The Thread where I air my grievances with the Assassins' Creed series SPOILERS EVERYWHERE

[Dalisclock]

Moved from the Hot Takes thread to keep from clogging it up.

As many of you know, I like this series. Or at least, I used to. For numerous reasons, the stupid sci-fi mixed with lots of histocial stabbity stabbity and the occasional Naval Combat simulation, just appealed to me in a way that no other series really could and I rode that train from the beginning, and I fell off a few times, only to go back, catch up, and then repeat the process once or twice.

But now I'm done with it, and like any love-hate relationship, the best part of it is trash talking my former love on the internet(Note: This is not condoning harassing real people on the internet because of a bad breakup or any other reason. PLEASE DON'T DO THAT). With that in mind, Unmarked spoilers for much of the Assassins' Creed Series.

So the hottest take of all, this series started strong with a great premise(though the first game was a bit overlong and clunkly at times) and basically lost it's way. It looked like it might have fixed itself a couple years ago but nope, it's lost in the wilderness again and I have no faith it'll ever figure out how to make it compelling at this point without a full reboot.

The inherent problem of course is that the series started with the idea the Templars rule the world secretly, the assasins, who act as "Organized" resistance to them, are scattered and in hiding and the Templars are trying to use Desmond, an apparent nobody, to delve into his ancestries using a time machine but not really, to find magical mcguffins hidden throughout the world and basically the cornerstones of our myths and legends so they can...rule the world more. With Mind Control, even though they don't need it. In the meantime, the Assassins' want to use the animus to find those McGuffins before the templars do so they can, well, stop them from having them and also train Desmond to be an assassin by giving him years of training in days.

And that's a great fucking premise. The problem is ,they pretty much lost track of that premise after like 2 fucking games. By AC Brotherhood, the story is "Use animus to find magical thingy #5". There's the threat of a Templar Satellite launch in the background and this never goes anywhere. Even up to AC3 they're still talking about it and then you find out in an e-mail that the launch was scrubbed. I imagined at some point Desmond was actually going to use his super assasin skills to scale the rocket under a time limit in order to prevent the apple being launched into orbit in AC3 because it felt like that's where this was supposed to be leading, but nope, you get an email and that's that.

And here you run into a number of other problems. They introduce the solar flare in AC2 or AC Brotherhood(I forget which off the top of my head) and tie it to the 2012 date, because of course they do. Yes, this was hinted in the first game when you see the blood stains at the end but it's very vague until like a couple games down the line. Then you start getting this background on the ISU(the ones who came before) which shows them as being hyper advanced to the point of absurdity but also incredibly fucking dumb and incapable of saving their own skins. AC3 gives you a bunch of little movies about how they tried to save their asses and all of them are basically magic but also completely ineffective because...of course they are. "We could build an energy shield ,but it wouldn't be finished in time. We can't even protect a single city with it" "We can upload ourselves to information storage but then we have to wait for someone else to get us out and need an internet to transfer over to and.....then someone needs to build us a body to download back into and..." And "We could mind control humans to make them magic shit into existence by wishing the same thing all at once so we told them "SAVE US" and......seriously, this this is fucking bananas and smacks of the writing of a 10 year old who read their first Sci-fi book. There's also the Sage thing that I'm not even gonna go into here because it's dumb but is the longest lived dumb plot thread.

