When Did Assassin's Creed Get Bad?

Assassin's Creed sucks now, the first time I heard that was back in 2011

when

Ezio's popularity in Monumental was starting to wane and fans were eager for an entry in the franchise that would change things since then. I've heard those four words quite a bit. every couple of years it seems like people are announcing the end of the series and pointing to the failures of the most recent entry as proof that the 2020s have started off as a decade of controversy for Ubisoft and its flagship franchise, with many critical eyes directed to your business. On screen and behind the scenes, while Assassin's Creed has remained consistently popular, it has also been a series defined by its flaws for most of its lifespan.

Reception from both the general public and hardcore fans has been mixed over the years and some long-time fans have denounced the franchise at various points throughout its existence - no, I'm not one of those fans personally, as which I obviously really enjoy these games and like to make videos about them, but still, as someone who has been playing these games since ac1 at the latest odds, I remember. a time

when

the consensus was much clearer and more positive, so looking back, when did that change? At what point did people's perception of Assassin's Creed go from the exciting Underdog to the Pinnacle of AAA greed and laziness discussed at the same time as the annual FIFA games?

It's not an easy question, mainly because there's no concrete answer, the series has gone up and down a lot and there are entries that fans have been kinder to in retrospect than others, as a result this will be something of a Video of Story story. Assassin's Creed because I want to explore how the series started and what it's gone through to get to where we are now. I'm going to talk about all the main games in the series, but I'm going to ignore a lot of the other media I like comics and books because while I've read some of them and enjoy a lot of them, they haven't really had an impact on the series in general, what I want to do, as a long time fan, is take a look at the franchise and ask.

A very complicated question for me: when did Assassin's Creed become bad? Assassin's Creed went bad with ac-1, at least that's what many people would have said when the game came out in 2007. It was released relatively early in the PS3 360 era and Assassin's Creed was an experimental game by the standards of the time , Prince of Persia Sands of Time, and its creator, Patrice Desolate, had helped put Ubisoft on the map with its beautiful visuals, unique setting, and emphasis on linear 3D free-running that I don't believe. It has actually been adapted to this day after the sands of time trilogy.

Ubisoft was looking for a sequel that could match its quality and reception. The Assassins of the Prince of Persia would be the idea thrown out of desolation instead of playing as the prince he would be playing with. his bodyguard, an

assassin

in an open-world setting, Prince of Persia Two Thrones in 2005, had experimented with more open spaces and some stealth mechanics, and Prince of Persia's

assassin

s were going to commit much more to that idea, as According to history, the concept was considered promising. enough to be its own franchise entirely and Desolate received the green light to begin its new IP Assassin's Creed, the game would include The Telltale Park or the focused gameplay of Prince of Persia, but with an open world twist and a completely new setting in Instead of navigating traps and obstacles through a variety of linear corridors Assassin's Creed would be about creating your own path through a completely open city, every notch in every wall would be interactive and the story would be your playground as you I liked to say that the basic game revolves around something.

It is called puppeteer concept in which different parts of the character's body are assigned to different buttons. The control scheme is very familiar when you look back on it, but at the time it was very unique. You would go to Three Cities in the Holy Land during the Third Crusade to locate. targets and kill them like in 1191 agent 47. It was an incredibly ambitious and unique game from the beginning and Prince of Persia fans were immediately interested without knowing that this new IP would actually play a big role in the death of our favorite franchise. in the very near future, but that's really neither here nor there for this video on Assassin's Creed's release, however, overall reception was lukewarm at best, the setting and concept were almost universally praised, but the game was criticized for being half-assed and the combat inconsistent.

It was seen as flashy and realistic, but boring and too simple. The mission design was criticized for its repetition, with fans and journalists pointing out how little creativity was used to prepare for the assassinations; Today, it was almost universally disliked and the game was generally unsuccessful. Splash that Ubisoft hoped would be so, said it was not without its own following, a not insignificant group of people saw AC-1 as a fantastic proof of concept, the gameplay was unlike anything we had seen before and the combat, Although simple, it had realistic and fluid animations. that stunk for a lot of people with mixed reception or not, people wanted more Assassin's Creed and Ubisoft intended to correct some of the mistakes they made with their freshman title. ac1 was about the mechanics of building a character who could fluidly move Clash Blades with each non-lethal attack and dismantle his enemies in a formulaic manner, one conversation on the bench overheard at a time, ec2 put a different priority on the front and back. center, fun, how could the team take everything they spent so much time working on in an ac1 but make it appealing to a broader audience in the first place?

