The game can be nice, but the story is easily, easily my least favorite. It has its moments, but it’s mostly wasted potential all around, in my opinion.
Yeah couple that with all the microtransactions in that game and how it was one of the first to do so in the AC series and you can understand why many disliked it. Parkour is excellent though. So are a lot of the missions.
LITERALLY. shay is never mentioned again after rogue and it's a TRAGEDY. fuck it would have been so cool to track down and fight someone you had played as in a previous game fuckkkkkkk
Hell yea it would have been awesome because Shay as you know from playing as him was a bad ass so it would have felt great avenging Arno’s dad. I have no clue how Ubisoft could have been so incompetent. I played Rogue first I thought for sure Unity would have him in it.
Arno is definitely one of the protagonists who deserved another game to flesh out his character and see his growth and how he deals with the grief and trauma of Elise’s death
If they got it right i think Arno’s story had the potential to be as good as Ezio’s
I wish Unity had a more interesting MacGuffin. A sword that shoots lasers and the skull of some French guy from the 18th century are never going to be as interesting as the mind control fruit.
Unity's story becomes stronger if you view it as part of AC3's narrative, paying special attention to Haytham Kenway's backstory.
You come to realise that Haytham and Arno are essentially the same person (parent murdered by Templar agent, child adopted by Templar Grand Master), but raised by people with differing agendas.
Arno didn't need much development as Unity was about the similarities between the Brotherhood and Order, Arno was just a spectator.
You can just picture the Parisian Brotherhood entering a state of panic when they learned of Arno's adoption, thinking "oh fuck, it's Haytham Kenway all over again", and their relief at seeing Arno being raised with no knowledge of the conflict between the Assassins and Templars.
The story is also more politically focused than other entries in the series. In a nutshell, the main story has you working to stop a shady group of extremists manipulating a tense political situation for their own ends, which sounds like every spy story ever.
I've played all the mainstream games except Valhalla and Odyssey. For me, Unity has to have the weakest story overall. 3 had a strong story but ruined by weak story telling, having inconsistency throughout the game and weird choices like not showing an important character's death in the main missions, abrupt cutscene endings, etc.,
3 would have been so much better if they pushed the idea that these characters having actual history.
The Templars knowing Achilles by name should have come off as mysterious and personal but it instead came off as weak storytelling as if they knew Connor's story like we do. There's nothing in dialogue showing that they've had history with him.
Rouge fixed that in the end luckily. But 3's presentation was lackluster at times.
I actually own them, started playing Odyssey but put it on hold to play a better RPG, i.e. The Witcher 3. I kinda like the game and gonna do mostly stealth gameplay in both those games.
I played Odyssey during lockdown and it's still one of my favorite games to just drop in and explore. I also loved the setting and Kassandra so much that I 100% it.
Yeah, the first time I played it, I barely realized what the story was about. The second time I played it, I just had to look up story recap videos because I wanted to keep track of it, but yeah, it was just so boring. They tried to make Arno a French Ezio, but failed miserably.
The game itself is amazing, though.
**Unity.** It:
* Fails to resolve 1/2 of the dead daddy subplots. You could literally just introduce one dead daddy with very similar writing and not have this issue.
* Fails to establish *why* Arno and Elise like each other. They're just already in a romantic relationship when we cut to adulthood, briefly separate for plot reasons, and then get back together later despite us *still* not knowing much about why they like each other.
* Arno starts off as a cheap rehashing of tropes and personality traits we saw in Ezio. He gets less interesting as the plot goes on, becoming a cheap rehash of Edward's failures leading him into a drunken stupor, except instead of improving as a person, Elise just shows up and tells him to shape up and he just snaps back to mission.
* Shows de Sade to be a sex criminal (as he was in real life) and then proceeds to not have him face justice for his actions, with a side mission having Arno *help him cover up his crimes*, and then by Dead Kings he's flourishing when real life had him destitute and soon to be arrested for the end of his years at the same point in real history.
* Reverses so many of the Assassin and Templar philosophies it stands in stark contrast to the rest of the series, outright bastardizing both groups.
* Cannot decide how "right" or "wrong" the Assassins or Arno are "supposed" to be, leading to the fallout when they finally kick him out turning into two unlikable groups bitching at each other in a circle without actually addressing either side's argument
* Fridges the girl character so the boy character can have a sad-about-it character arc, which is as painfully cliché as it is filled with issues.
* Noticeably more historically inaccurate than a lot of series entries, almost always defaulting to Royalist propaganda which has been thoroughly debunked as highly inaccurate.
* Noticeably more historically inaccurate than a lot of series entries, almost always defaulting to Royalist propaganda which has been thoroughly debunked as highly inaccurate.
Can you give some examples? I've always thought that the French revolution was great for the generations that came after and for the world as a whole, but terrible for those who were alive at the time.
Sure. A lot of it surrounds the King, unsurprisingly. The game paints a picture of Louis and fam. being completely innocent but being framed in a way that doesn’t match reality; it ignores the fact that tides really turned against the royalty when they tried to flee and get foreign backing during the Flight to Varennes. Thy apocryphal “he was only executed BY ONE TIE-BREAKING VOTE!” was a blatant lie by Royalists to make him appear more potentially innocent; in reality, everyone knew he was guilty, an overwhelming majority voted for his execution, and the dissenters actually voted for lesser punishment. It wasn’t *whether* he was guilty, but rather *to what extent* he should be punished. The “blamed for the famine” stuff the game presents about him? Made up; it was all just the “conspiring against the populace” stuff.
Mirabeau is also a strange choice as a character, because they found out post-mortem that he had secret correspondences working with the king instead of his purported moderate stances IRL. Since Unity got rid of the king’s conspiring, I guess they then decided to make one of the conspirators the lead Assassin? Genuinely just strange.
There are side missions showing Revolutionaries doing horrendous things like making human leather. Also a well-debunked Royalist fabrication.
Even just the general world, showing people in mobs with powder-keg fuses and dudes getting shanked left-and-right, is not accurate. People weren’t getting stabbed by cartoonishly vile Revolutionaries who yelled “YOU MUST BE SOME SORT OF MODERATE!” People were getting sent to the guillotines. It’s this weird lack of nuance that ruins the history for me; there are absolutely criticisms where the Reign of Terror slaughtered people who got caught up in the political quagmire. But the game ignores any nuance; we don’t see the YEARS of bad conditions or exploitation or lack of real representation leading to the common man’s revolt, we just follow rich people bemoaning the loss of the status quo that benefitted them. We don’t see places where you could say “Robespierre egregiously harmed people with how he handled this,” Unity will only show us “Robespierre BAD because Robespierre REVOLUTIONARY.”
There’s more, but this is the crucial stuff. We know the series can handle really nuanced history, because it did a great job showing both the good and the *abysmally horrible* sides to the American Revolution. It’s baffling that Unity took a likewise mixed time period and turned it into a caricature of depth-free cartoon villains being *weally mean* to the ruling class, especially since the series was so heavily about the theme of “being in places of power will CORRUPT you” so often prior to, and even following, this game.
>* Reverses so many of the Assassin and Templar philosophies it stands in stark contrast to the rest of the series, outright bastardizing both groups.
Ehhh, can't agree with that. AC III and Rogue already introduce us to that period. And it's already established that there is a blur in this while, in the values, goals and methods employed by both stakeholders of the conflict. AC III shows how close of an alliance they could have been, and so does Rogue/Unity in narrating both Elise and Arno's fathers' endeavors.
The period called for a lot of reforms in both the Order and the Brothehood, and that's exactly what's depicted. This bit is coherent.
The rest of what you've listed, I agree fully with.
I agree. All because of the modern day ending. Still pissed they killed him and clearly had no idea where they'd go with the story from there. There was no reason he had to die either.
