History Respawned is a show where historians consider historical video games. The series concentrates on current games, but will occasionally include classic history games as well. Join us here and on our website, www.historyrespawned.com. The show also has a podcast version available on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/historyrespawned
If you enjoy History Respawned, and want to support the show, please visit our page on Patreon: www.patreon.com/historyrespawned
History Respawned was created by Bob Whitaker, a history PhD and professor from Austin, Texas. He teaches at Collin College. You can reach Bob on Twitter @whitakeralmanac.
Bob is joined by John Harney as Associate Editor. John is Associate Professor of Asian History at Centre College. You can reach John on Twitter @profjohnharney.
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As a long-time player of historical games with a degree in history...and having just begun playing this outstanding and beautiful game yesterday...I thoroughly enjoyed this video! This is the first video I have watched featuring historians commenting from their perspectives on a video game. Liked and subscribed!
Great vid
Amazing vid
Thanks for having me on to talk about the Hajj Trail, i will hopefully have the demo of the 2D remake out by the end of this summer!
Nice to have had you both (on separate episodes) on my podcast Sociedad Gamer!
Your alive
Hope you upload some new episodes this year!
Few years late, but thank you for making these! Seriously awesome!
Really valuable to have Dr. Anderson's "peek behind the curtain" of where historical games get their history. Thanks to both of you.
Amazing video!
...this is what made AC great...these games are the closest thing to a real-life animus...and Ubisoft to Abstergo...lol...they're monetizing history!...lol...and I'll pay every time!...lol...and so will you...
Another great video, as always! Love seeing you just explore the city while interviewing an expert on the period
I just recently found your channel, and I am so confused??? Your content is _incredible_ and highly deserving of more attention!! At first I thought the views were in the hundreds of thousands, then realized it was just in the hundreds. Completely unfair! I've added you to a public playlist I have that gets a fair amount of views (it's about video essays and the like) so I hope that brings at least a few new viewers to your channel. You deserve so many more subscribers. I'm a proud new subscriber, with notifications on! I'll support your channel in any way possible, please do let me know of any other way to help 🥰🖤
Very interesting
Were you actually playing while you were talking to him? If so, do you have your mic on? It would be interesting to see COD players react to the things you were saying during the game 😂
Historians? How is this review video any different from two random gamers playing AC: Mirage?
Wow ,amazing video
Inb4 this comment section gets flooded by morons who think that a MW2&3 gun model not matching the actual weapon is WOKE and that COD used to be a serious military game before they put in Nikki Minaj.
As for the more "puzzle" like climbing, I get the appeal, but I'm not a huge fan. To me, climbing is just another part of traversal, like running or walking. I can understand certain surfaces being too smooth to climb, but otherwise I think climbing should be more freeform. The handholds looked fake to me. Now, I do like what they did in earlier games where the character animation would still look for more natural places to stick their hands and feet, even if that wasn't something it required the player to think about. Even in the bigger RPGs I do think there was an element of that, although lessened. However, the biggest thing I want is for the climbing to not just be so digital. Up/down/left/right. No, it should be more freeflowing like Unity. That's more based on the layout of the city and the type of animation that happens in the parkour, as well as things like "parkour down" a concept that we've lost that allowed for more smoother dropping from one surface to the next. Unity's parkour was interesting. If you just held the trigger, you were mostly going to go forwards, so if it was less of a difference in heigh than your knees, you could hop up or down, or make small vaults, but you'd mostly stay along the same path. However if you held one button, your character would prioritize going upwards with their next step, looking for things to jump up onto, and if you held a different button, your character would prioritize smoothly moving downwards, looking for lower platforms and things hanging off buildings that they could make smooth transitions down the side of a building without requiring that the player to awkwardly face the building while going down.
No actual discussion of history in this episode, just gameplay feature discussion/promotion.
