BONUS TANGENT: The Openings of Assassin’s Creed: Analysing the Cogs
Three examples of gripping openings in the franchise ... and three not-so great ones
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Other analysis posts: Assassin’s Creed Mirage: A Narrative Analysis | Assassin’s Creed Shadows: Reflecting on the preview build
Want more AC? Fortitude: A Connor and Arno vs. Shay novel
This is a tangent article from Assassin’s Creed Shadows: Reflecting on the preview build. If you like this one, be sure to give the other a shot.
This one took much longer than I wanted.
INTRO
I was trying to find a way to talk about the prologue of Assassin’s Creed Shadows without spoiling it beyond the mood, and realised it would be more productive to talk about other parts of the franchise which I am not shuttered behind an NDA about, i.e., the games which are already released. If you haven’t read my initial thoughts on the game, you can do so here. I go over the gameplay, the general narrative loop we can expect, and if the franchise really needs to stick with a formula regarding Assassins vs. Templars, freedom vs. order, and directions we could explore in the future.
A Hundred Thousand Clamours for Attention: So, what is a good opening, and what makes one?
I think, overall, Assassin’s Creed does its openings well. It has its few stinkers, but mostly they’re pretty good.
The goal of any opening is to get you as invested as possible so you want to see what happens next. This can be for a character, the unravelling of a mystery, a question of will so-and-so admit their feelings and kiss at the Royal Ball, etc. Openings want to entice you by selling the idea of the media to you — i.e., convincing you that it’s worth investing the time to see more — and when it comes to characters, this is achieved thorugh a mixture of relatability, charisma, mystery, etc. You’ll often hear this called the hook, and what the hook aims to do is get you to care as much as it possibly can.
But there is no one-size-fits-all formula; I am sure everyone reading this can think of an example of something they love but a friend of theirs was completely neutral on it, as well as the other way around. The way a writer will go about solving this equation of “make the audience care the maximum amount” will differ from story-to-story and case-to-case; no one writer writes stories the same way, and there are different ways to come to the same points. If you want to make a character relatable, for example, a writer could show the character’s love for petting animals, or taking part in everyday human experiences like trying to sing along to the radio but not knowing all the right words, or fearing for a specific thing in a stressful situation. The arrival point in all of these cases is to build up empathy for a character.
But again, the best and hardest thing about doing this is, there is no one, universal approach to do this. Which is really great because it means we can love things with more intensity.
How to Establish Empathy: The hidden switches and levers behind your favourite characters
One of my favourite critics, Film Crit Hulk, talks in one of his many, many fabulous essays about sympathy vs. empathy. The short and long of it is: sympathy is when you can understand why someone is feeling a certain way about a situation but it doesn’t effect you emotionally, and empathy is when an emotion is affecting some else at the same time it affects you.
Empathy is the key to making sure people get invested into what is going on. If you have ever had your heart jump into your throat watching a tense situation play out on screen, or feel a pain in your chest whenever one character loses another, that’s due to established empathy. Whereas, if a tense moment is met with nothing but a shrug from you, or a character death doesn’t leave you thinking anything beyond, “I am very sad that this has happened to you, character, my condolences,” then the story has failed to enact empathy within you.
Openings are one of the important tools with which to lay the grounds of empathy. It’s our introduction to the character and their situation, and it has to convince you not only to like the character, but to get invested in their story. It has to make you care to see what’s going to happen to them, and to care about why they should succeed or fail. A really good writer will be able to make you feel empathy for characters who are objectively terrible people.
First impressions are very, very important.
