It's also one in which the side Ubisoft picked is pretty clear.
We're talking about a game series whose central conceit is that an obscure Islamist sect noted mainly for murdering religious figures they disagreed with is actually a secret society acting to preserve an Enlightenment-style libertarian ethos for centuries before the Enlightenment (yet staying curiously neutral during the French Revolution!) Every design decision made in other periods shoehorns in the assumption whichever faction these ahistorically-inserted Assassins are allied to are 'good guys' who believe in freedom fighting an evil conspiracy very loosely associated with a historical Christian order, as well as assumptions like the opportunity to roleplay Vikings will sell more games than protecting Saxon homesteads (commercial pressures the author is well aware of when discussing other design decisions). I'm more surprised by the historically inaccurate weapon choices tbh.
It's clearly an article written by someone with plenty of knowledge about the actual history to share, but still reminds me of an old flatmate criticising the physics of the Simpson's Movie!
No one takes the Simpsons Movie as representative of real history, though. You absolutely do find people doing that with games in the Assassin's Creed series. Whether the developer intends that or not - and I'm sure they don't; whatever the intentions of anyone working there, Ubisoft collectively cares only for money - that it happens still makes it worthwhile for someone to criticize the work from a perspective knowledgeable of history.
> No one takes the Simpsons Movie as representative of real history, though
True, Assassin's Creed is certainly marketed as having more attention to realism than the Simpsons Movie. It's more like a Dan Brown book though: people might find the stock goodies and baddies narrative, historic/mythologic references and attention to detail with symbols and places all too believable but it's certainly possible to overanalyse design decisions which amount to stereotypical heroes in stereotyped historical settings sell better.
If one actually wanted to produce a nuanced representation of that historical timeline, it would be difficult to do so as a game based on killing large numbers of NPCs
People make the same mistake with Dan Brown books, too.
The point is that for the player character and allies to be killing large numbers of NPCs - well, killing small numbers and enslaving large numbers, more accurately - would itself constitute a nuanced representation of that period in history, this being very much what the historical viking raiders actually did. The major flaw Devereaux finds in the text is that it discards this nuance.
That Ubisoft's motivation in making the game they did is to make a lot of money, and only that, does not vitiate the value of the analysis with respect to history, both that of the 9th century CE and that of today. Devereaux makes clear enough, I think, that it's not about authorial intent, but about the meaning of the work in context - which is to say, the style of textual analysis he's using is the one that has been solidly doctrinaire for many decades now. To call this "overanalysis" seems to me to miss the point.
It's not to say anyone shouldn't enjoy the game as a game; Devereaux says right up front that he does enjoy it for its own sake, and isn't trying to detract from anyone else's enjoyment either. He's a historian knowledgeable of the period the game purports to represent, and so he analyzes it from that perspective. Anyone who does not want to partake of that perspective or that analysis is, it seems to me, at perfect liberty not to do so.
I'd say they chose pretty early in the series to show that neither side is good or later in the series even acting in good faith. I'd say somewhere after Assassins Creed 2 they tried to portray the 2 factions mostly as political factions favoring a type of rule. The insurgent/partisan/kinda communist vs the aristocratic/oligarchic. I think only in AC1 they actually portrayed the Assassins as good guys because they took the most simplistic look and even then the problem was rotting in the core of their order. Later on they increased the alien/old race bullshit which doesn't really make sense for the series as a whole and now it really just seems like they want to create an action adventure game in various settings and sprinkle some backstory on top
We're talking about a game series whose central conceit is that an obscure Islamist sect noted mainly for murdering religious figures they disagreed with is actually a secret society acting to preserve an Enlightenment-style libertarian ethos for centuries before the Enlightenment (yet staying curiously neutral during the French Revolution!) Every design decision made in other periods shoehorns in the assumption whichever faction these ahistorically-inserted Assassins are allied to are 'good guys' who believe in freedom fighting an evil conspiracy very loosely associated with a historical Christian order, as well as assumptions like the opportunity to roleplay Vikings will sell more games than protecting Saxon homesteads (commercial pressures the author is well aware of when discussing other design decisions). I'm more surprised by the historically inaccurate weapon choices tbh.
It's clearly an article written by someone with plenty of knowledge about the actual history to share, but still reminds me of an old flatmate criticising the physics of the Simpson's Movie!