Assassin's Creed in Space

My stomach appears to be a lot less grumpy than it was last weekend! I’ll take that win. Next week I’m out of town again, so I don’t know if I’ll be able to get a Saturday Note up in time.

Right now I’m almost done with Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. Naturally the following game might be Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, but I’m a bit tired of playing Assassin’s Creed games for the moment, so we might take a break with something like Stray. Finishing up Going Postal, then we’re onto a new book.

This one doesn’t really have an argument, it’s more like, “Hey, this is crazy, and I want to talk about it.”

Assassin’s Creed in Space

At one point, Assassin’s Creed was going to go to space.

Alright, for this to make sense, I need to give some context, because I’m worried that you think what I’m saying is, “The developers and writers of Assassin’s Creed were planning to do a game set during the twentieth century Space Race.” No, that’s not what I mean. I mean at one point there was a plan in place–and in motion–to have the series end by having the surviving modern day characters go to space.

Okay, so for those who haven’t followed this series: Assassin’s Creed, at least for the first few years, was about a guy in 2012 named Desmond Miles using a machine called an Animus to relive the memories of his Assassin ancestors at different points of history. Through this framing device, we learn about the war between the Brotherhood of Assassins and their archenemies, the Templar Order, over the fate of humanity and acquisition of powerful artifacts called Pieces of Eden, left by a precursor civilization. At the end of Assassin’s Creed II, through the use of one of these artifacts, Desmond and his allies (and us too) discover a message left by the First Civilization that on December 21, 2012, a solar flare was going to wreck life on Earth unless our heroes could find a way to stop it.

Spoiler alert: they find a way to stop it. The world didn’t end in 2012, and the Plot went onward. However, there was a plan at one point early on for the series to end in 2012, with our characters unable to save the world. They’d survive by hopping on some kind of spaceship–I suspect also built by the precursor civilization–and going on to give humanity a new home somewhere else. Desmond was going to be the new Adam, and his then-implied love interest Lucy (who was named by the writers after the fossil) the new Eve for the human race.

Articles about this came out after a writer spilled the beans, years after the series had changed direction. And in hindsight: yeah, the series was winding up to go in that direction. I just re-read Assassin’s Creed: The Fall, and in that comic there’s a sequence in which a character had a vision of different things from the past and future, which includes a quote by Soviet rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky: “The Earth is the cradle of humanity, but mankind cannot stay in the cradle forever.” If that’s not a hint that the series planned to go to space, I don’t know what is. It’s not exactly subtle, either.

Of course, part of this got derailed when 2011’s Brotherhood hit, because the voice actress for Lucy, Kristen Bell (yes, that Kristen Bell), wanted a better contract and was killed off. But even that game planned to continue in that direction. There’s a secret unlockable message from a dead guy in that one, in which the character clearly alludes to Eve, the sun, and insists that everything you’re working to save–the world, presumably–is already lost. This makes a lot of sense knowing that the endgame plan was to ditch the doomed Earth and start over.

Except, of course, that didn’t happen. The studio developing the series decided, “Hey, we can just keep making money!” And they did! So the game in 2012 ends with a device introduced that saves the world, though with a hefty price. This would be fine if the series ended up doing something with that, but it sadly doesn’t; however, that’s a subject for a different essay.

Part of me wants to mourn the loss of this storyline, an end to the ongoing Plot, everything wrapping up. Part of me thinks it’s a stupid ending that cuts off everything that could have been explored. I can’t say I mind too much that the ending was changed because it’s so weird, so out there, that I don’t think I would have liked it. Still… that’s clearly the direction they meant to go for a while, so maybe it would have fit?

I don’t know, man.

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