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are you ready to give up who you once thought you were I am ready to sacrifice everything you held
close I am are you ready to leave your life behind and walk the path of Shadows I am oh oh my that's
um this I just got some work done so I could have Eagle Vision like you guys that is not what that
means oh God back into the darkness and get out of here oh where's my bucket oh man John this rabbit
hello Internet welcome to Game Theory the show that has an eagle eye for detail loyal theorists
after two years it's finally time to take a leap of faith back into the world of Assassin's Creed
specifically with their newest game and our sponsor for today's episode Assassin's Creed
Mirage releasing later this year on October 12th now despite Mirage being the newest game in the
franchise it really promises to be a return to the Simplicity of the older games and what made
the AC franchise so unique an emphasis on stealth on hiding in plain sight on taking out targets and
then Vanishing before anyone knows that you're there that's what Assassin's Creed Mirage is
offering it's got a Back to Basics Vibe going on focusing on the iconic gameplay that defined the
franchise for 15 years shop fingers and all but while these features may feel old school the city
of Baghdad that you're tasked with navigating in the new game is anything but it feels alive
smarter more real with NPCs reacting to every small thing you do as you navigate through the
maze-like structures of the round City but obviously when you're talking about a bigger
smarter more reactive you're also talking about a need for a smarter faster more stealthy class
of assassin in other words you're gonna have to be relying on your training a lot specifically
one of the Mainstays of the franchise Eagle Vision that's the skill that makes the screen
go black and white and then lets you find your target regardless of what's in your way it also
helps with locating hiding spots key items even Clues to help with investigations this ability
is so iconic that after it was introduced in the original Assassin's Creed practically every other
game franchise decided it needed its own version and you know that for every iconic game ability
there's always the same old school game theory question is it possible is it possible for real
life humans to have something remotely close to an Assassin's Eagle Vision if I'm down at my local
Best Buy during a Black Friday sale could I hone my senses enough to track the single PS5 that got
buried in the chaos Hold On Tight loyal theorists as we take a leap of faith from the Tower of video
game logic to land nestled in the haystack of science let's just hope my calculations were
wrong about that Landing first off we should probably establish what exactly we're talking
about out today because when you look across the history of the series eaglevision has actually
had two separate forms the first is exactly what it sounds like Eagle Vision literally the eyes of
eagles in games that show the earliest days of the Assassins like Assassin's Creed Origins and
odyssey we see our main characters using physical Eagles in order to scope out their surroundings
and find their targets and this makes a lot of sense because Eagles have incredible Vision their
eyes are actually the same size as the humans despite how small their bodies and brains are
relative to us but the key difference is actually in the back of their eyes it's not rounded instead
it's flat which gives them incredible resolution and Clarity you've probably heard that humans
with good eyesight have 20 20 Vision rights well Eagles can have up to 24 Vision allowing them to
spot prey that's three kilometers or two miles away two miles away plus their eye muscles are
able to adjust while they're swooping in for an attack constantly changing the curvature of the
eyes in order to keep their focus on the target it is awesome and humans have been using this
literal bird's eye view to their advantage for Millennia falconry is the ancient practice of
training Eagles Falcons and other birds of prey for hunting purposes although the origins of
falconry are unclear it's believed to have started back in ancient Mesopotamia around 4 000 BC from
there it spread to other parts of the world including Egypt Rome and Greece exactly where
he saw it being used in both Origins and odyssey however I think we can all agree that training an
eagle to signal to you and having literal Eagle Vision in your head as we see it in the games are
not quite the same thing so what is Eagle Vision the real Eagle Vision the one that helped make
this franchise famous in the first place well just like with real-life Eagles it allows an assassin
to focus on and track their prey however rather than blurring the rest of your vision and focusing
on one thing it instead turns the world grayscale and highlights targets with a bright shining gold
enemies in red allies in blue and important items like hiding spots in White in short Eagle Vision
when you break it down isn't really Vision at all it's more of a sensation A vibe a feeling and this
is outright confirmed in the audiobook Assassin's Creed gold where we hear the story of an assassin
that's born blind but still able to use his Eagle Vision to see so really Eagle Vision functions
less like traditional sight and more like a sixth sense and this is exactly how it's talked about in
the games an Assassin's Creed Odyssey Cassandra's Eagle Vision her gift is described by Poseidon
like this humans have five senses to understand the world around them we have been blessed a sixth
knowledge the other interesting thing about Eagle Vision is that even though it's genetic it can
also be taught and honed in the lore of the games those like Poseidon who claim to have the true
