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rachelkaser · 4 years

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Has the Assassin’s Creed series lost its way... or its mind? (Part 2)

Disclaimer up front: The fact that my last blog post coincided with the reveal of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla was a complete coincidence. That being said, I’m so glad it happened, because it gives me more examples of the, we shall say, modern problems with Assassin’s Creed. But still, I won’t judge it too harshly considering I haven’t seen it yet.

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It’s time for me to give what I think are the two most prevalent (and fixable) problems regarding the series -- namely what the fuck everyone in the games is doing, and what they’re trying to accomplish. I also want to talk about the disconnect between the way the series started and where we currently are.

And we might as well start with the biggest disappointment in the series so far: Juno.

Juno A Thing or Two

First, let’s go all the way back to when this series began. The original game cloaks Those Who Came Before in very sinister hints, and Al Mualim speaks of them with even more quiet reverence than he does the Apple of Eden. In the next game, we meet one of TWCB, Minerva, albeit very briefly, and she outright states that her people, who aren’t gods, are long gone from the world and have only left behind a trail of bread crumbs in order to protect humanity -- their creation -- from a world-scorching solar flare.

If you think about it, that ought to have been all we ever knew about TWCB, at least to a certain degree. We know they aren’t gods, and we know they’re no longer around. Based on the cutscene from AC Revelations, we know they also didn’t manage to protect humanity from the previous solar flare. They were kind of like the Protheans from Mass Effect: a wise, powerful predecessor race brought low by their own overconfidence, acting as a warning for humanity to use their talents for better things.

Yet, by the time Odyssey rolls around, we see them constantly meddling with human history, undermining the original point that it was a last-ditch effort on the part of Minerva to avoid utter catastrophe, and not something they otherwise would have tried. In spite of the fact that Minerva explicitly said she and her kind weren’t gods, and weren’t strong enough to stop the solar flare, later games ramped up their power as a way of trying to make them interesting enough to take up a bigger part of the story.

They really didn’t need a bigger part of the story.

Also, the first six games of the series -- that’s about a combined 200 hours of play time, roughly -- revolved around one central plotline: The Juno story. It was even brought up, albeit in a tangential way, in later games such as Syndicate. Essentially, it was the backbone of Desmond’s story arc, and involved him making the difficult decision to unleash a literal evil god in the machine in order save all of humanity from a natural disaster. Not only did he die, but subsequent Assassins were left to deal with the fallout of a malevolent entity trying to assert herself in the modern world. It was corny as all hell, sure, but in the hands of interested and creative writers, I think it could have gone somewhere cool.

Now the modern stories are primarily about the pursuit of the Pieces of Eden, and the Juno plotline has been dropped entirely. Juno herself was actually unceremoniously killed off -- in a comic book, no less. Just to make the whole thing feel more like a rip-off, she was killed by Desmond’s bastard son (a character the games have only hinted at up to now) who’s also a Sage, meaning he carries the soul of Juno’s dead husband.

I can’t even begin to describe the disdain and frustration within me when I say, “Gee, I sure as hell wish I could have played that.”

The son of the previous protagonist, struggling with the sinister presence in his head, joining forces with both Templars and Assassins to take down the sinister would-be god responsible for his father’s death, his own mental health struggles, and potential global catastrophe? Pardon my language, but why the actual FUCK was this not the plot of one of the games?

The comics came out in 2017 and 2018. What were the games we got in that same time period? Origins and Odyssey, which star Layla Hassan in the modern sections, quite possibly the most boring person in the whole series. You’re telling me that someone seriously looked at this series and decided the modern gameplay of two tentpole games would best be propped up with the most uninteresting stick of wood Ubisoft has yet crafted? Fuck. Right. Off.

Everything the first seven games, from AC1 to Black Flag, had been building towards with regards to the modern story, including Desmond’s sacrifice for humanity and the race to give Juno a physical form, is for absolutely nothing. It’s abandoned in-game for no better reason than to give the player Pieces of Eden to play with instead.

Having mentioned that, it’s about time I told y’all what I really think about this particular plot device.

Pee Oh Ees? Pee Oh Ess

For the uninitiated who’re only here to see me have a big ol’ fangirl aneurysm, the Pieces of Eden are gadgets left behind by TWCB with various superpowers assigned to them as the plot demands. In-universe, they’re objects of great renown that cropped up in various forms throughout recorded history -- as crystal skulls, sacred orbs, swords, staffs, blankets, jewelry and even, in one memorable instance, the actual Koh-i-Noor diamond.

But let me establish -- as indeed we must again -- that while the POEs have always been described as powerful, in the first several games in the series they were only ever used to further a larger purpose. They were part of an elaborate communication network left behind by TWCB in order to contact Desmond, specifically, and get his help averting the end of the world.

