Assassin's Creed, Ubisoft's massive stealth RPG, has lofty ambitions when it comes to scale and historical scope. Games have a story to tell - fire up Assassin's Creed: Syndicate, and before you even take a single step as Jacob Fry, an in-game message will appear asking you to read 50-plus "codex entries." It may be admirable in some ways, this long-lasting commitment to facts and information, but if the AC series wants to stay fresh, then Assassin's Creed: Mirage, which comes before Codename Red and AC: Infinity, needs to be shorter, smaller and more focused on stealth .
Video games—Assassin's Creed is a prime example—often conflate quantity and value. From developers to players, "more" in games is synonymous with "better"—longer playtimes, varied features, and different game modes are the hallmarks of a good, or at least "worth the money" video game.
For as long as I can remember, in 1997 Final Fantasy VII felt like a more valuable and better game because it came on three discs rather than one. But I think the butterfly that spread its wings and caused our current dynamic, where anything under 20 hours and without open world elements is likely to be considered less valuable, is Assassin's Creed 2.
Assassin's Creed 2 is a fawning, timid apology for the first Assassin's Creed. While the first game had you doing the same follow/listen/kill missions over and over again, Assassin's Creed 2 had sidequests, customization, your own mansion, and multiplayer spin-offs. It created a kind of template for subsequent open world games. From Far Cry to MGS 5, and even something smaller like Remedy's Control, this is a format where you travel between sectors of the map, start with small tasks, work your way up to a boss encounter, and use the resources and points you receive. , to improve yourself, and then repeat in the next zone, found its initial, defining form in AC 2. At the time, it was incredible - there was so much to do! So many interesting things! They really listened to the fans!
But over the past 13 years, Assassin's Creed has expanded, grown, and devoured itself (and other games, including and especially from Ubisoft, have copied its format to such an extent) that it is difficult to single out any reliable identity. It is a stealth action RPG puzzle platformer set in the past and future, following the Greeks, Vikings, Knights, Templars, along with the American and French Revolutions, in Victorian London, Renaissance Italy, Ancient Egypt and the Syrian Holy Lands, in 12 main games and several spin-offs, including single and multiplayer.
I suppose this sounds almost standard for a big gaming franchise, but when it comes to delivering something compelling and cohesive about the respective historical periods, or a coherent story, or systems and mechanics that are focused and polished, it feels like Assassin's Creed is spread too widely, and as such, I'm suggesting some potential changes that I'd like to see made for Assassin's Creed: Mirage.
First, ditch the futuristic stuff. I've always suspected that it was a concession to convention and marketing in the first Assassin's Creed that ended up just sticking - in 2007, a game set in 11th century Damascus might have seemed too different, too new, and too alienating to fans of action and RPG games , so modern storytelling was built around and on top of Assassin's Creed to try to make it more accessible and palatable.
But in reality, this just makes AC more contrived. Which sounds better? A game where you play as an assassin in Ancient Greece, or a game where you play as someone who becomes an assassin in Ancient Greece while lying inside a machine that creates a virtual reality simulation from his biologically encoded memories? I'd argue that this is the first option - simpler, more solid, and truer to the AC series' ambitions for story capture. So in Assassin's Creed: Mirage you can just cut out the average person. I want to play as an assassin in ninth century Baghdad. I don't want to play as someone who plays as an assassin in ninth century Baghdad.
Secondly, I don't think Assassin's Creed should be an RPG anymore. In 2009, with the release of AC 2, the size of Ubisoft's game world and the countless options and paths it offered players were, if not unique, then at least distinctive and commendable in how skillfully they were made. Now, if we make a certain rhetorical generalization, we can say that everything is role-playing games, everything is open world. The same size, scale, and variety that once made Assassin's Creed stand out now make it feel like every other video game out there.
If the series is to regain its identity, if Assassin's Creed can once again become what it once was - a video game unlike any other - then it needs to be shorter, leaner, and willing to sacrifice player freedom and expression for the sake of historical drama. Simply put, I'd rather have a 10-hour game that takes me through a series of intentionally designed missions and moments, and in the process offer a holistic, perhaps even subjective, view of the story, than a 40-plus hour game where I can do everything I want. I want, and history is laid out for me like many books in a library.
I think you'll learn and feel more about a game when the developer stays on hand, so to speak, to guide you through its various claims. Assassin's Creed, especially in recent years, feels incredibly lonely, as if Ubisoft is simply throwing us into a jungle of missions, things to do, and points of interest without offering the necessary—and far more useful—context and guidance.
Finally, I'd like to see Assassin's Creed move away from continuous and serialized storytelling - instead of tying everything together with knights, templars and an eternal historical conflict, I'd prefer each game to be its own episode in an anthology of sorts, with with its characters, its conditions and its stories of beginning and end.
It's the infinity of Assassin's Creed that begins to weaken it, the infinity and resulting thinness and scatterbrain of a plot that never seems to reach any conclusion and is dragged into each successive game through increasingly flimsy premise. One game, one setting, one story. The next game is a different setting, different characters, a plot that begins and ends without any attempt to build an overarching, multi-way “universe.”
Focusing on a specific place in the story each time, without having to bring in all the story baggage from three or four or five games ago, would allow Assassin's Creed to pay more attention to the details, subtleties, and realities of their setting. Queen Victoria could have just been Queen Victoria, not manipulated behind the scenes by the Knights Templar. From now on, Assassin's Creed could get serious about the study of historical facts and, as a result, get a more powerful drama.
Will any of this happen? The cynic in me says absolutely not. Meanwhile, the part of me that hates the part of me that is a cynic wants to think so - maybe, maybe. Assassin's Creed: Infinity, a purported multiplayer hub meant to somehow tie the entire franchise together, makes me question even its name. However, Mirage, Codename Red and Codename Hexe, which seem to be positioned as smaller games isolated from the main body of AC, give me a little hope.
When the first game came out in 2007, I admired its vision, its commitment to the ball, so to speak. A stealth game set in 4th century Syria. In the days of Call of Duty 3, Halo XNUMX and the long tail Gears of WarAssassin's Creed - at least conceptually - seemed like something completely different. Thanks to its own success and dozens of games emulating the format laid down in AC 2, the series has become similar to all others. If Assassin's Creed were rebooted a bit, given a hard reboot, and returned to some of its original aspirations, it could have been made much better.
Recommended: Assassin's Creed: Valhalla Steam, as Ubisoft reunites with Valve