Oh, and to make it better, the Templars apparently never get a fucking hint the world is going to be melted to fucking glass by a solar flare, because there's no evidence of them ever talking about it beforehand or that they expected it, despite doing far and way the most research into the ISU stuff. And considering they control the world, you'd think THAT would be far more important to them then anything else and they'd do everything in their damn power to prevent it, because you don't want to break what you control. Nope, never fucking addressed. After 3, the Templars showed up and collected Desmonds corpse to mine for memory material and even in later games STILL don't mention "Oh, the assassins' saved our buts and were right all along on this, at this on this topic"

Here's where I get to talk about Juno. At the end of AC3, Desmond gets the choice to A.) let the solar flare hit and wipe out 90% of the world, creating a free but primitives blank state but one which eventually use him as a legendary figure for violence and oppression in his name or B.) Stop the flare, sacrifice his life and let Juno out of the ancient computer onto the Internet. Of course Desmond chooses B, and Juno is set up as the Arc Villian of the next few games, trying to get a body with help of a cult following her and some parts of Abstergo helping her. And the games following AC3 seem to be setting up her return. Except it doesn't end up mattering because Ubisoft resolved her return in a comic. She gets a new body(courtesy of one of the magical bits and some ISU DNA that they found) and then Desmonds Son(who he had with a hooker or something) shows up and stabs her because, sure why not? Who cares?

Ubisoft didn't because they never really mention it again in the games(so if you didn't read the comics that whole thing is left fucking hanging forever) and then they started making games about Layla and building up to another Calamity(because the big shield they turned on in AC3 to save the earth from the solar flare never turned off and that's bad apparently).

It all smacks of "We make these games yearly to make more money" and give no shits about where if anywhere this is going. Which is why the historical bits can work as their own stories but the overarching plot just never seems to fucking matter because ubisoft can't seem to bring themselves to properly construct plot arcs across multiple games that actually conclude and then a new plot arc follows from that. Or find a way to make the link between the history stuff tie into the present stuff in a compelling and interesting way besides "Find magical ISU doohicky #17 for reasons". There's creative sterility here where any hope of making compelling or interesting fiction takes a backseat to annual earnings and even though they'll be making this shit forever, god forbid we use that freedom from the threat of cancelation to build something compelling.

I mean, I could go on forever but I'll stop here. On my next post, I'll actually dive into individual games and pick them apart for your reading pleasure.

 

[Dalisclock]

With that out of the way, time to rip on the first game where all of this began. Bear in mind I haven't played the game since it first came out and watched a Story LP a couple years back to remind myself of the major plot points so I might be missing something really obvious or getting some details wrong.

Assasins Creed is a good idea hampered by somewhat clumsy execution in actual gameplay. Altair is kinda bleh and strangely lifeless as an actual character. Placing it during the Crusades in the Holy Land is fine, but there's not much to actually do there other then take out each of your targets of Notable Templars, and before that you need to do some fucking busywork before the game lets you actually approach the targets, which IIRC wasn't particularly interesting.

Yeah, there's some flag collecting and a bunch of extra templars to find and murder around the cities but those don't actually do anything but give the completionists something to do outside the main story.

The modern day bits of the story involve desmond, newly introduced, stuck in a big white room to either look around, go to bed and get stuck into the animus sections. Also, you can occasionally play with the nearby computer to find out that the outside world sucks a lot(Apparently the Brazilian Rainforest is gone, Mexico is shutting the borders to keep American Immigrants out and Hurricane season has ceased to a thing because hurricanes constantly bombard the east coast). Later games would retcon this into disinformation from a hacker group who occasionally get mentioned in the lore materials but it felt very sincere at the time(and since you couldn't leave the room and nobody mentions it, you assume it's correct). Near the end, you see a big projected map of the earth from the apple of eden and Vidic mentions "Some of those landmasses no long exist" or something to that effect, which is disturbing considering it's an accurate projection from our POV. This is never mentioned again, BTW, even when we see that map in later games and makes it feel like that plot point got changed along the way somwhere.

Anyway, these bits get a bit awkward, mostly because it's a way to exposit to desmond(and the player) how all of this shit is supposed to work about the animus and the templars and such. Interestingly, it allows the devs to shoehorn in a big handwave about all the historical inaccuracies in the series that the animus is always right(except in places where it's clearly noted to be wrong, glitchy or things have been purposefully altered). And oh man will this series abuse the shit out of that conceit as it goes on.


