Also, I want to add the fact that I'm huffing a major dose of copium to deal with the fact that ever since I played the first AC game, I always thought - like everybody else - that an AC game set in Japan would be just perfect... but now that it's finally coming out, I have no more interest in AC games lmao
Oof, same. I stopped playing after....assassin's creed 2 I think? The one in Italy. After that they made so many AC games and I have not kept up, and now I don't want to get back into it after the story's progressed so much.
And making the MC Yasuke? Missing out kinda stings.
I wish Ubisoft hadn't gone into using Assassin's Creed as a "sell more shit" button. A Black Flag game just about pirates and doing Cool Pirate Shit would've sold really well but nah, had to add AC to it to sell more copies
2's the best one still. Brotherhood was a direct sequel set in Rome and arguably of equal quality. Then you had Revelations, which didn't hit as hard as the previous ones, but had a good setting (16th Century Istanbul) and I thought was a decent conclusion to the Ezio Auditore arc.
3 was really dull, I felt, and never finished it back in the day, but it did end Desmond's story arc.
They could have stopped there, but they didn't. 4 is the famous pirate one, which is a good pirate sandbox but a bad AC game and the consistent descent into endless spinoffs and cashgrabs. They could make one set in Moscow in 1917 and I still wouldn't be interested (funnily enough, I think they actually did - one of the 2D ones?) for the Ubisoft sandbox model sucks, the writing is trash and the abomination of what they did to Karl Marx in Syndicate (he's a reformist lib in it) is about what one could expect in these supposedly historical settings.
Don't forget about Unity between Ezio and 3. There was still a little bit of juice left in the fruit at that point but on release it was a dumpster fire so it doesn't get the love it would have otherwise.
I played it some and thought it was good. More difficult than the other games and leaned away from the simplification of the controls 4 had. I could have just sucked at the combat but it was balanced so that you actually had to be sneaky because guards could kill you.
The Ezio trilogy was nice but you can really tell that after AC3 (which I disliked on release but actually quite enjoyed when I replayed it years later) there was a sort of "Well, shit. Now what do we do?" moment at Ubisoft where they were stuck between a rock and a hard place of "Keep doing basically the exact same thing over and over again like we have been for a while but with different settings and tacked-on mechanics and incremental improvements in the graphics and parkour" or "Try something totally different and hope the fans don't hate us", because of course the idea of just letting the franchise die and starting something fresh is impossible in an era of endless sequels, reboots, remasters, etc.
AC4 almost feels accidentally successful because while they failed to create an Assassin's Creed game, they definitely made a pretty great pirate game, and so it gets to coast (heh) by on that. They basically copy-pasted AC4 (but this time you're a TEMPLAR!) in Rogue. And then they cleared wanted to go back to the traditional formula and made Unity and then Syndicate, which made some genuinely really cool additions like the parkour system in Unity and it's finally a game about, like, Assassins again, but the faults were glaring enough that they then flip-flopped back and then miraculously managed to create two (maybe three, idk how good Valhalla is) well-received games and enjoyable games in a row that were even further away from Assassin's Creed than AC4 was, and then flip-flopped again with the new game which is set in the Middle East I think and kinda back to the AC1 days, aka a soft reboot of the series. So in a couple game's time they'll once again go back to the open world formula I predict.
The biggest issue I have with these games isn't really that the exemplify the typical Ubisoft formula that they do with fucking everything, though there's a discussion to be had about that too, it's basically just that you could have released AC4+Rogue and Origins+Odyssey+Valhalla off as entirely different franchises and remove any mention of the Assassins and just have them be entirely their own thing, and keep the Assassin's Creed franchise about goddamn assassins. It's part of the much larger problem in entertainment right now where literally like 90% of what is released right now is part of existing franchises because of the fear of taking a risk, so you have movies that were originally about something else entirely and then the directors go "Man, this would be great as Movie #32942 in the Blorbo Franchise! Change the script up a bit and tie it in!" or whatever the hell is going on in those companies
AC4 could have been "Local pirate man goes on a drunken adventure for a magical/nonmagical treasure and learns to become a less shitty person with morals after seeing all his friends die" without any mention of a templar and it would be like, 5% different. Origins could have been "Medjay man goes on revenge quest with his wife because his child was killed by a group of powerhungry assholes, helps local community along the way" and there would be no need to show an apple of eden. Same thing goes for the other similar games. you can't do the same for Altair or Ezio or Connor (well, maybe you could do the same for Connor actually but I don't think Ubisoft is based enough to make a game where you're a native American going sicko mode against settler-colonists, especially given that they did anti-French-revolution propaganda in Unity) or Arno and Jacob/Evie because those games are, top-to-bottom, about being a shady stabby dude with knives trying to build/rebuild/fix their order against a group of bad guys while funky magical objects help and hinder them
Who cares about the clusterfuck larger story? Just go on context clues for the modern section, the historical sections are relatively self-contained in each period.
I played bits of the one with Kassandra but they're so far from what interested me about the first couple of games now, and there are better open world rpgish games. Plus how did they go from roughly historical stuff to the viking one not having any one handed swords or spears?!
