User blog:Abelzorus Prime/White Room Return!

The point of UNITY was to relaunch the Franchise and update some of the gimmicks. A good idea in theory and I like some of the stuff, As for the old white-room conversations, on one hand I like some of the flashbacks but the game kind of proves why those Templar Deathbed Conversations were so important. It fulfilled a certain function which the deathbed flashbacks don't do at all.

In Assassin's Creed, the point of those conversations wasn't necessarily to advance the plot or spell out a cool plot twist. Its about humanizing the targets and making Altair question his work, provide him a different perspective and the like. In Assassin's Creed II and Ezio games, they made the conversations briefer and shorter but the point is to give the villain a theatrical dying scene and stage exit, to make each target memorable and unique. AC3 took it even further than that, going back to Assassin's Creed style and same with Black Flag. The thing is Assassins are supposed to question their goals and feel the weight of every target they attack and kill. The deathbed conversations don't necessarily provide plot information except in rare instances. In Unity, the game is largely a kind of murder mystery where Arno finds each target and the dying memories further the plot forward, this means that most of the targets are fairly disposable and don't get their moment in the sun. Like Marie Levesque for instance or the Roi des Thunes, or Sivert. You kind of get humanizaing points in the flashbacks for Le Peletier, La Touche and Frederic Roulle but mostly they are made to look like fools and puppets whereas in the earlier games, every Templar had his or her reason for being a Templar and remaining one and you understood that. I always saw the deathbed conversations as poetic, that is something that shouldn't be overly explained but accepted as a convention that provided an emotional payoff. Unity gives an in-Universe explanation and logic, they are part of the Eagle Sense's ability to commune with a person's dying consciousness. Now I always did suspect that but it kind of loses effect if its explained that baldly and that explanation kind of opens weird tangents. The explanations fans came up with for the Animus Death Chats were better and more meaningful than anything they came up with. I don't want no f**king telepathic Assassin this isn't X-Men.

Like when Arno tells the Assassin Council that he read his mind, they all react as if its totally normal and that makes it really funny. I mean what-the-hell. And you know its a nice joke, Arno is an Assassin investigating and interrogating Templars is...kill suspects and read their minds for clues. If you write it down like it, Arno sounds a lot like a serial killer who attacked people because he had hallucinatory experiences when he kills people, and you wonder how much of what we see in Unity is Arno's crazy mind rationalizing his actions and how much they are actually "communing in the afterlife". I just think the White Rooms should return.