"We're not shooting in Vancouver. I'm drawing the line on the insanity. Vancouver doesn't look like anything. Doesn't even look like Vancouver. It looks like Boston, California." - Danny Tripp, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip
Setting is not scenery. Places and eras have character far beyond their landmarks and events, and if setting is going to play a major role in a story it has to be convincing. A generic, all-purpose setting just looks fake, and makes everything else seem that way too.
Assassin's Creed walks straight into this trap and the entire game is hobbled by the unconvincing world in which it takes place. Despite having three sprawling cities open for investigation and assassination, Creed always feels like it is taking place in the back lot of a movie studio. The player explores the same two or three blocks a hundred different times, with a few decorations changed, different costumes on the same extras, and a new filter slapped over the camera to give the illusion of place. Poor level design is not at fault, however, because it is Ubisoft Montreal's narrative choices that ultimately drain the life out of Creed's gameworld.
Despite taking place in the Holy Land during the Crusades, religious conflict and faith are mostly ignored in favor of a medieval conspiracy story so safely shocking that it makes Dan Brown look like Voltaire. Faith has been evicted from the Holy Land, which is why the game wears so quickly. Assassin's Creed depends on its setting more than most, yet it eliminates the most important and interesting features of that setting.
Creed blurs the differences between ethnicities and religions so heavily that they have disappeared. Not in the sense that it has stripped away all the nonsense that keeps people from recognizing their common humanity (that's actually the evil Templar plot that the player spends the game foiling). Rather, in this game there is absolutely no difference between a Muslim or a Christian, a Saracen or a Crusader except costume and accent. Your character, Altair, can stand on a street in Jerusalem and watch Saracen troops about to carry off a woman, be accosted by a beggar, and listen to a street preacher rail against the Crusaders. Twenty minutes later, you can stand on a street in Acre, a city recently occupied by the Crusaders, and everything is exactly the same. It's like everyone switched clothes just to screw with Altair.
Moreover, for a game set during perhaps the most famous religious conflict in history, everyone seems remarkably indifferent to faith. Soldiers on both sides of the conflict are robotic cannon fodder. Templars wander freely around Christian and Muslim cities, which definitely seems wrong the first time Altair is jumped by a guy sporting a big red cross on his tabard in downtown Damascus. The people of the Holy Land are interchangeable peasants whose only purpose in life is to mill around public areas, carry heavy things, and run away in fear. The Middle East, a crossroads of several cultures and ethnicities has turned into a Monty Python set.
Finally, the Templar order is once again playing its customary videogame role of running a vast global conspiracy, and it counts Christian and Muslim leaders among its membership. They prove to be secular cynics who have not an ounce of faith in their bodies save the conviction that they work toward the greater good. This is about as close as the game comes to moral ambiguity.
While it's common to blur historical truths in the name of a better story or game, Ubisoft Montreal ripped the soul out of Creed's setting and put nothing in its place. The story actually undercuts itself by minimizing references to religion and its role in the war over the Holy Land. At one critical point in the game, Altair kills a Templar who is burning unnamed "ancient texts" (presumably Bibles and Korans). Altair asks him why he was destroying so much ancient knowledge and the Templar says it was to free people "from the tyranny of faith".
It should be a powerful moment, but the problem is that Assassin's Creed shows a world where faiths are both irrelevant and interchangeable. We understand what this victim means by the "tyranny of faith", but the game never makes it real.
Faith itself is barely visible in this game. The only true believers in evidence are the ones that wish to impose an atheist dictatorship in the Holy Land. In the middle of a holy war, nobody actually seems to believe in God.
Ubisoft Montreal seems to have made a real effort at making this game inoffensive and a bit abstract, but there's just not a lot to the Middle Ages once faith has been removed. Faith defined the age. God was a constant and watchful presence in the medieval world. His will was a real force, and it was important to listen for it and obey.
People would abandon home, family, and life itself if they believed those sacrifices would serve His purpose. Heaven was real, and the soul struggled to reach it throughout the long, hard passage through a fallen world. Earthly pleasure and misery were inconsequential when compared to the eternity that awaited the soul after death, especially because life contained so much of the misery and so little of the pleasure.
In short, the nature and intensity of their faith separates them from us, and their specific faiths divided them from one another. Faith permeated their world in a way that most us would find very strange, in ways both alluring and grotesque.
The allure worked well for Ubisoft, which sold several million copies of Assassin's Creed despite a reserved reaction from critics. The game's commercial success could be interpreted as vindication for Ubisoft Montreal's creative decisions, further proof that gamers don't actually want settings so much as they want new skins for old stories. Creed is a semi-stealthy action game with a Crusades theme, and gamers showed that's all they wanted.
There are limits to cynicism's explanatory power, however. If Assassin's Creed proves that gamers don't really care about settings or the ideas driving a story, it's hard to know what to make of a game like Bioshock, which was a contemporary of Creed's. Bioshock's success is difficult to square with the assertion that gamers are indifferent to setting, because Rapture was unquestionably the most developed part of the game. The story of the city's founding, the people who lived in it, and the culture they created were all memorable and convincing. It's hard to envision Bioshock having the success and impact that it had if Rapture had just been a set of Art Deco corridors.
For all the sales, it's hard to escape the sense that Assassin's Creed was a hit game with surprisingly little impact. It was always overshadowed by the other major releases of 2007, and is rarely discussed now except in the context of its sequel. It was an average game in a year that produced classic games and a legion of unforgettable moments.
If Assasin's Creed had a convincing world at its heart, a place where players could feel that their actions had meaning, it might have been a great game. But the world of Assassin's Creed is a matte painting against which the action of occurs. Altair kills people for reasons that are neither interesting nor convincing, because there is not a belief in its world that is worth killing or dying for.