I personally don't think it feels anything like the classic games, despite being advertised as such. Just about the only things that feel that way to me are the fact that it's in the middle east, and yeah you're part of the assassins (sort of) and there's a notoriety meter (which nobody really wanted). That's it. The parkour is just as bad as the last 3 games. The storytelling is even worse. The combat is the worst in the series. And it still has all the same bloated RPG design, just on a smaller scale map. With a smaller scale game, money should have gone to producing a much bigger focus on storytelling and improving gameplay, and just overall better production quality. AC Unity is basically a perfect example of where they should have looked. Fully performance captured cutscenes, and gorgeous parkour. And I'd recommend inspiration for combat being somewhere between AC3 and Brotherhood. When they said it was going to feel like the older games, these are the things I expected, and I was seriously underwhelmed. It just felt like a cheap DLC for Valhalla, with all procedurally animated cutscenes, and a story that is just not interesting at all. There are maybe a couple semi-interesting moments in the main part of the story, and the ending is kind of cool (although still plays it safe). Even by Assassin's Creed DLC standards, this one is weak. Although I didn't play any of the Valhalla DLC to compare it to.
Wonderful interview! Really cool to see how they continue to build on this Discovery and Codex format and make these settings even more elaborate depictions of history.
I think this is one of those game that don’t appeal to the larger population.. but those who do, obsessed about it!
The game is a pretty unrealistic portrayal of society in 9th century Baghdad.
I hear rumors of a new Kingdom Come Deliverance sequel, have you played the 1st game/will you be making content concerning the supposed sequel when it releases?
Yay!
It will be really interesting if you got an historian of the field for talking about the historical context and representation of that, because I read an article which says the ethnic minorities were depicted in a wrong way or were absent, for example Assyrians and Jews.
I was pretty bummed about the scale of the game and the lack of Discovery Tour, but I really liked the way they turned the codex entries into collectibles. I'm too ADHD for the standard menu but with the collectables I spent about half my time just reading. Picking them up as an Assassin also means you're getting extra context for missions so in a way it felt like they retooled Valhalla's DT quests for the main game. (A particularly good example is the harem) Also, Mirage is only 1 of 2(?) AC games to get a full voice track in the native language of the setting. Basim's Arabic voice is cannon for me! The increased dificulty on navigation.. almost drove me crazy. I think they mostly got it right but there are multiple missions/collectibles in large buildings that have numerous overlapping objectives and only one way in/out. About half way through I opted to sit in a bush for two days until I figured out what I was even doing. That's about the point I realized that your tools don't automatically unlock through story progression. Instead, you have to spend points to unlock the ability to unlock them, and once you do they're much more crucial to your success than I was expecting. First it was a good game, then it dragged, then it was really good and I stopped caring about it being smaller because it wasn't overstaying it's welcome. It's not the epic mainline AC I wanted but it's a very competent spinoff and probably one of my favorite endings of any game in the series.
Really looking forward to the historical analysis!!!
I kinda chuckled at the middle aged fan thing, but then I am 46, and have grown up with this series starting when it was still Prince of Persia. This new game does remind of the first AC but reminds me the most of the game in Istanbul (Revelations) which strangely enough is probably the most forgotten game of the series.
Was Baghdad city really such barren desert city like it's shown in the video game??
Why do u sound out of breath? So had to listen to you
In further collage stuff from all the previous games, that I could see: Most of the movement and animations, even in stealth, is exactly how Eivor moved in Valhalla. The non-linear infiltrations seem most like the London and Paris games. The assassin guild hideout looks like it did in the Egypt game's DLC. The nonlinear overall plot structure seems like Odyssey and the London one... I'm hyped for the history respawned with an actual expert on the period. Would love to know what characters and culture/philosophy are included. Also I'd expect more green and less dust in golden age Baghdad, but I don't actually know?
It'd be awesome if you could get an expert on to comment more on how the setting is realized and stuff!
