In my opinion Rockstar suffers from it too. This isn’t even a problem unique to Ubisoft. I’ve heard very similar things about Far Cry 4. It’s just also chock full of uninteresting linear shooting missions. Similarly, Far Cry 3 is a pretty cool open-world exploration game with a loop involving stealth gunfights and surviving vicious animals. I’m not playing another Creed game with tailing missions in it. I just wish it didn’t have this pesky main quest full of tailing missions. It’s simple, and probably unecessarily violent, but man is it a fun combination of sandbox gameplay and an extremely serious theme for a video game to tackle. Then you go out and raid slave ships on some Amistad-type business. You do all this with a machete, to the tune of what sounds like the music from Hotel Rwanda. Literally every five minutes you’ll encounter an escaped slave running away from an overseer you can casually cut apart on your way somewhere. You walk right up to slave auctions and butcher the auctioneers in front of crowds of prospective buyers to free those slaves. I was shocked by how brazenly this game has you go into plantations and outright slaughter the overseers to free the salves. The song at the beginning of that video is a pretty good summary of what you do in this game, and should have been its sole sea shanty. Freedom Cry is another typical mini Creed game that contains a surprisingly fun Django Unchained and Catcher Freeman simulator. In my previous post I already talked about how Black Flag is another typical Creed game that happens to contain a really good Caribbean pirate simulator.

But then Ubisoft always feels the need to bury that fun, unique sandbox game inside the most boring, tried-and-true AAA corridor imaginable. They even manage to be pretty unique from game to game. The ironic thing is, in Ubisoft’s obsession with open-world games, every time it makes one it seesm to actually come up with a pretty fun sandbox gameplay loop. I just followed up Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag with its Freedom Cry expansion, and I see the same problem in it I saw in the base game. Of course sandbox games can have good main missions, but in a great many of them, main missions seem to actually detract from the central appeal of the game. Yeah this is a brazen question to ask and it is partly to draw attention, but it get’s at the conflict I’ve been seeing in many open-world games made over the last few years, mainly action sandbox games in the Grand Theft Auto tradition.

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