Of course the big issue with this is that Desmond, like Altair, is very flat and uninteresting, which maybe was supposed to draw more attention to the historical meat of the game but since we have to keep coming to desmond every so often it basically makes these parts feel boring. And it so doesn't help that when the main game is done, you get left alone with the room with little to do but look at the big mural of cryptic symbols in your bedroom(yeah, try explaining just how that was made with such detail), a grand majority of which never ended up meaning anything to the series as a whole but hey it looked cool at the time and surely the writers for later games could figure out SOMETHING to do with it.

Desmond eventually does get a fair bit of actual character development in Revelations and 3, but that's 3 and 4 games down the line respectively and that's way too fucking late to be giving your main character a backstory. And worse then that, his backstory in Revelations is locked behind doing the 1st person platforming missions that you have to collect animus dodads or whatever to access and that's just BS. Its a damn shame, because his backstory isn't bad at all, but ubisoft didn't think it was fucking important for you to empathize with desmond or something like that.

 

[Bob_McMillan]

The earliest AC game I played was 3, because at the time 1 and 2 just looked too dated for me. And as such, I really give no shits at all about the plot or the characters from the future. Hell, I barely even give a shit about the historical plot. I don't disagree with you of course, but I never cared enough to be riled up by the flaws.

The appeal of AC has always been the gameplay for me. The stealth and the combat getting boring easily, but I just love freerunning around that much. So when the series started to focus on the combat, easily the worst aspect of the games, and ignored the stealth and freerunning, they lost me. In my opinion, the last few games look genuinely terrible. Not graphically, but everything else. The animations, the sound effects, the UI. I was actually immersed when I was sailing the seven seas, or parkouring through Paris. When Valhalla gameplay came out, I thought if you squinted, it looked like a knockoff For Honor. It just looks so... game-y.

 

[meiam]

I never saw the modern part of assassin creed as important, to me they were essentially just the crypt keeper bit of tales from the crypt, just a bit of window dressing to make a series out of a bunch of unconnected game taking place in interesting historical location. So ubisoft just abandoning it doesn't bother me, I think from their point of view it doesn't make any sense to make a real story out of them because they know some people will skip some of the game, like I have 0 interest in victoria england so I skipped that one, if every game had some really important story detail then most people would be lost along the way.

Plus I think the recent one are pretty good (but way too fucking big, I was burned out by the mid point in odyssey). My biggest complain is that the gameplay isn't thigh enough and there's way too much loot when 95% of it is just vendor trash

 

[gorfias]

I stink at games, much as I love them. AC Odyssey has a killer chasing me that is more powerful than me to begin with. I just started and really like the game but now can't get past this guy. So I got frustrated and quit. Got to look out there for some cheat codes and trainers, at least for the ones I have on PC. So much is so fun and beautful early on. I wish the game would let me progress further and enjoy it. I mean, I paid for the thing. Don't they want happy customers? And have a nightmare difficulty mode for them that want one.

 

[Dalisclock]

I never saw the modern part of assassin creed as important, to me they were essentially just the crypt keeper bit of tales from the crypt, just a bit of window dressing to make a series out of a bunch of unconnected game taking place in interesting historical location. So ubisoft just abandoning it doesn't bother me, I think from their point of view it doesn't make any sense to make a real story out of them because they know some people will skip some of the game, like I have 0 interest in victoria england so I skipped that one, if every game had some really important story detail then most people would be lost along the way.

The modern parts have never really been important but they keep being part of the game anyway. It's the frustration of they keep trying to make it part of the story(to the point of forcing you to engage with it) but not enough to make it compelling or make any real sense. So we're getting the worst of both worlds that the people who just want to do the history stuff have to suffer through the modern day stuff and the people who want the modern day stuff to matter just get little lore tidbits buried in e-mail that never seems to matter in the long run.

