest of us, I feel. Ubisoft doesn't have to go and make Assassin's Creed control like Street Fighter. We don't need frame-perfect Just-stabs. Tearing out the current control system and laying down a new one with less automation and more demands of the player (which would necessitate changing the gameplay) would be fine. Ubisoft shouldn't assume that people who play Assassin's Creed ONLY play Assassin's Creed. Gamers, even casual gamers, play MANY different videogames, and most of these games have much harder/more demanding controls than AC. They're used to it by now. Go for it.
Phi captures my thoughts perfectly. The issue is that the game thinks it knows what the player is trying to do, at all times. It often doesn't, resulting in climbing a wall when you meant to run by it. If you want to dial back on that automation, that means the player has to have a bigger arsenal of button combinations for specific actions. That way, one button combination can't translate to more than one specific action anymore (e.g. climbing/running).
If they go that way, players have to remember a whole bunch of button combinations, which would make the game a lot harder for everyone, up to the point where only the most seasoned AC players (looking at this community here) would be able to be good at it.
It is very hard to find balance between that and letting the system predict every action. They both don't work. For me, AC controls would greatly benefit from moving away from that automation and towards the many button combos. Freerunning is hard in real life, I'm okay with it being (a bit) hard(er) in the game. At the very least have one button that's always 'jump', which can then be altered, tweaked and influenced by combinations with other buttons, or holding it or whatever.
I'm just glad it's not just me. And here I thought I just sucked at the game this entire time! 
Yeah, really. I've felt like such a klutz with the Unity and Syndicate controls. One thing that has helped me is to reduce the sensitivity of the right thumbstick under Options > Controls.
My latest embarrassing incident with Syndicate controls: I kidnapped a gang boss and led him to an empty carriage. When I pressed 
, instead of shoving him into the back it somehow shoved him into the driver's seat. He took the reigns and pulled away!
Yeah, really. I've felt like such a klutz with the Unity and Syndicate controls. One thing that has helped me is to reduce the sensitivity of the right thumbstick under Options > Controls.My latest embarrassing incident with Syndicate controls: I kidnapped a gang boss and led him to an empty carriage. When I pressed
“Force has no place where there is need of skill." Herodotus
Ahaha! When are ppl gonna start posting bloopers like that? Lol
PS stabby! That should rate an achievement award! Love it! (Ahem, I've NEVER done anything that silly 
