Assassin’s Creed: Lineage

Written by kanbu33 | October 28, 2009

I’m going to share with you one of my pet hates, and one which has proliferated quite substantially over the last few years; full CG game trailers, and I’m sure I’m not alone. I’m talking about the tendency of many of today’s game devs to come to events such as E3, bearing little more than proof that their tech department can make a pretty, computer generated wondershow to keep us all slack jawed for three and half minutes; no gameplay footage, perhaps a few scant allusions to plot, essentially an nice looking intro cutscene that will most certainly never be an intro cutscene. Many games to appear at E3 this year already carry this mark of shame, and Assassins Creed 2 is no exception. But now it appears Ubisoft wish to go a step further in their dalience with total f*cking pointlessness, hence Assassin’s Creed: Lineage, a serial of three short films based in the warped Renaissance Italy gameworld, the first of which aired on Youtube last night.

The films are set to chronicle a sequence of events prior to those of actual game, and feature the protagonists father, a trained assassin naturally, as the star of the show. If you can’t draw a relative idea of the conclusion by this point, you may want to seek medical help, but that’s beside the point; this mini serial is a really good example of why games shouldn’t be made into movies and vice versa. Considering the sizable amount of shoddy green screen work going on here, I find it hard to see why Ubisoft didn’t just make an hours worth of cutscenes like they were doing anyway, and then market it as a mini film, or even an animation. If this had been the case, Lineage would’ve gelled nicely with the gameworld, and perhaps even lent it a lot of context, like a pleasing appetizer before a hearty meal. What we’re left with instead is badly acted piece of fan wank that looks like it was filmed on the Buffy budget.

I’m still pretty psyched for Assassins Creed 2, and while I can see the potential for something like Lineage as a slick marketing tool, I wouldn’t recommend pouring any time into it.