The Digital Museum - Assassin’s Creed Origins Discovery Tour - Extra Credits

you crawl up the ascending passage of the Great Pyramid towards the Royal chambers all is dark except for the small circle of light cast by your torch a voice guides you educates you informs you about this incredible place I think we might have found the best use for the Animus yet by the way say hi to Ethan he's doing the art for this episode we have to start this off by commending the Assassin's Creed team a few months ago they launched a non combat version of Assassin's Creed origins where you can go on a walking tour of the greatest sites of ancient Egypt not as they are today not as they were in their heyday but 2,000 years ago during the fall of the Ptolemies when Egypt was coming under Roman sway it's a fascinating period and they approach it with rigor the team worked with Egyptologists to make sure that they got their information right and sure I do have some critiques which are probably gonna take up most of the rest of this episode

because I think in the future it is important that we do things like this even better but I want to take a moment first just to praise the Assassin's Creed team and the folks at Ubisoft because this is a good thing even if the idea behind it had been mercenary even if this whole thing was kicked off by somebody in a boardroom saying hey this would be a cheap thing to do and there's a huge market if this paves the way for us getting into schools even then it's still a good thing in fact I'm willing to bet that was the argument that got this mote greenlit but I also bet you that this idea came out of passion from the team and an honest desire to do something great with what they had already made so hats off to Ethan can you draw me a hat real quick thank you hats off to you Ubisoft because for all I'm about to say about how we might improve on this idea further what you already did is more than almost any other triple-a company is doing so okay how might discovery mode in Assassin's Creed be improved upon well remember when I described the mode as a walking tour it is a literal walking tour it

almost mirrors a museum experience where you put on the little headphones and at each exhibit and audio file plays there's no real agency to it at all you go to a highlighted spot a glowing path appears and you follow it while voiceover reads you a few facts and that's pretty much it and the problem with that is that it's sacrifices some of the greatest strengths games have and some of the greatest strengths the Assassin's Creed series has it abandons the self-directed opt-in nature of games every game requires us to learn things whether it be a new control scheme or Pokemon stats and one of the things that makes us so willing to learn that stuff is that we're doing so voluntarily Assassin's Creed discovery mode doesn't feel voluntary it feels like something you wouldn't really ever do unless you were assigned to do it part of the reason for that is that discovery mode abandons the open-world nature of Assassin's Creed if you were able to run around the city finding cool sites with audio logs everywhere telling you about them as you went I would be doing that

all day one of the best parts of the Assassin's Creed series from the beginning has been gathering those historical tidbits about interesting buildings that you happens to get to through climbing and jumping and parkouring your way to improbable places here though the experience is entirely on Rails it's not self-motivated at all and in giving up exploration it also kills curiosity have you ever seen a building in an assassin's Creed game and said to yourself ooh what's that now and then tried to get to it and maybe when you got there you even took the time to read that little historical info blurb they gave you on it and you do so because you chose to explore and find it for yourself that is a powerful thing games are great at driving curiosity as game developers we've got to trust that and use it as a motivator and then there's just the fact that slow walking is not what Assassin's Creed is about we are naturally more inclined to learn about things that we think are awesome we're also more likely to learn about

things that happen in a context that is awesome walking in Assassin's Creed is not awesome let the player parkour and jump and dive around that city and don't worry that it doesn't allow for as much control of the players experience as a curator might have over museum goers games and museums are different tools for learning and that's okay trust your players and don't worry that they might get distracted from the learning by how awesome the parkour is because sure some people are certainly going to see that they can climb and leap about the rooftops and they'll just race off to find the highest point they can get to but you know what we should let them because I am willing to bet you that none of those players would ever have sat through even the first enforced walking session anyway but I am pretty sure that if they dash to the highest point in the city that point is probably going to be a monument one that you can now educate them about and maybe just maybe they will think that that's kind of Awesome and go looking for other cool places to climb and learn about and also

it's all right to use game-like elements in education the current format of discovery mode strips most of the collectibles out of the Assassin's Creed world and of course you have to balance these things you want to keep your collectibles from being an extrinsic motivator from being something that people chase after without any regard to the educational aspect of the game but if you want to provide an open-world that allows for exploration while still directing the users experience a little bit a glowy icon that they can spot in the distance is a great way to get the player to go somewhere and lastly discovery mode in its current form feels very static it tries to emulate a museum to the fullest but this means that it feels like walking through a gallery rather than experiencing history on the streets of a dynamic living City now I totally get that creating a few custom interactions is a little bit more expensive and so I totally understand why they didn't do this but allowing you to live history just a tiny bit is something that these games can do that

museums can't so we should totally play into that even just a stroll through a vibrant market with a voiceover talking about the trade and the market culture of the time would totally do the trick anything that embraces the fact that games can make history feel alive is something that we should do but while we can and must keep doing better at creating games that entertain while also providing modes to focus on education this is a bold first step making this commercially and publicly available was a huge leap forward for games who knows if this will be a watershed moment or if this will just be one of the first slow steps to getting triple-a companies to embrace the idea that they can both educate and entertain but either way we just want to conclude this by once again Ethan I'm gonna need that hat back taking our hats off to the Assassin's Creed team and the folks at Ubisoft for being bold enough to do this in the first place well done see y'all next time [Music]