5 mo. ago • 88%

Why Assassin's Creed has lost its identity?

Remember those iconic games before 2014? The OG, while dated was really unique for its time, the Ezio Auditore Trilogy that became the standard for the franchise, 3, that was very ambitious (probably too much) with it's setting and story telling. Even 4, although it was the first time AC escaped from the base of what an assassin's creed game is supposed to be.

Unity was the very first big misstep and since then the franchise has become unrecognisable, taking gameplay and mechanics from batman games and now went into unnecessarily long, repetitive and bloated RPGs than the real fans of the series couldn't care less, especially since the core legacy mechanics of parkour and missions were gone. Not only that but they completely threw the modern day story on the trash since Desmond's death...

AC was one of the last original franchises a triple A company gave us and now is just a Witcher wannabe.

"Oh wth are you talking about, it sells well" sales doesn't equal quality. The last games are such a step backwards for the series.

52 comments

Because they were getting really stale and they wanted to hold onto the franchise name anyways. People are nostalgic now, but when AC games were coming out back to back people were getting really bored of it.

When Assassin's Creed 3 came out, everyone was saying how this is the third time they remade what is basically the same game (AC2, brotherhood, revelations, then 3). People weren't impressed. Unity and Rogue didn't sell that well. Syndicate apparently also didn't sell very well.

So they basically remade the franchise into an RPG starting from Origins. They aren't that special, but honestly, neither was everything after Revelations.

45
- Rogue was barely advertised and the concurrent release with unity was doomed. Unity was so full of bugs (and there was the whole sexual assault scandal) that Ubisoft lost a ton of goodwill before syndicate.
  
  They fired the lead designer in the middle of Brotherhood because he didn't want to push shit games and you feel it. The only good things in Revelation is nostalgia and the bombs. After that you lost the parkour in 3 (although Rogue has some).
  
  I'm tentatively hopeful with Mirage but I don't expect the Japan one to be any good.
  
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  I also expect the japan one to be lackluster at this point, which sucks because it was the only setting I’ve actually been excited about for an AC game.
  
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- That doesn't explain throwing all the loved mechanics away. Imagine if CoD just becomes an strategy 3rd person game... Same shit. You don't just shit on your fans just because your previous games were bad. Remember the biggest criticism wasn't the game was the same, the biggest was the lack of polish plus not been an assassin in 4.
  
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  You joke but I would totally come back to CoD if they went 3rd person. Haven’t played since 2011 MW3
  
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  I know I am in the minority but if they kept the original gameplay loop, and implemented the multiplayer from Unity a little better, I think it would have gone somewhere better.
  
  If you took a page from Helldiver's 2, with their dungeon master guy, had that guy control the inquisitors, and make all the players assassin's that had goals and missions, and got even more points for being practically ghosts (like an assassin is supposed to be) it might have turned into a fun game. We might feel like we're actually part of a secret organization playing like that with our friends.
  
  Anyway, I liked the multiplayer in Unity, and saw extreme potential in that mixed with the original game loop.
  
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  Greed + wanting to appeal to even more normie's.
  
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- Unity was a mountain of bugs though. That wasted a lot of goodwill.
  
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Honestly killing off Desmond started the fall in my opinion. They had us invested and just killed him off suddenly. I personally think they should remove the assassins creed title at this point. It's open world combat barely any sneaking assassin stuff. The new Japan one is wasted at this point. It's what everyone wanted back when the start setting it up with ezios short movie. They shot themselves releasing it as a crappy side scroller....

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- That was a symptom. The only inspired thing in Revelation was the bombs.
  
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The series died when they killed desmond in favor of keeping the story open for endless sequels.

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I get the sentiment, even though I wasn't too much a fan of the original series. That said, while sales don't equal quality, nor does sticking to the same thing. Changing style, direction or genre doesn't equal lack of quality. I was quite a fan of Origins and Oddysey.

The real risk is losing the original fanbase, which did happen quite a bit, probably.

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- Valhalla is oozing with personality. It’s freakin’ huge, beating out the amount of content in Odyssey. It’s not all great content, but it isn’t terrible. Even the DLC is huge.
  
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  Exactly, it's awesome.
  
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  Both are terrible
  
  -11
Couldn’t agree more, currently rotating between Unity, Syndicate, Origins and Odyssey and the difference between the first two and the last two is massive. By the time you reach Odyssey it truly stopped feeling like an AC game. Still really like Origins though, vaguely felt true to the spirit of the rest of the series while introducing really nuanced and interesting changes.

My biggest complaint for all of them is how mtx is interwoven with in-game progression. Played them all on PS4 and they felt like a real slog to get through. Now on PC where I indulged and unlocked those features for free they feel accurately balanced. That’s the real problem with Ubi’s games. At some point features are hacked out to be monetized and squeeze out some extra dollars.

Not to mention how predatory the helix credit system is/was, haven’t played Valhalla nor Mirage.

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- Valhalla will feel a lot like Odyssey, though I would mention that they were much more careful about reusing layouts. Odyssey suffered from so many of the forts and environments being literal carbon copies of one another which is fine (I guess) for a glory fighter but really destroys the puzzle aspect.
  