What complicates matters, however, and something that we have already established in this essay, is that there is no one-size-fits-all. When creatives try to approach stories like this, well, you will most likely end up with something that feels like focus-tested corporate slop. The best way to combat this is to make characters into people. You don’t just give a character a bunch of traits like “nice to puppies”, “takes care of grandma”, “gives to charity and volunteers much of their free time for good causes” to make them likeable. You make them flawed, you make them like the audience in that they’re not perfect. Flaws are the ways to make characters interesting. One of the biggest signals that lets me identify a new or young writer is that they make their (main) characters either flawless or their flaws are too big and vague to mean anything. What does being clumsy mean? What does being perfect mean? Does one character’s drive for perfection mean they sacrifice their mental health? Does another character’s inherent clumsiness strain their personal relationships because why do you keep breaking cups, we have to keep replacing them every month and you never sweep up the shards that sneak under the dishwasher door and I can’t take it much longer please go see a doctor or I am going to leave.
So, flaws lead to conflict, and conflict leads to empathy because the character is not just “Person in Story”, they are someone real, someone you know, and when something bad like the Act 1 twist happens to them, it’s a bad thing that you feel pain about rather than going “aww man, that sucks”.
Where to Begin: How are we going to count “openings” in this essay?
Easy. Anything that is or is equivalent to “Sequence 1” in a game. Picking openings varies depending on rubric and medium, as anything that is strictly a prologue or first chapter can count as an opening, or it could be the first act, etc. But for these purposes, I will be cutting off my definition as Sequence 1 or the equivalent to as judged by me.
Hook, Line, and Sinker: What are we looking for in an opening? What makes one good whilst another is alright?
Generally, we’re looking for 1) the drives behind a character, which you will have probably heard called the wants and needs/desires, 2) how those interact with the main conflict, and 3) how the writer presents those two points to cause the audience to care the maximum amount so by the time the inciting incident happens, they are locked in. Other things that count towards great openings include character charisma and compelling mysteries. Honestly, the great and frustrating thing about writing and stories is the lack of hard and fast rules. Much of it springs from general guidelines on what usually works and what you’ll want to avoid, and honestly, a lot of practice and instinct. So, I will be using my judgement and explaining my reasoning for it. If you agree or disagree, I would love to hear about what and why!
Let’s jump into it!
FANTASTIC OPENINGS
Assassin’s Creed II
Yeah, you absolutely knew what was coming first.
Assassin’s Creed II’s opening is, undoubtedly, the most famous of the franchise, and for good reason. “It’s a good life we lead, brother.” “The best. May it never change.” “And may it never change us.” The camera pulls back to frame the Florence skyline, Ezio’s Family plays, and the game’s title appears on screen. Ahhhh~
Now, I want to propose that people adore this particular scene not for seeing it for the first time, but for how it makes us feel when we think back on it. We think of Ezio’s innocence, we think of his bond with Federico, and how much of a punch to the gut it is to lose both in one fell stroke. That’s because the game is establishing empathy not just with Ezio, but his family. It’s telling us why we should care about each member of it in turn before everything goes horribly sideways — Federico looks out for you, you help your parents with errands, you stand up for your siblings. It’s not just telling you why you should care and that Ezio is close with his family — it’s showing you and letting you live the experience. It’s making Ezio and his family people, and it’s instilling in the audience a sense of nostalgia. “The good olde days”.
All of this combined means that when Giovanni, Federico, and Petruchio are hanged by Rodrigo, it doesn’t feel like an every day fictional family tragedy. You are not losing Father, Brother 1, and Brother 2. You are losing people, people who have names and connections and relationships to you and the city. And what’s worse: their deaths feel grossly unfair.
After their arrest, you-as-Ezio have been running around doing what should be the right thing to get them free. You’re even assured that everything will be fine, made all the more important by the fact you have killed people for the first time in your life to free your family. But none of that turns out to matter. If anything, doing the right thing with delivering the documents made the situation worse, and all of these emotions and whirling thoughts and feelings makes this opening so effective. You can see this effect in play in other piece of media like Arcane (Season 1, Eps. 1-3 spoilers next paragraph).
The deaths of Vander, Milo, and Clagor hurt. The acting is superb, the music elevates the audience’s already churning emotions, but that element of unfairness makes everything feel so much worse because … it was all going right. The kids and Vander were on the cusp of escaping a tense, time-sensitive, Swiss clock sequence, and the reason why it goes so wrong is because Powder succeeds with the creation of her bomb, which is another thing the audience is rooting for after watching her fail before this. God, her pleading to Vi that, “[she] only wanted to help” echoes around my brain sometimes because goddamn….