The other Ezio games are totally worth playing. I dropped off after 2 for the same reason as you, but i went back and played those a year ago and loved them. The overarching story is complete bullshit and barely holds together game to game, so its not a big deal especially after ac3, so its not a big deal to not know about thise things to enjoy the games
Oof, same. I stopped playing after....assassin's creed 2 I think? The one in Italy. After that they made so many AC games and I have not kept up, and now I don't want to get back into it after the story's progressed so much.
And making the MC Yasuke? Missing out kinda stings.
deleted by creator
I wish Ubisoft hadn't gone into using Assassin's Creed as a "sell more shit" button. A Black Flag game just about pirates and doing Cool Pirate Shit would've sold really well but nah, had to add AC to it to sell more copies
2's the best one still. Brotherhood was a direct sequel set in Rome and arguably of equal quality. Then you had Revelations, which didn't hit as hard as the previous ones, but had a good setting (16th Century Istanbul) and I thought was a decent conclusion to the Ezio Auditore arc.
3 was really dull, I felt, and never finished it back in the day, but it did end Desmond's story arc.
They could have stopped there, but they didn't. 4 is the famous pirate one, which is a good pirate sandbox but a bad AC game and the consistent descent into endless spinoffs and cashgrabs. They could make one set in Moscow in 1917 and I still wouldn't be interested (funnily enough, I think they actually did - one of the 2D ones?) for the Ubisoft sandbox model sucks, the writing is trash and the abomination of what they did to Karl Marx in Syndicate (he's a reformist lib in it) is about what one could expect in these supposedly historical settings.
Don't forget about Unity between Ezio and 3. There was still a little bit of juice left in the fruit at that point but on release it was a dumpster fire so it doesn't get the love it would have otherwise.
Nah, it released after 4 actually.
I got it for free when Notre Dame was burning, but never played it.
I played it some and thought it was good. More difficult than the other games and leaned away from the simplification of the controls 4 had. I could have just sucked at the combat but it was balanced so that you actually had to be sneaky because guards could kill you.
The Ezio trilogy was nice but you can really tell that after AC3 (which I disliked on release but actually quite enjoyed when I replayed it years later) there was a sort of "Well, shit. Now what do we do?" moment at Ubisoft where they were stuck between a rock and a hard place of "Keep doing basically the exact same thing over and over again like we have been for a while but with different settings and tacked-on mechanics and incremental improvements in the graphics and parkour" or "Try something totally different and hope the fans don't hate us", because of course the idea of just letting the franchise die and starting something fresh is impossible in an era of endless sequels, reboots, remasters, etc.
AC4 almost feels accidentally successful because while they failed to create an Assassin's Creed game, they definitely made a pretty great pirate game, and so it gets to coast (heh) by on that. They basically copy-pasted AC4 (but this time you're a TEMPLAR!) in Rogue. And then they cleared wanted to go back to the traditional formula and made Unity and then Syndicate, which made some genuinely really cool additions like the parkour system in Unity and it's finally a game about, like, Assassins again, but the faults were glaring enough that they then flip-flopped back and then miraculously managed to create two (maybe three, idk how good Valhalla is) well-received games and enjoyable games in a row that were even further away from Assassin's Creed than AC4 was, and then flip-flopped again with the new game which is set in the Middle East I think and kinda back to the AC1 days, aka a soft reboot of the series. So in a couple game's time they'll once again go back to the open world formula I predict.
The biggest issue I have with these games isn't really that the exemplify the typical Ubisoft formula that they do with fucking everything, though there's a discussion to be had about that too, it's basically just that you could have released AC4+Rogue and Origins+Odyssey+Valhalla off as entirely different franchises and remove any mention of the Assassins and just have them be entirely their own thing, and keep the Assassin's Creed franchise about goddamn assassins. It's part of the much larger problem in entertainment right now where literally like 90% of what is released right now is part of existing franchises because of the fear of taking a risk, so you have movies that were originally about something else entirely and then the directors go "Man, this would be great as Movie #32942 in the Blorbo Franchise! Change the script up a bit and tie it in!" or whatever the hell is going on in those companies
AC4 could have been "Local pirate man goes on a drunken adventure for a magical/nonmagical treasure and learns to become a less shitty person with morals after seeing all his friends die" without any mention of a templar and it would be like, 5% different. Origins could have been "Medjay man goes on revenge quest with his wife because his child was killed by a group of powerhungry assholes, helps local community along the way" and there would be no need to show an apple of eden. Same thing goes for the other similar games. you can't do the same for Altair or Ezio or Connor (well, maybe you could do the same for Connor actually but I don't think Ubisoft is based enough to make a game where you're a native American going sicko mode against settler-colonists, especially given that they did anti-French-revolution propaganda in Unity) or Arno and Jacob/Evie because those games are, top-to-bottom, about being a shady stabby dude with knives trying to build/rebuild/fix their order against a group of bad guys while funky magical objects help and hinder them
Who cares about the clusterfuck larger story? Just go on context clues for the modern section, the historical sections are relatively self-contained in each period.
I played bits of the one with Kassandra but they're so far from what interested me about the first couple of games now, and there are better open world rpgish games. Plus how did they go from roughly historical stuff to the viking one not having any one handed swords or spears?!
The other Ezio games are totally worth playing. I dropped off after 2 for the same reason as you, but i went back and played those a year ago and loved them. The overarching story is complete bullshit and barely holds together game to game, so its not a big deal especially after ac3, so its not a big deal to not know about thise things to enjoy the games