The only reason they were ever important was because they usually somehow led to the clue that would help him move forward with that goal. Altair’s Apple? Showed where to find the other Pieces. Ezio’s Apple? Led to Desmond’s first contact with Minerva. Connor’s crystal ball? Showed Desmond where to find the medallion that opens the chamber where the end of the world may be averted. My point is, while the concept of them was cool, laying hands on them was never the ultimate goal.

Sure, they’re leftovers from the Precursor society, but let’s not forget they had a literal Precursor spirit haunting Abstergo’s computers, and the writers chose instead to focus on this garbage. And I don’t use the word lightly: In Assassin’s Creed 2 codex, Altair even wonders if humans are just squabbling over what was effectively rubbish to TWCB. He’s not exactly right (see again: communication network to Desmond), but you gotta wonder if he’s completely wrong either.

Instead of examining that, and pondering whether anyone, Assassin, Templar, or otherwise, should have these artifacts, the series has settled for shuffling them around like so many footballs. And to make them more interesting, the writers of later games have chosen to make the PoEs more powerful.

For example, the one in Syndicate is essentially a healing blanket that brings people back from the brink of death. The one in Odyssey makes the bearer immortal. All I could think when I found out about these was “Gee, it sure would have been nice if Minerva had led Desmond to that one when he was preparing to sacrifice himself for humanity.”

It’s getting to the point where I’m goddamned sick and tired of seeing them crop up. All three episodes of Assassin’s Creed Chronicles were about retrieving a POE -- the same POE, no less -- and playing keep away with the Templars at three different points in history.

It’d be different if we saw the Assassins ever used the POEs to further their cause or make the world a better place, but it’s happened almost never in the series. Most of the time it’s as though playing POE hot potato with the Templars is the only thing the Assassins can actually be bothered to do.

Which brings me to my last, and biggest issue...

Road to Nowhere

Let me ask a question: What, at this point, is the endgame for the Assassin’s Creed universe?

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I don’t mean what’s the planned endpoint of the series -- Ubisoft will keep making them for as long as we keep buying them. I mean, what’s the desired world state for the Assassin and Templar factions -- what, in essence, is the end goal of their efforts?

I have played every game in the series multiple times, read the comics and novels, and even watched the movie. I know this series very well, and it disturbs me that, when I ask myself that question, I can’t come up with more than a vague answer for the Templars, and no answer at all for the Assassins.

Think about it: What have the Assassins done for the last few games besides follow behind the Templar group du jour with a paint roller, covering up and undoing whatever it is they’ve done? When’s the last time the Assassins made an effort to do anything, rather than just react? When’s the last time you, the player, felt like you were playing a character that could have actually existed in history and made some kind of an impact?

The longer we do this dance, the less it feels like we’re working towards some kind of goal -- and that’s a damned drag. At the very least, with the Desmond storyline, we had a definite end. Ubisoft kind of painted itself into a corner by needing Desmond’s story to be wrapped up before the end of 2012 in order to tie into that whole “Mayan Doomsday” thing from December of the same year. So if nothing else, we knew his story was going to have to end by then.

Even Disney is aware it couldn’t just keep making Marvel adaptations forever without some kind of larger destination in mind or people would lose interest. But apparently that lesson’s escaped Ubisoft, because there doesn’t seem to be a cosmic expiry date on the modern-day story.

Its very tempting to say the series would be better off it cut out the figurative tumor and no longer have a modern narrative at all. But if it did, what would tie these games together, truly? Because the meat-and-potatoes of the games takes place in the past, it falls to the modern-day sections to deliver the big-picture story, which they have failed to do for a while now.

The problem isn’t that the modern sections exist. The problem is that the modern sections aren’t good. They’re aimless and boring, and the characters are so bland and uncontextualized that it’s impossible to sympathize with them. And that sucks because it means we have no connection to the world beyond the past storyline anymore. If you’d told me circa 2012 I’d be missing Desmond Miles in a few years, I wouldn’t have believed you, but here we are.

I’m not trying to give the impression, with this screed, that I don’t like or have fallen out of love with Assassin’s Creed. Because somehow, shockingly, I haven’t. I still love AC. I’ve loved AC since I was 17, which is over a third of my life. I’m just bitterly dissatisfied with AC at the present moment. At this point I’m afraid Valhalla is going to resemble For Honor more than previous entries in the series.

A franchise can change. A franchise can evolve. But this isn’t evolution. This is a game series that has gone completely off the rails and is spinning its wheels aimlessly in the air. I’ll revisit this topic after Valhalla, but I’m not holding out hope for a great change.

#assassin's creed #assassin's creed valhalla #juno #piece of eden #those who came before #assassin brotherhood #templars #video games

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