The game was sped up to improve the pace of the game, the new protagonist Ezio would climb much faster and kill much faster the player would have much more freedom in his play style with the ability to purchase and collect a variety of different weapons instead. By limiting itself to one core kit, the game would eventually advance to Renaissance Italy and focus on a character-driven cinematic story rather than the fly-on-the-wall perspective we got in AC1. We all know how the game went. an absolute success in a year with powerhouses like Uncharted 2 Kill Zone 2 Modern Warfare 2 Arkham Asylum Borderlands Dragon Age Origins Left 4 Dead 2 and Infamous Assassin's Creed 2 stood out as a generational masterpiece 2009 was a really good year for sequels, of people fell in love with the setting and the main character instantly and it addressed a lot of the issues people had with AC1.

The combat was still criticized, but people appreciated the faster pace and variety of weapons. Taller buildings meant more opportunities to run free and the story that spanned 20 years of the protagonist's life resonated with fans around the world. Additionally, the modern segment rarely interrupted the action compared to AC1. In some ways, Ubisoft sacrificed a bit of its uniqueness to make a better game. Ezio is a killer, sure, but his story is primarily a revenge story in which he plays the role of the Lone Wolf, not really committing to the Brotherhood until the Final Act. You're not searching for clues and creating assassination opportunities, but rather you experience a linear story with less emphasis on stealth kills in general.

The game was created to have more action and therefore, while it was not as novel as AC1, it was much more popular and much more refined. Some people have problems with ac2, but overall it was one of ubisoft's biggest hits. It helped turn Ubisoft into one of the top publishers of the time and was the point at which higher-ups began to realize how much money this concept had to make them. It would be hard to say that Assassin's Creed 2 is where the series got worse. Because it's a well-loved game and the same can be said for Brotherhood, which managed to live up to the high bar set by its predecessor, it took the ac2 product and basically did the same thing again, refining it to near perfection with revamped graphics. simplified combat a much larger city in the shape of Rome a completely new emphasis on side content and a level of Polish.

I really don't think we'll see this series again the addition of a new multiplayer mode just added dozens of hours of gameplay to the game justifying its own existence, in fact when it comes to multiplayer experiences and single player games, The unique style of cat-and-mouth online gameplay created by Brotherhood was one of the most memorable, yet at the same time it came so early. After Ubisoft achieved such great success with the IP that we started to see a shift in perspective on what exactly the franchise was and what was going to happen with Assassin's Creed, as far as we know, it was always meant to be a trilogy, we've heard a wide variety. of rumors about what it could have been like, but whatever it was, instead of sticking to that plan, Ubisoft took advantage of the success of ac2 with a vengeance, they launched the development of this new game with a schedule of only one year, while that work would soon begin.

In AC3, the game that would close out the entire series, Ubisoft knew they could get more money out of Ezio and Renaissance Italy when development on Brotherhood began. Assassin's Creed had a dedicated team. Desolate had led his team in Montreal in the creation of both ACs. -1 and 2 and he continued that shared creative vision through AC Brotherhood, but it was during the development of Brotherhood that this team split. Some say it's due to creative differences in the franchise, while other stories point to a general desire for creative freedom. As a developer, but what we do know is that Desele left the team in 2010 before the release of Brotherhood.

We also know that Ubisoft was changing its overall plan for the franchise. They were testing the waters to see if they could make a quality game. In just one year, for better or worse, his tests were promising. Brotherhood is a fantastic game and many people label it as one of the best games in the series. It may not have had the narrative weight of ac2, but in just one year they managed to do it. a game that was more fluid and engaging than the previous one with the desolation match the cracks were starting to appear and the first red flags were starting to appear the game was great but Ubisoft had now successfully completed a full game in just one year and they had started to expand his plans for Assassin's Creed far beyond a foreign trilogy with the success of Brotherhood.

Ubisoft wasted no time getting a new game in development that would come out once again before AC3. The company was already working on a 3DS title called Lost. Legacy which would have seen Ezio travel to Massiav to discover the secrets of Altair Now, although we were already in 2011 in our timeline, there are a few entries in the franchise that I haven't mentioned yet. Portable games where we were only a few games. series, but we already had a sizable repertoire of handhelds on the market, we got a story about Altair in 2008 called Altier's Chronicles and both Ezio and Altier got a game in 09 with Bloodlines and I found out that the reason I haven't mentioned them It's still that they just didn't have much of an impact on the franchise as a whole, the AC handheld games never reached a wide audience and in fact all of the handheld titles in the franchise came out between 08 and 2012 and none in recent years. 10.

