 What's up everybody I'm the hook and I'm the blade and I'm that like hidden blade dagger thingy that Connor has were like you shoot it out and they like flips it around and grabs it and it's like really not ergonomic at all and totally gonna stab himself in the hand that's me hi I'm blue from overly sarcastic productions welcome to the hook blade podcast a show about all things assassin's creed I'm your host Lawson with me as always is my co-host Tim and joining us this week he's a modern-day philosopher a historian a gentleman sword fighter and all-around renaissance man and once upon a time he was voted assassin's creed fan community sexiest man two years run oh that's right I forgot about that wow oh yeah this is great it feels like I'm coming home back to my old AC podcasting days this is great yeah yeah today you know him as blue from overly sarcastic productions a youtube channel that covers literature mythology and history with sarcastic but highly informative flair but before that we were collaborators on a handful of like assassin's creed fan community projects including a podcast roughly you know half a decade ago so hopefully this is a pretty nostalgic holy hell wow that's oh when you put it like that that makes me feel wow I just like time skipped in real life geez yeah but let's see we had animus island we had the bureau until sophomore year kicked me in the teeth and I'm like I yikes I can't do this and then we had um legacies the story which was like yeah it's like an old assassin's creed fan fix story but like was kind of better than it had any right to me I still stand by the list like no we made good choices there like that was good I like that yeah if you guys do some careful googling you may indeed find a a fan fiction that uh blue and I wrote together when I was a sophomore in high school about uh Shay Connor and Arno crossing paths because all these dummies are alive at the same time Ubisoft was was wasteful to not put them in a room together and I was around to read them every week or every however after you put them out yeah weeks months all blends together however long it took um yeah we worked on a lot of fun stuff and obviously Tim and I are really uh glad to have you with us this week because we are talking about we're just gonna we're gonna pick your brain and use your expertise here to talk about historical accuracy across the whole assassin's creed franchise what it means what it you know what it accomplishes in each game how it relates to the gameplay the story is it good to be historically accurate how historically accurate should the games be all these questions and more um I should probably say right up top that we're not talking about the the historical accuracy that people are talking about when they're like but but I can't be a woman Viking he couldn't be gay like that's not what we're doing at all pretty much all that stuff is legit yeah no I mean it is we there there are weird like Norse rules about like women can't go to Valhalla but like there were women vikings like it's a thing there are a lot of like oh well women can't be in a video game having any agency because it doesn't align with my narrow my very narrow view of how history works like no that's stop lying that's not true there are many things that Ubisoft has been kind of screwy with especially as we've learned this year with like women in their games but like being a woman viking like totally totally a thing not as common yeah but like you know no one really would have batted an eye so yeah we're not we're not going to do that nonsense we're going to talk about like history stuff like interesting things that we can have discussions about and not just like get into one-sided flame wars with uh strawman arguments of very obscured themes of like sexism and yeah exactly people on the internet are dumb sometimes and uh yeah so kind of as a jumping off point for a start we do highly recommend you check out and we will link these uh in the description of the episode here blue did a couple of videos called realism review both talking in depth like 15 minutes apiece about the historical accuracy and origins and odyssey like i was watching the uh i was rewatching the odyssey one the other day and it always like blows my mind that like sparta did not have a navy didn't have boats they could not sail it's it's the funniest thing because like the game has such like an emphasis on like oh there are these land battles between athens and sparta and these naval battles between athens and sparta like no no there weren't they're pretty much all made up athens couldn't field an army that could take on spartan hoplites and sparta like barely knew how merchant ships worked they couldn't take on athinian triremes so what makes the peloponnesian war so complicated and interesting is because it was an asymmetrical fight and the game like for all the things they get right which we'll get into very shortly like one of the most like off putting like aspects of of odyssey from like a gameplay perspective is the idea that like it was an equal war like it wasn't they couldn't even meet each other on the field of battle because they knew they would get blown out of the water wow it's it's the wildest thing to see like yeah i can go into a spartan navy and go beat up these athinian ships no it's impossible and that's one of those things that you know like you were saying in the video it makes perfect sense gameplay wise why oh we want to have battles happen we want the player to be able to fight in a war that's happening and you know if there was no other accurate easy way to do that you can kind of see why they would have cut those corners yeah it's concessions that you just need to make to be able to have a game at the end of the day let me ask you this what's a really good example if you have one of a time that the games were historically inaccurate and either it was a missed opportunity like being accurate would have been better for the game or that you feel like they might have just straight up gotten something wrong if that's too broad a question that's um well i'll keep that in the back of my mind it's it's hard to think of like okay we got like 18 mainline assassins creed games and yeah for the time periods i kind of know about like six of them i'm a little bit uh more fuzzy on well let's start there then what are the time periods that you feel really like qualified to go in depth on that is very fair uh that's a good question basically um my experience with with history kind of starts with my experience with assassins creed uh you know playing the first one i was like okay this is a cool game and then playing ac2 i was like oh my god this is amazing and then playing ac brotherhood is like whoa holy crap dude so um my like awakening to oh history is actually kind of a cool thing this is new it was really with that like renaissance italian setting um and i ended up taking a trip with my dad to uh rome florins and venice like very shortly after playing assassins creed brotherhood and i'm like holy crap i know what these places are um medieval renaissance italy is one of the things that i really like to get into and on my youtube channel um one of the the big memes is that oh blue likes venice ha ha ha it's like yes yes i do like venice it's it's cool damn it's they're not to like uh in addition to that uh my my other main area of of expertise that we can call it that is the classical world so greece um rome uh late like hellenistic egypt conveniently the setting of assassins creed origins which makes my life a lot easier um and that kind of stuff so mediterranean classic ancient and you know mediterranean uh medieval uh into early modern um miss me with like late british history and all the kings and queens and holy roman emperors with germany and subdivided into infinity like i can't do that stuff but uh the classical mediterranean world is really my jam so it makes my life quite convenient that a lot of the assassins creed games happen to take place in this little area so right yeah we can definitely accuse ac of having a bit of a europe bias yeah and even when they're not in europe it's still europeans who are doing everything so it's like ah yes well this game takes place in the caribbean and you play as a white guy but you know um so those are the areas that i i would really say that i know best so um conveniently that gives me a good point of comparison because we have you know the old etio trilogy games