#unisoft

Back in 2017 my best friend and I cosplayed Kirk and Spock from Star Trek: The Original Series at MCM Comic Con in London. At one point we were approached by two people from Star Trek: Bridge Crew, a VR video game (developed by Red Storm Entertainment and published by Ubisoft) and asked if we would be interested in trying it out.

Obviously, we agreed and after finding two red-shirt cosplayers, we sat down at the ‘bridge’ and put the headset on. I, dressed as James Kirk, was the obvious captain and my trusted Spock was the tactical officer. The other two roles, engineer and helm officer went to the red-shirts. My friend and I immediately got into character, which was fairly easy, seeing as the game seemed almost too realistic to us. None one of us tried a VR game before and we were simply amazed. After what felt about 2 minutes (or 6 commands) the game was shut down and we discovered it’s been over 25 minutes since we sat down.

This may seem silly to rant about but I need to address this since I'm very passionate about architecture and Assassin's Creed.

One of the biggest things that has bugged me about assassin's creed is the design of the cities of Paris in Unity and London in Syndicate. These cities are incredible in real life but fall short in Ubisoft's recreation. In AC2, we had the chance to visit multiple cities. Each city felt exactly like their real life counterpart and also provided a lot of variety in terms of architecture and design; each locations was varied and unique.

When Ubisoft started making games set in a single city most people would have thought that even though it would be one city, the city itself would feel diverse enough that multiple locations wouldn't be required. However the opposite turned out to be true. Paris and London, large as they may be, are so incredibly lacking in diversity in terms of architecture; and less historically accurate, as is the case of unity.

Each city has about 5-6 buildings that are copy and pasted throughout the entire map, giving the impression of feeling like you have seen and explored the entire city after going down a single street. The lack of variety and over the top copy-pasting severely removes any excitment or desire to explore the city itself. The only thing that really shines in each city are the landmarks.

In Paris, most of the landmarks were actually very impressive and incredibly recreated with an impressive attention to detail; with the exception of a couple of landmarks. In Syndicate however, the landmarks were dissapointing in many cases. Many landmarks were poorly done, using the same assets from the other landmarks. To provide some diversity, some districts simply had a simple row of festive decorations hanging over the streets and thought that counted as creating unique district. I can't stress enough how much the lack of diversity in architecture affects the desire to explore the cities.

One of the things I noticed about Paris when doing research was the symmetry and height of the buildings. Paris itself, at the time unity was set, had buildings that were often 3-5 storeys tall, tall and narrow, with symmetrically placed windows on the facades. In the game, we see the exact opposite. Often times the buildings were fairly small often 2 and sometimes 3 storeys but rarely 4 let alone 5; and in many cases the buildings lacked any form of symmetry on the facades.

Anither thing that stood out in Syndicate was the lack of vehicle variety. You had around 6 vehicles, with 3 of them simply being recoloured to give and impression of diversity. That seemed to carry through every design aspects of the game. A massive copy paste to give a superficial presentation of diversity. While the atmost in each respective city was well done in terms of the atmosphere it's hard to look past the fact that often, thousands of people work on these games and so you expect something with more diversity in terms of its design.