form of this Sixth Sense aren't Supernatural Gods instead they're a race known as the ISU eventually
the ISU mate with neanderthals given rise to the first humans Adam and Eve thanks to this
hybridization Adam and Eve gained The Sixth Sense knowledge or Eagle Vision from their ISU genetics
and as such All Humans now have the ability to access it buried deep down within their DNA it's
just that certain people are more attuned to this skill than others due to the higher concentrations
of ISU DNA floating around their bodies in Assassin's Creed Syndicate for instance we
meet the characters Evie and Jacob who are late comers to Eagle Vision learning how to use it in
their 20s meanwhile for characters like Altair Ezio and Edward they're highly sensitive to it
Eagle Vision is their natural gift in fact Ezio took it one step further he honed his skill to the
point that it became known as Eagle sense allowing him to detect the heartbeat of his Target even
predicting a target's path so knowing all of that what even is Eagle Vision then what is the Sixth
Sense well if it's not based on site maybe it's based on another sense like hearing maybe it's
something more akin to echolocation where you can form a mental picture of your surroundings using
sound believe it or not but echolocation actually comes in two different flavors active echolocation
which is done by emitting your own sounds kind of like how bats do it and passive echolocation where
you passively listen to sounds in the environment around you in both instances you're listening for
information like how long it took the sound to Echo back to you and how loud it was when it did
get back to you all of that helps you determine where objects are in the world around you it's a
process sort of similar to what we see with the superhero Daredevil but this isn't just a comic
book superpower this is something actual humans can learn to do turns out echolocation has nothing
to do with having better hearing the people that have been studied using echolocation may only be
figuring out their surroundings through hearing but brain scans show that they're not using the
parts of the brain typically associated with sound instead they're processing the sound with a part
of the brain responsible for vision literally creating visuals for the person to see and the
coolest part much like kid talked about this is a trained skill an experiment in 2020 21 taught 12
legally blind participants and 14 sighted people to navigate through mazes using echolocation
it took them only 10 weeks the results showed that even those with 2020 Vision were just as
proficient with learning to echolocate as those who were legally blind but for as awesome of a
human ability as that is there's just a few things wrong with it as applies to Assassin's Creed first
we never hear the Assassins making any sort of noise humming clicking nothing so that kind of
rules out any form of active echolocation and in order to make passive echolocation possible an
animal has to evolve special features larger ears to capture more sound specialized hair cells to
pick up the sound and convert it to electrical signals to the brain since our assassins don't
tend to have themselves large hairy ears I think we're safe to rule all these options
out but what if Eagle Vision is indeed a special sixth sense like Poseidon calls out but believe
it or not but we already have ourselves a sixth sense yeah I know Elementary School lied to you
humans don't just have five senses in fact we're not even limited to just six in reality we have
a whopping seven senses and no none of them are seeing ghosts nope these other two secret senses
that no one wants you to know about are called the vestibular sense and proprioception the vestibular
system is the perception of our body in relation to gravity movement and balance it measures things
like acceleration G-Force body movements and head position for example it's thanks to our vestibular
sense that you know that you're moving when you're in an elevator despite the fact that our eyes are
seeing ourselves as staying stationary your vestibular sense is also what helps you walk
across a balance beam basically our assassins are using their vestibular senses all the times they
parkour their way through insert ancient city here the seventh sense proprioception has to do
with perceiving the location movements and actions of different parts of your body for an example of
this close your eyes right now trust me I promise there won't be any jump scares while we do this as
closed great now with your eyes closed clap your hands together it was easy right you knew exactly
where your hands were despite your sight being obscured that right there that is proprioception
alright you can open your eyes now what it's been sitting there the whole time it's not my fault
that you jump scared yourself proprioception is also what tells your brain and muscles how much
strength you need to apply to Any Given action like climbing a wall pushing things out out of
your way or cutting through a man's jugular and the best part is we all have the senses and some
have them better than others just like what we saw in the games with regards to Eagle Vision
every man and woman on this Earth has in them a kind of intuition hidden deep away most never find
that others it takes years to tease out but for a rare few it comes As Natural as breed and except
yet again there's one piece of the puzzle that doesn't fit despite the fact that proprioception
and the vestibular system exist and act like six senses and despite the fact that they're
natural but can be enhanced with practice one thing still doesn't sit right proprioception
is specifically about how we interpret our body's position within the world around us not how we're