and to a lesser extent ac one um and then we have you know the the newer games the the mythical trilogy so to speak with with origins uh odyssey and then valhalla which oh boy we'll get to that um so those are really the two areas that i would say i'm most comfortable with with the history of because i have a undergraduate degree in classics which is like hey ancient Greece and Rome learn about this for four years and like yes i want to give it to me here's like a really kind of um maybe it may be too broad a question but out of all the games right if you had to say with your knowledge which game like nails historical accuracy to the highest degree or does it the best yeah i i have to recognize my own biases here but i would handily give it to assassins creed two for several different reasons first off the world is expertly done and honestly it always is even in the games where i feel like they're a little bit weaker in the historical accuracy departments like odyssey origins and as we'll get to alhala the world is is always top notch ubisoft hires like some of the best people to make those open world playgrounds that you can explore because the setting the people architecture the just the world that you can inhabit is so deliberately true to life you know in grand theft auto it's like oh yes we're in los angeles but it's really los entos so we rearranged a bunch of stuff and assassins creed it's like no you are in Athens everything is in the right spot like you can play this game and then go to the city and know where you are and actually that's that's a funny thing is that um going back to ac2 which is one of this question was that one time i was in florence on a school um like summer study abroad trip and i was up with my friends at the top of the the campanile by the duomo the big bell tower and i was like okay i need to go meet my friends at this place the market where you first meet labolpe the mercato becchio that bold statue thing it wasn't in the game because it came later but this this like landmark from the game i'm like okay in the game it's over here so i was at the top of the tower sinking at an irl viewpoint i'm like oh oh okay no i see it it's right over there so i i go down i go like four blocks that way and kind of hop over a little bit to the left and then i made my way there and it's like holy crap if i can do that with game knowledge clearly the people who made this game world knew what they were doing so just from a world design standpoint uh the worlds and assassins creed have always been fantastic yeah the cities were so small that you really got the chance to familiarize yourself with them and exist as a person who you know would have lived in these cities so just the sense of familiarity that you get is incredible it all starts with that all the assassins creed games no matter how good or bad the rest of it the worlds are always top-notch and ubisoft should be proud of how good of a job they're able to consistently do um but the second thing that really makes ac2 so great is the depth of the characters a lot of them are made up um labolpe not a real guy Machiavelli completely made up Rodrigo Borja completely made up yeah just the characters of you know your best friend is Leonardo and he makes your weapons like oh my god perfect um and with Machiavelli and and a lot of the bad guys who you know are you know real-ass people most of the time uh the airy is is a made-up character but Jacopo and Francesco de Pazzi they're real dudes and the conspiracy that they that they did against the Medici was a real event and what actually blew my mind was um last year i was reading a book about Machiavelli called be like the fox it's kind of partially a biography about him but also a book that talks about like his Florence and what it was like at that time which is conveniently the ac2 setting so what really like blew my mind was reading that book and getting to some parts of the historical sources for the patsy conspiracy the dialogue that you hear in the game is lifted right out of the original sources like verbatim quotes a lot of the the the stuff um with organizing of the conspiracy and oh they were going to you know kill them earlier but they had to delay it to do it right in the middle of high mass and oh we'll need to be on hand to make sure Giuliano gets out of bed for church tomorrow like i think that one's a made-up quote but the whole thing of like that's true to Giuliano's character he was a lazy fuck he didn't like to do stuff so you know they really in ways that if you were a casual player you would never even bat an eye at there are things that are so deeply true to how the story unfolded that like you can play the game and get an honestly pretty serviceable understanding of the the real renaissance history of the world and then there's stuff like how you know etzio is a you know very much a playboy the opening of the game is very you know like gangs of new york like there were groups of kids who ran around throwing stones at each other it's a documented problem in rome in the 1510s like these are all real things so there's so much stuff that just seems like directly lifted from the sources and i can't speak to the rest of the games with that level of detail because i just i haven't studied it as much so i don't really know but ac2 is so remarkable because every time i learn more i'm like holy crap they put that in ac2 i didn't even think about that but then you know here it is so oh we are being joined by my adorable cat clio she is currently rubbing up against the microphone hello clio say hi to my friends nope she just wants to nap okay that's fine uh but anyway yeah to answer your question in way too long of a form than you asked for uh ac2 good no worries you know it's funny is like just yesterday i had maybe one of the first times one of the first times that i was learning something about history and i went wait a second i played that yeah i'm in a political philosophy class right now and it's like week one and what they're starting with is we're looking at people who wrote about plagues and one of the first things we have to read is Thucydides talking about the plague Athens and i'm getting to like part of the the writing and i wasn't even thinking about it before and then it talks about how like pericles died of the plague and i was like wait i was there yeah yeah yeah i saw that you know the joke line in Assassin's Creed is like oh i've climbed that but you know really it is also oh hey i played that and it's it's a testament to the quality of the games overall even though some are better than others that there's just so much history that you'll learn like as actually doing history and be like oh oh yeah no i know that from ac like i've seen that before totally i've always liked that even though i have never really been a particularly like historically fascinated person like i you know i just i i really hate doing research is my thing that's my biggest problem i guess boring sometimes but you know having a frame of reference from say playing like black flag that when i you know walk in the living room and my family is watching you know black sails or whatever the show was called and i'm like wait a second oh that's you know that's been hornigold i know that guy you know yeah yeah yeah yeah and ac4 is a great example of of really going all in on the characters because all of those people are real pirates because there's such a wealth of amazing characters to draw from um so you know props to our lord and savior darby mcdevitt to doing such a great job on on nailing the characters uh in that game especially in a way that the other games um even when they have real characters like ac3 who all come across as kind of stuffy and boring they're so boring why are they all so boring in that game you know and that's one of the funny things is that there are sometimes like you know controversies that surround the games before they come out i mean every assassin's creed game has its own controversy like remember when ac3 was in the hype cycle before it came out and all of the material was was uh rodin hakeidon connor killing red coats and it's like oh my god this game is so anti-british and like so much of the discourse like i remember on the subreddit was like this game is so anti-british and then the actual game came out and it's like oh that was that was all marketing material this is actually fine it actually paints a surprisingly balanced picture of the