Assassin's Creed Retrospective: Primer

Sequence 0: Initiation

It feels strange to introduce Assassin’s Creed. It is one of the biggest franchises in the modern gaming landscape. At almost 160 million lifetime sales for the franchise, anybody who is even mildly an enthusiast of video games is aware of it. You, the reader, are no doubt familiar with it even at a passing level.The iconic white robes have made their way into other franchises such as Metal Gear Solid, Final Fantasy, Soul Calibur, and Super Smash Brothers. It has gotten comic book, feature film, and board game adaptations. Recently passing its 15th anniversary it shows no signs of ending any time soon. It has reached levels of success that any franchise would be thrilled to have. It has codified a significant portion of open world game design for better or for worse. You know what Assassin’s Creed is, at least fundamentally. Assassin’s Creed is emblematic of everything wrong with the Ubisoft formula to some, to others it is a franchise that has long overstayed its welcome, to others still it is amongst the greatest game franchises of all time. To me however it is a journey that has peaks and valleys, well earned victories and well deserved losses, artistic merit and shameless cash grab in equal parts. It is a franchise near and dear to my heart.

Assassin’s Creed was the first game I played on my Xbox 360 that I received as a birthday present on September 25th, 2008. I have played every mainline entry in the franchise and while I am often very critical of some of them, it is a franchise I do consider myself firmly a fan of. Despite their missteps, they always manage to get me back in. I think that a lot of the criticism the franchise has seen over the past 15 years is extremely justified but I still find myself singing its praises. Within the context of AAA video game development, it is a franchise that has constantly evolved, trying new ideas and throwing away old ones with equal frequency while maintaining a nearly yearly release cadence. As new technology was introduced to the industry, so expanded the scale of the games with each release. I have counted the franchise out multiple times only to be surprised within a few years of the missteps. I am going to simply come out and say it, Assassin’s Creed is the Chris Jericho of Video Games. It has had its ups and downs but it is never content to sit idly by. It has a fundamental concept and framework that allows it to be picked up and molded into new adventures with new stories and can viablely continue in perpetuity until the inevitable heat death of the universe. While they are a yearly AAA game, I think they have an incredible amount more heart than something like a Call of Duty or other yearly AAA game. We see huge swings of changing locales and characters while continuing to iterate on the mechanical core. We see a frame story that was clearly not planned out at any point of the process, flying by the seat of its pants from game to game. We see a growing need to get more and more absolutely buck wild with every element from stories, to set pieces, to weapons, to map sizes. I show up with equal parts morbid curiosity and excitement.

I am, by my education, a game designer. Applied Science - Game Development is what my extremely expensive piece of paper that I don’t use professionally says. While my job is not in game development, I can genuinely say that getting this degree has helped me appreciate a number of things about releases that the general public does not seem to pick up on or care about. I say this to then say that I want to talk about iteration and how game design and development is an extremely iterative process. This is not completely unique to games within the context of art and you can absolutely look at films or books and see how piece 1 can lead to piece 2 which leads to piece 3, especially when looking at the body of work from a specific artist. I think games expand this idea considerably though and you can directly trace the lineage of titles back several decades in a sort of weird ever expanding family tree. Iteration is then absolutely not unique to the Assassin’s Creed franchise, but I think that it is the best possible touchpoint to talk about it in the gaming landscape. It has a special combination of consistent releases and variation that make it a perfect case study.

It occupies a similar space in my mind as a comic book franchise. Different authors and artists picking up an established universe to tell a story within one general set of rules they must abide by. Sometimes the author will add in a new fundamental pillar only to have a future author remove it. Much like comic books, I sit and wonder about how I would advocate for someone to pick the franchise up, a problem Ubisoft themselves have been conscious of to a fault. While the in game stories are mostly standalone, you do see recurring characters in various ones as well as the overall frame story narrative that takes place in the modern day. However even the frame story has multiple point of view changes throughout different games. I think one of the great tragedies of the franchise’s direction was this need to try to make every game a jumping on point. However the flipside of that is grappling with the very difficult problem of bringing a person into fifteen years of lore and story. Starting early has you working through a pretty dull first game but starting later has made you miss out on the Ezio trilogy. If you start late and work backwards the mechanics devolve in a weird way each time but telling someone to play 11 other games before seeing what Eivor is up to in the most recent game also feels somewhat draconian. Even skipping the first game makes Revelations a worse experience. Maybe at the end of this project I will have the answer.

Doing a “retrospective” doesn't feel completely earned. There will be more Assassin’s Creed. This is not a speculative thing to say, Ubisoft has explicitly said there will be more coming after the recently delayed Assassin’s Creed Shadows. But 15+ years seems like a good chunk of time to look back on this franchise that means so many different things to me. Like any franchise, I have my favorites, my least favorites, and my downright dislikes and despite my affection for them they are mostly games I have only played one time. In service of this project, I plan to replay all mainline games as well as Liberation and the major DLC expansions such as Freedom Cry. This will not cover the Chronicles trilogy or the large number of portable spinoff games. This is a project I have wanted to do for years and years but now feels like as good a time as any to actually put text to document and revisit these games.

Ubisoft has at least done an extremely good job with making the games available to players between re-releases or Microsoft’s backwards compatibility feature on the Xbox platforms. To that point, I will be playing almost the entirety of the franchise on my Xbox Series X, literally using that disc of Assassin’s Creed 1 that I was given 14 years ago. Assassin’s Creed is a multi-platform franchise without question, but it has never felt totally right playing them on anything but a Microsoft platform for me. Like playing the Crash Bandicoot remasters on something that isn't Playstation just kind of feels weird. However I will be playing the re-releases or HD versions whenever possible so that I don't need to drag out a VitaTV for Liberation and I can play the best looking iterations of each one. I will get to leverage all updates, DLC, and cool enhancements like the 4K 60fps Assassin’s Creed 1 and an allegedly fully working and performative version of Assassin’s Creed Unity.

I don’t know who my audience for this piece is or what purpose it is meant to achieve. It would be like trying to convince someone to play Call of Duty. I think it is just for me ultimately, maybe it is my magnum opus. I have written about games before but never something as encompassing as this. End of the day I think I just want to make a case that Assassin’s Creed has some of the most artistic merit amongst its AAA peers. I want to rant and rave and hoot and holler about these games. I want to look back with a keener eye to the games that I think are nostalgic. I want to be critical about a game that might legitimately be perfect. I want to climb some buildings and jump into hay.

So with this in mind, join me and take a leap of faith.