It really doesn't help that as time goes on, the establish that they Assassins will Best the Templars in every single game(other then Rogue because reasons) but the Templars will inevitably kick the Assassins shit in by the time of the next game and by the modern day, the Templars have won. So very little of what you do ends up mattering in the long term and nothing you do in the past drives much of anything in the present other then finding where a thingy is. Even worse, that the whole Assassin vs. Templar conflict never seems to mean anything and can easily be described as a epoch spanning game of Spy vs Spy, where both sides exist soley to fuck with each other. Yes, certain games try to argue otherwise but it rarely manifests as something meaningful.

The Assassins presumably exist to safeguard human freedom but mostly just take down the existing power structure and rarely do anything to put anything in it's place, thus creating a power vacuum for the Templars to waltz right back into once the Assassins get complacent(which apparently never takes long). The Templars claim they're creating an orderly, better society and we've really yet to see this in action. Desmond points out in the first game to Vidic that if the Templars run the world, they're doing a sucky job at it considering how screwed up the world is. Vidic just mumbles something about how "Some people are harder to deal with then others". Cool VIdic, so the holocaust happened because.....uh, the Templars just couldn't give a shit at best or the Templars were in on it at worst(AC2 suggests FDR, Churchill, Stalin and Hitler were all Templars, which means the Templars are fully responsible). Hell, if the Templars routinely control the wheels of power, it basically makes them responsible for the worst atrocities in human history(such as institutionalized slavery) so this "Some people are harder to deal with then others" feels like impotent handwaving.

 

[meiam]

The modern parts have never really been important but they keep being part of the game anyway. It's the frustration of they keep trying to make it part of the story(to the point of forcing you to engage with it) but not enough to make it compelling or make any real sense. So we're getting the worst of both worlds that the people who just want to do the history stuff have to suffer through the modern day stuff and the people who want the modern day stuff to matter just get little lore tidbits buried in e-mail that never seems to matter in the long run.

It really doesn't help that as time goes on, the establish that they Assassins will Best the Templars in every single game(other then Rogue because reasons) but the Templars will inevitably kick the Assassins shit in by the time of the next game and by the modern day, the Templars have won. So very little of what you do ends up mattering in the long term and nothing you do in the past drives much of anything in the present other then finding where a thingy is. Even worse, that the whole Assassin vs. Templar conflict never seems to mean anything and can easily be described as a epoch spanning game of Spy vs Spy, where both sides exist soley to fuck with each other. Yes, certain games try to argue otherwise but it rarely manifests as something meaningful.

The Assassins presumably exist to safeguard human freedom but mostly just take down the existing power structure and rarely do anything to put anything in it's place, thus creating a power vacuum for the Templars to waltz right back into once the Assassins get complacent(which apparently never takes long). The Templars claim they're creating an orderly, better society and we've really yet to see this in action. Desmond points out in the first game to Vidic that if the Templars run the world, they're doing a sucky job at it considering how screwed up the world is. Vidic just mumbles something about how "Some people are harder to deal with then others". Cool VIdic, so the holocaust happened because.....uh, the Templars just couldn't give a shit at best or the Templars were in on it at worst(AC2 suggests FDR, Churchill, Stalin and Hitler were all Templars, which means the Templars are fully responsible). Hell, if the Templars routinely control the wheels of power, it basically makes them responsible for the worst atrocities in human history(such as institutionalized slavery) so this "Some people are harder to deal with then others" feels like impotent handwaving.

I think they started trying to have you play as Templar in some game to explain why the assassin were the loser by modern time but they only did that once (and I think it was the game that literally came out at the same time as another AC). Could be interesting if you'd see the downside of either worldview and maybe a bit more of an exploration of why the templar win in the end, which makes some sense, most people pick security over freedom.

 

[Dalisclock]

I think they started trying to have you play as Templar in some game to explain why the assassin were the loser by modern time but they only did that once (and I think it was the game that literally came out at the same time as another AC). Could be interesting if you'd see the downside of either worldview and maybe a bit more of an exploration of why the templar win in the end, which makes some sense, most people pick security over freedom.