Perhaps for years of watching this, Ubisoft didn't want to settle for portable Nintendo money, so they decided that Lost Legacy would change course to become its own full console game. They did it once and thought they could do it again, only now things weren't the same. As they were before, Desolate was gone and the core team that worked on the first three was split up with many of them working on AC3. They had even less time than Brotherhood and were reworking an existing 3DS project into a Mainline title. So, without that original team in Montreal to work on this new title, who did they bring in to carry that weight?

Have a core team working on this new title. Ubisoft went all out and turned the game into a Studio Venture of six, the largest team they had. Ever put out an Assassin's Creed title with less time to work with the company would make up for it in sheer manpower the game's cinematic introduction became a meme shortly after its reveal a seemingly endless number of Ubisoft teams working on this game now credit must be given where it's due, the team managed to get the game out on time and, for all intents and purposes, it exists as a perfectly fitting ending to the Ezio Trilogy.

It featured a new setting, new characters, and some minor additions to the game to keep the relationships interesting. It wasn't reviewed as brilliantly as the last two, but it was a hit, it was movingnarratively and people appreciated closure for both Altier and Ezio, but it was here in 2011 that we first got a glimpse of what Assassin's Creed was starting to become as a franchise. on an annual schedule with studios around the world working to build an acceptable product with a gradual style that will come together at the end. Looking closer at Revelations, the cracks become much clearer than in Brotherhood, while Brotherhood greatly expanded the different types of content that was its world. full of Revelations is actively scaled back a bit here are the pieces of side content that I would classify as quests Beyond being a tutorial or collectible quest in Brotherhood, these were greatly expanded from ac2 which didn't have a huge amount of side content so you look In the side quests in Revelations, which are very sparse in comparison, the non-quest based content that does exist, such as Templar Towers multiplayer and property purchasing, were all copied word for word from Brotherhood, with the new main edition being Den Defense, which really wasn't like that.

Well received due to its dissonance with the rest of the experience, you can feel how hard the team fought to make the game's plot the right length. The game has almost the same number of main missions as Brotherhood on paper, but five of the game's missions are just cutscenes, three of them are the entire ending sequence of the game, three more missions are just this strange mission repeated in the that you use Eagle Vision to find a book and pick it up, and the two missions that were secondary content. in ac2 and Brotherhood became main content here as a way to reinforce the main story content.

Also, Desmond essentially sleeps through the game because he was backed into a corner and his character didn't give him room to do anything important given that AC3 was already in full development, although these problems are very clear in retrospect, at the end of the day the game is a version reduced and more exclusive looking Brotherhood and people looking for more than what they already had were not going to be. Disappointed as I said, the reviews were more lukewarm than the previous two games, but they were by no means bad, as this development process was the game was what it needed to be, plus fans knew this was a middle-of-the-road game. , expectations were high for AC3, the true sequel to Assassin's Creed 2 that would finally push the series forward narratively and technologically.

Assassin's Creed Revelations had the luxury of being a very derivative game, regardless of its flaws, it was still built on the foundation of two immensely popular titles, the same cannot be. said of Assassin's Creed 3. While reveal teams were scrambling to turn a 3DS game into a mainline title, the new game set during the American Revolution was already moving forward in Montreal, fans had been eagerly awaiting the conclusion of The Desmond Saga for five years and AC3 was supposed to be the game that told us that Assassin's Creed wasn't the same franchise it was when it was initially created, the three-game saga had become a five-game saga and when AC3 was actually being made it wasn't they intended to stop there rather than be written as a final arc, it was written as a reboot of the series, there would be no apocalypse, the Templar Assassin conflict would not relent, and the ISU would hardly develop at all.

Desmond's story would end, but the series would continue and boy did they finish Desmond's Story Assassin's Creed 3 along with Mass Effect 3 May 2012, a year infamous for terrible video game endings, the end of AC3 was seen as abrupt, anticlimactic and disappointing, there would be no epic conclusion because the company already had years of Assassin's Creed games planned after that, it was a disappointing continuation of not only the games but also the really interesting graphic novels that had been released starring the brainwashed templar Daniel Cross and his murderous ancestor Nikolai Orloff Desmond cross and modern villain Warren Vidic were scrapped with little to no fanfare in one of the biggest flops of a half-decade-long story.

