Assassin’s Creed is a franchise that has a very dedicated fan base that will play every game they put out. I am one of those fans. I have played Assassin’s Creed since I was a young kid. The main thing that draws in fans is that it has a very deep story and every game is connected to the main story line of the franchise of Templars fighting the Assassins. The first few games were amazing in terms of plot and the mechanics at the time. However, after those first few games the franchise took a turn for the worse.
In my opinion and others who I have conversed with, Black Flag is where it all started to go downhill. The game itself in terms of mechanics was fine, but the story of it was very different from the games before it. I won’t get into why many of us didn’t like Black flag too much. A summary of why people didn’t like it, is that Edward Kenway, the main character of the game, had no real reason to become an assassin and the way he did it went against everything an assassin stood for. That may not seem like such a bad thing, but for the dedicated fans it was a massive turnoff. There was also a variant of the game after called Rogue, where you played as a Templar in the same world as Black Flag.
The following two games were also massive failures for the franchise. Unity and Syndicate just didn’t have the character development the fans wanted and there were many issues with the mechanics. There were many many issues with these games. Their story just didn’t hit the right mark and early on both games had issues so bad that would make it so people could not even play the game or lose all progress after they had played it for multiple hours. These games start their own narrative in terms of the ongoing story. The overall glitches and lack of engaging story made many fans sat questioning if the franchise they loved so much was killing itself. These games were also rushed in terms of trying to push out the game before they fine tuned it. Sure updates fixed those glitches, but it still leaves a bad taste in your mouth after those first impressions.
Watch this video below for a more in depth idea of these past games in the franchise.
Now we move onto the two most recent games released by Ubisoft in the AC series. These are both huge worlds that have a complex story line that gets in the right mindset of what Assassins are meant to be. I love the more open world of Origins and Odyssey . Their stories do not connect as well with all the games before them, but they are not rushed products because after the failure of Unity and Syndicate, Ubisoft started to take two years or so to make their games. Origins and Odyssey give the player more control over how their character develops in terms of relationships and other decisions they make with other characters in the game. I like the story of each because of the character development and the fact that I enjoyed all of the games. These two games are very different then what initially attracted me to the franchise. I do like where they are going with giving the player more choices to make and have a deeper plot then before. I want more games like these that get even deeper into the lore of AC. I’m not going to give a rating for this because it is too much to put into one rating, but I will say I look forward to AC games more now then I did after Black Flag came out. Let me know what you think about Assassin’s Creed as a franchise.
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