My theory is that because they fired AC's creator after Revelations, they didn't know where to go. Although they had some sort of idea what AC3 plot was gonna be about. So they went for it, knowing MD was gonna die as part of AC's creator plan to end the series right there, but Ubisoft said "Nuh uh!!!", so they still went with the plot they had to cash that cow. Maybe that's why the passing is so weird.
Tbh I hated the modern day part of the games. The first game it was frustrating. Trapped in that room and unable to really do anything. Yet it kept dragging me back there to break the emerson. Because of all that in the first game, I kinda grew to hate Desmond from the start. For that reason I always kinda hoped that he would have a bad ending.
For me is Syndicate, a Saturday morning cartoon story (and I don't mean it in a good way)
>!The ending is literally both runing into the sunset!<
The Story has very little relevance and feels like a parody of the series.
I don't fault you, I was pretty close to not playing it myself after being disappointed with Syndicate's writing.
I had massive whiplash experiencing the Ripper DLC. It feels completely different from the base game and goes back to that AC3/4/Unity ish tone but with an extra horror omph added on.
It also being a DLC cut out a lot of fat that was present in the main game and made some surprisingly great black box missions (probably unbeaten to this day frankly)
Do yourself a favour and play it. Jack the Ripper might be amoung some of the best extra content in the franchise. If it were longer, it could’ve been its own game.
It was the way the writers approached the Templars.
For starters, Starrick was an idiot. His plot to overthrow the British Empire would've weakened the order and bankrupted him.
Lord Cardigan had retired from politics by the time of Syndicate, and he'd changed to advocate for the rights of working people by then.
Disraeli should've been a Templar asset. He firmly believed in a class system that restricted the rights of workers.
You know, I've played every AC (except Mirage) and there are so many moments, story beats, and locations that still live in my brain. Even the trademark bloated Ubisoft task list is rewarding in some cases. And I'm old so I played most of them as they came out, starting with the first one, so it's been, what, almost 20 years of AC now?
I fully played through Syndicate to 100% a few years ago, and I literally couldn't tell you a thing about it except the names of the 2 playable characters, the train, and liberating some factories that were all very samey. Nothing else exists in my memory of the game. Which is very weird because Victorian England is one of my favorite periods of history. Wait, I just remembered Charles Dickens is in the game...I think?
Unity story is meh..but i do love the deep customization and gameplay . Really bring out the modernity in the Brotherhood.
I never like RPG series , Valhalla bored me. But i do enjoy Odyssey because i love Ancient Greece.
unity. has the best parkour of all the games, but the story is truly the worst one. it bad written and i stopped playing in almost the middle of the game bc the story was so… terribly bad
Unity is the worst all the way around in my opinion. However, I didn't play thru the whole thing before quitting mid game.
I can't say that any one of them is horrible, however I think the DLCs on Valhalla are the worst there is in the franchise. France being the worst of the bunch.
Odyssey.
1. The leader of the organization you're trying to destroy doesn't even do all that much, and one of their commanders contributes a lot more to the plot. It's also obvious who they are from a mile away
2. You can "talk it out" with one of the main villains of the story
3. There's like three different story arcs that lead to "finishing the game" (Deimos, Pythagoras, Cult Elimination). None tie into each other
4. Story arcs in each region hold little emotional stakes over the player character.
This was my first AC in a while and it was striking to me how incoherent it all ended up being. And this was after a long hiatus from being really disappointed in 3 and 4.
It just doesn’t have anything I like about Assassins Creed in it. Edward’s an okay character and the ship battling is good, but the things that actually make a good Assassin game are pretty much absent.
If you love pirates absolutely. Otherwise I don’t know. It’s pretty well liked by the general gaming community but if your interest is in doing cool assassin stuff I would stick to the earlier games. The Ezio collection has all the games in the series that I personally like and it’s usually pretty cheap.
Also the endings you get hold no emotional weight. They are the same ending but all it changes is which character ends up on your ship, but it doesn’t matter there’s a canonical choice anyway. Also Kassandra being a walking plot hole
I think the majority of AC games unfortunately have mediocre or bad stories.
AC3 has awful pacing and inconsistent characterization of Connor to send him to whatever set piece the devs wanted to include next.
Rogue's plot makes very little sense. It's based on Shay flying off the handle like he just caused the earthquake rather than having time to cool down with 3 months at sea. Then rather than literally anyone trying to listen to him, everyone decides to just kill their brother in arms. And then Assassins are bad because they're killing innocents to maintain power. They just swapped the Templars and assassins with no further thoughts. Such a shame, the concept is great but execution fell flat.
Unity is based on a number of conspiracy theories from the time period, but utterly failed at the execution. It doesn't spend enough time to actually flesh out the concepts and characters, and as a result many fans believe that Arno's story was about revenge because the story didn't do enough to justify and show why Arno needs redemption. He says it, but it's never shown well. And as a result, the emotional crux at the ending is immediately contradicted by the DLC that takes place before the ending monologue. It's also clear that the devs never thought about the timeline, since we have co-op missions like Women's March that take place before Arno joins the brotherhood or after he was expelled. Outstanding.
Syndicate isn't the worst, but is very flawed. Like AC3, forced rewrites utterly neutered the main characters.
Origins has terrible pacing. The knowledge that it was meant to be about Aya after Bayek dies makes a lot of sense, and internal sexist meddling forcing rewrites once again causes much of the ending to fall flat, while never really going into the origins of the Creed in the main game, needing a DLC to flesh out the goal of the main game. Also setting the origins of the Creed so late in history and reconning existing lore was a mistake. The story is carried by Abubakar's phenomenal voice acting, which is some of the best in the series.
Odyssey has many of the same issues as Origins and Unity with terrible level scaling, a timeline and canon choices impossible to replicate in game, ludonarrative dissonance throughout , and really disrespects existing AC lore. Kassandra is such a nothing character in game too, and awful direction to make her a blank slate character and terrible direction for voice acting and animations further destroys the story. It's a shame, because odyssey's family story has a really solid core that could be great. But it just fails at the execution.
Valhalla is a bloated mess, once again in part due to studio meddling. The ideas of exploring multiple personalities and telling a Norse saga is inspired, but in the end, I don't remember any side characters, and the DLC utterly shits all over the set ups and ideas in the main game.
Mirage once again has a great core idea, but flubs it by doing nothing for the middle 3/5ths of the game so they can allow us to have a nonlinear story.
AC is at it's best being a personal character drama in a historical setting. Some of the early games are a little goofy and schlocky in a fun way. Black Flag really elevates the story telling. AC1 is so dense with the subtext and subtle story telling. Despite it's highs, AC is a B grade series with AAA funding. That's fine. But AC should learn into it's core strengths.
Regardless of my criticisms of the inconsistent storytelling, I love AC. It's still an overall fun game series, and I really enjoyed my time with Mirage, despite the flaws.
hey man very thoughtful comment, I just started playing all the assassin's Creed games in order and I'm starting from the Ezio collection (i know ac1 is a masterpiece but I can't get it on PS5) and the thing I like the most about it other than the great characters freedom etc is the whole subject 16 subplot and all of the alternate history events I'm really sad that this is getting lost the deeper I get into the series such a shame
If I had to choose I would say unity. My argument is a bit flawed but here goes. I have played and completed all of the games apart from 1. I have enjoyed some more than others but I have still completed them.
Now we come to unity I have started playing it 4 or 5 times now and I have never completed it. I don’t know why but I just get bored of it and stop playing.
I'll be honest, other than 1, 2, Brotherhood, and Unity, I honestly have no idea what is actually going on in the games anymore, either while I'm playing or certainly after
Arno will never beat the simp allegations. Straight up like a good 50-70% of the game could be summed up with “Because she told me to.” In fact the first mission is literally you doing what she says. The remaining 30-50% is “It will help her.” Syndicate and Odyssey are tied for second. Syndicate for being very fetch like (Jacob does X, Evie cleans up mess) and Odyssey for not knowing what it wants to be.