revolution and the anti-british propaganda is so far down on the list of concerns for this game because there's so much other nonsense that's busted but i didn't even register it when you were saying blue about how like ac2 did even more than ac1 had gone into reality i think there is this intricate balance at the game's nail in terms of like it's historically accurate but it's not like Leonardo is actually like fighting battles with you he plays a capacity in the game that makes sense for that like you could be reading a Leonardo da Vinci book and probably be like oh yeah i imagine he made some weapons for etio also like when it comes to kind of the extravagant things like fighting the pope like it's not like you're fighting the pope in broad daylight or anything you're doing it like a super secret you know like you know tomb so i think yeah i think it strikes the balance of like it's obviously like this probably didn't happen but it it allows you to kind of think like oh well maybe this could have happened like my suspension at its belief isn't being taxed but when it comes to ac3 and they have you take part in so many like historical historically relevant things things that are pretty well known to people nowadays like most people have a general understanding of the american revolution yeah at least most americans oh yeah us as americans so when connor is you know forest gumping his way through all this stuff it kind of sets off that alarm of like wait a second that's that's kind of a little silly but when yeah yeah when you do it in a way like ac2 where your characters play with the play with the assassins and etio in a realistic capacity like machiavelli isn't running around like doing crazy parkour stunts and whatnot you know like he he plays a realistic capacity of his historical counterpart i think yeah no i mean you're absolutely right and i think ac3 is a little bit of a preview of the the historical problems that the the mythic ac games i don't know does anyone else call that or do i just invent that the the newer three ac games um run into where the original fantasy of assassins creed is you're a blade in a crowd you are operating in the shadows no one even knows that you were there except maybe they'll see a guy in a white hood walking away from the carnage whereas ac3 is like no you're in the the front thing you're you're shooting the first shot at lexington you're the first guy to sign the declaration of independence it's just like it puts you front and center in all of these things we're like ac2 you know etio is in a lot of really important and consequential things in renaissance history for this period of time but you're not front and center you're not you know right in the middle of it in the way that you are with ac and that you eventually end up being with with origins and odyssey and presumably valhalla where if you're like throwing your hood back like look at me world i'm the protagonist it ends up feeling fake because it's like oh well if this character really was such a big deal we would have known about them wouldn't we um and ac3 kind of like hides it by being like oh well he's a native american so we're gonna pretend like he wasn't there because why would we give anyone else credit so it's like i get it they find a way to do it narratively but tim you're absolutely right that like one of the big problems of ac3 is that it puts you so far in the front to make you feel like such a cool and awesome protagonist for being in all these places that it ends up just feeling kind of hokey right because it seems improbable that you can be like the finger on the scales in every single turning point in the american revolution and that ends up breaking it by going too far like you have to consider too like in that same vein of criticism i think if you took etzio out of ac2's events it's not like it's it's like history shattering if you take connor out of ac3's events would the boston tea party have even happened like with some of these things have even happened you know like connor has as you said his you know his thumb on the scales to such a degree that i feel like if you took him out of the events the story like the american revolution would have been so different and that is a big part of like where my alarm my head goes off and i'm like that doesn't seem right to me i definitely feel like there's kind of a scale that you can imagine a spectrum if you will where on one side you have ac3 and it's just like okay every person that we know of who's involved in this you know you get to talk to and it's a little bit on the nose and i think maybe you could make a case that just to the right of ac3 like they're close to that end of the scale but they're not quite as bad would be i think syndicate and odyssey just because there's so many historical characters and you're involved in so many important moments then you can go to the entire other end of the scale and that's where unity lives and it might be the only game that lives there because there's really nothing going on that's relevant to the french revolution the games that end up pretty much right in the middle where you're getting a deep historical involvement and you're also not force gumping like you are in ac3 ac2 and ac4 i would say live in that in that center and those are obviously in my opinion to the two best games in the franchise yeah and to the point about ac4 it ends up working for the benefit of the story because the the story of of ac4 is that edward lives in this pirate paradise and then no matter what he does it falls apart so he has no ability to edward has no ability to stop this calamity from just you know crumbling down in front of him and stop this this huge like disintegration of this this beautiful pirate paradise so in a way it's like you know if he was there it would still play out the same way as if he was and so that ends up actually reinforcing the story by by somewhat taking away your agency and just letting you be there to witness the tragedy of all of these figures being laid low in their various ways so it's like rogue one we all know what's gonna happen but it's it's about like the journey to get to that end point yeah and what it does to the character at least in ac4 not so much rogue one i know this is sometimes unpopular opinion but like i really liked rogue one a lot i like it better than a lot of other star wars movies but i've got some i've got some problems with it it's better than solo i mean yeah it's it's it's not perfect anyway back to his essence creed there's no historical accuracy to talk about in rogue one unfortunately no that's what you think hey they do say a long time ago i i do think that's a great point because like i feel like even if you do have a knowledge of like what ends up happening to these people i feel like the story presents it in a way like they're constantly telling edward and everyone around him who's more sensible is like this path that you're going down is going to lead you to you know death or what have you and so i think the story is constantly priming you for a lot of those people to end up dying or passing or what have you because like edward is on the same path as them and everyone else around him is aware of that and i think it also is aided that like while we do know these pirates as like kind of larger than life characters like especially especially blackbeard when you can take them and give them some humanity and some actual like character it brings them down to reality in a way that's really compelling yeah treating the historical figures that you're going to include in the game as characters is honestly the biggest differentiator between that and something like ac3 where you know samuel adams is just there to like to deliver exposition really and all of those colonial dudes that you're supposed to be kicking it with there's never any effort made to like build a friendship connection between connor and those guys it's always just like we could really use a guy like you to do this thing that we need to do haha and they're all stuffy and yeah well you know we're we're going to talk a lot about the ac3 problems next week for sure oh have fun with that uh i will stay very far away not only because it's american history but also just oh ac3 and back to that one in a while but one of the things that uh lost into your point um on the subject of like the characters having like character is that they do grow and change over time and one of the things about