Quick, try and think of a good
game about the American Revolutionary War besides Assassin’s
Creed III. Partial credit if you
picked Empire: Total War, even if it’s more about imperialism in
general. I’ll also accept this gem
of a Flash game, which plays
like Hogan’s Alley with a machine-gun musket. Fact is, the
Revolutionary War is a difficult setting for a game. It suffers from the same
problem as any game set before World War II: In the mind of
the average person, all of the fighting was done single-file with
muskets that had to be reloaded after every shot. It was also a war
that was fought well more than 200 years ago, making it hazy at best in our collective memory. Put it this way: World War II has Band of Brothers,
The
Pacific, and Saving Private Ryan.
The American Revolution has a great History Channel mini-series, a
musical, and a middling film starring a certified crazy person.
Thankfully, the people behind
Assassin’s Creed III appear willing to think outside the box. Consider creative lead Alex Hutchinson’s comments on the topic of settings:
“We’ve had versions of the assassin… people have thrown ideas around
for probably literally any setting that people would think of. But when
you get right down to it — when we’re doing the actual nitty-gritty of spending the time on it, spending a couple years making
something — we wanna go to a setting that other games haven’t.” Given its scarcity in other games, you can understand why Ubi looked to the Revolutionary War for ACIII.
The
Action Doesn’t Rely on Firearms
