How do Assassin's Creed games encourage players to use parkour?
Assassin’s Creed or AC is a franchise built on the idea of a grounded protagonist who can free run and parkour through the environments. Encouraging players to parkour is a key gameplay goal of these games. Therefore there a lot of core design decisions that need to focus on nudging players to use parkour rather than running through the streets. This can be achieved by simply making parkour more convenient and interesting as compared to running through the streets.
I break down these core design decisions into mainly level design and encounter design decisions. Level design decisions refer to how the spaces, layouts and inanimate assets placed around the world support this parkour-first philosophy while encounter design refers to how enemies spawn, chase, capture and search for the player to encourage parkour.
Level design decisions
Below listed are the level design decisions that encourage or force players to use parkour.
- Give easy and frequent access to parkour starters.
- Hide objectives behind walls, gates.
- Some objectives should be harder to find or track from the lower ground.
- Entrances to a regular buildings are sometimes hard to find.
- Small gaps between buildings so players can move between rooftops using parkour.
- Adding fun interactable objects to parkour paths.
- Large gaps like rivers and ravines are easier to cross with parkour.
- Being able to go through buildings or structures using open windows.
- Placing chests/collectibles in spaces only accessible by parkour.
1. Give easy and frequent access to parkour starters
Objects like carts or a stack of boxes that allow the player to quickly start free running and gain access to higher ground are called parkour starters. These are placed abundantly around a particular street or a space to allow players to quickly start their parkour runs. The goal of these pieces is to reduce any inconvenience that the players may experience in a particular space while trying to start their parkour runs.
2. Hide objectives behind walls, gates
A quick and easy way to force the use of parkour is to place objectives; especially the main mission objectives; behind walls and closed gates. This decision makes sure that parkour is the only way of reaching them, essentially forcing the player’s traversal approach to parkour.
3. Some objectives are harder to find or track from the lower ground
Placing objectives far away from the player’s current location and not providing the player with a clear path of reaching the said objective can force the player to take a higher ground to map out the surrounding area.
Not just for far away objectives, but this approach also holds true if the player wants to infiltrate a well guarded palace or an outpost and needs to scout from higher ground to see where they need to go or what their mission strategy/path will be.
4. Entrances to regular buildings are sometimes hard to find
This might be more of a theming decision but there are a few instances where a simple building can have its entrance set up in such a way that is not easy to find. The most recent example of this type of setup was for bureaus in Assassin’s Creed Mirage. Looks like this was to mostly keep the location of the bureau hidden from soldiers (theming) but it also makes it harder to find the bureau for a player on the streets looking for the entrance, so they definitely need to climb up the building, find the entrance from the roof and them parkour down.
5. Small gaps between buildings so players can move between rooftops using parkour
To create a clean free-running path, gaps between building rooftops and/or parkour-able objects, need to be in jumping metric. The longer and varied this path is, the more satisfying it is for players to traverse it for as long as they can. An intentional parkouring experience can provide players with a lot of satisfaction and make them feel like an athlete and almost a superhero while going around the environment.
6. Adding fun interactable objects to parkour paths
Running through the streets is mostly boring with no fun interactions like a vault over or a slide under. Parkour gives a lot of variety and choice and interaction to players by adding branching paths and several unique object interactions like poles to vault to another building, corner lamps to take quick turns, etc. Parkouring lets players charter out their own path and create a unique experience traversing through the environment. Branching out paths on rooftops also provide a good amount of choice or agency to the player further increasing the lure of using parkour.
7. Large gaps like rivers and ravines are easier to cross with parkour
AC environments are filled with rivers and ravines and usually there are multiple bridges provided to cross these large gaps that cannot easily be jumped across. But these bridges can be far away from the player’s current location since the distances between these bridges can be considerable. In this situation it becomes more convenient for players to use the limited parkour or quick traversal opportunities provided by the designers. Zip-lines are usually used in these situations to cross a large gap in the environment that would usually be tedious to cross while using the streets.
8. Being able to go through buildings or structures using open windows
Starting from Assassin’s Creed 3, buildings started having open windows and doors. Players can use these to quickly cut through the building and get to the street in the other side thus avoiding going around the building. This approach not only saves time for the player but going in and out of indoor spaces also provides environmental variety and makes the player feel like a cool free runner. This works out especially well if the door or window opening is on higher ground and players have to climb a little to cut through and get tot he other side.
9. Placing chests/collectibles in spaces only accessible by parkour
I have already talked about hiding objectives in parkour accessible spaces in point 2. Following the same principle, designers hide majority of collectibles and chests in spaces that can only be accessed using parkour. This decision largely affects the overall game experience of AC games since a good amount of goals are based on exploration and loot/collectible finding.
Encounter design decisions
Below listed are the encounter design decisions that encourage or force players to use parkour.
- Enemies block entrances to mission spaces.
- Narrow streets that can be blocked by 2–4 enemies that are always standing by when the player tries to escape and run.
- Soldiers usually take a patrolling approach on the ground mostly assuming that the enemies will intrude from the ground level.
- Most soldiers don’t run fast enough on rooftops or cannot access certain areas without parkour.
1. Enemies block entrances to mission spaces
A classic trick AC games use to force parkour in the player is to block entrances to mission objective and collectible spaces with guards. In this situation, the player usually has two options. First, the player can either fight the guards and risk those guards calling more guards which will turn the fight sometimes into an arduous affair depending on the AC game. Second, they can avoid the guards and try to get into the blocked area by climbing a wall or jumping down from the roof of the adjacent building which is much quicker than fighting and consumes much less effort. Most players usually go for the second option so this is a great trick to use to nudge players to use parkour in the games.
2. Narrow streets that can be blocked by 2–4 enemies that are always standing by when the player tries to escape and run
This decision is more of a mix of encounter and level design but the idea is that a lot of the streets in AC games are narrow enough to be blocked by a few enemies. Designers use this setup when a player is trying to escape a bunch of enemies on their tail by running through the streets. The designers then spawn a bunch of guards on the street that the player is running on or towards, and these guards stand in a line to completely block the street, thus almost pushing players to take to the rooftops and use parkour.
3. Soldiers usually take a patrolling approach on the ground mostly assuming that the enemies will intrude from the ground level
Enemy patrol paths on the ground are designed to mostly look out for intruders from lower levels which automatically gives the advantage to any rooftop intruder. And usually the numbers of enemies on the ground are high enough to discourage the player from walking into the area without drawing any attention. So a simple consideration of how enemies move and patrol the area can encourage or discourage players from using parkour to intrude a space.
4. Most soldiers don’t run fast enough on rooftops or cannot access certain areas without parkour
Since the assassins are specially trained to parkour, soldiers are not usually as adept on the rooftops. This makes it easier for players to lose the soldiers on their tail by parkouring. There are also some areas that are only assassin reachable by intense climbing that others cannot access, which makes using parkour more lucrative for the player when escaping an area or running away from enemies.
Further resources
To get more in-depth information about parkour mentioned in this article, check out these articles and videos:
