With Assassin’s Creed: Shadows, Ubisoft remains the undisputed king of snackable launch worlds

It seems that the expansive realm of open-world gaming has been facing a significant, existential crisis over the last few years. There is a sense that the traditional framework consisting of extensive maps, checkmarks, and colorable icons that has served us so well, from The Witcher 3 to Skyrim and even The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, is no longer quite effective. An alteration or advancement – if not a complete overhaul – of some kind is crucial for the genre to flourish. However, it becomes a bit of a paradox, as those games grappling with these bold new frontiers in mapmaking may not genuinely understand what this new, improved format should entail.

I am choosing to place the blame for this firmly on The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, a game so profoundly impactful in its creation that it has become cliché to even mention it. But mention it I must! As we all recall, Breath of the Wild was the first major budget, third-person, open-world action game to emerge in the post-Skyrim landscape and to accomplish something distinctly innovative with its design – and it succeeded in doing so. It achieved this by abandoning the approach of gradually increasing gear levels for tiers of fragile sticks and discarding the multitude of design icons that many of its contemporaries relied on, opting instead for something less prescriptive and more topographical. A design that drew your gaze with its nuanced details and irregular formations rather than straightforward waypoints, resulting in an approach that we all joyfully agreed was far more artistic.

From that point, things got a bit convoluted. Open-world developers took various attempts at adopting elements from Zelda, often landing bizarrely on the inclusion of a paraglider, of all things. No game illustrated this better than Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, the most substantial Assassin’s Creed offering from Ubisoft and arguably one of the strangest. Valhalla’s approach to maps and exploration both perplexed and intrigued: beginning as a fog-enveloped swath of southeast English parchment, this design gradually revealed its alternative to the Great Question mark dilemma. We can no longer just slap a bunch of mystery boxes on there, I’m guessing the conversation went, as that seems a bit simplistic – so what should we do? Well, we keep them but replace them with shiny dots instead: silver for, um, something, and gold for when there’s rare loot.

This was a touch gloomy, and indeed a rather curious idea, merging two nearly opposing strategies to exploration into one – the icon-and-checkmark maximalism of previous Assassin’s Creeds like Odyssey with the dreamlike minimalism of Zelda – resulting in something that ultimately neither captured the comfort of the former nor the charm of the latter. Numerous games from this loosely defined post-Skyrim era have gotten themselves into a tizzy concerning how they construct their open worlds, as they’ve found themselves in everything from Halo and Gears of War to God of War and Call of Duty. Many have become even more confused by Breath of the Wild, caught in a relentless struggle between the desire to make things easy for the player and, as I’ve long suspected, a nagging belief that, in reality, encouraging players to engage actively should be paramount. Ubisoft, frequently criticized for its commitment to a very formulaic, almost ubiquitous open-world model of tower-climbing and icon-discovery, has arguably been the most affected, ensnared in this web of conflicting ideas and lost identities as a result.

The problem is, and remains, that the actual solution is merely adjacent to checkmarks. The critique of this nature was indeed about the entire philosophy of Assassin’s Creed games, and, beyond that, the many open worlds, both Ubisoft and otherwise, that came before and after. Specifically: passivity. You play these games on autopilot, as highlighted in recent Assassin’s Creeds illustrated by the fact that you can even set your horse to auto-run to your selected destination, resulting in a completely carefree journey that allows for you to indulge in a few more dopamine hits from your phone while bashing skulls, collecting loot, and discovering chests.

Your mindset as a player here, in games that invite you into passive mode, is not to observe, investigate, experiment, and question, as much as it is to be continuously provided gameplay in rhythmic, well-timed intervals. For many, if not all, hints of friction are smoothed away into nothingness by all the soothing, massaging elements within the sphere. This means checkmarks for naive lures, yes, but also GTA-style sat-nav directions to get you there; pinned bullet-point reminders in the top-left; instant fast-travel; visual indicators above all interactable characters’ heads; chests that produce sounds; loot that teleports itself to your inventory when you forget to collect it; and, of course, classic yellow paint on climbable edges. Each of these serves as a silent homage to the substantial, unseen Bioshock arrow in the sky. In simpler terms: feed me; don’t make me hunt – unless the hunt itself feels like feeding too.

Once again, all of this has become quite an established discussion now. We had it with the notable higher-brow critics’ debates upon Breath of the Wild’s release and the total (severely misguided) expectations…

it sparked further innovative triple-A action-packed high-speed concepts (guilty). And amid the smoldering dissatisfaction at notorious yellow paint splotches that appear every time they move splattering (also guilty). But also, even from feedback coming from rather compelling game directors themselves, too.

“Travel is dull? That’s simply not accurate. It’s merely a problem because your game lacks excitement. All you need to do is make travel enjoyable,” Dragon’s Dogma 2 director Hideaki Itsuno shared with IGN, when questioned about quick travel last year, condemning an entire new subject in a single sentence. “That’s why you place elements in the right spots for players to discover, or devise enemy appearance methods that offer varied experiences every time, or push players into uncertain scenarios where they’re unsure if it’s safe or not just ahead.” Over time, the conversation has been condensed, as it often is, into a type of critical truism: hands-off, Breath of the Wild-style exploration is good; Ubisoft-style hand-holding is bad.

Well, I beg to differ. Or actually, I strongly disagree, but that doesn’t sound as catchy. The hands-off techniques of the recent Zelda titles, of Dragon’s Dogma 2, and the smaller-scale projects inspired by that approach – think: Sable – are indeed excellent. Almost genius, without a doubt. I believe they are in many respects ‘superior’, necessitating more sophistication and subtlety in design, or at least more intentional engagement from you as a player – this isn’t me adopting a relativistic stance about how everything is just your preference, man. However: it would be misguided to claim that there isn’t some brilliance in there, somewhere, among the Ubisofts of this world.

It’s a tougher sell to visualize, though. Picture this: you’re racing through the tree-speckled hills of outer Osaka heading towards a distant landmark – the masterfully designed, soaring tenshu of Osaka Castle, perhaps – when you spot a distressed villager beside an overturned cart along the roadside. You hop off for a brief chat and, through a bit of conversational deduction, you glean some information about tales of a lost dog nearby yearning for comfort. The dog is in the opposite direction of the castle, prompting you to check the newly-added marker on your increasingly populated map, but it turns out it’s a bit closer; the castle can wait.

So off you go to find this dog, leading to a minor quest as you’d expect, and soon you’re on a hill near an eagle tower (yes, we still have them!) that can be unlocked, so you rush off to complete that, and now more of your hazy map has cleared, revealing even more quest markers, which annoys you. And so you think: better clear out those quest markers since I’m right here! And those markers lead to more quests, which are close to more eagle towers…

This is the opposite of intention, the opposite of control, arguably even the opposite of empowerment, or fulfillment. When games like the new Assassin’s Creeds and other Ubisoft offerings are referred to as “junk food,” there’s more truth to that than many realize – although perhaps a more fitting term would be snack food. A good snack isn’t satisfying, at least not fully. Delectable snacks are irresistibly enticing! And they’re enticing by design, engineered with ultra-processed precision to keep those orange-dusted fingers diving back into the bowl.

I mentioned an intriguing blog last week regarding how games have been crafted for addiction, not just in the obvious gambling-related aspects but within numerous game-specific ones.