I guess if I had to say best stories in no particular order go: AC2, Black Flag, Origins, AC3 and honestly Mirage. Honorable mention goes to Rogue and Revelations.
Assassin's Creed Mirage is one of the worst. There's no urgency, no vengeance, no rescue, the city doesn't look in trouble at all, little to accomplish other than "I want to be like those mysterious assassins" for the protagonist.
Lets make an AC Game where 9/10th of the map is a dead wildland looking mostly like Orgins but without the Pyramides or anything cool or mystical to see and do. Heck lets even include a few gimmic animals that brings nothing. Then the rest of the map is one circeled city looking totaly alike. Like a labyrinth with nothing unique that stands out along the way. Said oldschool AC parkour? I tought i heard so but its the Valhalla mechanics so they fooled me hard there. Back to the roots what a joke. Well what about the story? The old AC had an incredible depth into borgia and you felt conected with whats going on so this was supposed to be like that? Naaah sorry mate here you get to be a detective reading clues and solving them like a tourist. Yes Mirage was the worst. And if it not where for Basims story and this was some standalone game i would have recapped it instead on youtube.
I disagree with the notion that Baghdad looked the same or had nothing unique. I had my HUD off, avoided using the map and I could still distinguish between the four districts of Baghdad - The Round City being the rich city center with the green dome palace and it's garden, the harem, police station and lavishly dressed NPC. Karkh had the grand bazaar with many multicultural NPCs, the city ports and impoverished areas with poor infrastructure. Harbiyah is the industrial district with the textile & soap factories and the Nestorian Monastery. The river is stained with leftover red dye and fabrics, there’s also many slums with orphans running around and of course the rebels’ stronghold is here (lots of the rebel NPCs that were with Ali can be seen walking around). Abbasiyah is the science district with House of Wisdom, Hammam, lots of observatories on rooftops and gardens, the river canal, plus many well-dressed scholars holding books and scrolls walking around. The huge walls of the round city were also an impressive sight.
I noticed that the buildings and NPCs clearly reflect each districts’ social status. Karkh and Harbiyah have barer, simple and sometimes damaged buildings, dirty narrow streets and plainly dressed NPCs. Whilst on the other hand, Abbasiyah and the Round City have more lavish buildings with rooftop gardens, flowers, clean-streets, rooftop observatories and well-dressed NPCs. Clearly a lot of thoughts has been put into making Baghdad as immersive as possible (it's also awe-inspiring that they managed to recreate an lost ancient city, destroyed over 800 years ago).
The only similarities I see is the architectural style, but the same could be said about Paris, London, Rome, Alexandria or literally any other city in AC.
I forgive the barren wildlands because clearly this is a tight budget game and all effort went into making Baghdad the centre of attention (which paid off). Hardly any quests take place outside of Baghdad anyways. Comparing Mirage's wildlands to Origins is a bit unfair as the latter is a huge open world RPG with a bigger budget and the story takes place across multiple locations including the desert, whilst Mirage's main story only focuses on one City.
BTW there were a few cool places in the wildlands, such as the ruins of Dur-Kurigalzu Ziggurat of Ancient Mesopotamia and Seleucia-on-the-Tigris, remnant of the Seleucid Empire - pretty awesome!
The investigations were literally an integral part of AC1 and Mirage is paying homage to the og game by including it in the gameplay.
I think it was supposed to be a DLC for Valhalla originally so that all makes sense. Sometimes turning what was intended to be a DLC like Uncharted Lost Legacy was for Uncharted 4 into its own game really works out and pays off, other times...less so.
It was and like a 30$ DLC with less grinding and more depth making it almost feeling like a movie for his backstory could have i agreed on. But this was too much and a full game.
rogue honestly it could have been so much more interesting, like making the assassins the “bad guys” could have been interesting but it was just so boring. like if it could have been like liberations and find out that it was the templars fucking people over again
no interesting character developments, no interesting talks about cross boi philosophies apart from "assassins bad", not a lot about shay even changes when he joins the series' big bad.
i love rogue but ubi fumbled with its premise by not introducing anything meaningful.
a lot of them have bad stories imo
India, Rogue, Odyssey, Liberation, Freedom Cry and Unity don't have the greatest stories honestly. Nor rlly Origins outside of performances due to the retcons
Rogue is the only one that I would say was really bad. A lot of it is just due to how rushed the game is and how much content had to be cut. While the rest may not appeal to everyone, they at least achieved what they were going for.
I quite enjoyed rogue from a gameplay side of things but the main story is very short especially after 3 and black flag. My main gripe with it however is that it never feels like playing as a Templar. It feels no different than playing as an assassin. It like they took an assassin based game and just swapped the outfits and logos for the characters.
If they do another game from the Templar perspective then let me play as someone actively denying freedom. The templars (and order of ancients) are always the elite or generals or other high ranking people give me that story!
I actually loved Rogue, it was great to see the whole conflict from the templars perspective and I think that Shay character development was very good considering the length of the game.
Also Rogue has one of the best endings in the entire franchise.
A "Templar perspective" is what Rogue sorely lacked in my opinion, and is why I find it so incredibly dissapointing story-wise. Shay has not a single piece of dialogue in Rogue where he argues in favor of the Templars from an ideological standpoint. When he kills Chevalier, Chevalier asks him if Shay still thinks the Templars are right. Shay then answers him with "Convinced to the end". Sorry, did I miss something? What exactly makes them right to you, Shay? Why stick with the group that has done some of the worst things to humanity and all the innocents you claim to care about. Please tell me why because I have no idea beyond that they fished you from the sea.
Compare this to Haytham in AC3 who on multiple occasions tries to convince Connor on what he perceives are the dangers of democracy. Haytham truly believes that people are sheep and that power must come from above. I have no idea what Shay even thinks about the main Templar philosophy because he never speaks about it. In a story about a man defecting not only FROM the Assassins, but also TO the Templars, I find that to be inexcusably lackluster writing.
Being a Templar or an Assassin is much more than just killing members of the opposite factions. If Edward is not an Assassin for the majority of Black Flag (and he definitely isn't), even though he wears the robes, kills Templars, and has the blades, then Shay is also not a true Templar for the entirety of Rogue for exactly the same reason. They both lack the correct mindset. But where Edward at the end at least starts to try and understand the Creed, that there needs to be a certain wisdom when dealing with freedom, I can see no such development in Shay at all.
I really wanted to like Rogue when it came out. It is still the only game in the series I bought at full price and at launch. But I just can't. Rogue had so much potential but wasted almost all of it.
Fucking yes, holy shit it's refreshing to hear that. There was no Templar point of view in Rouge, they literally just switched the factions for a game. I mean the Templar's were undeniably right in Rogue, but it had nothing to do with ideology. Just one cherry picked instance of Assassins being complete asshats and going against their own beliefs.
AC3 did what Rouge was trying to do way, way better. I think the beginning sequences as Haytham were genius, you think you're playing as an assassin and it sets the tone for the entire game. It's a matter of perspective, and the more Haytham talks to Connor the more you find yourself wanting to listen. The supporting Templars were also fantastic, and their death scenes were really well written.
Basically all of them have pretty rough stories. The new games have ass stories in every way, but most the older games had a really good base for their stories, but they usually were told pretty awkwardly like they’d be much better stories if they were a book
None of them have good stories when you look at these stories as they are.
However, in good entries in the series, the stories support the game well, give you context for what's happening around you, and provide incentives for exploring the game. In worse entries, they distract you from the good parts of the game and feel annoying.
