But maybe not completely

When I first played Assassin’s Creed in 2007, I was immediately sucked in. It had sword-fighting, throwing knives, and assassinations that primarily involved jumping off rooftops with a hidden blade. And you didn’t even have to do it that way; it’s just the way that the series became known for. But the part that drew me in the most was a story involving two secret organizations fighting each other in the shadows. It had so much potential for a rich backstory that utilized recorded history and added in a few extra details to make prominent historical figures part of it. It also seemed to set up a final showdown between the two groups that doesn’t seem to be coming anytime soon. The longevity has turned into a major detriment to the series, but it didn’t have to.

If you’re unfamiliar with the series, it revolves around a secret war that’s been waged for centuries by two secret factions called the Templars and the Assassins. The Templars believe that peace can only be achieved if they have the ability to control everyone’s thoughts and actions. The Assassins believe that everyone should be allowed to do what they want, but be punished if they commit crimes. In the near future, Templars, via a company called Abstergo, capture a descendant of the Assassins named Desmond Miles. They hook him up to a device called an Animus that helps him relive the memories of his ancestors, specifically one that lived during the Crusades. Their goal is to search these memories for an item that will help them get the control they want.

Desmond escapes with some help, but keeps searching through other time periods with other ancestors, trying to find the artifact. Each game primarily focuses on one of these ancestors (three of them focusing on the same one at different stages of his life) with Desmond and pals searching in the present, using the clues they get from his time in the Animus. Their hope is to find this artifact before the Templars do.

Sounds like an interesting story, doesn’t it? It certainly did to me when Ubisoft started telling it. It also sounded like a story that would one day have an ending, like all good stories. Unfortunately, Ubisoft has other plans. They’ve gone on record saying that they want to keep this series going for as long as they can make money off of it before ending it. But this story is the very thing keeping the the series from staying good.

I’m going to venture into spoiler territory here, so skip this paragraph if you haven’t finished Assassin’s Creed III or started IV. At the end of III, Desmond makes a choice that causes his own death rather than that of the entire human race. This marked the end of Desmond’s story, supposedly starting a whole new storyline (if you have played III and found the ending incredibly confusing, I found this article pretty helpful). Abstergo harvests his brain and they start digging through his genes to find more answers.

The spoilers should be over now. Assassin’s Creed III concluded by ending Desmond’s story and creating a whole new one. This would normally be ok, but I got the impression from the very beginning that Assassin’s Creed IV’s writers were out of ideas on how to proceed; they came up with an interesting new goal, but had absolutely no idea on how to get there. Ubisoft wouldn’t admit their plans to milk the series for all it’s worth until later, but this was definitely one of the first warning signs.

The writers decided that, instead of establishing a whole new main character for Assassin’s Creed IV or utilizing some of the existing ones, they should just make the near-future protagonist a first-person silent protagonist for the player to project onto. This strikes me as incredibly lazy compared to their character development skills up to this point. The whole thing felt like a holding pattern. Edward Kenway spends the game looking for an artifact, but it doesn’t seem like that’s what Abstergo or the Assassins are looking for. The game just wraps up without advancing the overarching plot anywhere.

This is a story that needs an ending. The writers set out to write an interesting overarching story that would connect a lot of other interesting stories. The executives at Ubisoft set out to make a product that they could keep selling year after year until the audience was tired of it. At this point, the two objectives are starting to get in each other’s way. The longer you drag out a story like this, the more uninteresting and convoluted it becomes. The more uninteresting and convoluted a story becomes, the faster everyone gives up on it.

This series could’ve been exactly what Ubisoft wants it to be if it wasn’t for this overarching story. As a matter of fact, the near-future story is never even what’s advertised. In the commercials and trailers, all you ever see is ancestor du jour jumping around on rooftops, stabbing people, and taking in whatever the current period and location have to offer. And that’s exactly what we want. That’s exactly what sells the games. So why do we need any more than that?

Some of the most interesting stories are about different people loosely connected by one or two elements in the story. Take the Sin City comics; a lot of different people who live in the same sleazy city, run by the same sleazy politicians. These people may never meet, but they all have the city and its problems tying them together. This method as applied to sequels has already been done, and has been very successful. Take the Silent Hill series; all of the games feature different protagonists coming into the town for different reasons. The main connecting factor is the town itself. Not even the monsters are (supposed to be) the same because they’re (supposed to be) unique to the character’s inner demons.

This could’ve worked so well with the Assassin’s Creed series. It’s the same war. It’s established pretty early on that it’s a war that has been going on for a long time and is probably going to keep going. One of the things that keeps drawing people in is how the writers manage to incorporate real historical figures into the war, like Leonardo da Vinci, the Borgias, Captain Kidd, and Bart Roberts. The upcoming Assassin’s Creed: Unity will be set during the French Revolution, so you can probably expect people like Marie Antoinette to be involved with the Templars in some way.

Ubisoft can have their long-running series. But they have to do something first: end the story set in the future. That story needs to conclude soon, before everyone loses interest. The story has turned into a hunt for an ancient being named Juno, a member of a species that once enslaved the human race. I forgot this very quickly, however, because IV didn’t seem to do anything with it. They mention her towards the end, but nothing substantial. Over the next two or three games, Ubisoft needs to introduce a new main protagonist (it could even be the same person, just finally given a face, voice, name, and the all-important personality) and advance the search for Juno. I’m picturing a final fight involving all of the artifacts we’ve found so far.

Once this story is over, Ubisoft can then keep churning out these games as long as they are consistent in changing up locations, periods, and characters. I was hoping to see a French Resistance fighter jumping onto Nazis in the early ‘40s. I’m interested to see if Adolf Hitler would be a Templar, or if the Assassins would join the Templars to take him down. Or maybe one set during Feudal Japan, as a ninja whose clan, while still carrying on the Assassins’ mission, occasionally moonlights as the spies for hire that they actually were. Maybe a Mujahideen warrior during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan; there’s a lot of potential in mountain warfare, and I can just picture the Assassin running through the terrain while getting shot at by a Hind helicopter. These are the stories where all of the best writing ends up anyway. But because they started the connecting story, they have to finish it. You can’t just drop it; the fans are going to want closure. So, have that story go out with a bang before it goes out with a whimper along with the entire series. The series will probably last longer if they do.