That was Rogue and I'm gonna be getting to that one soon, but it came out around the exact same time as AC Unity, so AC Unity got all the attention(for good and bad reasons). Suffice it to say, Rogue had the opportunity to make things a lot more interesting and didn't.

 

[Dalisclock]

With that out of the way, time to fast forward about 300 years to the Renaissance and the Ezio Trilogy. Arguably this is where the series really began to hit stride but unfortunately where a lot of bad habits began to set in.


Assassins' Creed 2 has a lot of things it does right so it's hard to hit on it too much. It has a nice revenge plot, some good dramatic moments, the cities are interesting to fuck around in and clamber over and there's a lot more interaction, not to mention the bards and beggars can easily be dealt with unlike the lepers in the first game The way the web of Intrigue slowly fans out from "Guy who killed my dad" to "Massive pan-Italian Conspiracy that goes all the way up to the pope" is wonderfully done. Getting your own little town to upgrade which then makes it from a slum into a cool place to life is a fun side quest, even if that does mean you have to keep running back there to grab your cash all the time(and if the money box fills up, well then you're missing out on any extra cash you could be getting because it doesn't backfill in you forget to empty it 3 paydays later). And of course, the final moment at the end where you get the message for Desmond in the 15th century was fucking mind fuck at the time because it felt like it came out of nowhere, right after the moment where you fist fight the pope in the sistine chapel, which is just up there with "Cool ideas for a boss fight" even if the fight itself is basically just punching a fat dude in his fancy robe.

I also really liked the side activities where you found glitches which turned into puzzles around the maps and solving those puzzles gave you little tidbits into the how various historical people and events have been influenced by the Templars and ISU McNuggets that this series would become enamored with. It was cool, it was poking at the edge of the mystery box and it gave the impression maybe there was more to history then we imagined(especially the one where they found a golden ISU thingy on the Moon of all places, though that raises questions for later games). This is also the game that introduces shawn, the snarky british dude who does your mission briefings and explains who exactly these dudes are that your taking down.

With that out of the way, It does have some notable flaws, however. The biggest is that while the game covers about 25 years, there are a ton of time skips that feel like Ezio was doing, well, fucking nothing important. He just apparently chills out for years at a time between certain sequences and nothing changes. Also, Ezio doesn't really change much over the course of the story and honestly looks very different in his early 40s when the story ends then in his late teens when the story begins(I'm not counting baby ezio). There's also 2 sequences which were originally not in the game and later added into to the later editions(but apparently they were DLC or something of the sort). Neither are particularly interesting, and you can skip both of them and not really miss much.

More annoyingly, the story has a few beats where you're just kind of forced to let shit happen because the plot demands it. A couple moments in particular concern when you run into the head of the conspiracy, Rodrigo Borgia, AKA Pope Alexander VI. Twice you have him in your grasp and TWICE Ezio lets him go. Once because he lets a 60 year old fat boy just very slowly meander off and at the end, he breaks into the Vatican, beats up the pope and then decides "I'm not going to kill you, because I don't need this revenge". I mean, okay, I guess that's fine for a character growth standpoint, but WHY DID YOU COME ALL THIS WAY NOT TO FINISH THE JOB? If you didn't want to get revenge, you could have just stayed home and done that. And yeah there's the "Well, Pope Alexander didn't die until 1507" and while yes, that's a good point, it runs into the duel problems of hand waving that this is the "REAL HISTORY" like Vidic did in the clip from AC1 and if you wanted to avoid doing that, then just set the scene in 1507 and have Ezio kill him then. I mean, there are enough fucking time skips in the game so another 8 years won't fucking matter much.

 

[Hades]

On the whole I dislike the modern day storyline. It rests on the faulty assumption that historical settings can't stand on their own. If they wanted to connect the games then just have each protagonist be the great, great grandson of the last. No reason to get Desmond involved.