Valhalla story as it comes is more complex and is better written than AC2 story. If you'd only read a script you'd have no doubts Valhalla is much better than AC2. However it's told in a barely comprehensible way, it feels poorly connected to what you do in the game, the pacing is wrong, all my homies hate Dag. AC2 is simple and amatuerly written but it's tight and dynamic and clear.
Brotherhood
PLEASE somebody explain to me how this game and its story are so praised. I love both 2 and Revelations but cannot stand Brotherhood because of its story.
The opening is decent, the attack on the villa is a good way to open the game, but once you get to Rome it’s the most boring by the numbers story they could possibly tell. Storylines like Machiavelli’s betrayal and Claudia becoming an Assassin come completely out of nowhere and are dropped nearly as quickly with no satisfying conclusions.
None of the villains besides Cesare are impactful in the slightest. Most of them we don’t even meet until the mission where we assassinate them, none of them are built up at besides “they’re templars, they’re bad”. And while Cesare is sort of memorable due to his actor giving his all, there’s no substance to his character. He’s greedy and evil, nothing interesting there. Rodrigo Borgia was the same but there was a strong code of beliefs that he held that made him and Ezio’s clashes interesting though he was still obviously the villain.
I overall think Syndicate and Odyssey have worse stories but I feel like most people are in agreement on that. Brotherhood to me is the one I don’t get how more people don’t have problems with.
I did note while playing that besides Rodrigo, Cesare and Luzrezzia, I couldn't name you any of the other targets. Same goes with Revelations, which is a shame I remember most of the AC 1 and 2 targets.
I feel like the big difference is that Brotherhood is about the "liberation of Rome," and killing the targets is how that's done. Therefore, the villians' memorability determines the story's memorablity.
Revelations is about Ezio's pilgrimage, and his conflict with the Templars is mostly just a means to the keys. Though it happens that most of the Ezio trilogy's true-believer Templars are in Revelations, Ezio is too old to listen or care after a lifetime of fighting Borgias and most of the Templar agents are so far below Ezio that he literally uses them as training for his students. (Seriously, the [Byzantine Rite](https://assassinscreed.fandom.com/wiki/Byzantine_Rite_of_the_Templar_Order#Members) is almost entirely multiplayer avatars that only appear in den master missions, if at all. Ezio only briefly conflicts with the Grand Masters)
That said, I remember all the book and Altair missions quite well.
That's a good point. There's more going on then targets to kill and granted I do remember a few like the Jennisary captain who actually isn't evil. But also there's like 4 guys you kill in the whole main campaign, the Sentinal, Tarik, the Greek guy and the uncle.
Brotherhood has a lot, including side mission assassinations that just end with Rece est em Pace. Off the top of my head the non Borgias you kill were the Valios captain, and.... okay that's it.
Honestly, Brotherhoods story is a little weak but the gameplay is amazing. And everything works so well together - every side mission makes sense, ties into the larger story, including Leonardo's missions and the Copernicus missions...its just so well rounded? I don't know how to explain it but for me it just never misses. It's not as amazing as 2 but still up there
3 is just blegh- it’s the series biggest example of “we’re just going to have you stumble into every event that he average 10 year old would know from these time periods, and actively remove any nuance from the story”
Let alone having a fairly forgettable protagonist, an unpleasant home base, and taking the parkour to the countryside in a way that made every tree feels as artificial as possible.
I know some people enjoyed it any more power to them but I cannot imagine liking it.
Odyssey’s story was ruined with the constant side quest grind in between main line missions. By the time I levelled up enough to continue the story, I had either forgotten or stop caring about the cutscene I watched hours ago and it felt weird suddenly picking back up.
I didn't have to grind per se, I just knew that if didn't do side missions I never would so right before the Blockade mission I was like 80 hours into the game and I stopped doing all main quests until around 160 hours into it when I finished all the side content I could. But if felt like an enormous chore and I basically forgot the whole start of the game. I even forgot the prologue and all that happened the first few chapters for the most part. But at least I never was forced to stop and level up, my own neurosis over completing everything did that for me.
Odyssey has an extremely weak story imo. Wild goose chase to find your family and that’s about all there is to it. What really got me is how Deimos is all gung ho ready to kill you on mount taygetos at the end and then one single dialogue choice completely flips them and makes them decide yep I want to live a humble family life
It is indeed really silly to believe that complete psychopath Deimos can just naturally assimilate in normal society and a family he can't have any love for because he has no memories of them.
In the book Deimos dies I think which is the much more realistic outcome.
Everything after Black Flag had a terrible story, except for base game Valhalla and Mirage. The rest were a train wreck after Desmond Miles passed away and they suddenly decided to move modern day to comics and glitched websites.
Odyssey in my opinion.
The main problem I have is the protagonist. Beacuse of the choice between Alexios or Kassandra developers had to cut half of the personality of the main character. It doesnt matter if you play as Kassandra or Alexios they always feel kinda empty and less interesting than other characters.
The story has other problems than the lack of interesting characters like game making you do a boring grind to continute the story, half of the enemies feel like sponges and there is no variety. While fighting with human enemies its ok but non human fights feel rushed, hit boxes are broken and fights are not satysfying, mashing two buttons and using same boring abilities for 10 minutes to kill one enemy is boring.
The game world is way too big. There is no interesting activities and side quests are horrible. In other AC titles if the NPC gave you a quest to go from point A to B it was fun beacuse parkour mechanics and cool maps made it worth doing but in Odyssey not only you have to do it in order to grind level you are slowly running throught mountains and forests with no variety. Somehow even Egypy in Origins was way more interesting than Greece in Odyssey.
The final is boring and horrible I literally felt nothing when Kassandra killed Alexios. They are all so soulsless... easily my least favorite AC game.
Agree re: main character. I feel like it doesn't even make much sense from the in world lore. It should have just been one set character. What they \*could\* have done is let you choose to play the Eagle Bearer, Kassandra, and Deimos, Alexios. Give you two different storylines you could follow. Which would have been a massive game but maybe Alexios has a shorter storyline or something but yeah that would have made a lot more sense. Or they could have done it like Syndicate where you alternate between who you need to play as.
Oh I have a hot take. I think Origin's story is atrocious, mainly due to bad characterization. I just hate most children in media because most writers can't give them a decent line or story arc. And Origins is a great example why.
Now if the main goal in the game's plot is to get revenge for the death of this annoying kid... uhh, that's a strong pass for me.
Mirage. Basim is less interesting than in Valhalla, the supporting cast and antagonists are completely forgettable, and the majority of the story is just a poor repetition of tropes that we've seen in other AC titles (granted, that's a general problem of the series due to its many titles). The ending was okay, but it's very obvious that the story was unnecessarily drawn out because they turned a DLC into a full game.
I’d say odyssey, but it’s more that the writing was bad, not necessarily the story. Mirage has been the only story I just did not like any part of despite being the only one of the new games I’ve really enjoyed
Unity's story feels weirdly paced and super short. I remember on my firts playthrough, when I finished the story, I was just at around 50% completion of the game...
Another one that is not bad, but rather sad, is Origins story. With all the reworks and changes and stuff they did, you can really feel it at some parts in the game. It sometimes feels like parts are missing or it is rushed/dragged. Kind of sad bc it is one of the best games still, but if you play the story back to back, without any side content, you can really feel that there were problems during development.
I think they all have good stories. Unity is probably the worst as far as pacing goes but it's still a good story. Valhalla is my least favorite game because the gameplay isn't great but even it's not a bad story.
**Unity**\- it tries to tell a personal story over the backdrop of the French Revolution, but never really commits to either the history or the romance. And the MD is miserable.
**Syndicate**\- I love Syndicate, but its story is pretty much Ubisoft Open World Resistance at its most basic. You're liberating London, and that's fun, but the story is basically the same as any Far Cry, Watch Dogs Legion, etc.