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- I greatly enjoyed Origins after having played Odyssey (which was an absolute slog). I could NOT get into Syndicate, it just felt like a beat-em-up with ~~bullet~~ knife-sponge enemies. Unity was fun.
  
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  I’m playing Unity right now and I’m about to switch to something else. I really like Unity, it is also the biggest collect-a-thon since ACIII. Referring to my earlier point, the maps for the collections are largely locked behind additional purchases.
  
  I had the same complaint about Syndicate, really felt like you were hacking away for way too long on even basic enemies. And again locked behind mtx was basic gameplay balancing.
  
  Origins was great because although it had largely the same mtx issues the new mechanics allowed you to work around them. Odyssey then rolls around and undoes much of the changes Origins made in that regard. It’s an obvious pattern of using questionable design to boost margins.
  
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Oh man, I get it, but I loved Unity for the co-op features! Trying to sneak around an apartment with your friend only to get discovered, sudden panic and hauling ass out of a window, was hilarious. I really missed that in the other AC games.

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They're churned out year on year with tens or possibly hundreds of hours worth of completely shallow, boring, meaningless busywork gameplay. Forgettable characters, bad voice acting, badly written stories, etc. They're quantity over quality games these days. Everything feels so generic and formulaic.

For me, killing off Desmond in AC3 was the beginning of the series' narrative decline. We got one more great game in Black Flag, but after that, it began to go downhill rapidly.

They're just not fun anymore, and I especially hate the RPG elements they shoehorned into Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla.

That's just my opinion on the series, feel free to disagree.

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I liked Unity. I liked Origins. I also liked Valhalla, but it didn't feel like an Assassin's Creed game. But I liked it nonetheless.

4
Money.

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This is interesting. I had never played one before, was looking for a new game and downloaded Mirage. I love the sneaking/killing games so I figured I’d love it. It bored me. The story was convoluted and the characters were soulless. I just didn’t even find it that much fun. Maybe it was meant to be a lot of stuff from other AC games where you know a base level background/game tricks. But I just felt like it wasn’t for me, the animation was bad, the mechanics seemed stupid, the story progress seemed pointless…it was just kind of a bad game. I wish some of the old ones came out more recently so I could play them and they wouldn’t be super dated. I had usually heard good things. But it was just so meh.

4
- Play the ezio trilogy. Still plays great. And it's definitely more compact and with better characters and stories.
  
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The new games are probably better then the old ones

But nostalgia and the fact that it was something new at the time...

By today's ac, ac1 is sub par

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- They're not. They removed the parkour and social stealth options, the stories suck, the modern day story is worthless, the scenarios are not longer fun to climb due how small the buildings are and how sparse the areas are.
  
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  They did not remove parkour and social stealth lol. I don't know what drugs you are on, but in Valhalla you absolutely do have stealth, for example distrust areas.
  
  Parkour is also available in cities. And stories sucking? Lol. Valhalla literally draws from actual historical mythology, as does Odyssey. Modern story is also more than just "OMG??? Symbols??" nowadays, having more depth, and also continues like the older games, eg. a character being replaced by another, or killed, just as the Ezio games have.
  
  Also, the buildings are actually bigger than in the older games. In the older games you could walk around one in like 8 seconds, in the new one you might need 30 seconds.
  
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  But that doesnt mean these games are bad. It only means that the core aspect of what the series originally was has been thrown out and replaced.
  
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- Honestly they're not
  
  I played constantly up til black flag, got unity and the Viking one, and hated both. Stopped playing after an hour
  
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I liked Unity...

Imo the movement and flow of animations in Unity was the peak of the series. Getting to climb down the Notre Dame in like 10 seconds with all the spins and flips felt really nice. And the crowds were pretty great too. And the customization was pretty sweet, too; so many different armor pieces so you could make a truly unique assassin. And the co-op stuff was awesome.

4
There's only so much content you can milk out of a single franchise. After a while it becomes tired and repetitive, or strays in bad direction. Very few franchises continue for so long for a reason.

Unless Ubisoft is trying to create Coronation Street equivalent of video games.

2
- Changing settings, changing tools. Hell, they could have made a modern one playing as Lucy or Desmond and interwoven it with Watch Dogs.
  
  But people liked the first 3/4 games for the story and the movement. The Ezio trilogy is pretty much the same game three times! Make good stories and keep/improve on the core mechanics and they would have been successful.
  
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"Why has Assassin's creed lost its identity?"

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As someone who has áctually played since the start, I actually like the newer games more. The old ones had missions that were not just challenging but straight up impossible even if you were a good player. They also had terrible and few accessibility features.

1
- You honestly just suck at them. AC is known for having one of the lowest difficulties ever. Is one of the few flaws of the ezio trilogy, a monkey could finish the game
  
  -3
What about Tiananmen Square…?!? That was kinda cool for the CCP!

I wasn’t there but maybe someone here was.

Oh wait.

No.

They were all killed and then turned to mush by tanks repeatedly driving over the bodies and then hosed dune the drains.

GLORY TO THE CCP AND HOW WONDERFUL THEY ARE TO ALL THE PEOPLE.

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