So this opening has not only gotten you invested in what’s happened to Ezio up to the end of Sequence 1, but the player wants to take revenge as much as Ezio does. It fuels the satisfaction when we kill Uberto soon after. It lends triumph to Ezio’s proclamation of “the Auditore are not dead!” And it makes us want to root out the rest of the Templars that had any kind of hand in this.
What an opening. What a hook.
Assassin’s Creed III
This game is my favourite narratively for a reason. I think it can and often is a dogshit experience to play, but the story? Mwah.
What we need to get out of the way first is that Haytham’s charisma makes this opening work as well as it does. Above, I was talking about a good writer being able to make you feel empathy for objectively terrible people, and this is an example here. Haytham is a cruel person. I think, in the culture of the upper-classes, the British have a capacity unmatched by any except the Japanese of being singularly polite-but-cruel, and Haytham is an exceptional student in this regard. Adrian Hough’s performance brings Haytham’s aloof chill to life, and this combined with his overall competence makes it a magnetic watch. We are drawn into this man who not only murders someone five minutes after being introduced to him, but does so without regret in front of a child, and then proceeds to be glib about the entire affair upon leaving. “And how was the opera?” “Rather dull, truth be told.” Ten minutes later, when we’re aboard the Providence and he is talking with her captain about mutiny, Haytham threatens to cut the captain’s head off should the man cross him again, and … you believe him. Haytham is competent, Haytham is dangerous, and Haytham has mastered himself in words and actions; he is very deliberate, and very willing and able to do what has to be done for getting his way. And that makes him really cool. You want to get to know him.
It also creates expectations within the player about the kind of story they’re going to be in for. Because Haytham is a serious person doing serious things, it makes us expect this dark drama. I think that Assassin’s Creed III is fabulous at mood setting, and it all starts right here at the beginning. After it sells you the promise of a drama at the opera house, it sells you a promise of a frontier when Haytham sees America for the first time, and its key and “storeroom” mystery promise to answer the questions posited by the modern day.
The second thing to understand about this game is that it’s much slower paced and deliberate than those that came out before it. This opening conveys that very well, so one thing I vehemently disagree with, is the criticism that the story is too slow. Much of this misconception springs from our play time as Connor (i.e., not getting our hands on the Assassin robes until the beginning of Sequence 6 of 12), but the story pacing itself is perfect. And Haytham in this beginning section is important not only for that, but for how we feel later as Connor taking down his allies. I think it deserves the criticisms of stretching its tutorials out for far too long, and like I mentioned up the top, the moment-to-moment gameplay feels like dogshit outside of combat and maybe some freerunning tree sections, but I have no issue with the narrative content being communicated.
Along with establishing the mood of the story, it establishes this theme of stuff just being plain unfair a lot of the time, but one of the brilliant things about it is that it’s not, from Haytham’s perspective. Everything is easy for him, which brings such a stark contrast for later when we play as Connor.
Assassin’s Creed Origins
My fondest memories of Origins on release day were of people finishing Siwa and going “holy crap, that was amazing!” Because no matter what you think about Origins in terms of the rest of the game, I don’t know a single person who wasn’t captured by the opening at first.
I’ve identified three things that make the opening of Origins not only great, but arguably the best in the franchise.
Firstly, like Haytham in Assassin’s Creed III, Bayek is extremely charismatic. But where Haytham’s charisma is derived from upper-class British cuntiness, Bayek is the kind of guy you want to have beers with, and that warmth contrasted with the grief, rage, and pain that we see following the hard jump cut between Siwa of 49BCE and the Bent Pyramid one year later makes for a terrifying display. We sit up for it. What has happened to change the man we saw before into this guy? This is a mystery opening where we are peppered with unanswered questions.