And its not helped by Desmond being soooooo aggressively boring. Being dragged out of the animus and being forced to spend time with the modern day characters always felt like a punishment.

 

[Dalisclock]

Assassins' Creed Brotherhood picks up right after that, with a killer opening of Ezio going home and going to bed, only to be woken up the next morning by the Papal Army on his doorstep, which blow up his town, causes him to lose all of his shit and injure him so of course, all his fancy shit, all his money and most of his health bar from the previous game get wiped out in seconds. Arguably not a bad way to make you work up from the bottom again and one of the better justified but still annoying. The game then drops you in Rome, where you travel about the city and do stuff to undermine the Templars. There's plenty of stabby mission and sneaky infiltrations(one cool one is into the Castel Sant' Angelo, or as it's known "The castle of the holy angel", and I can attest it's very cool IRL). I honestly can't remember much of the plot however, because it's a bit of a step down. I remember a lot of the side activities more, like sabotaging war machines made by Da Vinci by taking control of them and using them to take out other prototypes and such. It's stupid(like a glider with a little self loading cannon strapped to it so you can dive bomb the Templers but I guess the animus did that or something.

You also get to recruit others for your little brotherhood, which you can then send on missions around the Mediterranean or use them to kill dudes in the game world. Eventually they rank up and become full assassins', which means they can't be killed when sent on missions, but also can take out harder enemies for you. Yes, you can just call down your bois(and girls) to jump out the bushes and kill some dudes for you and spare yourself the killing. It's fun but it exists to perpetuate itself.

Where this game (and the series in general) starts to run into trouble in a much larger since is where it decided it was gonna be BIGGER and have MORE STUFF then AC2 did. AC2 was fairly lean as far as side activities were concerned, mostly the villa and some stupid feather collecting. Here Ubisoft decided to have a million shops all around Rome to buy, which then fed you an income, which you could use to buy MORE Shops and eventually monuments. We went from "Be an Assassin" to "Be an assassin and run an assassin guild on a map and be a roman landlord" in the space of one game.

Also, this is the game that introduced the imfamous tower climbing thing in ubisoft games. Each district of rome has a tower, and before you can do anything in that district you need to climb the tower and blow it up or something and then you can buy shops there because apparently the templars don't move back in once you've blown up their towers.

The problem is, now you've got this whole extra layer of stuff. Climb tower to liberate district, buy shops to make money to buy more shops, recruit assassins to train them up to use on guards or do missions on the world map to make money to spend on shops and such, which takes extra time and effort more on top of finding random shit in the open world. And the animus puzzle minigame is back but now it's less compelling and harder to find(Basically, it tells you the Templars transitioned into Capitalism to better control the world, which is ironic considering you're supposed to become a capitalist who owns a big chunk of the city and by the end you might as well evict them instead of bothering to kill them).


The game does have a rather nice bit at the end where you go visit the Colosseum in Rome(and Parkour all around it) as Desmond to find a secret ISU vault under it, only to get hit with another cliffhanger. Unfortunately this one doesn't work as well at the end of 2 and feels like more for shock value then anything else even if it's later justified. But overall it feels less like a true sequel and more like an extension of 2. Calling it Assassin's Creed 2.5 isn't a bad descriptor at all.

 

[Dalisclock]

Finally, to round out the Ezio Trilogy, we have AC Revelations. I have mixed feelings about this game. On the plus side, getting away from Italy and getting to explore Constantinople was fucking awesome and platforming sections are as good as they've ever been. There's some great story moments, especially the bit at the end where Ezio finds Altair's Corpse in a sealed room in the old Assassin fortress from AC1, not to mention seeing the remainder of Altairs life in Flashback sequences. All of those all help bring the first era of this series to a close by concluding Ezio and Altairs story. And the game looks good.