interpreting others in the world around us same thing with the vestibular senses they're more
about movement and balance of ourselves and not so much sensing anything in the world around us
in that previous clip I just played kid mentions that most people never find their knowledge they
never find their ego vision and that quite frankly just isn't true for most humans as it relates to
these two very basic senses so what else could it be kind of feels like we're running out of
options I mean how many extra senses do I need to be pulling out of the human anatomy hat in order
to explain away this obviously gameplay-centric mechanic but then as I was re-watching scenes to
see if there was anything I was missing I noticed this in Assassin's Creed 4 Edward Kenway describes
his Eagle Vision like this it's like using every sense at once isn't it to see sounds and hear
shapes are the combination and that's when it hit me I've been looking at this all wrong the
reason they call it a sixth sense isn't because it's literally a sixth sense but a combination of
all the senses allowing us to see things that we shouldn't be able to see and hear things that we
shouldn't be able to hear and once I realized that I knew that there was one thing that could truly
account for real life Eagle Vision synesthesia synesthesia is where the brain mixes up the usual
senses that we've talked about and allows people to do exactly what Edward Kenway suggested hear
colors See sounds some can even overlap multiple Senses at once the most common version of this is
when a person hears a specific sound but sees a specific color what's essentially Happening Here
is much like how echolocation was activating the visual centers of the brain synesthesia
is doing the exact same thing but taking it a step for further by applying it across all the
senses like when you smell something instead of neurons activating in a part of your brain
responsible for smell it's instead activating the part responsible for feeling and touch you
are sensing things that aren't technically there like what we see with Eagle Vision we
see different people in different colors gold for a Target red for an enemy white for a safe place
which is one of the many ways that synesthesia Works associating visual things like colors with
specific sounds smells and textures you might not see the safe Haystack to hide in but you can smell
it in the air and your brain translates that into a white light in your vision directing you to it
and while synesthesia hasn't yet been proven to be genetic Studies have shown that it tends to
be more prevalent in first degree relatives just like what we see in Assassin's Creed
Odyssey we are able to build something around us that is our family's gift it's also worth
noting that synesthesia functions differently in different people and at varying levels of
effect this is very similar to what we see of Eagle Vision in the games with each new
character having different levels of use as well as variations on the specific abilities
that Eagle Vision allows for pay them Kenway for instance was unable to track his targets using
Eagle Vision but both his father and his son could during the French Revolution there were actually
three variations of Eagle Vision ranging from a quick burst all the way to being able to see
through the eyes of other assassins not only that but just like every human in the game has Eagle
Vision DNA inside of them to different levels the same is starting to be hypothesized for
synesthesia in humans the neonatal synesthesia hypothesis suggests that all humans are born
with synesthesia because our neural Pathways and sensory outputs are all interlinked by the time
we get to eight months old most people's brains have lost those interconnections resulting in the
seven separate main senses that we have today if you have synesthesia as an adult then you never
lost those extra neural Pathways however a handful of small Studies have been done to see see whether
or not humans can rebuild those lost Pathways and the results are surprisingly positive while
the training to accomplish this was extremely rigorous the results did show that people that
identified as non-synesthetic at the beginning of the testing did show brain activity similar
to those that do identify as synesthetic after the test was complete now these are very small
studies right now but if science carries on this line of thinking there's a chance
that everyone will be able to use synesthesia in their adult lives and the benefits of that could
actually be huge synesthesia has been shown to greatly improve memory especially when it comes
to musical literary or colorful stimuli and we all know how important memory is for Assassin's
Creed games you ain't gonna be able to search through your ancestors memory if they can't
remember what they had for breakfast so there you have it my eagle-eyed theorists the truth
behind our sixth and seventh senses and how they can all combine and remix together to form what
Poseidon calls knowledge a way to taste color see a sound listen to a smell but hey one final
thank you to Ubisoft for sponsoring today's episode I gotta say it was really fun getting
to go back to the franchise's roots the newest game Mirage is promising to fill you up on all
that Nostalgia by taking us Back to Basics as we play as newcomer Basin who is honing his unique
abilities some tells me that we're going to be getting some more classic Eagle Vision and now
armed with the knowledge of today's episode maybe you'll look at the game and the world
a little bit differently so head on down to the description and click the link to pre-order the
game for yourself and as always remember it's all just a theory okay Game Theory thanks for watching