specifically a character like davinci who is so fun in in ac2 because like oh davinci is building your tech that's so cool he almost becomes a bit of a tragic figure in in brotherhood because he's being you know forced to work against his will in the main game and then when you when you do davinci disappearance you just get the sense that he's being like taken for a ride by this kid salai and it's like oh no davinci like what are you doing like have some agency man like stand up for yourself but like davinci hasn't really been standing up for himself like kind of the entire game he just like bops around between florans and venice and you know malan and montedigione just like doing what people ask him to do so you can kind of see it coming and there's this this interesting if tragic arc over the course of the two games that like you see like where his his life takes him and it it does kind of reflect what actually happens to him davinci was you know very like fun and flamboyant character but he wasn't always the happiest guy so it's things like that actually bring character to the game and the characters that you know is missing in a lot of other types of historical media where these figures are larger than life and then they're static because they're larger than life they're not allowed to have life it's one of the things that some of the ac games do really well is is making these people feel like people and that's actually a problem that i have with origins in particular going back to my my realism review on the subject beyond you know talking about sparta's lack of triremes is uh you know the worlds are great but some of the characters in those recent games really come across as kind of iffy and flat so the two biggest personalities in origins are cleopatra and julia caesar they are some of the most interesting people in all of ancient history because they are so charismatic they're so abundantly smart they are so ambitious and accomplished but in the game caesar comes off as just kind of an old jock and cleopatra is you know played up as kind of slutty where the first thing she says is i'll sleep with anyone as long as i can kill them in the morning like come on it's it's pretty embarrassing and not only like not right but like you had a team of historians working on this you had a responsibility to do better because cleopatra being you know turned into this like oh devious like trixie woman who you know confuses men with the power of boobs you know that's that's a stereotype going back to the roman period later codified by shakespeare that is you know when you actually look at the the greek egyptian sources that we have not really a thing so they they fell prey to not only an easy stereotype for cleopatra but even the roman perspective of a character like caesar is so much more than what they play him as so you know two of the most interesting possible characters in all of the assassin's creed games are some of the worst done and i i don't know who did the the script for for origins and you know granted there's a lot of difficulty that goes into how you you structure a game story but oh man that was was a serious missed opportunity i want to very quickly go back to when you mentioned the da Vinci disappearance dlc because there's something i've been wanting to say about that dlc and and about a different thing in assassin's creed that i have not had an opportunity for it to be relevant but considering it involves historical accuracy this little tangent is going to be most relevant here we did an episode our second episode on the podcast was about assassin's creed gold which was an audiobook set during the great recoinage of like what 1660 something the great recoinage the hell is that that's one of our favorite episodes because we we kind of trashed that whole audiobook and i think deservedly so as far as storytelling goes but something i didn't realize until playing da Vinci disappearances that they pretty much completely wholesale ripped off part of the da Vinci disappearance because in da Vinci disappearance you have leonard of da Vinci and you have salai who's his assistant and it's sort of suggested implied that da Vinci and salai have a homosexual romance they have a little you know thing going on and you have that moment sort of at the end where etzio is like uh he suits you and leonardo is like you knew all along and oh my gosh and etzio is like it's okay i'm you know uh progressive for my time it's okay leonard love is love they do the exact same thing in gold with isek they're both taking characters who i guess like historically i think historians there's some there's some gray area i think about like they could have been gay they could have been asexual they could have been virgins who knows really but some people think they might have been gay or at least bisexual or what have you and then taking them and being like oh here's this thing that you know they have an assistant wink wink and then at the very end of the story that the main character is like that's cool i just thought it was really weird that both of these assassins creed things do the exact same thing with real people da Vinci and isek newton it's funny when a franchise gets so bloated that it loops around and plagiarizes itself right anyway that's just a quick little well that's probably the most incisive thing i've ever said about ac dude the other day on twitter i said the most incisive thing i'll ever say about assassins creed which is that it is the video game equivalent of a bad sci-fi channel tv show which when you think about it doesn't that make a lot of sense yeah i oh man that's the thing it's like there you know there's a lot of talk on the various online communities of like oh you know old ac monolith versus new ac monolith as if there's no variation between the two and there aren't old ac games that suck ass and new ac games that are actually kind of good yeah um i think one of the differences between the two of them is the way in which they handle history and we can actually kind of get into the way that the newer games handle it in this regard is we mentioned or i guess i mentioned earlier like the the philosophy of the older games was you are a blade in a crowd that's the fantasy you are working in the dark in the shadows behind the scenes to make all these things happen but in ac origins and in ac odyssey and presumably in ac valhalla on a kind of like over game philosophical level there's no real conflict between the assassin ideology and the templar ideology not even like just ignoring the fact that there aren't assassins and templars the ideologies of order versus control is not there darby said he was going to bring it back for valhalla i am awaiting optimistically i i am hopeful but um you know in addition to to that very core story difference of like what these games are about is now a different thing it's no longer you are this in the shadows mysterious figure with you know like their their hand on the scales in a way that no one would ever know you are front and center you are like up on the stage with everybody doing everything you know in the way that we're talking about with ac three where you are so pushed to the foreground that you're not an assassin you're just like a generic like everywhere hero kind of thing like and that's completely antithetical to the way that the early games handled history because the newer games give the players so much power to terraform the way that the worlds look and operate the character has such a unique ability to completely dictate the order of the world in a way that the earlier games had not a single trace of even an ac three it wasn't that bad and to be fair that is you know that's an artifact of an open world game that responds to the players actions and that's you know whatever wants to make nowadays is a big open world game that's dynamic and you know yada yada yada but it doesn't fit the the original idea of assassin's creed and it ends up feeling you know to what we're saying with ac three it's kind of clunky when the main player you know the protagonist has way too much ability to just change the world easily you know without breaking a sweat it just it doesn't work and in asiatica specifically it's like there is no character archetype that equates to what Cassandra and Alexios is doing like sure there were there were mercenaries but like not really ends not until later so for a character like Alexios or Cassandra to just be able to go