Gaming Case Study: Assassins Creed Liberations

Assassins Creed Liberations is a role playing rpg game that was released on the PS Vita in 2012, and the PS3 in 2014. The game was created by ubisoft and was a side game in the franchise. It was released on the same day that assassins creed 3 was released on PS3. This was done to try and lure people into buying the game on both consoles. In the game, you play as Aveline, a female assassin who's goal is to free her people from Spanish slave masters who invade. The game is set in New Orleans in the 1700's. Aveline has the ability to control 3 personas: the assassin, slave and lady, each with their own skills and traits. The assassin is a skilled fighter who is able yo move swiftly with ease and eliminate targets efficiently. The slave is a character that can go undercover and cause riots and such by using the others slaves as scapegoats of some sort and causing riots and rallies. The final persona is the lady, a character who is described as not being a very skilled fighter in the slightest but uses her looks to seduce targets and gain entry into places other personas could not. This character has some social issues surrounding it as it takes the female and makes her suddenly unable to fight well because she's a lady. It makes her seem like more of a sex object rather than an actual assassin. This character is socially complex and nowadays, this character would gain massive amount of criticism and hate due. However, due to the New Orleans setting and fact that the world is based in the 1700's makes this seem more acceptable as that was a common perception of a lady in those times. The controls of the game are similar to most other Assassin Creed games. It uses a similar format and doesn't attempt to drift away from what made the franchise famous in the 1st place. The games multiplayer function was not received well. Rather than having other players online control assassins in an attempt to eliminate others online, the game has you pick a side of a war and makes you deploy troops in that area to try win it for your clan.

Assassins Creed is created by Ubisoft, a gaming company that is known for creating games such as Far Cry, Just Dance and Tom Clancy's. The company is French, based in Rennes and are the 4th biggest gaming company in the world. The game was 1st release in October 2007 on the PS3. The franchise puts assassins, who fight for freedom and free will against the Templars, who attempt to create peace by controlling humanity. The game uses real world settings and events, and adds its own historical fiction to it, keeping a sense of realism in the game.  The game was advertised using trailers and billboards. The game has the main selling point that it was an exclusive to the PS Vita and added a new and portable way to play the game. This was advertised as apart of a bundle with a PS Vita along with it. The games focus was on the new setting and the fact that it stayed true to what made the franchise such a success in the 1st place, and was able to adapt and add new content to the game avoiding staleness.

The game sold relatively well. With around 4.6 million people owning a PS Vita at the time, the game sold 600,000 copies. This shows that the game was able to draw interest and make people want to try the new console. The game developers took to their forums and social media to gain opinions and views of the PS Vita version of the game, and took this advice and applied it to the PS3 release. The main criticisms were the lacklustre  multiplayer content and the story which commonly drifted in and out of the game itself, often getting lost in the mix. The positives from the game were that they made New Orleans look aesthetically stunning and made the consumer feel as if they were apart of the timeline with the avatar. This links into the idea of fandom, where fans have an overriding sense of control over the developers and are invested in the product so much that they have an influence on the product in future.

You could apply the theory of Albert Bandura and the Bobo doll experiment. This experiment looked into the idea that children learn through what they see. This was shown when a man beat up a doll, then sent kids into the same situation once they saw him beat the doll up. The kids starting to copy           the mans movements and actions and beat up the prone doll. This idea is used to try and criticise the rise and success of the games by the news and other forms of media. They put  the image into the mind of the public that kids are becoming more violent and more aggressive thanks to the content of games. In disagreement with this idea, the fact that the game is set in a older world and uses weapons that most kids can't fathom getting their hands on, the idea that they are getting more violent thanks to them is ridiculous. The line between fiction and reality is drawn very clearly in this game and is not crossed by your younger consumer thanks to the art of the game.