Extra Lives: When good things are ruined

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Nick Booth, JagWire copy editor

So, I just watched the trailer for “Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate,” and, frankly, I’m a little bit disappointed. Make no mistake, the trailer itself, which features historical figures like Charles Dickens and Alexander Graham Bell, was pretty cool looking. But I just couldn’t get one thought out of my head: God, are they making yet another Assassin’s Creed game?

This series used to be great. When the first games in it came out several years ago, they were ingenious and pioneering. The game’s premise and setting in the past were interesting and novel.

In the past few years, however, Ubisoft has turned this once great series of games into nothing but the same old recycled material that they pump out yearly to make a profit. The quality of the games has dramatically dropped, with “Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag” being the only real exception, ever since Ubisoft decided to make Assasin’s Creed a franchise released on a yearly schedule. Now, the series is only a shell of what it once was, destined to be remembered other trashy annuals like the Call of Duty series.

This got me thinking. It seems to be a trend within the modern games industry that corporate greed is more important than creativity and ingenuity. Even the famously awful Call of Duty franchise was once great; the original “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare” had one of the best plot twists seen in a video game. I’m worried that if games are continuously treated this way as a medium, then games might be silently resigned to the fate of being nothing more than toys for children’s amusement.

Or maybe I’ve just been burned too many times. After all, like I said, the new game looks pretty good. But then again, so did “Assassin’s Creed: Unity,” and that just turned out to be an uninventive buggy nightmare. I, and many other gamers like me, have become so wary of AAA games and the promises they give that we just start to disbelieve them altogether at face value. What the mainstream industry needs to do now is simply reestablish trust with gamers; the pitfalls of the Assassin’s Creed franchise and my reaction to them are merely symptoms. The problem is a larger attitude within the industry, and that attitude needs to be changed now.

Senior Nick Booth has played games since he was a young child. He is still an avid PC gamer to this day, spending a large portion of his time playing with a keyboard and mouse.

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