between every city in Greece and be welcome you know like it's no big deal is completely unheard of like Thucydides the historian who is inconceivably not in assassin's creed he was the Athenian general at amphipolis where where the Brassidus guy gets killed he was the the other side in that battle and he's just not a character nonsense right um but like he was able to go to sparta and like write about it and learn about it because he got exiled from Athens and that's the only reason he was allowed in is he's like oh you're not with Athens okay fine you know come in say hi you know take your shoes off um so the ability of a character to just go anywhere and do anything is is completely silly in in a wartime game whereas in ac2 and brotherhood and revelations like it totally makes sense because these were open trading cities that anybody could go to there wasn't any active wars going on and it's just like yeah sure come in you know buy some stuff while you're here contribute to the local economy so it it ends up giving a totally different feeling to the player yeah it really feels as though and tim we were just talking about this the other day that they want you to have these like multiple sides they're all all the assassin scree games are kind of obsessed with like their red guards and blue guards and you can kill either of them and doesn't really make a difference like they want you to feel like you're between two sides but because especially in odyssey's case it's never really a focal point of the story what side you're on it really just feels like they're all the same and that it doesn't matter if someone's spartan or athenaean i can go into either city yeah i can do whatever i want i can fight on either side in any battle based on what kind of loot i'm gonna get at the end so i think that's that's actually a really good example of where maybe on a storytelling level and on a role playing level they're missing the opportunity to really get you invested in a particular side by virtue of the fact that that it never really matters so yeah it's like despite all of the ability of the player to to go and and do and make all these changes it ends up just feeling arbitrary and weightless in a way that like when you're etio you're putting in money to you know to rebuild the the villa or to rebuild roamer constance and opal even though it's a much more mechanically shallow endeavor it ends up having a much more like emotionally resonant feeling on the story because you put the money into the villa you put the money into the city and then you see and benefit from the way that it like it comes back to life that's a much more effective way to get that same feeling but in a way that doesn't end up being you know janky and weird with a character whose loyalties you know turn on a dime depending on what fancy spear you know they might get so it is interesting that you bring up like monoragione versus rome because to me personally i always prefer having just monoragione because and and i never really thought about it from like an historical standpoint but i i guess it kind of does apply that way too for me because allowing me to like literally be like the soul capital in rome kind of takes me out of the experience and i do like having monoragione because it doesn't it kind of just feels like this own even though it's a real place it and it kind of just feels like its own place that doesn't really exist in the rest of the world and i can go there and upgrade it and it's etio's and and it's the auditorium place but when you start getting into like renovating entire cities obviously i have other problems with that system but i i never thought about it from a historical standpoint of does it really make sense that etio is renovating the entire city of rome i mean you're right when you expand the scope you lose the focus and then you lose the impact so from you know from a historical perspective that's another way that that going you know too much and too big ends up dampening the effect and i think that's just a general problem that you see in the more recent games is that they they are too big that your ability to interact with the world and feel a sense of place is so diminished even if the worlds are lovingly rendered in a way that is like yeah this is like probably the best recreation of ancient Greece that we're going to get in a very long time and that you know the historical community has ever seen like even with that the emotional connection that you as a player can feel is is so smushed by just the sheer scale that you're forced to contend with yeah i think that also on a character level right when they decided to kind of take this direction of let's kind of do some witcher three style things they also took what made witcher three possible as far as the story goes for gerald in the sense that you know he's a witcher his job is to help random people with things that they need help with that means you can go across the entire world and be doing fetch quests for people and completing tasks and killing monsters and it's all right with the character that's not what an assassin does it's a great point so in these historical settings they're like okay well you're playing as a megi or you're playing as a mistyos which are essentially historical garrots and they just go around and they help people but without being grounded in the you know the fantasy world in the lore that that's a franchise like the witcher provides for you it really does feel like a flimsy justification to create a game where you can go around and just do busy work for people all the time and grounding it in you know in the world of what an assassin's obligations are or even as as edward as a pirate right like the fact that you're caught between the assassins and templars and that really interesting story way that they set that up it's more in your literal job description to be doing the things you're doing in those games and now in order to accommodate a big fuck off world with hundreds of side quests we've lost the part of the character story the the fantasy even yeah assassin's creed and that's yeah i mean maybe that's not a historical accuracy thing but i get that also if they're gonna go to a time before assassins even existed we're gonna play as a mistyos whatever the fuck that is because that's what existed yeah apparently you know and for sure mistyos is just a greek word for wage earner implying that they fought for money instead of fighting for their city or fighting for you know like civic glory right it's mercenaries so like i think that existed but you know it wasn't it wasn't to the same level in the game as it ended up being like a century later and you know there there's some things where i'm willing to like grant a little bit of wiggle room to make you know mechanics in the game fit because ancient Greece is a very long period of time it's hard to get you know a complete picture with just you know a sliver of of time but uh there are some things that that they do that that stretch the the kind of realism of it where it's like yeah you're living in in classical Greece in this game but the way that you act is reminiscent of you know the age of heroes and like Homeric stuff from like a thousand years earlier or like putting Pythagoras in it at the age of 150 yeah i don't know if this is too much of a hard right turn but i can make a comparison to ghost of Tsushima i would love for you to make a comparison of ghost of Tsushima but Tim did you have something to say i do think that all of what you're saying like uniquely kind of fits into the idea of what you were saying before blue about how earlier games philosophy was your blade in the crowd and i think in that very much motivated like a lot of your decision-making it's especially in the first game where you kind of kill a target and doesn't matter what side of the war he's on what he represents you know he's a Templar and that is why you were killing him i think that focus does kind of fade away as the games go on and always makes me think about what Bel-ek was saying about how like we've concerned ourselves too much with like revolutions and wars you know like we're losing focus of what we're supposed to be doing as assassins and that's killing Templars not supposed to be you know like the the the head of a revolution or would have you and and so lost in like what you were saying about how like you're just kind of like a mercenary it's like you're not really taking up the