The pirating life, it seems, is all about prospects and broken promises. The prospect of wealth made by the promise of a treasure map or faintly whispered legend. A legend often unfulfilled, of course, or forever unclaimed, ending in more skulls and scabbards lining the treasure trove. The videogame pirate genre, too, has been marred by broken promises since it swaggered onto the scene, rubber chicken in hand.
The Curse Of Monkey Island took us to a place of potent atmosphere and punchy one-liners. A place of insult swordfighting and extraordinary men changed irrevocably by a life spent searching at sea. We couldn’t scavenge the hills of Monkey Island, nor search the mountains or swim the seas, but the promise was there – the idea implanted in our minds like a weathered map – painted in those perfect pixel backdrops. We filled in the blanks with our imaginations and waited for technology to catch up and offer us a more open pirate world. A world we could influence beyond linear point-and-click mischief.
It took a long, long time for Galleon to arrive and bring us a step closer. Toby Gard’s broken opus let us scour some of the mountains and it let us duke it out with a few scoundrels but the freedoms of the game served merely to emphasise its restrictions: we couldn’t truly interact with its world and eco-systems, we couldn’t set sail and plunder or pioneer.
Sid Meier’s Pirates made the fantasy of piratical life as safe as safe can be.
Then came the revival of Sid Meier’s Pirates! We could chart courses, set sails, dance with a maiden or two and stealth our way through occupied settlements in a luscious world of locks and lost chests waiting to be discovered. It captured a delightful sense of adventure with its painterly aesthetic but it was all style; it was all so disparate and dislocated. It felt like three mini-games glued together with smears of wit and charm. The pirate’s life as fantasised by young men since time immemorial – one of swashbuckling adventure, gut instincts and spare of the moment changes of course – was still far out of reach of videogame designers, it seemed.
These three titles may seem far and wide from each other on the ocean of pirating games, but they share more elements than differences. They carry the spirit of the fictionalised pirate. The swagger, the unpredictability and, in their bold visual strokes, the avant garde sense of style and humour.
And now we have Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. I began Black Flag weary of its use of pirate iconography and themes; certain it was set-dressing for the formula Ubisoft has iterated on for so long and sure to be similarly flat in terms of humour and personality. I was wrong. ACIV flies the flag for the pirate genre like no other game before it, while simultaneously tipping its hat to those that have come before. There was a hint in ACII that the series was prepared to riff on videogame history (evident in that cringe-worthy delivery of “it’s a me, Mario”) and ACIV is the fulfilment of that promise. There’s the condensed, streamlined navigation of Pirates! (and the sea shanties, of course), the speedy traversal of Galleon and the mountain mists of Monkey Island’s backdrops and exotic, mysteriously inviting locales.
Fat, blue and unkillable – The Ghost Pirate LeChuck!
In delivering on and uniting the promises of the genre up to this point, however, ACIV inevitably forces us to ask what the next step is, and I’m not convinced after 10-15 hours’ with the game (and I may be proved wrong yet) that the game will proffer or realise that next phase.
Despite Black Flag’s numerous positives and its drive towards the fulfilment of the pirating promise, you see, it still falls short of the ultimate fantasy. There’s a tension at the heart of the game that’s both indirectly acknowledged by its meta-narrative (that of a game designer plumbing the depths of the simulated world to handpick its finest moments) and accentuated by progressive play. Black Flag is all about freedom – the freedom to choose, to decide, to actually be free – but is itself a slave to various hand-me-downs from its namesake.
You can dabble in cross-cultural warfare with the Brits and Spaniards, for example, but you can’t truly sway the tides of global warfare no matter how epic and serious your victories and prizes. You can meddle in the minutiae of each inhabited island but never really eschew its status quo or damage the psyche of its citizenship. You can pillage and ruin till your heart’s content and your head spinning with smoke and oakum, but your effect on the world, in reality, is rather skin-deep. The real control still rests with the creators. In parallel to the puppet-master-like guild of Assassin’s and their sway on human history, you’re more pawn than power player. It’s arguable that in restricting your role to that of minor, mischevious player in the high stakes high seas Black Flag is an even more accurate depiction of the life of a rebel, but if you look at pirates as revolutionaries then in Black Flag they’re quite disappointingly passive.
Perhaps these are all issues with the open-world genre’s creaking transition into true “freedom”. We’re currently at a cross-roads for open-world games, one where AI occupants of our worlds are looking seemingly outdated as experiences move towards more persistent experiences. The pirating equivalent to EVE Online, is perhaps the promise fulfilled: a world of fully-manned crews where each rope of a ship, each sail, has an owner and each ship has a master and commander at the helm.
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Source http://www.edge-online.com/features/assassins-creed-iv-black-flag-and-the-pirate-genres-broken-promises/
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