Unfortunately, the game isn't nearly as good in a lot of other respects. All the extra shit from AC Brotherhood is back, but now there's a tower defense game to boot, which triggers if you get too much attention. Fortunately you only have to play it once as a tutorial and after that can either keep a low profile and train up assassins to defend districts to prevent you from ever having to do the mini-game(which does create more busywork for you). The main story is okay, but is basically Ezio inserting himself into a conflict he has no interest or stake in mostly for the sake of getting his magical memory wafers to open the BIG DOOR in the Assassin Fortress at Masyaf. And to do this he basically does a shitload of collateral damage which is supposed to be against his principles of old man ezio doesn't fucking care anymore. Of the top of my head, he starts a riot to provoke a guard response to get into an military district(the civilians who got injured or killed I guess don't matter), he starts a fire in the underground city of cappadocia but it's okay because out of the thousands of people who live there, you see like 10 of them make it out with Ezio and at one point he uses a greek fire sprayer to set fire to half the ships in the harbor because.....reasons. It's hard to see the Assassins having the moral high ground in this one and Ezio doesn't seem to show any real regret for any of this.

The Modern day part of the game more or less grinds to a complete halt. At the end of AC: Brotherhood, Desmond grabbed an apple under the Roman colosseum, was possessed by Juno and stabbed Lucy, then went comatose. Why? Well, good fucking question. But they stick in the animus to....keep his brain alive or something and play through Ezio's later memories because why not. And clearing those somehow cures him. Also, in the extra stuff, you find out Lucy was actually a mole, an assassin who has been turned by the templars and I guess was gonna help take them down. It's all locked behind optional 1st person platforming sections that you access from an island of sorts in desmond's brain(just go with it) which you have to collect things in the main game to access. This is also the only way you find out Desmonds Backstory(that he was raised by the Assassins in what amounts to Spartan style training, which is why ran away from home to go to New York to tend bar. This is vaguely hinted at in the first game but you probably won't notice this without knowing about it beforehand).

Apparently ACIII was in protected development and Ubisoft wanted an AC game to fill the gap, so this was built off the AC: Brotherhood framework and it fucking shows. It's basically AC2.75 for as similar as it is to the previous games. So yeah, it's a decent game but you could skip it and not miss much other than the closeout of Ezio and Altairs story. That was a lot. I'm gonna take a little break because the Americas/Enlightenment era has 5 games in it(2 main ones and 3 smaller ones) and I have a lot to say about 3 and Rogue in particular.

 

[Dalisclock]

On the whole I dislike the modern day storyline. It rests on the faulty assumption that historical settings can't stand on their own. If they wanted to connect the games then just have each protagonist be the great, great grandson of the last. No reason to get Desmond involved.

And its not helped by Desmond being soooooo aggressively boring. Being dragged out of the animus and being forced to spend time with the modern day characters always felt like a punishment.

I mean, after 3 they reduced Desmond to a brain in a jar and built a video game console off his memories in universe, so you'd stream "Historical Videogames" to your animus headset was pulling from Desmonds brain or something. This is no shit the actual justification behind every game after 3 until Origins.

 

[meiam]

Revelation was just supposed to be some side game for PSP (or was it vita, can't remember) that was upgraded for console, it was always just suppose to be some random side game of no real importance. But yeah it was really running out of steam after brotherhood and illustrate pretty well that the main draw of the franchise is diverse historical location rather than the templar V assasin stuff. Stay too long in one setting and it quickly get stale.

Another storyline that the franchise abandon is the idea that memory is supposed to go be passed trough DNA, so you'd expect that becoming a parent would play some role in those games but I don't think there's even one where it's mentioned. Did Ezio even have a kid by revelation?

 

[Dalisclock]

Revelation was just supposed to be some side game for PSP (or was it vita, can't remember) that was upgraded for console, it was always just suppose to be some random side game of no real importance. But yeah it was really running out of steam after brotherhood and illustrate pretty well that the main draw of the franchise is diverse historical location rather than the templar V assasin stuff. Stay too long in one setting and it quickly get stale.

