Why Skill Trees are Great (but not so much in Assassin's Creed: Origins)

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*As a small disclaimer up front, I write this analysis as an Ubisoft employee. I did not work on Assassin's Creed Origins, but I have colleagues who did, and I received my copy of the game for free.

 

If there is one absolute truth about my taste in games, it's that I love a good skill tree. I've always felt like a properly implemented skill system just adds so much depth to a game, and this can manifest in a huge number of ways. So when I learned that Assassin's Creed Origins was going to have a skill tree, I was pretty interested to see where it was going to go (keeping in mind I had no experience with the series since Assassin's Creed 3, and so had not seen previous AC games' implementations of skill trees). I had visions of crafting my own personal version of Bayek, and judging by the cool and varied stuff we could see him doing in the trailers, that seemed like a pretty promising prospect. 

Unfortunately, I ended up being pretty disappointed- but we'll get to that in a minute. What I want to do right now instead, is paint a picture for you. I want to describe to you what exactly it is that goes through my head when I hear the phrase "skill tree", that gets me so excited.

The Vision

So the main thing that a good skill system does for a game, is offer the player meaningful choices. It gives the player agency to interact with the game's systems in whatever way interests them the most. This also means that they have some level of control over which systems they don't want to interact with (like say, stealth mechanics). This creates for them, a more personalized experience that is going to be at least a little bit different from that of their friends. This is important, because it creates an experience that feels like it is uniquely theirs; an experience that they had some hand in crafting through their choices.

It also introduces a new kind of challenge in that, the player now has to solve the puzzle of, which skills will solve the problems they expect to encounter in their play time. This is especially potent when skills have good synergy together, because creating powerful skill combos is just one of those things that feels great. Even when it's entirely developer intended, using one's wits to put 1 and 1 together feels like cheating the system to become super powerful. Even if power isn't the ultimate goal, having lots of interesting ways to use skills together empowers the player to feel clever, even if they are just trying to make some really weird build work, purely because that's what seems fun to them.

The result of all of this is a game that's deeper, more personal, and just all around more engaging. Players become more likely to explore the game to plumb those depths, potentially even giving the game repeat plays just for that reason. A player who is engaged in the skill system is more likely to engage in adjacent game systems, too (like say, doing sidequests to gain more skill points). Even outside of the game itself - a player's personal experiences and choices become a big part of the way they think and talk about the game. Just talk to anyone who has ever played World of Warcraft - chances are high they will lead with "oh yeah, I play an Undead Protection Warrior". 

Of course, this is all assuming it's done right...

The Reality

The unfortunate truth of Assassin's Creed Origins is that, it uses what I like to refer to as a "AAA skill tree". I'll talk about that more in a minute, but essentially it means that they have all of the basic components of a proper skill system in place, but it seemingly wasn't designed with any of the things I just mentioned in mind.

Let's start by just looking at it. It looks inoffensive, and in fact, the way it has little pathways that allow the player to hop from tree to tree is actually pretty neat! One of the things that I notice beyond that however, is that this "tree" is very broad, but not especially deep. In fact, it's more of a "skill blob" really, which is pretty representative of how it works mechanically as well.

The main issue here is that, most of these skills are just bad. Very few of them have any synergy with each other. Almost none of them enable the player to experience new or specialized play styles. Many of the skills on here are just ho-hum improvements to abilities you are already going to be using (such as +exp on assassinations). Perhaps most offensive though, are skills that, really shouldn't be skills. Such as, why do I need to invest a skill point to access simple things like the ability to meditate to pass time, or attack enemies in the air, or parry attacks (which is a core mechanic of the combat). 

In addition to all of this is the fact that, you just get a lot of skill points. Anyone who plays the game to the end is most likely going to have most of the skill tree unlocked by the time they are done. This means that you're choices aren't all that important, because just like everyone else, you're going to end up learning basically everything. You can't really specialize in anything, you can't really personalize your build; you're skill choices are actually kind of inconsequential, really. The skills deeper into the tree aren't really any better than the early skills, and so with no good reason to dive deep into the tree, you end up just kind of "oozing" around the "skill blob" picking whatever cheap skills you can grab, hoping it might one day be useful.

As you play the game you just kind of vaguely become better at being Bayek. But you never really get to choose what that actually looks like.

Where it All Went Wrong

As I mentioned earlier, Assassin's Creed Origins has a "AAA skill tree", which is the term I use for a "skill tree lite", of sorts. Basically, this is the kind of skill tree you see when a AAA developer wants to reap the benefits of having a skill tree in their game, without really committing to doing it properly. And there are a bunch of reasons to want to do this honestly; it's very common these days for a reason.

The simplest is simply that, linear progression is boring. By having a skill tree system, the player at least still gets some agency over their progression. Even if they end up in the same place as their friends, by forcing the player to choose what they want to learn, they become more engaged in the process. This can also be kind of nice a game with a lot of discrete tools and abilities to introduce over the game's duration, which is definitely true of the average Assassin's Creed game. Rather than showering the player with 7 different types of assassin's tools and 9 different melee specials at random points in the story, giving the player the ability to choose which skills to learn means they are probably more likely to ever actually use it.

I think one of the biggest reasons we see this watered down version of a skill tree though, is because a lot of games kind of don't want the players to specialize too deeply. See, the problem with specializing, is that the more of a specialist you become, the less likely you are to use tools outside of that specialization. If a player spent 50 hours leveling up their melee skills, why would they ever bother using stealth or archery? In massive productions like Assassin's Creed, this is a problem. They don't want players to feel like they are "locked" out of those options, Ubisoft spent a lot of time and energy designing them, they are some of the core systems that make the game work.

So you have a design where everything is purely additive. Bayek is a badass at level 1. Even if you never spend a single point improving your stealth, you will still be a master of stealth- because you really should be, this is Assassin's Creed.

In Conclusion

So in the end of the day, Assassin's Creed Origins had a pretty boring skill system, but it's not really all that surprising. I had visions of becoming a master of the Khopesh and riding my camel into battle, but Ubisoft had other things in mind. They have their reasons for doing so, and I do think it's very difficult to commit to the kind of skill system that my heart desires, especially when the project is so massive. In reality, most of the RPG elements in Origins were pretty underwhelming if you ask me, but I have hope that part of this was also just Ubisoft as a company still learning how to really apply those RPG systems to the Assassin's Creed franchise.

What's more, as I write this, we are about 3 months from the release of the followup, Assassin's Creed Odyssey, and from what I have seen, it looks like they are taking a lot of those learnings to heart. I have some hopes for what I've seen of the skill system in that game. We see a much smaller number of skills, and trees that are much taller than they are wide. In addition, the skill descriptions we can see refer to things like "Hunter/Warrior/Assassin damage" , suggesting that if nothing else, there is at least a stat creating more separation between the 3 play styles.

Here's hoping!