Secondly, it’s a blatantly shocking opening. Even though many an Assassin’s Creed game has family members dying at the beginning, the franchise hadn’t killed a child since Assassin’s Creed II. And even then, Petruchio’s death isn’t as great a blow as this, for it’s soften by the fact we knew him the least well of the Auditores and he dies along with his eldest brother and father. Bayek’s hand in Khemu’s death, and the fact Khemu was a better established character than Petruchio, makes this a devastating introduction.
Thirdly, its entire presentation is simply magical. From the revamped design of the Confession Corridor (understood by Bayek to be some sort of gateway to the Duat), to the extremely hyped use of the Apple of Eden as both a prop for Bayek to smash Medunamun’s face in and as an object we the audience recognise from previous instalments. That Bayek doesn’t know what it is and it doesn’t display any of its supernatural properties during this scene adds to the hype factor; it is a blunt and satisfying instrument of death.
But what sells all of these points is the strength of Origins’ sincerity. It isn’t afraid of putting Bayek into these intensely vulnerable positions, and that of all things pries at the heart. You need good writing, good directing, and good actors to pull this off, because if any of these elements are missing (and to be clear, I am sanding down this process as a lot of vital, lizard-brain-noticing effort goes into production (e.g., imagine if the lighting was bad, or the audio *cough cough COUGH*)), then that crucial element of sincerity is lost, and so, much of the impact. It also needs to stay on the right side of believable, less it veer too far into the realm of melodrama. Think: “You’re tearing me apart, Lisa!!”
Emotional pain is a shared human experience, and so it is an easy one to latch onto. However, in cold opens like Origins, it tends to work well, or fall completely flat.
NOT-SO FANTASTIC OPENINGS
Assassin’s Creed Revelations
Revelations has always been a bit of a dud game to me. It’s not one I’ve spent much time in over the years, despite playing it through to completion at least four times. There’s a lot I like about in when it comes to its dungeon design, but its story is … ehh. I think I would rank Brotherhood’s below (maybe; that one scene with Cesare killing Rodrigo is cracking fantastic stuff), but I do have to think about it.
The opening for this game doesn’t have the stake-setting of Brotherhood, or the family bonding of Assassin’s Creed II. Instead, we are introduced to an Ezio traveling to the abandoned Assassin stronghold of Masyaf, only to arrive and find it hosting a Templar army now determined to kill him. Ezio is haunted by visions of Altaïr which are greatly nostalgic for the player and lend weight to the sacredness of this place, but despite a tense action sequence in the next part of the mission that rounds out the introduction, it doesn’t do a very good job of establishing the whys of itself.
The biggest defence I can see for this opening is, “but it’s the third game, we do not need to do character or Creed introductions — it’s Ezio! We know this guy!”
Incorrect. We do know Ezio (or at least, I assume you, in 2025 reading this, have also played II and Brotherhood), and we do know the Creed … but we still need to establish why Ezio is here and why the Templars are too. I think a lot of people mistake “introducing the characters” with getting to know them as people, and whilst that is a very crucial job for stories, the other half is in getting to know what they want and why, which Revelations doesn’t do in the soul.
“But the Library!”
Yes, that is the plot reason. It is the goal we are working towards over the course of the story. But why now? Why not five, ten, fifteen years ago for Ezio? Why does he come to look for the Library now?
Fucked if I know. That stuff is explained out of text, iirc. And if I am wrong, well, it didn’t impress the reason on me enough that I have forgotten it despite playing this game at least four times. This is what I mean by the game not doing its reasoning in the soul. It doesn’t do anything in the way of convincing me why this is such an important task for Ezio and makes me want to get into this Library beyond, “game objective told me to”.
What this opening aims to do first and foremost is set up exposition, and it doesn’t do it very well. This is a criticism I have of all of Darby’s games in that he doesn’t delve into on-screen psychology — i.e., telling and not showing — and relies too much on texture, which is why I have trouble connecting to all of his games (yes, Black Flag too). Revelations is the same: this opening sequence is, first and foremost, bombastic and adrenaline inducing. The other reason it can potentially get away with this opening is a meta reason, and that is the player’s connection to Ezio and Altaïr as characters.