assassin cause you're just kind of or any cause right yeah for sure and they think that it's giving you with a choice of like you know presumably could a character or could a player just go through assassin's creed odyssey and like i'm i'm a Spartan the whole time and just never fight for the Athenians i suppose no no because the game makes you fight for the Athenians at certain points in the story that that that is true you couldn't even if you try that's true yeah yeah it's like there's no way to immerse yourself if you're constantly making those choices for extrinsic reasons and not for intrinsic reasons like you have to be yeah like you know i would look at a conquest battle and they'd say this one's medium this the side is hard and this side will get you more loot and i'll go okay i like a challenge so i will just choose the harder battle and then i'm fighting in a battle that i have no investment in whatsoever as to the outcome other than that i win whereas you can look at rogue and you can be involved in a naval clash and whenever you're in a naval clash you are on the side of the british you are fighting the french and you've got all of your british homey ships they have health bars in the corner of the screen they're going down and you are going to care at least a little bit that like the people whose team you're on don't die and that's a level of like motivation in that context that you just can't have in a game where you're playing all sides and i think that val hall is going to be really interesting because on one hand you are a viking presumably you have the alliance of you're going to be helping your tribe first and foremost but as we've already seen in gameplay you're going to be fighting other viking tribes which means you're going to be helping saxons and you're going to be helping the british in that in that's in those situations yeah and it's slippery it's really slippery to get you to still care it is slippery to be fair from a historical perspective that's not baseless because you know it wasn't like unified viking army versus like unified anglisks and saxon kingdoms which i can get into this in a second but the terminology that they use for valhalla ends up like bordering on problematic oh really but i want to know more about that yeah i i'll finish this and then i'll explain that like the the way that they have like you know anglisks and saxon kingdoms and vikings like these weren't unified monolithic sides like they were all kind of playing off each other for whatever advantages they can get so in that in that regard it will actually be somewhat accurate to be like an opportunistic viking trying to just make ends meet here and like find a space for your people but that doesn't mean it's going to be the most engaging for gameplay to the to the point of all how one of the things is that in the marketing and again i i hesitate to throw too many stones when i haven't played the game because things can always change and marketing and gameplay are sometimes not the most aligned but the way that they promoted the story in valhalla and you know not along if this is stuff that you heard is ah in dark age england you are a viking coming from your lands to go fight among these broken petty kingdoms and build a home for your people okay sure sure um you're gonna go fight all these anglisks and anglisks and is not a thing there were a series of migrations after the fall of the roman empire where the angles the jutes and the saxons and also kind of the pics up in scotland um came into britain and started you know living there and you know having a good time so anglo saxon is not a monolithic term there were angles and saxons but anglo saxon is not a thing and it's been kind of co-opted in unsavory ways by um by people on the right who proclaimed that like oh yes our anglo saxon heritage is you know faultless and perfect it's like it's not it's not a thing you're you're inventing an identity where there was none it was a lot of different peoples you know intermingling together in this historical cauldron of of early medieval britain and calling it dark ages is also problematic because the term dark age from a historical perspective refers to a time when there are no records that's all it implies it it doesn't imply um anything about the smartness of the people in that period uh it doesn't imply anything about you know like conditions about um yeah about the light conditions in a cloudy dark age um i mean having seen the weather in britain yeah they are living in the dark ages uh but you know it it doesn't apply anything about the like smartness of people there so it isn't the dark ages because there was still writing people just didn't you know you know regress back to illiteracy um there was a rich monastic tradition coming out of ireland and then up into the north of england south of scotland where you know it was like the place to preserve greek and latin scholarship in in europe there was there were there were two poles in europe in the christian world where scholarship was being you know preserved it was Byzantium and the Byzantine empire constants noble and it was you know ireland and then outside of that there was the muslim world but that's you know that's peripheral to the viking stuff um only uh but the point is um calling it the dark ages and leading with that as the pitch of what the game is about is just so misleading in a way that almost any historian will tell you is kind of shitty um and granted in my videos i've been guilty of using the term dark ages in in a couple isolated instances but even then it's mostly in exaggeration rather than to actually legitimately describe the conditions of a place um where it's like oh you know while these guys were bumbling around in the dark age as ireland's knew what was that well yeah but i'm i'm obviously you know joking for comparison but the the way that they talk about you know anglosaxons in the dark ages is just like off-putting enough that historians are getting a little antsy about it interesting and there are other things about the way that they portray vikings that is just iffy from a historical perspective going in like they don't have the horned helmets you know we all know that's just uh that's a myth made from vogner in 1800s german opera horn helmets aren't a thing but the vikings in valhalla are like you know fur and leather fetish like decked out to hell with like all of these like furs and leather bracers and this and that which they wouldn't really have had all that much it would have been you know cloth and some chain mail and not a lot super fancy but of course because they want to fit the aesthetic that a lot of people have in their minds they you know they take the costumes up to 10 and all of the tattoos that these characters have is is not historically attributed at all there are some you know vikings in eastern europe that were described as having tattoos in like one and a half sources but you know so much of these aesthetic qualities of the viking age that valhalla is really latching on to in borderline sensationalizing are either you know iffy from a record standpoint or just kind of fabricated so from a historical perspective there is a lot that they can still do right you know the the characters the the setting the world will probably be very good but the aesthetics of the vikings is so sensationalized that it makes me wary of what the actual game will end up being i i can still very much be proven wrong but the reason that and one of a friend of the channel yellow who does historical game streams has talked about this at some length the many reasons that valhalla specifically looks problematic in a way that the other ac games really haven't because even though there are a lot of problems with you know the aesthetics of of odyssey and origins there's nothing that's quite been on the level of of what they're doing to the vikings in valhalla so yeah i had no idea about any of that stuff oh they also do a lot of kind of crappy stuff about the the Celtic peoples in britain that looks to be hella sensationalized beyond like anything that is is legitimate or born out by historical documentation or archaeology so there's some iffy stuff in there that's crazy yeah i never i never knew anything about that stuff but it makes sense this isn't a thing where other past ac games are maybe similarly guilty of sensationalizing the aesthetic of something like is this is this something new for the series you