I've seen ideas that had been built like the rebellion of Adam and Eve, the secrets of subject 16 and Abstergo. The higher level operations had been abandoned at this point as victims of this change in focus, on top of that the game just wasn't particularly loved, it was a mess and the Polish that Brotherhood worked so hard to instill in the series was no longer there. . While the game's themes were praised for being more mature than what the series had historically addressed, the dialogue and pacing of the narrative were criticized for failing to achieve those themes. Fairness response to the game was mixed with some appreciating the simplified mechanics and others lamenting the small details of reduced complexity that hardcore fans appreciated, such as constant parkour jacks and realistic sword clashes in combat, had been left in the past. , that's not to say that the game has been criticized, it has its merits and retains its own following to this day.

It was hugely ambitious compared to what came before and the scenery was magnificent, as expected from an Assassin's Creed game, but after years of waiting, AC3 left a bad taste in many people's mouths, this was supposed to be the game that would embarrass the last two entries. and was instead largely seen as a low point for the entire series. The release of Assassin's Creed III came out at the same time as AC3 for the Playstation Vita, and while it was a technical Marvel and a great release for the platform, it was still only a portable title.

At the end of the day, it also received mediocre reviews and was not embraced by many fans at all due to the Vita's limited popularity, and Liberation ended up being Ubisoft's last chance to create a handheld game tied to it. On the day when fans waited patiently and their faith was not rewarded, even more worrying was the fact that Ubisoft did not finish after the release, fans were informed that they could wait for the next installment, just a year later, we come to what which should have been a breaking point, a disappointment. The entry that was supposed to usher in a new era of Assassin's Creed failed to hit the mark and was receiving a direct follow-up in a single year, plus the lead-up to the release of this new game was hampered by behind the dramatic scenes once again, as I said above, desolate left in 2010 to go to THQ Montreal and work on some exciting new projects, but as fate would have it, Ubisoft ended up acquiring THQ Montreal leaving it pretty much in the same place it was. earlier in 2013.

Desele was fired permanently from Ubisoft, the company claimed that they could not reach an agreement with him, while Desilee himself claimed that he was fired without basis and escorted out of the building by security at the time Ubisoft to distance himself quite a bit from people who put Assassin's Creed on the map and hopes for new games weren't working out especially Miraculously High Assassin's Creed IV was fantastic there was no pressure to finish a full-length story for the first time in a long time Assassin's Creed was free to branch out and be The creative thing that stood out first was Polish, the game was not without unintentional portals to the underworld, but this was a much more stable experience than Assassin's Creed III rather than starting from scratch like the last game, the team had a skeleton about the one they could build. to create something completely new, the graphics were much cleaner, the color is much more vibrant, and the gameplay was much more responsive.

The side quests were more varied and plentiful and the overall gameplay was much more cinematic. It had many of the same gameplay problems that AC3 had. but greatly improved stealth with new tools and a better detection system. Their biggest move, however, was changing the gameplay to introduce a new focus on naval traversal and combat that took place decades before AC3. AC4 sees the player take on the role of Edward, a pirate and grandfather. by raduna gedu, this was a bold move that is somewhat controversial to this day. Some hardcore fans see the game as too big a leap from tradition and an invitation to dull the core mechanics that were established in ac1; however, the vast majority of fans and critics. praised AC4, it was unique and retained the primary gameplay elements of previous games and addressed much of AC3's sloppiness;

It was still built on a shaky foundation, but it managed to be arguably the best pirate game of all time and a strong entry into the market. The Ubisoft franchise was starting to find a flow by having its different studios handle different projects simultaneously while still giving them time to maintain a rapid release schedule. Maybe Ubisoft could really pull off annual releases if the quality had the ability to be as high as Black Flag Assassin's Creed. was unashamedly good again and fans who could stomach the naval combat were rewarded with a year of enjoying an entry that was getting pretty good press and oh how brief it felt.

Ubisoft wanted to know how much they could get away with in 2014, the new generation. of consoles was upon us and the company had to decide how they wanted to handle the transition. They came up with a lucrative idea: release two brand new games on the same day, one for the last generation and one for the new, for PS3 and Xbox 360. We got Assassin's Creed Rogue, a game set between three and four that would branch the two stories. for PS4 and Xbox One. we got Assassin's Creed Unity, a generation x experience set in revolutionary Paris that promised to take the franchise to the next level.