The best part about Revelations in terms of its story, in my humble opinion, is Yusuf. Chris Parson did a fantastic job in making Yusuf charismatic and likeable.
Assassin’s Creed Unity
Ahh, Unity. My love, and my hate.
Next to its delightfully memeable launch state and hilarious/rage-inducing bugs, Unity is known for having a so-so story. I will have to admit to some bias in that I love it very dearly, warts and all, but that’s only because I have spent a lot of time thinking about it. But even for the amount of time I have spent with the game, its opening has never been able to elicit an emotional response from me. At least, not one that requires me to dig deep first for knowing and caring about Arno as one of my blorbos for the better part of a decade.
Much of that comes from the quick pace of Arno’s introduction. In the first mission as kid-him, we disobey our father to follow Élise and perform the minor misdemeanour of theft, and return to the spot past the time our father specified to find him dead. Much of this opening is reliant on assumed empathy — that is, Arno has lost his father, isn’t that sad? But so what? We haven’t had the time to get to know Arno or Charles beyond “they are a father and son visiting Versailles, and Arno is a disobedient little toerag who likes redheads”, and so when Charles dies, it’s one of many family tragedies we’ve seen in media. Add it to the pile! The narrative tries to give the two a relationship via lines like them watching the fireworks together, but why do the fireworks matter? Is there a special connection to fireworks these two have? Or is it the chance for Arno to spend time with his father for the first time in ages? What about the pocket watch? I get that Arno places so much significance on it throughout the game to the point where it is used as a symbol for his unwillingness to deal with loss, but without the attachment Arno has to his father being properly established, the whole point of the watch falls flat; I certainly did not realise Arno had fixed the watch in the epilogue until someone casually mentioned it on Reddit years after I had played the game the first time. Good … good job. Video game. Good job.
*sigh*
Moving past the 14th century prologue (that sets up themes and introduces the Sword), the rest of Sequence 1 sets up the actual plot of the game. Arno is now twenty and a ward of M. de la Serre. Élise is his daughter, and she and Arno have this cute little romance going on. I really like how they interact here, but there’s a lot missing between Arno and M. de la Serre so when he dies, it’s just another thing that happens. Before M. de la Serre’s death, we see the two interacting once when M. de la Serre scolds Arno for being a twat. I want to know what these two think of each other outside of this conversation. Is M. de la Serre fond of Arno? Does Arno think of him as a father? I mean, it would at least be something at this point if M. de la Serre gave a cliched “you have great potential that you are wasting” speech! Just anything to give us a hint on what he thinks! Something else I would like to see in this proposed speech? Delving into the reasons for his taking Arno in after his father’s death; this is never touched on in the game, which is such a baffling decision for me because that’s kind of important?? Why is Arno with the de la Serres instead of being foisted off onto someone else? I don’t care if it’s explained in the companion novel; explain it here.
Anyway, the point I am working towards regarding knowing what these two think about each other, is because it produces two effects. The first being, Arno’s sorrow at his death. This will be especially helpful because Arno’s Big Thing is that he is petrified of losing people; this is the trauma that drives all of his decisions and that he has to spend the narrative managing (the whole reason he goes rogue is to keep from losing Élise, even if it means losing everything else). Why not add to this? The biggest, and most common, misconception I see about Unity’s story is that it is a revenge story. It’s not. At least, not for Arno. It’s a story about Arno’s fear of losing people, and his talk of “redemption” is just how he frames not losing Élise (for who it is a revenge story). See, if he can make up his mistake to Élise by killing her father’s killers (and bonus: he keeps her out of harm’s way by doing it himself), then surely they will be together again. But I can see why people think this because I made the exact same mistake too — theme and character setup has not been correctly established. At this point, your only chance of becoming engaged in the story is by being a Unity freak, which most players will not want to do. Which is such a shame because there is a really fascinating story underneath all the bare bones writing; the amount of subtext and shifting psychologies in this game is really good??? I’ll forever be sad that it’s obscured by the rest of the blandness???