First Assassinss Creed probably the most memorable for me. Its setting in jerusalem are dear to my heart as a Muslim
This setting of 9th century Baghdad is really great IMO. Reminds me a lot of the first game. I don't know almost anything about my heritage/ancestry, but I know that my last name (Harmadi) comes from somewhere in the Midde East. I wonder if my ancestors saw cities like the ones in AC1 and Mirage
I look forward to the new History Respawned episode more than the new Assassin's Creed game every time.
But are there toilets in the game?
Ooh! I haven't paid attention to AC in years but this really piques my interest. Love smaller scale games, I wish they would go even smaller, like Beyond Good And Evil. I hope this does really well so we see many more games going in this direction.
I'd say it's worth it to pick up Mirage, it's great to finally have parkour back and way more relevant than it has been in most other recent AC games. Also it's great that they brought the stealth aspects back into focus. The combat is serviceable enough, but it's definitely a game built around stealth first and foremost
This game was not on my radar at all until about a week ago. Now I have to get my hands on it, especially for those later games. I love these almost mueseum-esk releases of older games, such a cool way to experience them. I agree with Jon about how the nostalgic aesthetic can shape how a game is experienced. There is a program/emulator called EmuVR, where you can play old games in environments relevant to when they released, in VR, which is an insane prospect. Great video as always.
23:01 Swordquest was one of those games where video games were more like great adventures. The Angry Video Game Nerd has done a video explaining the entire history of the Swordquest competition
11:00 AC Origins had the best western media representation of Egyptians ever, coming from an Egyptian btw. The phenotypes are accurate to the Egyptian ethnic group, and many Egyptian characters actually look like modern Egyptian actors, Hepzefa looked like a family freind of mine, Bayek looked a bit like Amr Saad and so on, Origins is among the few games that did Egyptians justice representation-wise, they did not blackwash or whitewash Egypt, even NPCs have accurate Egyptian phenotypes. On the issue of race, the Egyptians, Cushitics, and Amazighs all have a common ancestor group which was a mixture of mostly Paleolithic pastoral settlers of Upper Egypt and Lower Nubia, Neolithic Levantines and Anatolians, among other later groups depending on the region, in the case of Egypt we had predynastic southern European influx and later Cushitic influx, all these groups mixed in the North and East African regions specifically Egypt, and would lay the overall genetic makeup of Ethnic Egyptians ancient and modern, so ofc they were and still are phenotypically diverse. To bring it closer to a western audience, the ancient Egyptians were multigenerationally mixed similar to modern Brazilians or Afro-latinos, they come in all colors and share a good variety in features. A country that had a ginger pharaoh (Ramses II), and a phenotypically Nilotic founder (Narmer or Mena) is by no means a "black" or "white" country. This accusation is unfair to say the least
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It's clear neither have played the game. The player isn't thrown straight into the Reign of Terror. The first big event depicted is the Estates General of 1789, then the storming of the Bastille, and then a jump forward to 1791. The guys randomly stabbing people in the streets are meant to be agitators hired by the fictional Templars, so no real need for strict accuracy here. The game also has a built in encyclopedia for further information. As for how accurate the encyclopedia or the rest of the game is, I can't say for sure. I'm not an historian, and I know for sure this game is far from perfect. But I'm not sure how useful it is to show an historian snippets of gameplay without context, instead of letting them engage with all of the historical material the game has to offer.
Wow. This video has really held up!
Qin shi Huan wide
Far Cry 2 is a good companion game to the original S.T.A.L.K.R trilogy.
My favorite Yokai is my the umbrella one. Which is sarcasm, fuck that guy in particular.
The streets are SOOO wide, it breaks the immersion for me, and it quite frankly looks ridiculous. Listen, I get wanting to make it a bit wider, but they absolutely overdid it, besides, having at least some of the streets be relatively narrow would add atmosphere to certain parts of the city.
Very nice video! Loved everything Meaghan's input about it.
Having lived on a rural Bavarian farm for nine months as a game studies scholar and having seen small-town Bavaria through the seasons, this game found me at the right time. I am loving this massively, and I think of my time spent in Bavaria fondly.