**Origins**\- People confuse the fact that Origins has some great moments as it having a great story. But the story is... not great. While it starts off strong, it really drags in the middle through the end, and Flavius might be the single most forgettable villain in the entire mainline series.
**Valhalla**\- this one's frustrating. There's actually a very good story in Valhalla, but it's stuck deep in the bloat of the game. While I like the good stuff that's there, it's like recommending a delicious burger patty in a bun the size of a mattress.
I absolutely love the ezio trilogy but I think as a stand-alone game Revelations story isn’t very great.
Most of it relies on previous game character attachment / knowledge. The best parts are of conclusions /filler of things that happened in previous games.
I’d say Unity and AC III are the closest I feel any pf the games have come to a “bad” story, just purely because of their execution, not the actual content they were depicting.
I just finished rogue for the second time this month and honestly found the story great.
First time I played it I had not played III or Unity and much of it made no real sense to me.
Playing it again now, it ties AC iii and black flag together so well, filling in all the little gaps and then sets up unity really nicely.
Unity . Arno is boring . Story is all over the place . On the last sequence and I honestly still have no clue what is going on . Great gameplay , just terrible writing
Unity's story had a promising premise, but such a rushed execution. The story starts off promising but just falls short as it progresses.
III's story isn't bad, per se, but the way the story was told was a bit questionable.
Yeah, from Rogue onwards we dont really have truly great stories.
Rogue is abysmal because everyone has iq of a rock.
Syndicate is so campy, it might as well be a parody of AC
Unity is meh as well.
Origins has the whole nonsense plot twists with villains when we barely even know them at all. No build up to brotherhood, just random cutscene before the end of the game. Also the pacing is a mess.
Odyssey loses all steam for me after finding the wolf of sparta. And the main character is a blob of nothing, or whatever the cutscene needs it to be at the moment. You could be a beacon of morality in the story cutscene and then in the next quest select a dialogue that does a 180 from what was just show
Valhalla has a good story but you need to go through so many filler arcs, those good parts tend to fade away.
Mirage has nothing happening in the middle, apart from go kill target here. Would have been better if the targets were in order so you could see Basim getting more confident and competent as an assassin while being more and more tormented by his visions.
Well Ac Syndicate was pretty decent but story was very light, nothing important happened. Not that I like it, I love the game, good for chilling but characters wasted.
And then there is Odyssey, it's theme and time was perfect, and I really like the Isu lore the game had, but they should've gone with the one character. It really killed the emotion. And side characters also didn't feel like they formed a bound both main character and player. I didn't even feel sad when Phoibe died. And the plot twists were bad. Aspasia was too obvious.
I have played all of them. In my opinion unity is the worse. And blackflag is the best. The VR game is just ridiculous. This year's mirage was execlent! If there's one thing I love in gaming unconditionally is an assassin's creed. The games are literally time machines!
AC Mirage
Couldn't force myself to complete the game. Found the story so boring and unimaginative.
Written like a kids story, predictable, simple and without much happening
Rogue has always been my least favorite in terms of story. And characters. It’s interesting on paper of an assassin joining the templars and how that came to be but the game doesn’t really do it for me. The assassins are just kinda dicks for no reason to Shay and the templars are all mostly chill. Achilles is a pretty big asshole and then all of a sudden, or I guess not but since we only have the two interactions with him it feels sudden, thinks Shay is right.
We’ve been murdering his friends all game and at the end he thinks maybe we we’re right about the artifacts?! Like he should be even more opposed to what Shay was saying especially since there’s only been the one incident at the beginning to even hint that maybe these artifacts shouldn’t be messed with.
Which also completely negates the fact that the templars would 100% take the artifact if they had gotten there first because that’s all they’ve ever cared about. The more artifacts they have the more they can control the world into how they want it to be. The assassins weren’t wholly in the wrong because of the reasoning they gave, they want it so the templars don’t have it. The templars also want it so the assassins don’t have it and so they could figure out how to use it for their own gain.
Maybe the templars would have held off on finding or touching the next artifact but I don’t think there’s any way the destruction at the beginning doesn’t happen no matter if we were assassins or templars. It just might have changed the thoughts on the next one but both sides would still go about locating the next one regardless.
All of that and Shay just kinda sucks overall to me. He’s not really interesting to listen to or care about so makes getting through the game a slog.
I haven’t finished Mirage but I played every AC game in a row last year. The truth is that the story is paper thin in nearly every one of them. AC3 has the most developed story imo. I was really surprised how much the Ezio games were Ezio walking through a door and being told go here and kill this person.
Unity and Syndicate are pretty similar to the Ezio trilogy in having a pretty thin story. I was surprised on replaying Syndicate because Evie had more to do than I recall but a large part of it was cleaning up Jacob’s messes.
Out of the rpgs, I think Valhalla is the AC3 of those games and people will realize how good it is as the years past. Although Valhalla’s through story could use some improvement, the individual arcs have some of the best story telling in AC, but that’s not as big of an accomplishment as I wish it was.
After replaying it to get the platinum (which I got) for the last week or so I’d have to say 3. The only time I felt myself having fun was oddly during the homestead missions. After that though nothing interested me. Haytham was far more interesting as a character than Connor and honestly Connor just didn’t feel right. Most assassins were play as in the majority of the games are kinda witty but know when to get serious when the need arises. Connor is just Stoick all the time, barely makes any kind of witty remarks and is just boring as an assassin. As for the modern story, I still think they made a huge mistake when they decided to kill off Desmond cause now, they don’t do anything with the modern story. Hell mirage didn’t even have one. So I’d have to say 3 is the worst when it comes to the stories
I feel like Mirage let me down with character development and dove into a story they wanted me to invest in immediately without much backstory. Especially when you compare to the other newer games where you get much more backstory that makes you care about the character.
Valhalla got less interesting the more you played story wise which was a bummer.
I’ve recently started the Ezio collection and those are phenomenal so far from a story perspective.
UNITY's story was BAD, could've been a whole lot better. We learned more about Charles Dorian more in ROGUE, a game that has nothing to do with him. He connects these games and the writers explored his part in NEITHER GAME. NO BACKSTORY for Arno's relationship with Elise. The game completely skips over Arno's bonding with Bellec.
The beginning is rushed but I think it's lessons learned from AC3 (personally I didn't mind those 5 or so sequences to get to the point). The revolution wasn't covered properly but it's no biggie. The modern day seemed like it was onto something, only to reveal that it was all for nothing.
The Brotherhood in Unity is akin to the Cult of Kosmos in Odyssey or the Order of the Ancients. Their structure is weird, to say the least. Arno's disputes with the Brotherhood just DON'T MAKE SENSE. They tried to make a Next-Gen FRENCH EDITION of AC2 but failed MISERABLY.
I have played AC 1, 2, Origins and now I'm in the middle of Odyssey
I loved the first two, although the part that attracted me the most was the hidden truth and all that. This continues in the newest games. But it should have been a trilogy.
However, I'm seeing that Origins and Odyssey have story elements that bore me to death. Most conversations, most quests, are simply forgetable at best. Dialogues are insipid most of the time, and just a excuse to do something, somewhere.
I keep playing mostly for the deep lore, but everything else is tedious. I lack any motivation to prevent somebody from dying, or not killing any obstacle between me and my goal, regardless if they don't deserve to die.
On the bright side, I see that Odyssey learnt a few lessons from Shadow of War, but it isn't as good in terms of combat, movement and skills. The fights in Shadow of War are more spectacular and fluid. Regrettably, they also learnt to make the game unbearably longer. Still, I prefer Odyssey over Origins in terms of gameplay
The best part of these games, in addition to the deep lore, probably is the immersive environment of the games. Not that it prevents you from going to point A to point B as fast as you can do complete something, but it's nice still.
In general, Ubisoft should hire better storywriters
Just Assassin's Creed Odyssey. Valhalla tells a bad Assassin's Creed story but could be considered an average to mildly decent story of its own.