Rogue ended up being the forgotten child with a smaller budget and minimal marketing attention, it was like revelations in many ways, a rehash of previous games; However, unlike Revelations Rogue, it did feature an original character and actually expanded its content quite a bit by adding things that 3 and 4 didn't, playing as a Templar was a fun gimmick and, while derivative, was reviewed quite well. as a game, at the end of the day people just didn't pay attention to it and why would they when Unity looked as good as it did, a one-to-one recreation of Paris, fluid and unparalleled parkour animations and incredible mocap work, I really felt like this game was going to make a splash, it did.

Splashing and sizzling under immense glitches, the game's release is among Bosch's most famous works in gaming, keeping company with Cyberpunk 2077 and No Man's Sky, images of character models with their faces melted and NPCs crashing through the walls where all people could find them in the game and it was unforgivably broken before it was repaired in time. since the reception has softened slightly as some technical fixes made the game much more tolerable, but issues like that don't happen in a bubble, a broken game doesn't end up being flawless in every other category and the unit reeks of lost potential even without considering the bugs, the game was full of companion app content that no one asked for, and while thousands of NPCs could appear on the screen at once, their novelty was diminished by the instability these crowds made the game.

Even on PC, the ambitious free-running system remains unlike anything before it. The gaming world has seen it to this day and yet it just wasn't ready, but things like parkour work perfectly and should have been in all subsequent games, but the basic forward and upward movement was inconsistent and unpredictable. Janky is the word people use to describe it and it's as good as any practice that can make the system a lot of fun, but you have to put hours into this game just to make it playable, not even master it. Getting good at Parkour in Unity really feels like learning to fight against its broken mechanics.

More than anything else, combat was ultimately deeper and more complex, but the fierce input lag and enemies' tendency to simply draw weapons if they surround you made the difficulty feel artificial, especially considering how heavily telegraphed and easy-to-play counter most of the attacks, this did its job. of pushing players towards stealth, but even then the sticky cover system and questionable detection system kept it from being great, especially just a year after the same company released Splinter Cell Blacklist narratively, it started strong with interesting characters and a good premise, but it falls apart very quickly. The ideas that were there throw a non-believer into a world where the Assassins and the Templars have become politically accommodating to each other and put it in the context of one of the most famous and bloody revolutions in history, unfortunately a lot of that was set aside in favor of ahalf Baked Love Story Almost everything good in Unity comes with a caveat and no amount of patching could have saved how terribly rushed this game was.

So much so that, on paper, the game was everything Assassin's Creed fans had wanted from the series after AC1. The games had stealth, sure, but they had shifted their focus to being open-world action-adventure games above all else. Unity was supposed to be the one to take us back to that and that commitment to the franchise's original promise is what has led to its recent resurgence in popularity, but no matter how pristine the city of Paris is or how inspired the changes of parkour, once you can fix its problems, the game remains one of ubisoft's biggest shames if they had allowed their team the time and resources to cultivate some of the incredible creative ideas they had while developing the game, such Maybe the franchise would be in a very different place today, but instead Ubisoft wanted their money to double quickly, and as it stands, this was the point where the casual public really started to discount Assassin's Creed as just another addition to the franchise. the soulless annual release Club two Duds in one year was a huge disappointment overseas at this time Assassin's Creed had a pattern.

Assassin's Creed 1 didn't deliver and ac2 refined it three failed to deliver and four refined it now Unity had arrived and Syndicate actually refined a lot but this time it just wasn't enough. In truth, not one or three were as fundamentally broken as Unity was, and there were many things that Syndicate could only hope to mask, not fix, the ideas behind the free version. The races were awesome, but simply too complex for the team to figure out in the given time, so Syndicate ended up avoiding them as much as possible. London has fewer obstacles for the new twin protagonists to navigate and they were given a new tool, a rope launcher, to stop them quickly.

When traversing the wide streets of London, the large crowds that Unity tried to implement simply weren't stable, so Syndicate scaled it back greatly and the challenge of Unity's combat felt artificial, so Syndicate generally removed the difficulty entirely. . Syndicate had plenty of damage control to do it more. than the series was used to though, there were a lot of hits, the city was much more inhabited with lots of interesting side content and ways to interact with the city of London, something that Unity was sorely lacking, the story had a Much lighter tone, which turned off a lot of people, but it was also much more focused than Unity, allowing its heroes and villains much more time to develop.

