Honestly one thing I like about Assassin’s Creed is how they send you back in time but highlight that even that past lived in the shadow of further legendary past.

AC: Ancient Greece you visit tons of Attic ruins-already, and at least one crumbled Minoan palace, in the Egypt one it’s the very dawn of the Roman Empire and the pyramids are already ancient. Those and the AC: Vikings one with the English settlement still speaking Latin were more Roman than AC: Rome which was set in the Renaissance amid ruins, with Leonardo da Vinci as your gadget guy

(I do like how for the American Revolution one after the Ezio trilogy they teased Benjamin Franklin like he would be the equivalent and instead you just overheard him talking about the appeal of fucking older women)

Final AC:Odyssey thoughts

They didn’t really do anything with Sparta/Athens or kingship/democracy, they kinda finished up with a vague sense of necessary balance between an equivalent Order (Templars) and Chaos (Assassins), which was kinda what they were going with London and the Americas ones

They have been hinting in universe in ancient-aliens-voice about a series reboot tho, that’s funny

It was so long I finally got bored at 85%, but that’s only cause I’m the type to grind to 100%

To come back for the 3rd time, it’s really the best use of moralized choices in a narrative I’ve ever seen. I’ve said before it’s less angel/demon than strict/lenient with no obvious relationship to instrumental ends. More than that no obvious relationship to moral ends because it really does grok a pagan ethic where “fiery, proud, vengeful” can be virtuous just as much as clever and subtle; you effectively get the choice to be Achilles or Odysseus.

And the choices are subtle and so distant from their payoff to deter savescumming so in the course of a playthrough you will experience tragedy. But you can’t really “fail” them and they’re not really central except in the Socrates and Hippocrates questlines. Which are written so well that whatever ethical choice you make gets well-challenged and honestly yes the Socrates and Hippocrates questlines should be about ethics.

Also not as much as AC:Egypt (which, not AC:Rome, is the one with Julius Caesar) but things like the Minoan ruins and all the collapsed temples really realized the fact that the cultures we consider “ancient” were living among reminders of civilizations just as far back themselves

They use a flavor epithet - malaka - but sometimes they just say “fuck”. Also the herms don’t have dicks out but some of the statuary does so good.

Your Hate Object Has Redeeming Qualities: The “Abstergo” Frame Story to Assassin’s Creed

• been pretty consistently about the coming neoliberal apocalypse from the start, before it was obvious that was the theme of our generation

• once the Dan Brown shit burned off that was the scaffolding, our modern world and all the decoration we associate with it is continuous with the rawest premodern power structures

• there was even that one where they got meta and Abstergo was a Montreal-based game developer making the pivot from single-player campaigns to online matchmaking

• where the vulnerability was the neoliberal contracting-out of the break room to an independent coffee stand in the lobby

• also Shaun can be a fun voice with a writer who understands that cynical front from inside

So the next yearly Assassin’s Creed is going to be in Victorian London. That’s cool, and I hear people being “ooh, Jack the Ripper!”

The important question though: will Karl Marx be an Assassin or a Templar?

It’s interesting how the AC games have been going revisionist for the last few, giving Templars sympathetic self-understandings and highlighting naive Assassin blowback.

(if they’re committed to the release-a-year schedule they could do worse than split into alternating Templar/Assassin lineages along the gameplay [medicine and 2 button climbing/greased rails and combo chains] split)

I keep going back and forth on AC: Unity.

It’s World of Assassin’sCreedcraft, with the SP mode as a spinal solo questline that gives you decent greens and blues then purples. But past that loot-grindable instances and parallel and semifungible progression systems and everything.

Destiny was World of Halocraft and AC:U did it better, half of GTAV was WoGTA and AC:U integrated the sides better, on the other hand Diablo III was More Diablo II and that didn’t happen so. So.

Also the French Revolution, they did even more than you could expect.

the AC3 lineage, 3-Black Flag-Rogue, I liked that. More wilderness, more stealth timing. ubisoft says okay let’s see that work out in Batman: Arkham and Shadow of Mordor’s lineage, let’s split another branch off from early Ezio and make it WoAC and I’ll give them a chance.

(Borderlands was Doomablo)