think i think so i i think it's it is too it's not necessarily new but it is to a much more significant degree than we've seen before and i can't speak to everything because again you know like the the valhalla stuff from from my understanding of the viking history and again the vikings went to a lot of places so what you hear about the vikings in ireland is very different from what you'll hear about the vikings in scandinavia versus what you'll hear about the vikings in like the black sea around like modern-day ukraine it's it's not new because you always have a kind of like sensationalizing and and fantasizing of the history in order to you know put butts in seats and sell product but even the pirates like they were fancy people they they dressed up for show blackbeard was a performer more than he was ever a fighter um and that kind of stuff is accurate because it's it's true of the characters that they were all just big personalities um so that kind of stuff the fantastical elements like they fit the historical you know tone and and meaning of a period even if they're not strictly adhering to the surface characteristics so there's a difference between like surface historical accuracy and really like mechanical like deep level meaningful realism and there's an extra credits video on this that that that talks about it really well um and shows how you know just beyond like getting the facts and dates and costumes right there there's a lot to be said for the way that a game makes you feel and puts you in the shoes of a character who would be in that historical situation ac2 is fantastic because being you know brotherhood revelations like being this rich italian like banker playboy guy you know fits very well with you know the fantasy of traveling around all these cities and getting the brush shoulders and all these like fancy artist hot shots like that is what a character like Ezio would have been doing so it's totally on par um for a character like Connor and ac3 it's it's interesting and different because you know we don't have a lot of documentation for people of like half you know british and half native american ancestry so we kind of make him do what Ezio does and then it feels weird when it's you know incongruous so there are there are different levels of of realism in the experience and the mechanics that is is of a different kind um completely than the experience of of the historical you know surface qualities and surface aesthetics of the period what were you going to say about um about ghost of sushi which is like my favorite game i've played so far this year but i really don't know much about the historical side of things other than that they did take some liberties and that like you know kotin con was not a real guy and things like that yeah so ghost of sushi was a really interesting uh case study and historical accuracy in games because it ends up not being very accurate gotcha but it almost doesn't matter because they're not trying to sell you on a realistic depiction of the actual events of the mongol invasion of you know 1272 or 1274 or whatever um they're trying to sell you on an homage to samurai cinema and those are very different things and it ends up showing because you have all of like the showdowns and these like very dramatic like windy like kurosawa kinds of battles where all the stuff is happening which is is very accurate to the the you know the fantasy of of samurai movies but it's not trying to be a historically accurate game the you know the character of kotin kan is is made up but the way in which he acts is not uncharacteristic of a mongol warlord they weren't just these brutal conquerors they were deeply smart and always made sure to go into a new place knowing about the people they were dealing with so they could prepare a battle plan and know what to do so you know at the beginning where where kotin kan tells lord shimada like look when you were sharpening your blade this morning i was reading i was studying i was preparing for my mind for this like that kind of stuff is really historically accurate and ends up having an impact on the course of the story so that realism is so much more valuable than like oh well actually you know technically the katana didn't actually exist for another 100 years and the kind of armor that jinn is wearing that really that's like a 14-15 hundreds thing so like all of those details are just you know not at all trying to be accurate but they're trying to be accurate to the the samurai aesthetic and the samurai fantasy from kurosawa movies where it makes sense and they're trying to be accurate to the historical realism where it makes sense so the funny thing about the mongol invasion is um it it lasted like a couple days they showed up on the island of sushi ma but their ships were destroyed by a storm so they couldn't get any reinforcements and they just kind of packed up and left they fought a battle and that was it so like this whole thing of oh the mongols have taken over the island and we have to go through all this effort to get rid of them like no just wait a couple days they'll be gone they'll they'll pack up and leave like they'll leave their one star reviews they don't need to worry about it anymore um so they can accomplish a lot by picking their battles and adhering to various types of of source material where it suits them so in a way it's it's a model for the kind of thing that Assassin's Creed could do granted you know not every culture has a kurosawa like body of pop culture work to draw from but it's a great example of of doing it really really right in a way that you know not only makes me um jealous of of the gameplay of of of ghosts of sushi ma like oh this is what the new assassin's creeds are trying to be i see it now oh no they do it so much better but like in from a historical perspective of like bringing in all of these different elements and and fusing them together in a way that is so plausible but not trying to lie to you and pretend like this is what actually happened so it does so many things so well that like i'm mad about how good it is yeah it's interesting i think that between ghost of sushi ma and assassin's creed you have two very different visions of how a game can handle historical accuracy but obviously i think the thing that makes both of them work is that they have an approach and that they're doing things specifically and they're doing things on purpose like i think i read something about ghost of sushi ma like do they technically get things wrong about what was available and what existed at the time yes of course but they're all deliberate choices they're not including haikus because they think that haikus existed right right yeah it's because it's part of the audience's understanding of like this culture that's been kind of like homogenized through time into one idea of what the samurai are but the samurai were around for hundreds and hundreds of years and filled very different roles across that time do you feel like even though you know you can look at odyssey and you can see all the ways that they've done this sort of stunning recreation of a of a place and that they're all of these characters that are fairly faithfully rendered at the same time you know you have like i can come across a cyclops and shoot it in the eye and all these sort of mythological inclusions that are maybe betraying the idea of historical accuracy as a defining element of the assassin's creed games do you think that over time that historical accuracy has become less important to the developers or do you think that its role has just changed i think that in a environment of game design where you want to create bigger more complex experiences where the player can go anywhere and do anything it is a natural consequence that you lose the focus that allows you to craft a very historically grounded character so there is no basis for a character like Alexios or Cassandra you know in in Greek history in in that period of Greek history at least the the thing with like the cyclops is in the mythical characters is like the way that these creatures exist reflects the way that the Greeks thought about them so it's like yeah underneath the island of Crete there's a bull monster if you go under there into the labyrinth you'll find him so it's not exactly one to one but you know the way that the game presents the the monsters of mythology is a pretty good reflection of how the Greeks at this point in time understood their world