The end credits inAssassin’s Creed Shadowsare two hours long. This is a game thatconjures up extreme emotions, with every element of it dissected and debated to death. As a result, many people who had already decided Shadows was a bad game long before it came out have decided the long credits offer proof to their point of view. While this argument is clearly paper-thin and ridiculous, there is still something to be said about this extremely long sequence, and what it means forAssassin’s Creedand modern video games.
Most of us skip the credits, so while two hours sounds long off the bat, you might be thinking ‘how long is that really?’. Well, the answer is, pretty gosh darn long folks. It’s longer than Alien and The Thing. It’s longer than Yojimbo and Rashomon, two of the best samurai movies ever made (at least, that’s how I remember it).The Last of Us Part 2andRed Dead Redemption 2, typically considered the technical peak of gaming, have credits that clock in at 16 and 34 minutes respectively.Astro Bot, which hasplayable credits followed by real credits, runs for just nine minutes total. Two hours is, as you first assumed, extremely long.
There Is A Reason Assassin’s Creed Shadows Credits Are So Long
First, there is a little bit of context here. The stylisation of Assassin’s Creed Shadows' creditsisunusual. Every person credited gets their own line with the font size unchanged throughout, unlike other credits where senior staff get this treatment and more departmental devs are credited in half-size font with a chunk of names stretched across two to five columns, or else are just credited by as ‘the staff at [insert satellite studio]’. It’s unlikely many people will watch the full two hours, but it still feels like a positive to give everyone their due.
But then, there are other caveats you could apply to other credit sequences. Red Dead Redemption 2’s is interspersed with artistic screenshots of the game, adding to the runtime. Astro Bot’s, as I already mentioned, is a fully playable level where you control the robot as he shoots out blocky names of the development staff. Shadows could have condensed the credits with a different style, but only so much. This is a game where a lot of people worked on it, and that’s not necessarily a healthy thing.
ExcludingMirageas more of a smaller spin-off, it has been five years sincethe last Assassin’s Creed game. It has launched to commercial success, sellingone million copies in its first day, but the general reception has been exactly what we expected. It’s good but not great, polished but not perfect. It’smainly getting 4/5s, which iswhere Assassin’s Creed usually sits, and a game that delivers a good time for a good chunk of time is completely fine. The problem is it took five years and so many people that two hours isn’t quite enough time to list them all, to make a game that is, by blockbuster triple-A standards, only just on the happy side of okay.
But Games Shouldn’t Take This Many People To Make
This is where the two hours become an issue. Not because it speaks to something about the politics of the game, but because it reveals the pressure on every video game being made to a high level right now. The rumblings were thatShadows needed to be a hit to save Ubisoft- if that was the case, the mission has likely been accomplished. But it increasingly feels as though every game is made under similar pressures, withlayoffs and studio closures an imminent threatover every triple-A game out there.
That’s why these long credits sequences worry me. Not because I think more names means more risk of some mythological agenda being inserted into games, but because it takes so many people to make games that come out the other end and only impress us enough that we say ‘yeah, that was alright, that’.Games are too expensive for everybody- theycost too much to make, and they already cost too much to buy before you factor ina potential GTA 6-led price rise.
These long credits show the immense amount of people (and therefore money to pay them) required to get a game off the ground. It contextualises the money lost when games flop, or are outright cancelled, and it’s scary to think that -Ubisoft’sodd decision to list them so individually aside - video games require this many hands as the norm. Itdoes not seem sustainable.
Thevideo game industry has not felt sustainable in a long while, in truth, but when you feel that way in the wake of layoffs you worry you are acting emotionally. That the obvious bad news of people losing their jobs clouds your feelings of the industry as a whole. Now, seeing two hours' worth of people make a game that’s enjoyable at best, you realise these were very rational thoughts.