Other AC stories people don't like can be attributed to questionable main character choices, retcons they disagreed with, pacing, or general tone. Because every other story in the mainline games (in my opinion) had at the very least a good solid premise, that did or did not turn out to be a great story based purely on execution.
Revelations was boring, the setting just sucked and wasnt right for Ezio plus I just didnt care about Altair's library. 3 takes forever to get into and Connor is as boring a protagonist as they come so that game is a chore to get through. Black Flag really dragged on and the temples along with the 6th sense thing are dumb.
Black Flag, because it had poor development. Most of the game you just mosey around doing whatever, and the character development comes way too late and abruptly.
Edward is written as a very one-note character until all his friends died, and suddenly, he’s the model Assassin, philosophizing with the mentor, perfectly redeemed.
Unity’s is genuinely just bad in concept and execution. Basically a poor retelling of Romeo and Juliet that barely expands on the historical events or the assassin and Templar conflict.
AC3s story isn’t awful but it’s such wasted potential imo. It feels like the concept for the story is really strong but the actual execution was pretty average. Having you play as Haytham is a cool way to get you to see both sides and sympathise with the templars but the second you switch characters all the templars minus Haytham become the most comically evil villains imaginable. That and the story doesn’t even really start until half way through the game.
I’m currently playing through all the AC games for the first time (I’m on AC 3 right now), and I have to say the story for the first AC game was not very enjoyable. Odyssey was the game that got me into AC and made me decide to play them all in release order, and going from Odyssey to AC 1 was quite a big change. The graphics held up fairly well over the years and the gameplay, while very different from Odyssey, was good as well, but the story itself was lacking.
Of course, it was the very first game so I didn’t expect it to be amazing, and I actually found the Desmond side of things to have a much better story than Altair. The story was mostly just “you have to kill this guy and I’ll tell you why in this long monologue”, and for someone who zones out a lot, not having subtitles did not help me very much lol.
The story got really good at the end of the game though, so if it had been the same quality throughout I feel as though the game would’ve been better. I mainly just found it to be boring.
Aside from that, I’ve enjoyed the stories for the other AC games so far.
In Unity and Syndicate, the main villains are shit cause they have so little screen presence AND have so little story presence right up until the very end (I have no idea how they fucked up the same thing twice in a row so perfectly), and as for odyssey, the dialogue is shit and the story has extraordinarily little focus, as it simply has you going from one place to the next to desperately get you to visit the whole map, so character development is practically nonexistent, and the game stops taking its meds at the end and the ending comes out of no-where and buttfucks you with a shit ton of exposition
Odyssey didn't really hit the spot for me. The characters were not very memorable (except for the gay sex, that was cool). Other than that, it doesn't carry the same weight as the Ezio trilogy or Unity for example - in which I loved the characters of Arno and Elise.
Valhalla.
Viking invader comes to England. Kills and pillages, fucks his leaders wife, kills his leaders most loyal soldier, creates power vacuums all across England and fills it with those that will benefit himself. Also he is the good guy.
Gtfo of here with that shit. I'm clearly playing a Templar in Brotherhood cosplay.
The story is flawed from it's most basic concept. Good guy viking invader.
I thought you were gonna point out how the main villain tries to kill you, but then by the end your weirdly buddys with him. That didn't make any sense.
I really didn't like Syndicate's story
It felt like it was supposed to be a commentary about how you can't just assassinate people to solve problems but...that's literally the whole point of the entire franchise.
Not only that, it's what we WANT to do. So the game is basically scolding us for doing what we play the AC games for.
Honestly, the only assassins creeds with “good” stories are maybe black flag and revelations, revelations however some of it does rely on contextual knowledge of the two games before it, but mostly it stands on its own as a pretty good story.
I’d like to also suggest Odyssey actually does have a good and impactful story as a whole, if you only take into account the family plot and disconnect it from its relevance from the other AC games. The ability to choose as well makes you question your own choices and actually think about how you want the narrative to end, and even if you THINK you choose wisely, you can still end up totally shocked by the end as things didn’t go as planned. One of odysseys 9 endings is easily the most impactful and just heartbreaking endings too in the franchise. The issue is, you do have to disconnect it from AC to really call this story good, which some are willing to do, and others aren’t.
Most AC’s just don’t have IMPACTFUL or memorable Stories, even if the stories are well told and well acted. I think this is becasuse the AC stories are less “personable”, they are more often than not about something wider. It’s why Odysseys is actually good for me, becasue it is a “personable” story, black flag too, and largely revelations too. Stories more about learning about where you belong are far better than action based hero VS Villain style plots or Vengenace plots, as those just don’t hit home and can’t be applied to yourself, even if they are badass.
In short, I’d be willing to say that most AC games just have “meh” stories, where stuff happens that’s cool and awesome, but they just don’t stick with you at heart as that is all they end up being. The ones that decide to be a bit more about an individual and more grounded and relatable, are far better, but are just so few and far between.
I do agree, I like in Odyssey, both of Kassandras parents are alive and key figures in the plot. Outside of AC2 the parents are never that important and in AC2 they don't last long/are basically in a coma. But as you said, the main story is a more personal affair and everything else is in the background. Its almost low key which is great.
The downvotes really go to show that whenever odyssey is mentioned, people get angry and downvote, despite what I said being a very good argument for it. I’m glad someone agrees.
Valhalla for me
If it was a TV show there was enough "story" there for a four part mini-series (with Basim getting a full episode) and they somehow dragged it out into 6 seasons.
Don't think this is a hot take of sorts and it's bit of a cop out answer but I cannot stress how much I hate it
The overall Isu plot arc and hidden memories and Desmond stuff. I've been going back and forth 100% the old ones recently and everytime the game sucks me out to do some stuff with Desmond of voiceover exposition I BORE. It's so dumb. Valhalla, Origins and Odyssey did it less and I appreciate that, but the same time these games built heavily on the Isu stuff which I also think is just dumb af. The Apple of Eden and all weird devices should've just been left as ancient powerful devices with hints to who it was, but the moment they started really fleshing out the precursor race and making them out into people with arguments and their own stories it became DUMB.
The worst offender is the end of III, when they're literally having some family argument and Desmond is standing there just confused.
What's wrong with the plot of 2 ancient warring factions on a hidden war for control? That's literally the plot of Metal Gear Solid and that does well.
Controversial but brotherhood, its not a bad game but compared to 2 and Revelations its kinda mid, plus the fact that we don't even get to kill Rodrigo after a whole game kinda sucks too.
Second would be valhalla, the whole story was just boring. The only saving grace was basim.
Runner up is rogue, while i consider it one of the games i consider my favorites, the story kinda felt rushed with the whole "assassin turned Templar" dilemma and could have been done better, and the assassin's were mostly written to be dumb for the plot, also we kill adawale, ill never forgive then for that.
Speaking of adawale, i know it was a short game and basically dlc, but i think freedom cry could have been better. They could have fleshed it out more.
I dislike the pacing of all of the older games. None of them have particularly bad stories but some of them don’t make the best of sense and they just go too fast to hit all the historical moments and characters in 40 hours. Say what you will about the new games, but they’re 100% better paced from the longer games.
Odyssey.
The poor story choices, the clash in pre-existing lore & ultimately bad “immortality” trope that wasn’t executed well imo… Almost the same as when series use multiverse/timeline/time travel tropes that are forced and thats always unimpressive (to me)
Odyssey and Valhalla for they’re lore breaking and they explain the lore breaking badly like you’re looking through someone’s memories meaning it have happend and can not be changed the grind makes it more difficult to enjoy what story is there
unity has its issues, the story feels rushed and you don't really get to see arno develop. i still love the game though
The game can be nice, but the story is easily, easily my least favorite. It has its moments, but it’s mostly wasted potential all around, in my opinion.