Another storyline that the franchise abandon is the idea that memory is supposed to go be passed trough DNA, so you'd expect that becoming a parent would play some role in those games but I don't think there's even one where it's mentioned. Did Ezio even have a kid by revelation?

He apparently had a kid afterwards with the lady meets in that game. The short film embers confirms this IIRC.

 

[ZCAB]

I stink at games, much as I love them. AC Odyssey has a killer chasing me that is more powerful than me to begin with. I just started and really like the game but now can't get past this guy. So I got frustrated and quit. Got to look out there for some cheat codes and trainers, at least for the ones I have on PC. So much is so fun and beautful early on. I wish the game would let me progress further and enjoy it. I mean, I paid for the thing. Don't they want happy customers? And have a nightmare difficulty mode for them that want one.

You aren't forced to fight that mercenary, just avoid him for now. Go do other stuff to level up and try later. There are enough side missions and question marks on Kefalonia to reach the same level as the mercenary and defeat him with not too much issue.

 

[Kyrian007]

I feel I got out at the right time. I was a fan of the series... even 3 to me was simply "eh, ok." And then I played Black Flag. That was an amazing high point... and that's when I got out. Unity's release was so terrible, and by that time my "no release date money for AAA publishers" extended to most companies; Ubisoft most definitely included. So when a game has a terrible launch, I just don't buy it until a completely bug free "complete" edition comes out and is itself drastically lower in price. And to that end, I never got Unity... until Ubisoft gave it away for free when Notre Dame burned down. I still haven't ever played it, or any AC further game. Not really tempted. I think I got out at the right time.

 

[PsychedelicDiamond]

It's interesting to see someone criticize the overarching story of AC in some length because... well, there's a lot of it and I get the impression most have given up on trying to follow it a while ago. I'm saying that as someone who only very sporadically plays any games in the series but the impression that I get is that it was originally meant to be wrapped up in a trilogy and once they decided to extend the series beyond AC3 they just sorta started playing it by ear. I am absolutely ready to believe that the series lore has gotten Kingdom Hearts levels of convoluted and aimless by now. The thing about that series is: There are a lot of games over a lot of different platforms and, as is the case with a lot of Ubisoft's series, if you want to play every single game in it, you are likely to get burnt out sooner or later. See, the last AC I've played was Odyssey. And it's not that it's a bad game or anything. But it is overwhelmingly long for how little variety in gameplay it has. So you've got this 70 hours game where the gameplay doesn't really evolve or change up much throughout the entire game. And then that game is technically the middle part of a sub trilogy consisting of it, Origins and Valhalla and then there are two other games that have basically that gameplay which last respectively another 70 hours each. I don't think anyone beyond a very small hardcore fanbase is ready to commit to that. Especially considering that I don't think AC has that kind of ride or die fandom something like Metal Gear or Kingdom Hearts or even Resident Evil has, where people genuinely lap up every little piece of lore, just to see where it's all going. Mainly because I think Kojima and Nomura, writing by the seat of their pants as they are, do seem to have some greater plans worked out. AC on the other hand has more the vibe of a television series that has gone for about 10+ seasons now, changed the showrunner a few times, tried to soft reboot itself once or twice and is mainly moving along on inertia alone because it continues to pay for itself. I generally think the majority of the people playing that are not ones that follow the series religiously, but ones that play an AC game once every few years on a whim, just to see what they're like now.

I haven't played a single one between 3 and Odyssey and the fact that you can play each one without being up to date on the overarching story is part of what keeps the series alive.

 

[BrawlMan]

I stopped caring after Brotherhood. That should let you know how fast the series lost interests for me, and how I never looked back.

 

[bobdark]

I loved the games, and even the crazy plots but Valhalla broke me. To much wandering around in boring forests and the whole game centers around leading a war party to go raid, which is not very assassin.