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. 

Assassin's Creed Infinity

 Ubisoft are just 'falling with style'

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Thinking up ideas and concepts as a creator is oh-so very hard, take it from Mr amateur author over here, that stuff just doesn't come easily. And in fact, creative stunting can affect just about anyone in any circumstance across all mediums, you'll sometime get maters of their craft who can't bring themselves to finish a single work for months, maybe even years at a time. Perhaps that comes from the way that dreaming up an idea and then putting it into action is sort of like ripping strips of your skin off and leaving them on the window sill for people to come and gawk at, it's an uncomfortable experience. But at least at the end of the day, when it's all said and done, you can turn around and say somehow, at somepoint, you sat down and made something that no one else could have. You came up with it yourself, and that makes it valuable to you if not to anyone else. But imagine, having the aid of an entire multimillion dollar company backing your creative endeavours, and yet you haven't conjured up an original idea for about a decade. At that point, what's even the point of being in a creative field? Why don't you just open up a pastry company, one that only does Shortcrust. Maybe then you'd be playing to your strengths of robot-grade factory precision in lieu of letting down your hopeful fans for the umpteenth time with Assassin's Creed Infinity.

I know what you're thinking, "Is this about Ubisoft again? You get unnecessarily harsh when it's a blog about Ubisoft" to which I'll throw up my hands and say "Okay! So Watch Dogs Legion was kind of a unique idea. (If highly derivative of Shadow of War and poorly executed)". If Yves doesn't want to face the constant ire of his consumer base then maybe he should just stop having bad ideas. Has he considered that? Although I suspect he cares not one wit what I or anyone of the millions of loyal out there think because Assassin's Creed still makes wheelbarrows of cash each and every year and I can't for the love of me figure out why. Does everyone just secretly swoop up the game on launch week and then continently forget they did that so they can complain about the franchise on the Internet? Because just so we're clear, criticism rings sort of hollow when it follows direct finical support. (I know I'm getting off track, I'm venting.)

Okay but seriously, what are the problems with the Assassin's Creed franchise as it exists today? Come on, let's pow-wow for a second. So the games have veered drastically from the original storyline of this Assassin order throughout history, the overall narrative (i.e. Modern day) has slowed to such a pathetic crawl that it's become an honestly insulting addendum to the package nowadays, the games are slowly getting bloated to ungodly lengths with little to no justification for it, all the exciting amours that would traditionally be the reward for a lengthy meta-game arc have been relegated to the microtransaction store, basic customisation features are slowly becoming exclusive to the microtransaction store, some of the content in the microtransaction store are literally just recolours, (I'm veering again, back to the game) and there's just no direction for the franchise that fans can get all excited for. That, in a non-specific nutshell, are the main problems with the Assassin's Creed franchise right now. And which of those are being addressed by this next game? I guess the directionlessness, possibly...

Assassin's Creed Infinity, for those blessed enough not to have found out already, is the annual early leak of the next Assassin's Creed game which runs like clockwork at this point. (I can't remember the last time when the AC team managed to make it to the official reveal without a leak, it might have been Brotherhood) News of this game dropped last week, and it was immediately followed by an official confirmation, but one which came with literally no keyart (Yes, unfortunately this isn't the Assassin's Creed to finally introduce Buzz lightyear into the canon) so you know that the team were caught with their pants down yet again. (You think they'd expect the leaks at this point.) But what exactly is Assassin's Creed Infinity, why is everyone mad at it already, and why am I slamming it as the ultimate manifestation of Ubisoft creative stagnancy? (That is how I feel, by the way. In case that didn't come across.) Simple, it's a Live service.

But not just any old garden variety Live service, on no! (Besides, most recent Assassin's Creed games have been garden variety live services anyway) It's going to be a Live Service 'platform', which means it's going to be an overarching game that serves to link together subsequent Assassin's Creed titles in order centralise and homogenise all heretofore unannounced future games. Think what Call of Duty Warzone is doing for the Call of Duty games recently except... actually it's just exactly that, because Ubisoft couldn't come up with a fresh idea if they were forced to under threat of the entire planet being destroyed to make way for an intergalactic highway. (Woah, that was a wild and unrelated reference. This story has really thrown me out of it, huh?)