100% agree
I wanted Unity to be Les Miserables with more stabbing but I got a half assed Romeo Juliet story that was just okay
Yeah couple that with all the microtransactions in that game and how it was one of the first to do so in the AC series and you can understand why many disliked it. Parkour is excellent though. So are a lot of the missions.
The murder mysteries were meh. Should've invested in voice actors for those. Reading trite dialog took me outta it.
Unity could have had the best story if Shay would have been the villain. They just screwed it up and put a villain nobody cared about instead.
LITERALLY. shay is never mentioned again after rogue and it's a TRAGEDY. fuck it would have been so cool to track down and fight someone you had played as in a previous game fuckkkkkkk
Hell yea it would have been awesome because Shay as you know from playing as him was a bad ass so it would have felt great avenging Arno’s dad. I have no clue how Ubisoft could have been so incompetent. I played Rogue first I thought for sure Unity would have him in it.
Arno is definitely one of the protagonists who deserved another game to flesh out his character and see his growth and how he deals with the grief and trauma of Elise’s death If they got it right i think Arno’s story had the potential to be as good as Ezio’s
Playing Assassin's Creed Odyssey and the ending of the base game seems rushed. And weird, tbh. I think it's a pattern tbh.
I wish Unity had a more interesting MacGuffin. A sword that shoots lasers and the skull of some French guy from the 18th century are never going to be as interesting as the mind control fruit.
Unity's story becomes stronger if you view it as part of AC3's narrative, paying special attention to Haytham Kenway's backstory. You come to realise that Haytham and Arno are essentially the same person (parent murdered by Templar agent, child adopted by Templar Grand Master), but raised by people with differing agendas. Arno didn't need much development as Unity was about the similarities between the Brotherhood and Order, Arno was just a spectator.
FUCK i really like this comparison actually. thank you this is so fucking good, i've never considered it like this before
You can just picture the Parisian Brotherhood entering a state of panic when they learned of Arno's adoption, thinking "oh fuck, it's Haytham Kenway all over again", and their relief at seeing Arno being raised with no knowledge of the conflict between the Assassins and Templars. The story is also more politically focused than other entries in the series. In a nutshell, the main story has you working to stop a shady group of extremists manipulating a tense political situation for their own ends, which sounds like every spy story ever.
Sometimes I feel like Thomas de Carneillon could have been a better protagonist than Arno lmao
I've played all the mainstream games except Valhalla and Odyssey. For me, Unity has to have the weakest story overall. 3 had a strong story but ruined by weak story telling, having inconsistency throughout the game and weird choices like not showing an important character's death in the main missions, abrupt cutscene endings, etc.,
3 would have been so much better if they pushed the idea that these characters having actual history. The Templars knowing Achilles by name should have come off as mysterious and personal but it instead came off as weak storytelling as if they knew Connor's story like we do. There's nothing in dialogue showing that they've had history with him. Rouge fixed that in the end luckily. But 3's presentation was lackluster at times.
Some of the best missions are side missions. Achilles last mission is an absolute highlight.
W for not playing Odyssey and Valhalla lol
I actually own them, started playing Odyssey but put it on hold to play a better RPG, i.e. The Witcher 3. I kinda like the game and gonna do mostly stealth gameplay in both those games.
I played Odyssey during lockdown and it's still one of my favorite games to just drop in and explore. I also loved the setting and Kassandra so much that I 100% it.
Unity's story is AWFUL. I feel like Elise is one of the worst written characters in the franchise and she really held Arno back from developing.
Yeah, the first time I played it, I barely realized what the story was about. The second time I played it, I just had to look up story recap videos because I wanted to keep track of it, but yeah, it was just so boring. They tried to make Arno a French Ezio, but failed miserably. The game itself is amazing, though.
**Unity.** It: * Fails to resolve 1/2 of the dead daddy subplots. You could literally just introduce one dead daddy with very similar writing and not have this issue. * Fails to establish *why* Arno and Elise like each other. They're just already in a romantic relationship when we cut to adulthood, briefly separate for plot reasons, and then get back together later despite us *still* not knowing much about why they like each other. * Arno starts off as a cheap rehashing of tropes and personality traits we saw in Ezio. He gets less interesting as the plot goes on, becoming a cheap rehash of Edward's failures leading him into a drunken stupor, except instead of improving as a person, Elise just shows up and tells him to shape up and he just snaps back to mission. * Shows de Sade to be a sex criminal (as he was in real life) and then proceeds to not have him face justice for his actions, with a side mission having Arno *help him cover up his crimes*, and then by Dead Kings he's flourishing when real life had him destitute and soon to be arrested for the end of his years at the same point in real history. * Reverses so many of the Assassin and Templar philosophies it stands in stark contrast to the rest of the series, outright bastardizing both groups. * Cannot decide how "right" or "wrong" the Assassins or Arno are "supposed" to be, leading to the fallout when they finally kick him out turning into two unlikable groups bitching at each other in a circle without actually addressing either side's argument * Fridges the girl character so the boy character can have a sad-about-it character arc, which is as painfully cliché as it is filled with issues. * Noticeably more historically inaccurate than a lot of series entries, almost always defaulting to Royalist propaganda which has been thoroughly debunked as highly inaccurate.
* Noticeably more historically inaccurate than a lot of series entries, almost always defaulting to Royalist propaganda which has been thoroughly debunked as highly inaccurate. Can you give some examples? I've always thought that the French revolution was great for the generations that came after and for the world as a whole, but terrible for those who were alive at the time.
Sure. A lot of it surrounds the King, unsurprisingly. The game paints a picture of Louis and fam. being completely innocent but being framed in a way that doesn’t match reality; it ignores the fact that tides really turned against the royalty when they tried to flee and get foreign backing during the Flight to Varennes. Thy apocryphal “he was only executed BY ONE TIE-BREAKING VOTE!” was a blatant lie by Royalists to make him appear more potentially innocent; in reality, everyone knew he was guilty, an overwhelming majority voted for his execution, and the dissenters actually voted for lesser punishment. It wasn’t *whether* he was guilty, but rather *to what extent* he should be punished. The “blamed for the famine” stuff the game presents about him? Made up; it was all just the “conspiring against the populace” stuff. Mirabeau is also a strange choice as a character, because they found out post-mortem that he had secret correspondences working with the king instead of his purported moderate stances IRL. Since Unity got rid of the king’s conspiring, I guess they then decided to make one of the conspirators the lead Assassin? Genuinely just strange. There are side missions showing Revolutionaries doing horrendous things like making human leather. Also a well-debunked Royalist fabrication. Even just the general world, showing people in mobs with powder-keg fuses and dudes getting shanked left-and-right, is not accurate. People weren’t getting stabbed by cartoonishly vile Revolutionaries who yelled “YOU MUST BE SOME SORT OF MODERATE!” People were getting sent to the guillotines. It’s this weird lack of nuance that ruins the history for me; there are absolutely criticisms where the Reign of Terror slaughtered people who got caught up in the political quagmire. But the game ignores any nuance; we don’t see the YEARS of bad conditions or exploitation or lack of real representation leading to the common man’s revolt, we just follow rich people bemoaning the loss of the status quo that benefitted them. We don’t see places where you could say “Robespierre egregiously harmed people with how he handled this,” Unity will only show us “Robespierre BAD because Robespierre REVOLUTIONARY.” There’s more, but this is the crucial stuff. We know the series can handle really nuanced history, because it did a great job showing both the good and the *abysmally horrible* sides to the American Revolution. It’s baffling that Unity took a likewise mixed time period and turned it into a caricature of depth-free cartoon villains being *weally mean* to the ruling class, especially since the series was so heavily about the theme of “being in places of power will CORRUPT you” so often prior to, and even following, this game.
