Assassin's Creed Overload

 If I ever hear the words 'Hidden Ones' again, so help me god...

Do you remember the age you were when hearing about not 1, not 2, not 3 but 4 new upcoming Assassin's Creed games would have still been exciting? Do you remember that? Because I can distantly recall a moment before Valhalla, before Origins and before Unity when that would have sent me spinning around the moon. Now it makes me groan as I picture a market totally saturated by low-effort, rapid production, video games that slowly drown out the sense of the world with their incessant repetition and squandered creativity. Ubisoft is not a big enough company to successfully pursue 4 major projects at the same time whilst giving them all significant enough amounts of attention to be the games they are meant to be. Assassin's Creed is going have what little life the games still had in them sucked dry. This was a grim showing from the Ubisoft teams.

It's such a shame as, there was some genuine excitement bobbing about a brand new Assassin's Creed game that was coming to bring back the franchise to it's roots, a game that was codenamed Assassin's Creed Mirag- wait, that was the full name? (Damn, Ubisoft leaks are getting wild; I wonder if there's a single development team in that entire company that doesn't have a direct line with leakers... It really does make it hard to surprise anyone nowadays.) But all that excitement seems kind of muted thanks to the dual fact that we have absolutely no gameplay proving their affirmations that this is an Assassin's Creed game back in the style of the old games that we loved, and that there will be twenty million other Assassin's Creed projects getting in the way of this singular one which is supposed to be good. Having your cake and eating it at the same time is really what's going on here. Ubisoft want to reach out to old school fans, stroke their RPG fans, bolster their mobile game fans, and wrap them all in a merciless Metaverse designed to trap you in a never ending dance of hooded murder hobos.

First we do have a pretty cool looking cinematic in Assassin's Creed Mirage. It's Baghdad streets seem eerily reminiscent of the origins of the franchise; Jerusalem, Acre and Damascus, with a bit more of the richness and volume of Revelation's Constantinople. Our new hero is a Valhalla alum, just as the leaks teased, meaning we already know his story is going to end with him becoming a master assassin just like Ezio's did; but considering we're on the whole 'play the hits' train, I can understand why the team went for symmetry there. Stealth is said to be the focus this time around, which means a renewing of the all-powerful hidden blade and the need to run as well as fight; which this trailer plays some lip service to. I just wonder if it's not just a bit too familiar. (Hah, this is a Ubisoft game, so I suppose that's kind of the Modus Operandi, huh.)

What I mean is; we've already explored a couple of settings eerily familiar to this one. When we look across the skyline of Baghdad and we can see many shapes similar to Constantinople, obviously because of the architectural heritage of the places. Even the Assassin's Tower, where we'll be taught how to stab good by the mentor character portrayed by Shohreh Aghdashloo, which the Ubisoft team wanted us make sure that we knew, looks similar to Masyaf from afar. There's going back to where it all began and then there's re-treading the grounds we've already walked before, and the gaming community has already been forcibly fed that bitter pill after the whole 'The Last of Us Part 1' debacle. (At least I don't think Ubisoft have gone quite so crazy that they're going to start throwing 70$ price tags at us. They'd be opening themselves to war if that were the case.)

But that's just one of the projects that Ubisoft are eager to drown us all within. There's also the big new RPG style Assassin's Creed game flying our way that is going to be set in Ancient Japan! Yes, after all this time we're finally going to that one time period that Ubisoft said they'd never travel to because it would be too obvious. (Of course, that was before they hit a slump and started pissing people off.) It's called Codename Red for the time being and... that's about it. No word about what they're going to do with the game to try and claw back some interest, especially now that they've faffed around so long that people have 'Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice' and 'Ghost of Tsushima' to compare it against. Honestly, their 'RPG done light' style of development is kind of emblematic of everything wrong with Ubisoft as a company; so the less I see about it, the better.

Oh, and then there's Assassin's Creed Codename Jade... we're really doing the 'codename' stuff, huh... Here is a game set in old China, and it's a mobile game. Oh no. The team were very excited about this game, enough to actually show some in-engine gameplay where they wouldn't dream about such disclosure when it came to the real games, Mirage and Red. They also were so excited to talk up a big game about how it's going to be the first Assassin's Creed game where you get to make your own character, that they screwed up and lied with that very statement. The first game to do that was the short lived mobile bomb, Assassin's Creed Identity; and this game is just a reattempt at that sort of project only with considerably more resources thrown into it. Isn't it telling when even Ubisoft can't tell the difference between their own products...

Then there was Assassin's Creed project Hexe; a game that we're already seeing people declaring their favourite looking game out of the line-up. Kind of upsetting, given that all it showed off was a twig-made Assassin's Logo hanging alone in the woods and literally nothing else besides. Hexe means 'Witch' in German; great, big whoop. If you literally can't even be bothered to share the time period, why announce the damn thing? This is like Bethesda gabbing about The Elder Scrolls Six when the game was still probably more than a decade away; there's nothing to talk about! Oh, and of course there's also Assassin's Creed Infinity which is their whole Meta-connected platform so they can try and hook people into a never ending live service that is going to be crammed full of MTX that will start small and then begin to build until it gets unbearable, normal folk will be driven away from the service for greener pastures and the game will continue to be supported by whales until it ultimately withers because of lack of general interest. There, I just summarised the entire to-happen lifespan of that crappy idea; can we scrap it now and pretend it was never announced?

Taking on too much at once is a recipe for screw ups. And even if every game turns out to be the very best that Ubisoft can possibly manage, which is 'above average', it will just lead to Assassin's fatigue even more than we're already seeing. Just as with the MCU, people get tired of the same thing too often; and this is looking like an oncoming army of the same thing upsettingly regularly. Even if they had just announced Infinity that would be concerning enough on it's own. But one game looking back, one looking forward, one for mobiles and one for mystery? Who exactly is going to make all of these games? Your staff? Because unless they've all sold their houses and families and grown four sets of arms, that seems unlikely without working their whole bodies to nubs. At the very least I can say that Mirage is trending towards a direction I like in theory, because we're still yet to have any tangible gameplay, and everything else... it all sounds like Ubisoft is heading towards a brick wall at high speed.