Johnny Novgorod said:
I'm still waiting for Assassin's Creed: You're A Samurai Now.
You're kidding right? Hero ninjas vs evil Samurais was a narrative made for this series: stealthy peasants against well armoured dogmatic aristocrats. Similarly, I'm still baffled why Egypt hasn't shown up, Ancient or otherwise. Until the series lets you leap of faith off of the Sphinx's nose as it crumbles away, it still hasn't done enough.
Contrarily, I gain a small amount of morbid satisfaction with each new "eh"ntry to the series. I adored 2 and even loved Brotherhood, but it was with the latter that they announced that it would become a yearly thing and I promptly never bought another one. The things I loved most was the sheer depth of the historical research and the clever twisting they applied to make it fit an appropriately fun narrative. And while I still loved Brotherhood, my thinking going into it was that it came from unused AC2 research - making it exactly the booster shot we wanted. After that, I expected the series to be jumping from period to period with revamped gameplay, aesthetics and a whole lot of new history... but there was no way they could achieve any of that, least of all the latter, in only a year. I predicted to myself, way back when, that each new entry would show signs of less research, meaning the more popular icons would overtake the plot and the gameplay would stagnate. 'Lo and behold, with the history devolving into the depth of a museum children's tour of England, France and America, I feel I was right.
Granted Black Flag threw me through a loop and almost broke me, but with every "not as good" game to come out, I feel pathetically slightly prouder that I held to my little protest.
Ubisoft, drop the yearly releases. THAT'S what crippled the franchise. It was fine when they were crappy little portable games but turning this series yearly is what ultimately stopped it from being the monumental juggernaut we all expected it to be.