Nowadays, many people criticize Syndicate for making Unity's mechanics shallower rather than trying to make them work, but at the time it was appreciated that Syndicate was a much more stable and focused game than its predecessor, but despite a better reception, the game didn't surprise anyone, its reviews were good and it didn't cause any drama, but it wasn't building up the cache that its predecessors had, the public hadn't forgiven Ubisoft for Unity and the interest in Assassin's Creed had simply waned . Syndicate sold approximately 5.5 million copies in 2017 compared to Unity and Black Flag, which had surpassed 10 million. Sales were declining and the existing model had to change after seven games in seven years, the annual release schedule would finally end.

If there was ever a time when the general consensus was that Assassin's Creed had gotten worse, this was probably the first time in that decade that Assassin's Creed took a year off and went back to the drawing board with the intention of revitalizing the game. franchise with new Meanwhile, creative ideas we got the Assassin's Creed movie in 2016, which managed to further solidify the world's distaste for the franchise, it was a bad movie in 2015 and 16 we got the Assassin's Creed Chronicles games, a trilogy of side-scrolling games that became mediocre. In other words, Assassin's Creed saturation remained high, but opinions didn't increase at E3 2017.

Assassin's Creed Origins was announced, aside from a jump back a few decades for AC4 in 2013, the franchise had always moved forward in the time, now we would do it. Be experiencing Ptolemaic Egypt to witness the birth of the Assassin Brotherhood as we know it. There were two widespread criticisms of older games from their detractors: the stagnation of creative ideas and the superficiality of their mechanics. Origins was therefore built from the ground up from a design perspective. RPG mechanics and player choice would be emphasized by including them in unit and union rather than being set on a single singular City Origins map. would cover a large majority of the country of Egypt.

Combat would no longer rely on matched animations, instead opting for In a traditional hitbox system, animations would no longer fit together perfectly, although we hadn't really gotten that done since the days of Ezio and visual style would be sacrificed for depth. mechanic where range dodge and weapon type would matter more than ever, so for the first time a 1v1. Fighting could actually present a challenge in the series, while freerunning was scaled down further to fit Egypt's smaller cities and to avoid the frustrations of unity. Removed free-running social stealth given the lack of large crowds and a new emphasis on Fort infiltration and exploration. was provided, while the RPG mechanics were certainly light compared to some full RPGs, they were enough to make the game feel radically different to some people, even if the basic Loop gameplay remained relatively unchanged, Looking back at early reactions, fans were cautiously optimistic at the time almost everyone knew they wanted something new and Origins looked like it could be it, but at the same time the sleek crowd-blending animations and dense urban environments had become The norm and more traditional combat and stealth systems seemed dissonant with that identity, but at launch Origins was a Fans and critics alike had fallen back in love with the franchise with particular praise directed at the world design and its main character. , Bayek, played by Abu Bakr Salim.

People who hated Assassin's Creed for being a shallow queue simulator were pleased with the changes during the game. remained focused enough on its roots to excite most older gamers, as well as most, but not all, when Assassin's Creed 2 and Assassin's Creed IV saved the franchise in their respective eras, they did so while keeping the same features. basic mechanics from the previous game and simply refining them. Origins was a whole new beast and while the jump from Syndicate to Origins was certainly tame compared to the genre leaps many other franchises have made in the past, there were some things that just didn't sit well with all players. , some people had spent hours researching.

Unity's system traversal and learned how to fix the broken core experience for something deep and beautiful. There was much less room for that kind of exploration in Origins, even though it was a much more functional game, people missed hiding in a simple plane. On the face of it, even if the traditional stealth mechanics were solid, Origins was a hugely popular game and reignited interest in the franchise around the world, but there was now a growing sect of the fanbase that was happy with the way it that was the way things were and clearly upset with the direction of Assassin's Creed. was now doing whatever Ubisoft thought caused Origin's success, they definitely didn't think it was the extra development time during Origins' development.

Ubisoft had already put a plan in place for a 2018 installment that would go even further back in time for In Classical Greece, the Origins experiment was a success and the team was willing to go all out for the game's gameplay mechanics. role that in Origins had remained relatively minimal. Players would now have gender choice dialogue options, romance, a more developed skill tree, and multiple endings for the first time. in the series, it would be built on the skeleton of Origins, but it wouldn't be a copy-and-paste job like Revelations or Rogue Odyssey, it would bring back naval combat in full force to explore the islands of Greece and general gameplay.

