For now.
Assassin's Creed is widely identified as that one franchise which simply refuses to die through reiteration after reiteration on a never ending quest to have a series you can fall back on when the chips aren't lining up in your court. As such when Ubisoft ever get the crazy cancerous urge to try something new, instead of actually committing to a new idea with a new creative that might, god forbid, spark a new idea in the industry, they just cram that baby in the Assassin's Creed formula and forget about checking if it'll even fit first. That, I assume, is how we ended up with Assassin's Creed being a low-rent Role Playing Game that stretches itself out to a gut wrenching length with paint-by-numbers levelling and just some of the most utterly deeply unsatisfying gameplay loops in the modern industry. This face of Assassin's Creed does have it's defenders, but those count among the most deranged menaces to society out there today: RPG Assassin's Creed is an illness.
Which is why I'm so happy with the slate of leaked stories coming out of Ubisoft that seem to imply that out of the shotgun scatter of several dozen incoming Assassin's Creed titles, Red is set to be the last terrible disgrace to the RPG franchise for all time. Or until Ubisoft get desperate again. Give them a couple of low performing releases and we'll be right back in the bottom of the barrel. Right now Assassin's Creed is the 'Marvel Phase 4 and 5' of the gaming space, only without the sparks of genius scattered between the deluge of aggressively generic underwhelming trash, and in the same vein as Marvel they've decided to handle this by releasing 5 titles at the same time, because if there's one thing their audience responds to it's the exact same content on a loop. They're like toddlers clapping for the repeat sequences in Paw Patrol or Miraculous Ladybug- as I said, menaces.
Red appears to be taking us to the one era that, back when the franchise had integrity, the creators say they would never resort to for it being 'too obvious'. We're doing Assassin's Creed feudal Japan everybody, rejoice all those who still have the capacity to care. With that scraping of the bottom of the barrel for the last 'good ideas' they can muster, we will allegedly be getting another 'branching narrative' from the genius that conceived such clever quests as a simple 'self fulfilling prophecy' concept that totally falls apart if the player doesn't accept a sex scene from a creepy old horny blacksmith in Odyssey. (Their writing prowess collapse at the simplest of hurdles.) Shinobi or Samurai, multiple quests paths, and likely an open world that will be squeezed clean of life over the space of 1 to 2 hundred hours.
To think that you have companies like Larian totally devoting their entire livelihood into the success of one title so resplendent in it's effort that other developers have come out and called it an anomaly- impossible to replicate for 99% of other studios out there. And then you have Ubisoft, who eclipse Larian in size and resources, repeatedly spitting on the whatever genre of industry they take aim at with utterly soulless products that suck the life out of the room of genuine heartfelt game development. I'm actually getting to the point where I'm starting to see something genuinely insidious in their proceedings, as if the entire company exists to try and prevent smaller genuine companies from getting a foothold in the industry by placing itself as a blubbering landwhale on the ladder to creative artistic success. Yeah, Ubisoft got me going 'conspiracy theorist' up in here!
Obviously there's going to be a market for weebs who love feudal Japan jumping into some vast sweeping spectacle of an adventure that'll likely be sprinkled with Tokugawa Ieyasu as the famous mentor style character and Oda Nobunaga as the big bad who kicks puppies and commits minor acts of genocide. In fact, I'm guessing that whichever 'path' you pick it will start with the wiping out of that small prefecture of Shinobi that gave Oda trouble for a while, with you playing on either side of the conflict and ending up a rebel to the cause. Have I done it, Ubisoft? Have I guessed your game? Let me guess, the finale takes place in the raid of Oda's fortress where we slay him in his bathhouse- can we just skip the game now?
The thing is- there really isn't any new ideas left when scouring the Samurai era of Japanese history, and if they decide to throw a curve ball and not adapt the Edo, then people will just end up feeling cheated because Ubisoft jumped around the most interesting world events. It's a catch 22 situation where people are either going to be disappointed the game didn't go as far as it could have, or disappointed that Nobunaga doesn't transform into a giant hydra boss fight at the end. (God, why do I actually miss Nioh? What is wrong with me?) And whatsmore we're really going to get the dishonour of feeling the length of the entire Edo period when this pathetic excuse for an RPG stretches out a likely mediocre framework for about the length of England and France's 14th century tussle. (That was the one which went on for a bit.)
If the rumours are to be believed then we must also believe the apparent optimising buzzing behind the scenes where at least one developer was stated as believing Red will prove the biggest blockbuster of the year, which- barring the release of literally anything decent whatsoever, could be true. But I find that grimly telling about the bar of success here. Once again we're looking for a big game. Not a good one. Not a creative or out of the box or revolutionary game; just a really big hit that will keep people playing for a long time and hopefully score a lot of microtransaction sales, because these RPG Assassin's Creed single player games are always filthy with those as well. I can't wait to pay 15 quid for a set of fiery demon armour to match my modern day Glock, because aesthetic consistency and narrative cohesion is for paupers I guess. Oh god, and I guess Layla is coming back too? Kill me now.
So as you can likely hear I'm beyond the point of even feigning optimism that anything of quality lies in the hands of the Ubisoft company anymore, as far as I'm concerned their very soul is an robotic machine of output that might as well be replaced with an AI for it's sheer inability to create anything new and innovative. It's attempts at creating RPGs have done so much damage for the general public's perception of what an RPG even is supposed to be I'm slightly concerned that any BG3 adopters might suffer actual heart attacks when they see an actual consequence to a dialogue choice for the first time in their lives. With the coming of Red we will see the end of Ubisoft's experiment in seeing if the Assassin's Creed franchise has the legs to withstand a different take in a different genre. The results? Uh... no, best stick to what you're average at, eh?
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