Assassins Creed Games On

16-09-2021
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I've been a dedicated fan of the Assassin's Creed video game franchise for 11 years. It hasn't always been a happy relationship. While the early games captured my imagination and introduced me to whole new modes of gameplay, the series' middle years were laden with misfires, feature bloat, and other serious problems.

The next game in Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed franchise, currently codenamed Assassin’s Creed Infinity, will unfold across multiple historical settings and receive persistent updates. Assassin's Creed is an action-adventure video game developed by Ubisoft Montreal and published by Ubisoft.It is the first installment in the Assassin's Creed series.The game was released for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in November 2007 and was made available on Microsoft Windows in April 2008.

I often look at fans raging against the companies that make their favorite franchises—Bethesda or Blizzard are the two most common targets I see—and shake my head in bewilderment. 'If you hate their work so much, why don't you just play something else and let everyone else enjoy their games? It's not like there's a shortage of great games to try,' I say.

But as I looked back on more than a decade of playing Assassin's Creed games to write this article, I for the first time kind of understood loving something so much that its stumbles make you feel not just disappointed, but a little mad.

And Assassin's Creed has made some infuriating missteps over the years. But at the same time, it has something in common with many of my favorite music artists like David Bowie and Radiohead: it's willing to reinvent the wheel on the regular and try new things rather than settle into a Call of Duty or FIFA-like pattern of barely-there refinements.

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My ups and downs with the series reached a new zenith with this year's Assassin's Creed Odyssey. Just as I was giving up on one of my favorite franchises, this reinvention gave me the feels I hadn't had since the series' best days (that means the Ezio Trilogy, by the way). And while the deepest heart of the new game was still Assassin's Creed, Odyssey was a wild departure.

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, the latest opus to date is available since November 2020 on PS4, Xbox One, PC, PS5, Xbox Series X / S and Stadia. According to the latest information from Bloomberg, one of the next games could arrive in 2024 as a service game.

But that's OK. Because by tossing out the old ideas about what this beloved franchise was, Ubisoft actually saved it from doom. What you're about to read isn't a review—Ars already did that. This is just a super-fan putting his geek-out hat on to ponder why Odyssey worked so well where other recent Assassin's Creed games didn't.

Table of Contents

11 games in 11 years

It makes sense to start with a summary of the journey so far, so we'll go through each main series game one-by-one. To understand why Odyssey is great, it's important to recognize why not all of its predecessors were.

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If you're just interested in Odyssey, you can skip ahead—this will be bloated and lengthy, just like a modern Assassin's Creed game. You probably won't agree with all my takes. That's OK, it makes for a good conversation. Think of it kind of like a 'best and worst' list without firm rankings. Also included here: a link to every main series Assassin's Creed review ever published on Ars.

Here we go.

Assassin’s Creed (2007)

This was a janky, broken, frustrating mess of ideas. The potential was there, and I was enthralled, but Assassin's Creed was not always fun to play. Still, it was a revelation. I could see what it was going for, and I loved it. How often did a triple-A game come along that tried this many ambitious new things? Even if it didn't always work, you had to respect the game for trying during a time when it felt like almost every big release was a Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, or God of War copycat.

Today, the series has a reputation for aping the best ideas from other franchises and adapting them for the Assassin's Creed formula, and that's accurate. But sometimes we forget that the first game actually was truly inventive. It wasn't just imitating other games—at least, not other triple-A ones. While the first version of anything usually falls short and this title was no exception, I warmly remember it for its ambition regardless.

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I'm just glad the future titles made it so falling in the water wouldn't instantly kill you, you know?

(Also, the bratty, entitled main character was the absolute worst.)

Assassin’s Creed II (2009)

What followed two years later was one of my favorite games of all time. I virtually never play games multiple times through. Yet I have played Assassin's Creed II three times, as recently as last year. II took every great idea from Assassin's Creed, refined most of the rough edges, and added even more to love.

II kicked off a trilogy of titles (with Brotherhood and Revelations) centered around the Renaissance-era Italian protagonist Ezio Auditore. That trilogy is regarded by most fans as the series' heyday. To this day, the mobile-game spinoffs Ubisoft makes are still set in this era, if that tells you anything.

While Assassin's Creed's fresh ideas were janky and unfinished, II realized them fully. It's definitely not perfect, but it's a great game.

Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood (2010)

Brotherhood was a direct sequel to II, and more of the same. While II had some gear upgrades, Brotherhood introduced much deeper progression systems that would become a key part of the series moving forward. Many people consider it to be the best in the series, and I enjoyed it immensely, but I wasn't as engaged by its setting, and the freshness of the first two games had faded a bit—the first sign of what a curse the series' too-frequent annual release schedule would be—so I remember II more fondly. Still, this game was in the series' sweet spot.

Assassin’s Creed Revelations (2011)

Revelations was a good game, but it was also the first time since the forgivable experimentalism of the first title that the series stumbled a little bit for me. Ubisoft claimed they wanted more action set piece moments in this one, but trying to cram Naughty Dog/Uncharted-style on-rails moments into a systems-based game was confusing at best, frustrating at worst.

Further, this is when Ubisoft started putting in entirely different, less-good games and systems unrelated to the core experience—in this case, the awful tower defense minigame for territorial control.

