Marx saying "killing people and destroying property solves nothing" still makes me mad. Not just because Marx would never say a thing like that, but also game is a fucking killing spree simulator. Whole game you go into factories to liberate workers, kill templars and destroy their stuff. Why pacify Marx in a game where you kill people with your stabby-stabby mechanism?
Ubisoft are French liberals, our current equivalents to the very same backstabbing bourgie liberal-democratic bastards who made life hell for Marx's and Engels's French, German, and Italian comrades starting in 1848. Ass-Creed distorts Marx in almost the same fashion the Kautskyites and succdems did, and for the same reasons: depicting Marx advocating violent proletarian revolution and the smashing of the bourgie state as he did since 1851 is threatening to the game publisher's class interests (because there's a straight line going from Marx and Engels to Lenin), while the murder spree against the fictional Templars isn't.
i got odyssey for ten bucks and i’m looking forward to it precisely because it is far enough in the past that they can’t fuck up any history i care about
"Oh fuck, sorry about the terror, i have a reasonable excuse for this" -Marx, probably
"My turn has come, I will apologize profusely for the terror."
despite their pacifist pretensions, libs don't lack the will to violence. They just have terrible taste
Wait Marx shows up in an AC game and you work with him? What the fuck how did I not know this before?
Oh yeah because I haven't been interested in the series since you could be a pirate.
Sorry for the confusing wording - thats the last good one. I played hours of that shiz. Between the shanties and the actually fun ship combat it was a pirate game I always dreamed of.
Karl "The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.
Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production. " Marx? A pacifist?
I'd say it's a classic example of ludonarrative dissonance, I think. Violence is traditionally very conducive to quality gameplay.
The game's narrative in its core is created by, as someone else has pointed out, French liberals, so it's not surprising at all that it sends a message that's beneficial to the class of those who created it. They're not going to betray their own class by outright saying it's okay to kill the capitalist opressor. Maybe you should, you know, talk it out or something. Reach a bloodless agreement.
However, the whole Assassins' Creed series centers its gameplay loop around, well, being an Assassin, which means the way you make progress is, obviously, by killing people. So at the same time that it pushes you, as a game, to kill the templars and liberate workers, it also tries to pacify you, as a bourgie-friendly narrative. Otherwise it wouldn't be a very fun game. I mean... AC Syndicate is not exactly fun but you get the idea.
Ubisoft meddling basically. Only the Darby games can get away with actual edge.
If you want to head-canon it, you can imagine that since the animus is created by the sinister templar abstergo company they have sanitised historical figures for propaganda purposes - to that end, if you read the in-game encyclopedia entries on Marx, they're deliberately presented in a condescending dismissive way, as though written by a corporate apologist working for the 'big bad'
