Sunday Thoughts: Depth

So here we are, start of a new year and all that. I hope you all had a lovely Christmas, a New Years Eve full of partying and are looking forward to things getting back to normal over the next week or so. Personally I’ve been using the time to lounge about, not doing much and dipping my toes carefully into the waters of Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood.

This trepidation about Brotherhood may seem peculiar to you. “Why Kris!” I hear you cry. “The Assassin’s Creed series is simply fantastic, and Brotherhood is the best yet!” I’m certainly with you on the first part there, and from what I’ve played it does seem that Brotherhood is the cream of the series so far. The slight timidness with which I approach the game comes from remembering what happened when I played Assassin’s Creed II mid-way through last year.

See I lost about a week of my life to Assassin’s Creed II. I’d pick up the controller for a quick half hour blast as a reward for a few hours work, and the next thing I new it was six hours later and I’d lost the day. It’s rare that a game does this to me, normally I get sick of it after an hour or two.

The reason the game managed to grab hold of me with such force was the sheer depth the title presented you with, the variety not only of missions and possibilities, but of Italy itself. Few titles actually manage depth anywhere close to that, but Assassin’s Creed II really did deliver it in spades. From what I’ve played of Brotherhood it seems to be even deeper than it’s predecessor, in particular the restoration of Rome mechanic takes the shops, which were fairly trivial in ACII, and brings them to the forefront of the game giving them a meaningful purpose.

There aren’t many titles that I see anything like this kind depth appear in, and it’s not just because there are titles that aren’t set in a sandbox world. I mean if we only had one type of game things would get pretty tired quickly. Anyway, there are plenty of titles that manage to have a story the feels deep across all genres. Look at Call of Duty: Black Ops, the story felt deep to me even though it was ‘only’ a FPS.

Of course it does seem harder to achieve depth if all of your level design is completely linear. I mean Sonic is a fantastic game, but it’s hardly the poster child for depth or complexity now is it? The only way it ever could be would be to transform it into something it really isn’t, and that’s not what I’d want to see.

Not every game needs a world that feels as close to real as possible, you don’t need to have a city that lives and breathes, that thrives and wilts. Games that feel pretty shallow can be incredible, and games that have all the depth in the world can be absolutely terrible.

However, it’s undoubtedly harder to create a world, story or characters that feel deep or meaningful in any way and most people, to some extent, are looking for the easy way forwards. If that’s creating a game that’s still fantastic, but doesn’t have the depth that can really hook you then that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I suppose part of me wants more games that managed that kind of depth and really dragged you in, but the other part doesn’t like investing that much time in one title.