The Unfortunate Baggage of Current Assassin's Creed

Following two widely acclaimed entries, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla has immediately become one of the year’s most hotly anticipated games with its recent official reveal. After skimming through several articles divulging more details about the game’s mechanics, with the open-world design changing focus to give more of the spotlight to your Viking settlement which develops throughout the course of the game, I also found myself being pulled in by the game’s alluring concepts. That was until I quickly remembered what being a mainline Assassin’s Creed game would entail, and the baggage that comes along with it.

Since Assassin’s Creed III irrevocably wrecked the multi-entry spanning modern day storyline, that acted as the thread tying all earlier entries together into a larger and more intricate narrative, all my interest in the Assassin’s Creed lore immediately dissipated. For those who aren’t aware, Assassin’s Creed used to be a franchise about a 20-something year old man named Desmond, who was forced by global enterprise Abstergo into entering a machine known as the Animus. Doing so allowed Desmond to relive the past memories of his ancestors, leading to all of the stealthy stabbings in historical locations and time periods that the series is known for. Long story short, it turned out that Abstergo was formed by the long-standing Templar organisation in order to find various assassin artefacts to create a New World Order. This led to a rather engaging cat-and-mouse narrative, with Desmond trying to outpace Abstergo and prevent them from taking over the world.

Without going into specific details, this plotline essentially started to derail after Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, before being pretty much scrapped entirely with Assassin’s Creed III. In the eight years since, Assassin’s Creed has still retained modern day elements, with the occasional splashes of larger conspiracies being dropped into each mainline entry. Despite this, the recent overarching story has been somewhat aimless between games, feeling rather tacked on and clumsily implemented, at least in Black Flag, Unity and Syndicate.

While I can’t comment on how well Origins and Odyssey handle the larger story, having not bothered to play them, I still can’t bring myself to care about the idea of having to sit through these moments during the course of the story. It’s a double-edged sword, with the larger narrative making the standalone endeavours of the characters in each game’s unique historical time period feel less significant, while also losing its own appeal and sense of direction.

The rambling central narrative becomes even more alarming when you factor in the drastic change in direction that the series has taken over the past few years. Starting with Origins, the series has begun to incorporate more RPG elements, similar to those seen in other contemporary titles. While this has certainly helped bring back more interest into the series, it’s also meant that Assassin’s Creed has begun to shed more of its former identity.

This point can be proven no more concisely than by using the recent box arts for the games as examples: Odyssey’s front cover features a heavily armour-clad Spartan warrior, while Valhalla’s showcases a burly looking Viking warrior wielding two axes in each hand. These two images are antithetical to the idea of a subdued killer who uses the shadows to their advantage, leading to the imperative question of why these recent titles have even been called Assassin’s Creed? The obvious conclusion to be made is that an established brand is much more likely to draw in a larger audience than a new one-off IP (and a new IP certainly wouldn’t get the 15-studio manpower of Valhalla), but as a player and not a Ubisoft investor, it’s an answer that rings hollow and feels disheartening.

While I’m slightly more receptive to the idea of picking up Valhalla than I have been the past couple of entries in the Assassin’s Creed franchise, I feel like it would be an even easier sell for me if this was a high-quality new IP from Ubisoft instead. It says a lot about how the Assassin’s Creed branding has damaged my interest in these titles when Origins - a supposedly high-quality release set in a time period I’ve always had a great deal of fascination towards - was an easy skip for me because I couldn’t care less about this franchise that lacks agency. Maybe Valhalla will be the entry that gets me to care about Assassin’s Creed again, but right now I’d rather see the Assassin’s Creed name disappear to make way for titles that can branch out in new directions, without being tied to a name that’s mostly lost its identity.