The Assassin’s Creed franchise has released a new game almost every year since Assassin’s Creed 2 was released back in 2009. When the first game released in 2007, there was already criticism that the segments set in 2012 felt out of place, with many fans simply wanting to immerse themselves in a historical period piece without the science-fiction element introduced by the animus.
There is a bigger problem with Assassin’s Creed’s premise, however, which has drastically limited the ability of the games to tell compelling stories with a new game released every single holiday season. While the modern sections still strike some fans as out of place, there is an aspect of the premise which pervades the entire game series’ story and which has been a burden on its narratives.
When Assassin’s Creed 1 was released the game focused on two real-world organizations in their actual historical context, the Hashashin sect and the Knights Templar during the time of the Third Crusade. Part of the premise of the original game was that the Knights Templar still existed and needed to access the ancestral memories of Desmond Miles in order to achieve their goals. Though it stood out to some players as unnecessary, the modern segments with Abstergo Industries as the new Templars didn’t particularly limit the segments set in 1191 AD.
Assassin’s Creed 2 established that both organizations also existed in renaissance Italy in secret, with connections to major political families like the Borgias who had extensive influence over Europe at that time. Even before the first game the conspiracy theory that the Knights Templar had an Illuminati-like afterlife had existed, but after Ezio’s story concluded in Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, the series was left with a problem.
The Assassin versus Templar conflict appears in every single Assassin’s Creed game and the more the series explores different periods of history, including some which take place before the main events of the first Assassin’s Creed, this has had an unfortunate implication which limits the storytelling in the games.
The series has released so many games at this point set in so many different points of history that fans always know that the conflict between the Assassins and the Templars will never make any progress in one direction or another. Even after Assassin’s Creed 3 and Rogue when the Templar order is rendered almost extinct in North America, the victory rings hollow with the knowledge that the order has to have very quickly reestablished itself in the timeline, already affecting events in the 19th century as well.
The problem is that ever since Ezio’s story, few Assassin’s Creed games have had stories which the two main orders could be cut from and which would still make sense. The games tend to slot in a new Assassin and a new historical figure as the Templar villain, but the stakes of the story are rendered non-existent by the fact that players know the games rely upon the conflict existing at seemingly all known points of history.
The games in the series which work best are the ones focused on the individual motivations of people in both the Assassin’s and the Templars who don’t have a particularly ideological stake in either organization but are using them to their own ends. For Ezio, this began in AC2 as a means of getting revenge against Rodrigo Borgia, who in turn wanted to use the Templars to achieve his own personal dreams of power. The series doesn’t have to do away with the main conflict, but it does have to tell stories that are not driven by it.
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla releases on November 10th for PC, PS4, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X, with a PS5 version launching November 12.
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