(Also, bonus, bonus tangent: This central point of Arno’s fear of loss rather than thirst for revenge is also the reason why Shay’s part in Charles’ death is never brought up in the game — because it does not contribute anything to the story, and would have actively harmed it because it would have split the focus. The whole point of Charles dying is that Arno has internalised his death as his fault. Because if he had not left as Charles asked, then he wouldn’t have died, and so left Arno paranoid about something similar happening again which in turn drives so much of his behaviour regarding his unsanctioned kills. Shay’s part is just a fun little crossover trivia point; see more of my thoughts about Arno and Shay here. If you would like to actually see what it might have looked like should Arno have found out about Shay’s part in his father’s death, have a read of Assassin’s Creed Fortitude.)
Anyways, last but not least …
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla
I don’t think it’s a secret how much I dislike this game. I always think of Valhalla more as a lore-game than a narrative game, as most of the enjoyment I have seen derived from it is very much to do with its impact on the lore rather than anything to do with how players feel about Eivor or those surrounding her (I’m not including the active and thriving shipping part of the fandom because that’s its own beast and not really related to my point here). I could talk endlessly about how the narrative’s desire to emulate a “Viking-like saga” by locking the main progression behind useless regions was a terrible decision; I could point out how it would be impossible for Eivor to make friends with everyone in proto-England because the practicalities behind that idea are laughable, but I’m only going to concern myself with the first section of Norway, which I think is both one of the strongest points of the story but is also not very good at the same time?
What I do like — Eivor and Sigurd’s relationship. Sigurd’s frustrations with his father’s decisions regarding the future of Norway and their kingdom. The plot decision of Eivor avenging her parents’ killers via the death of Kjotve who did the murder, but that grudge then passing onto his son Gorm that sows the seeds of future problems.
What I don’t like: Well … A lot of it.
Valhalla is another of those games that fails to establish drama in any meaningful way. Why should players care about anything happening here? Why is every action and revelation, unrelated to the lore, met with this universal “Cool 👍” attitude rather than “tea is being spilllled, things are going dooown, aaah”? First, take Eivor’s want for revenge. When her parents die, I don’t know why they’re special to her beyond being her parents. Like Charles Dorian, I have seen many a fictional parent die; why should I care about these ones? I don’t know! Again, it’s this problem of assumed empathy — you saw something pretty sad, isn’t that awful? Let’s go do something about the sad thing! But again: why is this a tragedy I should be invested in over someone else’s?
And the truth is with Valhalla, it isn’t established. It has the same problem as Black Flag and Unity where it relies too much on texture to have its audience properly engage. Writing is about constantly communicating to your audience. “Imagine this … but then this happens, and therefore, it leads to this! But then that means this! And this! Therefore we can go to this!!” This stream of communication is what keeps your audience invested. But Valhalla feels so much like an “and then, and then, and then,” story which I know it isn’t … but it really feels that way. That it does, fascinates me.
The length of Valhalla’s opening also doesn’t do it any favours. I think conversations in this game aren’t engaging enough to justify their lengths, which starts to be felt at the beginning, and that along with the bland shot-reverse-shot presented with pulled animations from a pre-determined pool are a sign of what’s to come; Valhalla is not a game interested in efficiency. We have a lot of information being introduced here — Eivor’s feud, her visions of Ragnarok, Sigurd and his father, Basim and Hytham, Harald Fairhair, tutorials — but despite the subject matter being exciting stuff, it drags. It’s mostly telling, not enough showing. That, along with the technical issues like the poor audio quality and the afore mentioned animations, and how the general gameplay feels not great, makes this opening really, really uninspiring to play through.
And for no particular reason, here are my game openings ranked (as of writing this article; subject to future revision):
Origins
Assassin’s Creed II
Assassin’s Creed III
Mirage
Brotherhood
Odyssey
Shadows
Assassin’s Creed
Rogue
Black Flag
Valhalla
Syndicate
Unity
Revelations
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