Saturday Morning Gaming: The Railroad Trick

There’s an old trick in action/adventure video games that goes something like this:

1. Tell player that there is an area that is off limits until a particular threshold is met
2. Have player meet this particular threshold
3. Have a cutscene that puts the player in a different, inescapable, area for a scene or three
4. Laugh

What Assassin’s Creed III just did to me was this:

Tell me that I had a bunch of stuff to do in New York
Took me to Philadelphia to watch the signing of the Declaration of Independence
Took me to New York and my mission was to get on a horse and follow my guide to downtown, passing by a lot of stuff that I wanted to do
Had me get off the horse
Put me in a cutscene where I get beaten up and knocked out and had me wake up in jail
Had me do the jail missions
Once out of jail, it put me back in the role of Desmond and I had to do some stuff in Brazil at a UFC fight
And only *AFTER* this mission was done, did it let me go to New York

There’s even a trope for this: Cutscene Incompetence

Your character can withstand a shotgun to the chest, can fight off a dozen men with rifles and bayonets, and has fought bears in hand-to-hand combat and won…

And a cop with a truncheon just walks up behind him and hits him on the noggin and that’s that.

And it really bugs me when games pull that on you.

So… what are you playing?

(Featured Image is the title card of Assassin’s Creed III. All screenshots taken by the author.)