Assassin's Creed and Inconsistent Vision

 I’m not going to lie to you guys; I’m kind of a wreck right now. My guts hurt, and I don’t know why, and I’m anxious about the upcoming election, and the covid test, and my procedure, and I’m scared and I am not okay. I just want to live in Solitude, sitting at a desk and making maps for the next thousand years or something. 

Anyway let’s talk about Assassin’s Creed.

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Assassin’s Creed and Inconsistent Creative Vision

You know, as much crap as I give the Sequel Trilogy for not having a game plan, in some ways Assassin’s Creed  is worse. I gripe about the fact that there was no overarching plan for Star Wars under Lucasfilm, and that it was a dumb move on Disney’s part. And it was! Let’s not forget that! That J.J. Abrams did a movie that asked a bunch of questions, and didn’t have a clue about what the answers were or how to go about answering them is garbage storytelling.

But consider this: plans that are set up and are constantly dropped. Because that’s what happens with Assassin’s Creed! Of course there’s going to be some inconsistencies in a years-long saga with a bunch of different writers in different mediums. And yeah, of course they’re going to change their plans, as characters develop, plot lines go on, and the developers realize how much money they can make out of each game in the series. But there was very obviously a Plan from the beginning, and it gets dropped, and another one is picked up, and then dropped.

The biggest and most egregious of these is probably killing Desmond Miles. Desmond’s set up as the main character, learning about all of his Assassin ancestors throughout history and picking up their skillz, getting hyped up as the Greatest Assassin Evah and the key to solving the world’s problems. Except a lot of fans didn’t like him, and they didn’t quite know what to do with the character, so he was killed off in 2012 and the series struggled to find its footing since. There is a lot that Desmond is supposed to do--find Eve, for starters--that got left dangling.

And that’s not even the last one they dropped. Desmond’s death left Juno as a new main villain, and the hint that Assassins and Templars might have to team up to stop her. But again, that story wasn’t very well-developed and fans didn’t like it, so they dropped it, along with all storylines connected to it, by killing her off in the side comics.

And Origins also retconned the Assassin Brotherhood as starting in Cleopatra’s reign? When AC2 clearly shows Assassins from earlier? And how the fudge does that make any sense?

And I love this series, but it very obviously cannot keep it together to form a coherent story over the course of a few years. I get annoyed with the hardcore fans a lot (mostly over Odyssey), but them being made that there’s not a person in Ubisoft keeping track of all the lore? I agree with them on that! It’s pretty egregious. So now we get things like Darby McDervit, who is writer on the upcoming game, and was once one of the lead writers of the series, declaring that “Ezio’s Family” isn’t the series’s theme and we’re dumb for thinking so, even though it’s been used as the series theme since 2014. That musical motifs can shift to fit different needs is apparently beyond this man.

And like… pick a story. And stick with it. It’s not hard. I get that there are going to be adjustments on the way, but it shouldn’t be difficult to give a character a fulfilling arc over the course of three games or so. You don’t even have to have a planned end for the series (although that would be better). But do some actual stakes instead of going on and keep switching stories every so often.

There is a fantastic premise here, about telling stories connected throughout all of history, about the conflict between these two groups, and the crazy stuff that happened in the time before recorded history. But instead of telling a really good overarching story, they’ve instead elected that it’s good enough to tell several sometimes-good stories every couple of years or so. They should all be connected, and yet they’re not.

I imagine part of the reason for that is because it helps attract new players; after all, new players aren’t going to want to learn about over ten years’ worth of canon. And yeah, I get that. Of course I do. But I think there should be a way to make games that are rewarding pieces of an overarching story without having tedious catchup sessions. I’m currently playing The Witcher 3, which is a sequel to the previous two games and a series of at least six books, and yet not only is the game great and not too much of a problem understanding, but was a massive success, to the point that it’s generally considered one of the greatest fantasy games ever made. AC has been taking some cues from that game for a while now; can’t it take that one, too?

I like stories with plans! I think other people do too. So it’s more than annoying that Assassin’s Creed can keep telling good episodes but can’t really work out what to do with itself, other than tease mysteries and then drop them without fanfare.

Stick with a story guys. Get a story supervisor.

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