In Revelations, these down moments were edge cases in an otherwise good game—after all, the problems were on the fringes, but the core gameplay built nicely on top of the previous titles—but the problems that would become all-pervasive in future titles planted their seeds here.

Assassin’s Creed III (2012)

Advertisement III was the true beginning of dark days for player satisfaction over the ensuing years. It might have been the worst game in the franchise's history. (For the other candidate, jump ahead two years to Unity.)

Control precision was never the series' strong suit, so III decided to overhaul the inputs. But the resulting control mechanism was spectacularly worse than what it replaced. For every time you felt awesome climbing a tree like a ninja before dropping down on your unaware target, there were at least two times you'd be trying to jump from a branch to a rooftop and found yourself leaping 80 degrees in the wrong direction off a cliff to your death—or you'd tumble into one of the game's brutal instant mission-fail states. (This was a persistent design problem in the franchise until 2017's Origins.)

There was the infamous final mission, which had you dashing through a burning building chasing an enemy using those controls that only worked the way you expected 33 percent of the time. It was awful—it was almost as if Ubisoft had designed a set piece specifically to show off everything that was wrong with the franchise.

Revelations introduced these problems, but III really drove them home.

Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag (2013)

I have trouble making helpful assessments of Black Flag

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as an Assassin's Creed game, because 70 percent of it isn't one. III introduced a series of boat combat missions. I thought they were the best part of a bad game, and so did some other people. Similar sailing gameplay played a big part in IV, which cast the player as a pirate in the Caribbean.

The Caribbean was the largest and most realistic setting yet, and the immersion was helped by the fact that Black Flag was the first of the series released on current-generation consoles, which had much more memory than their predecessors and were thus better equipped for open worlds.

But you could easily spend more time on your boat than you did with traditional Assassin's Creed stuff. Remember how Revelations had problems because it had separate-seeming games like tower defense? IV went nuts with that. I'm not sure I could even count how many different games were packed into this one disc, and they didn't all appeal to the same type of player, giving pretty much everyone something they just wanted to get over with to get to the good part. The systems like underwater diving, boat combat, ground combat, ground combat on boats, ground stealth, boat stealth, collections, mission tables, resource management, and so on were disconnected from one another and didn't support any one core experience.

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In a systems-based game, the systems have to interlock and talk to each other to create emergent stories for the player. When they're disconnected from one another this way, it just feels like bloat.

A lot of people like Black Flag, and that's fine. But it was a game co-developed by a half-dozen different Ubisoft studios, and it felt like it. Also, Black Flag was way too long to be an annual release. Finishing it before the next one came out felt like pressure—as I recall, I only managed to complete it a couple of weeks before Unity hit. I was really starting to feel the fatigue.

Since 2007, the Assassin’s Creed saga has been one of the biggest video game licenses. With more than 20 games developed, 155 million copies have been sold. A huge success for Ubisoft which does not intend to stop there. Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, the latest opus to date is available since November 2020 on PS4, Xbox One, PC, PS5, Xbox Series X / S and Stadia.

According to the latest information from Bloomberg, one of the next games could arrive in 2024 as a service game. A huge upheaval for the saga on the horizon?

Assassin’s Creed Infinity, a service game for 2024?

It is once again through Jason Schreier, the former Kotaku reporter, now editor at Bloomberg that we have the right to crisp information about the next Assassin’s Creed.

If since 2016 the fans are used to discovering a new unpublished opus every two years, they should apparently wait four years to discover the new game of the saga. After exploring a dozen different eras, Ubisoft may opt for a service game largely inspired by Grand Theft Auto V, Fortnite or Call of Duty Warzone.

What is a service game?

A service game is a generally free online game. Like Fortnite or Call of Duty Warzone, you can download it on PC and consoles without spending a single dime. This is also the case with GTA Online which is offered with every copy of GTA V.

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The peculiarity of its games is that they will evolve over the months and years with new updates (often free) that will constantly offer new things to players. In return, many collectibles, items, and other perks are offered for purchase to customize and improve your character.

According to the first information, the French publisher would work on an online platform making it possible to regroup several opus of the license. The project would be named Assassin’s Creed Infinity and would be an app that regularly brings content.

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It is thus two complete teams which are currently working on Assassin’s Creed Infinity. The release would not be scheduled until 2024 (at best). A bit like GTA Online or Fortnite, regular updates and content would change eras and bring some new things.

However, setting up this project does not mean stopping “classic” and solo games. In parallel with the “Infinity” project, it is not impossible that the teams can develop a new original game. As Jason Schreier points out, the last three games of Assassin’s Creed were developed by two big teams:

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  • Assassin’s Creed Origins (2016) by Ubisoft Montreal
  • Assassin’s Creed Odyssey (2018) by Ubisoft Quebec
  • Assassin’s Creed Valhalla (2020) by Ubisoft Montreal

On the official Ubisoft website, the “Assassin’s Creed Infinity” project is formalized and the publisher confirms that Montreal and Quebec will co-develop the title.

The collaboration on Assassin’s Creed Infinity will be led by Julien Laferrière, and will be in charge of production for Ubisoft Montreal and Ubisoft Quebec. He brings with him additional experience for the franchise, having worked on the license since 2007 and being a producer on Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.

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And you ? Does an Assassin’s Creed Online grouping together all the universes of the saga make you want? Or are you dreading this new project?