Loop was revamped from the previous game. To put it lightly, this caused a schism in the franchise Odyssey was a very polarizing game and when I say polarize I mean polarize, a lot of people use the word to refer to things that they generally don't like but that have a cult following of people who they think like that. is misunderstood or underrated, that's not what Odyssey is Odyssey was an absolute critical success and many critics and fans placed it at the top of their all-time Assassin's Creed lists. It created its own community to a degree we've never seen before or since. with a very active subreddit created just for people who had an interest in that game and even with the release of Valhalla, the game maintains a much more loyal player base on the other end of the spectrum, many fans also place it at the bottom of their preferences. lists of all time changes to the established formula had skyrocketed from what Origins did and on top of that there were basic gameplay issues that people didn't like the dialogue and the gender choices made the game feel less focused, the map and side quests were expanded to the point of being overwhelming, and the combat and stealth had so many over-the-top powers that some people found it hard to feel grounded.

Plus, Quebec had regained control after making Syndicate and the relaxed comedic tone just wasn't what he was looking for. some people were looking, on top of that, some people felt alienated and feared that the style of play they grew up with would be unceremoniously dumped in the trash. This was further highlighted with the release of Assassin's Creed Uprising, a series of comics that actually concluded the modern story told in AC4 and the people at Rogue were upset that Juno and other modern plot points had been relegated to a comic that almost no one knew it existed and it seemed like there were aspects of Assassin's Creed that Ubisoft wanted to leave in the past this Wasn't Splinter Cell the one that changed the formula only for the franchise's popularity to decline along with that split?

Assassin's Creed was more popular than ever and helped propel Ubisoft to more than $2.2 billion in profits for 2018. But the detractors were now no longer a small vocal part of the fanbase, but a very loud and constant presence. in any discussion of the Assassin's Creed franchise that had become loved and hated in almost equal measure. Valhalla came out in 2020 once again in the hands of Montreal. I made my own opinions clear in my Valhalla review on the channel, but honestly, regardless of your opinions on the game, it didn't really do much to push the series in a positive or negative direction, it tried to appeal to both sides of the fanbase. in a way he didn't.

It doesn't really change anyone's mind with the RPG mechanics being toned down, but the stealth and visual style don't really improve enough to match it, reviewed pretty well without the ups and downs of Odyssey that said it felt like the conversation had arrived at Ubisoft. and how could it not be like that when the game was announced, people were harassing the stream of boss logic art announcements with a single sentence, no RPG was repeated over and over again. Ubisoft was aware of the schism, even if Valhalla wasn't the one to fix it, the game was also the first to have two full years of post-launch support.

Ubisoft wanted to see how much money they could get out of a game and that came in the form of eight content updates, including three major paid expansions. Ubisoft continued at zero. over which model would make them the most money, however, the really significant drama was happening behind the scenes in July 2020. Bloomberg published a huge report detailing allegations of sexism, harassment, and misconduct within Ubisoft. The creative director of Valhalla was fired before its release, while a variety of layoffs led to the CCO of the company Ubisoft, like many other companies in the world of video games, was painted as toxic and, at times, as a place dangerous to work according to the article if a creative team wanted a woman to be front and center in their next story the idea was not going to pass through the top brass at Ubisoft unharmed women don't sell was supposedly the Mantra released by the CCO before mentioned and was apparently the lens through which Ubisoft viewed all of its projects from a marketing perspective.

It's already somethingobvious given that in the three main games where you can play as a woman, the only time a woman has been on the cover of the game was Evie, who is standing in the background while Jacob takes center stage, the man. characters get the cinematic trailers and the vast majority of promotional materials even when they're not Canon to the game's story, now representing women in video games is one thing: widespread accusations of harassment and employees feeling like they can't trust HR or the company. overall it's something else, obviously it wasn't a story about 2020 but rather a reflection on a current culture at Ubisoft that simply hadn't been looked at before the exposure of this culture was just one of the many struggles it was having Ubisoft.

To start the decade it was fast forwarded to 2023 and the company is struggling more than it has in a long time, a slew of canceled games and poor results caused a 38% drop in the stock price in 2022, leaving the company's financial future uncertain. and in this time of uncertainty, they have put their faith in an old and very reliable IP to try to get them back on track. We have five confirmed games in development right now starting in March 2023, which is unprecedented for Assassin's Creed and, if I'm honest, I've never heard of anything like this in any franchise.