So what does this actually mean going forward? Because it's all well and good to say "Oops, they threw out the bad key word, time to get upset!", but let's sit tight and analyse why this is such a screw up for the Assassin's Creed franchise. Firstly, this means that for the foreseeable future, or at least as long as this platform is running, we're going to see no significant evolutions upon the engine, which is a staple of this series in a weird way. (I'm not even joking, these games feel wildly different from generation to generation.) It means that Ubisoft are making a dedicated leap to Microtransaction fuelled Assassin's Creed, because they won't settle for just the one-time fee and they'd be absolutely silly to charge a subscription in this day and age. (Only truly premier MMO's and Gamepass can get away with that) But most of all it means that the next Assassin's Creed games are going to all feel the same, in the same way that Origins, Odyssey and Valhalla sort of felt like themed expansion content. There's not going to be any great leap forward, we won't have one game set in the ancient age and another in a time of automobiles; (not like the latter would be in the cards anyway. That would be way too much work for the Ubisoft team) everything will have to fit together nicely enough so that the games feel like dress-up for history class. (even more than this franchise already does) So the next game better be phenomenal, because we'll be seeing more of the same from there on in.

Now lets do the thing we always do when it's live service o'clock. You know what time it is! It's 'Live Service Crystal Ball' time! It's the point at which I use King Crimson's Epitaph to see into the future and see exactly how the first few months of this service will go, and then proceed to erase any time in which I might have actually bought this game. (Except that doesn't work because by King Crimson's rules the actions I would have done will still play out, even if no one else in the world can perceive or interrupt them; and so I'll still have bought the game. Is anyone following this? No? Okay-) The game will launch with fireworks and champagne throughout the night, but it'll last all of three hours before some sort of issue pops up. Whether we're talking Network troubles, (the Assassin's Creed team don't have much experience with this sort of project, so that's where my money's at) rampant glitches or just a shoddy general product. Actually, that 'shoddy product' feeling will be unavoidable, as somehow, despite this team having done literally nothing else but repaint and juggle the same basic game for about 10 years, this entry is going to be anaemic in comparison to all previous ones. This is of course so that the content they intentionally removed can be slowly reintroduced into the game and be called 'updates'. The MTX store will kick in about a month after everyone's settled in, it'll be live beforehand but the prices will be a fraction of what they're supposed to be, now it gets serious and people really start noticing when customisation for primary colours starts costing the soul of your first born. Player numbers will waver, Ubisoft will promise everything will improve, bad publicity will ensue; the only actual question is whether or not the game will recover from the launch woes or get abandoned. Personally I think Ubisoft have hit that 'Too big to fail' stage, so no matter how bad things get this live service will personally fill up Yves Guillemot's swiss bank account set aside purely for hush money.

It's exhausting, covering the latest shenanigans from Ubisoft, just honestly mentally draining. Because I feel I'm running around on a hamster wheel, watching the same rungs rush by my face over and over but not actually moving anywhere. I scratch my head for every colloquialisms to make it a bit more fun, 'Can't teach old dogs new tricks', 'A leopard never changes it's spots', but nothing seems to capture the true hopeless absurdity of watching these guys make the same mistakes like extras in Groundhog Day. But it's not mistakes to them, now is it? Because they get rich no matter what they do! (You could replace the Ubisoft boardroom with cardboard cut-outs of Mike Wazowski and the TVA wouldn't detect a single Nexus Event from the sacred timeline, because nothing will have changed) But hey, if you're a diehard Ubisoft fan and somehow managed to make to the bottom of this scathing blog then can I just say congratulations; you've got your dream project lining up for you and while you wait for that I have great and completely legit investment scheme I'd like to run by you-  Can't wait for Ubisoft to jettison another beloved franchise of mine to Infinity and beyond.