it's like yeah there there are all these like fantastical things out there but you have to go really out of your way to find them because they're not going to be you know cyclops is running around in downtown Athens like in you know in disney's hercules or anything like that so that i actually kind of give them a pass on because even though it's like yes obviously there are no you know cyclops is if you ask someone in ancient Greece they would have told you yeah there were so that's actually where i will i'll go like fully out on you know you know my principles and say like look i i stand by that like that is that is actually meaningful historical accuracy because even though it's obviously wrong it is true to what it would have been like to be a character in that point in time interesting the the problem with with historical accuracy as we go on is that as the player gets more agency to terraform the landscape of the world it becomes so much harder to craft a focused experience for them to to be a character you know when the player is getting lost in go everywhere do everything you are all powerful no one can touch you and you know there's there's no consequences for anything the ways in which the games have gotten less bound to historical realism are much more nuanced than oh there's myths in it now because there are a lot of things that are better and worse to some degrees about how they're how they're progressing and whether you know the good outweighs the bad is is ultimately up to you fall hollow notwithstanding because we really have to see how badly they messed that one up or if it turns out to be great so i'm hopeful but not optimistic if that makes sense so i think that's a great point i think your your spot on and that's honestly that's a great way of looking at some of the mythology inclusion in in these past couple games that i hadn't really thought about um yeah me i really appreciate that something i wanted to mention was um i feel like assassin's creed more than most games run a risk of becoming just these like historical theme parks and i think a lot of people play assassin's creed for that reason they like running around renaissance alien i mean like who doesn't you know i i do and then so i do think that people who for instance like want the modern day to be dropped or that they want the assassin templar conflict to be you know watered down more like i think the people who want those things and just want to have this historical theme park to run around in what i what i don't think that they acknowledge though is i think the reason why it's so fully realized especially again like ac2 and the reason why it's so compelling to be a part of that world is because as you were saying blue is that you know you're a character that's grounded in this reality and you're a character that exists in this history yeah and so that's why you can go talk to Leonardo da Vinci and it's and it's you know it's like you're building that friendship connection like you said earlier instead of just oh let me walk around as a faceless you know character being able to you know go to the coliseum in Rome is compelling because like there's a purpose to it and there's a method to the madness and i think if it was just okay so here's Rome and you could get to create your character and and you know and it's like a like a Skyrim type deal wouldn't wouldn't be as compelling to me i think personally no i totally agree because to your point like the more that you build a theme park out of the game world and turn it into a historical fantasy rather than a historical like narrative experience is that the more of a theme park the game becomes the less room the writers are given to write a very good story and i think that we've seen that in narratives of odyssey and origins which are passable at best but really not that great when you look at just the pure narrative level where the story used to be the selling point of the ac games the irony is that in their efforts to make the game more dynamic as you said more systemic more reactive to the influences that are put on it by the player what we've actually gotten on pretty much all levels in terms of story and in terms of engagement role playing it actually becomes a remarkably static world it actually becomes not very dynamic you know the fact that i can participate in all these battles and decide the outcome of who wins all that's changing is like a progress bar in the map screen it's not changing the world in a meaningful way all of these missions that i go on to assassinate a target it's always the same fort structure that i'm doing the same stealth moves in the same air assassinations and while there's technically loads of freedom in how i approach that mission it means that all of those missions that i'm going to play through the duration of an 80 to 100 hour playthrough are all going to end up feeling largely the same yeah in in service of of making a game that's so malleable and bendable to the player's will they've made a game that's paper thin yeah and kind of flat and you know ultimately less interesting so you're totally right i don't know if people with these games will be able to have the same kind of experience that i did with ac with ac2 and brotherhood revelations where i feel like i am a part of this world and i am friends with maki god damn it you know i i feel like people aren't able to have those kinds of experiences that have been so formational to me in my interest in history that i really can't help but feel like something's been lost so you know as much as we can praise how great of a job the world's team is doing it's it's not just a matter of like oh you know the vikings aren't dressed properly you know the outfits they're wearing are kind of silly it's there's something more deep that is being given up uh in these more recent games that i feel like i've been trying to articulate this for months now in years and i've finally been able to figure it out so i'm glad i was able to be able to talk about that that's exactly how i've been feeling too in the sense that you know sure i was reading for school and i remembered that pericles died but you know when i remember blackbeard's death i also remember being sad about it when i remember pericles death yeah i remember that pericles died i don't remember like any emotional experience that i had associated with that or with the plague in general or really anything to do with the historical elements of that story so yeah luckily guys in this episode we cracked the case to why assassins creed sucks now and we figured it out sucks specifically like s u x exactly and uh i think that's probably a good place to start wrapping things up thank you so much blue for joining us it's been great to have you on and i know i've learned a ton of things that i did not know thank you for having me on this was a wonderful experience uh lawson tim i i have to express my my deepest gratitude for being able to come on and talk about ac with you guys i feel like i've uh i've been able to like draw a line between like me back then and me now it's like oh i know things that i can tell people that look smart we've changed and grown up so much uh i'll remind you guys again listening to check out hit blue's realism reviews if you haven't already and subscribe to overly sarcastic productions if you haven't already uh because it's easily one of the best channels on youtube oh you flatter me obviously guys if you like this episode we would really appreciate if you subscribe to our channel leave us a comment talk about maybe something that you experienced about history in regards to assassins creed like what are some of those those connections that you've made to your your real life and your education based on things you learn in the games because we'd love to hear those stories obviously if you enjoy the show if you have friends who like assassins creed or like history or or like three people talking on a podcast about those things you know send them a link spread the word spread the love follow us on twitter at hookblade uh you can follow uh blue on twitter at osp youtube there you go osp youtube i've been the hook i've been the blade and i've been that like dumbass pivot hidden blade thing that connor has where i stab myself in the wrist a million times and we will see you next week to talk about assassins creed three which is going to be a really long episode because tim and i both hate it a lot news one for the other