E3: Day Two - Hands on with Assassin's Creed

The winner of the famously difficult to receive honour of being "the best thing we've seen as of about 2pm PST on day 2" is Ubisoft's rather startling Assassin's Creed. Set in medieval times the general premise sounds kind of basic, you're an assassin in medieval times (redundant we know) who can wander freely about an open world, completing quests in any number of open ended ways. The demo we witnessed entailed entering a city and "eliminating" a particular political figure by whatever means necessary.

The first thing you will invariably notice about the game is the incredibly fluid way in which everything is animated. By contrast it makes current gen animation luminaries like Prince of Persia look a bit like an episode of gumby. Of course no amount of key frames will ever matter if the transitions are crud, but AC more than exceeds expectations here as well. The character actually behaves very dynamically, responding to controls almost as if you're just sort of giving him recommendations and letting him figure out the less important details. Run and jump at a wall and you'll instantly latch on to any 3D bits within reach. The programmers don't have to make specific climbable objects but rather the system in place determines if a bit of geometry sticks out far enough to cling to and your characters figures out the rest.

As nice as this sounds on its own, the feeling of immersion that springs from it cannot be understated. How many times have you been playing a game where you're supposed to be some bad ass ninja or whatever and yet if you can't handle the analogue stick like a true pro you can't so much as walk down a narrow path without taking a dive - some ninja you are! In AC when you go running across roof tops - all you need do is direct your character in the appropriate direction and let him handle the details, skipping from plank to plank of sparse scaffolding like you would imagine a true professional killing machine would. It's really very stunning.

While you may be thinking this would be an over simplification of things it actually allows for a much greater amount of control by freeing you up to make the bigger decisions. In the demo we saw, upon completing the appointed task of dispatching our intend mark we were immediately assaulted by a barrage of guards. While we probably could have taken out a good number of them, in incredibly cool and stylish ways we might add, we chose instead to follow the old "he who fights and runs away" method. During our dash to safety we could have quickly scampered up nearly any wall, onto any rooftop in the entire city at will. As it were, we chose to swipe at the base of a bit of scaffolding to slow our pursuers with debris and then scampered up a bit of architecture once we were out of sight to throw them off our trail. Leaping from roof to roof, catching ledges and window sills instantly, jumping off of walls, and just looking like quite the bad ass the whole way through.

Until of course we were just about out of the castle walls, at which point they dropped the gates and a horde of guards surrounded us and proceeded to beat the life right out of us. The interesting twist here is that upon death you don't appear to actually be dead but rather you wake up in some sort of futuristic laboratory type setting ... and that's where it ended. In spite all of our pressing we were unable to get any info about said lab of the future but we can relatively safely assume its either a case of holodeck type action a-la Star Trek, or it's a bit of a Quantum Leap type thing, wherein the player is part of some sort of plot to bend history to their will by way of past event manipulation. Either way we are highly intrigued.

While we could also go on and on about the crowds in the streets, the beautiful architecture, and the impressive draw distance and size of the city (which was a tiny demo city by the way) we'll leave it to you to have a look at the attached images and find videos of it about the Interweb (well worth your trouble to be sure). So be sure to check out our other made-up award type features later, and let us know how very, very jealous you are of us (and your speculations about the future lab if you have any) in the forums below.