Sharp Knives, Rewards and Penalties

One of the latest games in my collection is Assassins Creed. Aside from fantastic graphics it also has an intriguing story and main character.

You start out as a high ranking, officer status member of a secret society, the assassins guild sometimes during the crusades in medieval times. You are bound to the creed: don’t harm innocents, keep the guild a secret by being stealthy in appearance and action and don’t harm your fellow assassins, or something to that effect.

On your first mission you have all your powers and items even though you probably wont ever use most of them at that stage because you don’t know you have them. But the game leads you to use the most impressive ones by ways of on-screen hints.

Let’s look at the system of penalty and rewards implemented in this game:

So you break all the guild’s rules in that first mission and get demoted to novice upon return. The demotion also cost you all the coolest moves and weapons.

You are then sent on a mission and it is then that you realize how much you have been penalized, or what is yet to come in form of rewards.

Once you finish that mission and return, some of your abilities are returned and one of the extra weapons is given to you.

This cycle repeats until the (I assume, I haven’t finished the game) end of the game. All these rewards make stabbing people easier and allow you to get to places you couldn’t get to before. This is a consistent reward schedule.

Completing various sub-missions gains you rewards in form of making the completion of the main mission potentially easier and gaining experience for health level-up’s.

Your vision gets impaired if you take damage which is a penalty you want to reverse by not getting hit for a period of time. This obviously requires you to either run away or apply the more advanced techniques of stabbing or sword fighting which you have received as rewards to get the slaughter done quickly.