People have complained that the ending sucks, but I don't necessarily think that's true. It's just that it isn't quite handled in the most effective way possible. Desmond's "death" (if that's what it really is) lacks anything in the way of dramatic build-up or execution. The basic ideas and story beats are great, it's just that the pacing in the cutscenes feels completely rushed. Part of it is due to the cutscene editing, part of it is due to bad voice direction. But it's really unfortunate that so many interesting and
potentially affecting ideas are hurried along the way they are, as if the cutscene editor and voice directors were just trying to rush their way through a days work, rather than spending time to get the
pacing right in a cutscene.
As it is, they wrap the story up so quickly that Desmond ends up feeling like a completely throwaway character. I mean, he was never exactly the most appealing or fascinating character in the world, but after spending 5 games with this guy, I would have expected them to handle something like his
death scene with a much more careful hand.
Likewise, as I've mentioned before, Connor just isn't that great a character, which is doubley disappointing since his background as a half-British/half-Indian Assassin had such potential. I've always dreamed of playing a game where the main character is a lithe, tomahawk-weilding native warrior. And gameplay-wise, this doesn't disappoint at all (the counter-kills are excellent). But as a character, he's totally bland and lacking.
The game actually starts with you playing as his father, Haytham, who, in the words of the AC3 staff, was meant to be a sort of "dark James Bond". Thing is, they pull that idea off really well, which makes Haytham an incredibly fun and interesting character. But then you stop playing as him a fourth of the way through. And then you're stuck playing this no-personality hothead who gets angry like a teenager every five seconds. And then that angry teenager kills Haytham in one of the least climactic fights of the game.
And then you're just left thinking "fuck... I wish I would have been playing as
that guy the whole time instead."
On that note (the anti-climactic fight one), it just needs to be said that the AC development team really needs to learn how to better integrate gameplay into increasing the drama and impact of a story.
In a game where you play as an
assassin, it's totally ridiculous that the last three "marks" are all killed in cutscenes. And for two of those three, the missions involved don't feel at all like anything big and intense and "end of game-worthy"... they actually feel like some of the least-exciting ones in the entire game.
One of them involves a big, elaborate, epic-sounding plan, detailed in the preceding cutscenes... a plan which gets cut short by a cannonball and ends with you fighting a single guy while your abilities are inhibited.
And the other one involves a very short chase sequence which leads to a cutscene where the "mark" (the main villain of the game, actually) gets stabbed once and dies with little flair. Granted, it is one of the few cutscenes where the dramatic potential of the situation is properly communicated the way it should be, but it ends up feeling hollow nonetheless because there was little in the way of interactivity involved. The
player doesn't beat the big, main bad guy... the game does it for you.
It just feels like the creative team and the gameplay team weren't working together much during development. The two elements feel completely separate from eachother, which clearly isn't the right way to do things.