Assassin's Creed Mirage will take players to Baghdad later in the year under codename red and codename hexade to introduce feudal Japan and the European witch trials, respectively, in the years ahead. The China-set mobile game called Jade has already had some gameplay leaked and we know that a multiplayer title codenamed Invictus is also on the horizon. This is a bewilderingly complete dossier on its own, but a recent Insider article reported that there may even be more titles in development. Project Nexus, a virtual reality title, is expected to launch this year and already has a sequel planned. Two more multiplayer games, Project Raid and Project Echoes, may be in the works and Project Nebula is rumored to be a single-player game. title, take all that with a grain of salt, but even ignoring The Insider's gaming article, which is an absolutely ridiculous amount of resources to invest in a series, these titles can be really great and I'm 100% going to play them as they come out, but Assassin's Creed has a history of trying to do too much, whether it's squeezing two full games into the middle of an existing trilogy or trying to release two games on the same day to take advantage of a console switch despite this three-year hiatus that we find.

It doesn't seem like Ubisoft thinks controlling it would be in their best interest, which makes me wonder if Ubisoft has learned anything from the last decade of Assassin's Creed and that brings me back to my original question, when did they get Assassin's Creed? bad as a fan of the series who still really enjoys the games that have been coming out. I think it's healthy to be critical and identify when the existing problem began, it was the collapse of the original trilogy, it was when Syndicate came out and no. One thing that mattered was when Odyssey came out and split the fanbase in half, obviously for some people it was one or all of those things.

Anyone who no longer likes Assassin's Creed has a point where they stopped doing the things they liked in the series. and I started to feel strange for them, but in my case, I would put that line here at the height of the critical popularity of the franchise between ac2 and AC Brotherhood, why there are between two games that I consider fantastic because to me, even if the Later games were solid, that's where the change and mindset happened, that's when the question stopped being how can we tell a big three game story and instead became how can we sustain this IP for 10 years.

Not everyone liked ac1 and ac2 but if you didn't like them then that was because you didn't agree with the creative direction and mechanics of the games since then the problems and quality have been directly related to poor corporate management 2010 was When Desiree left and the core team was disbanded, Ubisoft began outsourcing work to smaller studios to speed up development time. It was when the series began to have several games in development at the same time, it was when Ubisoft began to import assets en masse to create each new game and it was when the idea of ​​content arose.

The trilogy was dissolved to make room for 10 years of Assassin's Creed titles - you could feel the human element in the first two games so clearly that they were games created out of passion for the industry and enthusiasm for new creative ideas that could help to shape the medium, which is not to say that the human element is There are still incredible people doing incredible work on these titles, creating beautiful worlds and stories for people to experience, but as the games became more mechanical in their development, that human touch became harder to find. Seeing how unceremoniously they fired Desiree, it felt like Ubisoft hadn't done it.

They don't care that humans made their games in 2013. Knowing what we're doing now with Ubisoft, 10 years later, it's clear that they never cared in the first place. I think back to 2009, when I rolled to the credits on ac2 and sat in awe wondering what the series would do to finish its amazing trilogy. I never felt like this again. Assassin's Creed became popcorn fun at best, a guilty pleasure at worst, and there's nothing really wrong with annual episodes of mindless fun having their place, but in 2009 I had the potential to be more and I missed that, looking at a future where Assassin's Creed is this multi-genre extravaganza with multiple releases per year that acts as the company's lifeboat in a difficult financial period, it's hard to hope that any maybe we get that type. of passion projects again in this series, it is certainly more lucrative to do it the way they have been doing it and who am I to say that consumer friendliness should guide your business plans, but as a consumer I miss the days in that I looked at Ubisoft and Naughty Dog and legitimately couldn't pick a favorite, while I personally wouldn't call killers creating a bad series, it doesn't really matter what I believe, the objective truth is that Ubisoft has lost the respect of many of the people who grew up. with these games and they don't seem to have a clue how to really fix that 2010 didn't turn the franchise into a bad series overnight, we've had a ton of fantastic games over the last 10 years and I appreciate my cent with Multiple entries in this one franchise, but 2010 is when Ubisoft stopped treating it like one big series, stopped putting manpower and resources into individual experiences and an overarching plot, instead choosing to distribute its resources in a way that maximized the production of the product, regardless of the quality of that.

The result was: I'm sure these games will continue to be huge hits, but from a consumer perspective, Assassin's Creed will only have a chance to be truly great again if the creativity, ambition and passion of the team members at ubisoft is something the company cultivates rather than something. that slips through the corporate cracks, maybe one day we'll return to a place where an experienced team of developers and artists show us their plan for a great game instead of some guy in a suit showing us a roadmap for 10. Thanks by Sorry for another cynical video, but I wanted to talk more broadly about the series and I hope you got something out of it.

If you have more things you'd like me to talk about, let me know in the comments, but otherwise just do it. Have a great day and take care foreigner