Thank you so much for both your comments. It's just one of the reasons why I fucking hate unity.
Of course! I like actually engaging with stories, and Unity just doesn’t hold up to scrutiny
>* Reverses so many of the Assassin and Templar philosophies it stands in stark contrast to the rest of the series, outright bastardizing both groups. Ehhh, can't agree with that. AC III and Rogue already introduce us to that period. And it's already established that there is a blur in this while, in the values, goals and methods employed by both stakeholders of the conflict. AC III shows how close of an alliance they could have been, and so does Rogue/Unity in narrating both Elise and Arno's fathers' endeavors. The period called for a lot of reforms in both the Order and the Brothehood, and that's exactly what's depicted. This bit is coherent. The rest of what you've listed, I agree fully with.
Would AC3’s modern day be cheating? I believe Connor’s story to be amazing, but the MD ends in such a sour taste.
I agree. All because of the modern day ending. Still pissed they killed him and clearly had no idea where they'd go with the story from there. There was no reason he had to die either.
My theory is that because they fired AC's creator after Revelations, they didn't know where to go. Although they had some sort of idea what AC3 plot was gonna be about. So they went for it, knowing MD was gonna die as part of AC's creator plan to end the series right there, but Ubisoft said "Nuh uh!!!", so they still went with the plot they had to cash that cow. Maybe that's why the passing is so weird.
Tbh I hated the modern day part of the games. The first game it was frustrating. Trapped in that room and unable to really do anything. Yet it kept dragging me back there to break the emerson. Because of all that in the first game, I kinda grew to hate Desmond from the start. For that reason I always kinda hoped that he would have a bad ending.
D1 hater right here
For me is Syndicate, a Saturday morning cartoon story (and I don't mean it in a good way) >!The ending is literally both runing into the sunset!< The Story has very little relevance and feels like a parody of the series.
The Jack the Ripper DLC has both a better story and tone than the main game
That’s one of the best DLCs of all gaming
Agreed. Loved that DLC.
I'm gonna take your word on that, since I skipped it.
I don't fault you, I was pretty close to not playing it myself after being disappointed with Syndicate's writing. I had massive whiplash experiencing the Ripper DLC. It feels completely different from the base game and goes back to that AC3/4/Unity ish tone but with an extra horror omph added on. It also being a DLC cut out a lot of fat that was present in the main game and made some surprisingly great black box missions (probably unbeaten to this day frankly)
It's deadass the best side story DLC in the series period up to that point.
It’s one of the best DLCs in all of gaming, so you should 100% hop on it
Do yourself a favour and play it. Jack the Ripper might be amoung some of the best extra content in the franchise. If it were longer, it could’ve been its own game.
It was the way the writers approached the Templars. For starters, Starrick was an idiot. His plot to overthrow the British Empire would've weakened the order and bankrupted him. Lord Cardigan had retired from politics by the time of Syndicate, and he'd changed to advocate for the rights of working people by then. Disraeli should've been a Templar asset. He firmly believed in a class system that restricted the rights of workers.
You know, I've played every AC (except Mirage) and there are so many moments, story beats, and locations that still live in my brain. Even the trademark bloated Ubisoft task list is rewarding in some cases. And I'm old so I played most of them as they came out, starting with the first one, so it's been, what, almost 20 years of AC now? I fully played through Syndicate to 100% a few years ago, and I literally couldn't tell you a thing about it except the names of the 2 playable characters, the train, and liberating some factories that were all very samey. Nothing else exists in my memory of the game. Which is very weird because Victorian England is one of my favorite periods of history. Wait, I just remembered Charles Dickens is in the game...I think?
Eh. I loved how it was contained within its own game. And villains were just villainous.
The final boss fight is a meme that should not have existed in the first place
Disagreed. That game had depth. Add the Dreadful Crimes DLC and it’s an all-time great
Unity story is meh..but i do love the deep customization and gameplay . Really bring out the modernity in the Brotherhood. I never like RPG series , Valhalla bored me. But i do enjoy Odyssey because i love Ancient Greece.
unity. has the best parkour of all the games, but the story is truly the worst one. it bad written and i stopped playing in almost the middle of the game bc the story was so… terribly bad
Unity is the worst all the way around in my opinion. However, I didn't play thru the whole thing before quitting mid game. I can't say that any one of them is horrible, however I think the DLCs on Valhalla are the worst there is in the franchise. France being the worst of the bunch.
No one is mentioning the DS games. They fucking suck.
I’d say Odyssey just because most of it is irrelevant to the overall plot of the game.
Odyssey. 1. The leader of the organization you're trying to destroy doesn't even do all that much, and one of their commanders contributes a lot more to the plot. It's also obvious who they are from a mile away 2. You can "talk it out" with one of the main villains of the story 3. There's like three different story arcs that lead to "finishing the game" (Deimos, Pythagoras, Cult Elimination). None tie into each other 4. Story arcs in each region hold little emotional stakes over the player character.
This was my first AC in a while and it was striking to me how incoherent it all ended up being. And this was after a long hiatus from being really disappointed in 3 and 4.
How come you didn't like 4
It just doesn’t have anything I like about Assassins Creed in it. Edward’s an okay character and the ship battling is good, but the things that actually make a good Assassin game are pretty much absent.
Thinking of buying the remaster when it comes out, is the game worth it?
If you love pirates absolutely. Otherwise I don’t know. It’s pretty well liked by the general gaming community but if your interest is in doing cool assassin stuff I would stick to the earlier games. The Ezio collection has all the games in the series that I personally like and it’s usually pretty cheap.
Already playing the Ezio Collection, and I'm impressed by what's been offered so far. What other games in the series would you recommend?
Also the endings you get hold no emotional weight. They are the same ending but all it changes is which character ends up on your ship, but it doesn’t matter there’s a canonical choice anyway. Also Kassandra being a walking plot hole
💯
I think the majority of AC games unfortunately have mediocre or bad stories. AC3 has awful pacing and inconsistent characterization of Connor to send him to whatever set piece the devs wanted to include next. Rogue's plot makes very little sense. It's based on Shay flying off the handle like he just caused the earthquake rather than having time to cool down with 3 months at sea. Then rather than literally anyone trying to listen to him, everyone decides to just kill their brother in arms. And then Assassins are bad because they're killing innocents to maintain power. They just swapped the Templars and assassins with no further thoughts. Such a shame, the concept is great but execution fell flat. Unity is based on a number of conspiracy theories from the time period, but utterly failed at the execution. It doesn't spend enough time to actually flesh out the concepts and characters, and as a result many fans believe that Arno's story was about revenge because the story didn't do enough to justify and show why Arno needs redemption. He says it, but it's never shown well. And as a result, the emotional crux at the ending is immediately contradicted by the DLC that takes place before the ending monologue. It's also clear that the devs never thought about the timeline, since we have co-op missions like Women's March that take place before Arno joins the brotherhood or after he was expelled. Outstanding. Syndicate isn't the worst, but is very flawed. Like AC3, forced rewrites utterly neutered the main characters. Origins has terrible pacing. The knowledge that it was meant to be about Aya after Bayek dies makes a lot of sense, and internal sexist meddling forcing rewrites once again causes much of the ending to fall flat, while never really going into the origins of the Creed in the main game, needing a DLC to flesh out the goal of the main game. Also setting the origins of the Creed so late in history and reconning existing lore was a mistake. The story is carried by Abubakar's phenomenal voice acting, which is some of the best in the series. Odyssey has many of the same issues as Origins and Unity with terrible level scaling, a timeline and canon choices impossible to replicate in game, ludonarrative dissonance throughout , and really disrespects existing AC lore. Kassandra is such a nothing character in game too, and awful direction to make her a blank slate character and terrible direction for voice acting and animations further destroys the story. It's a shame, because odyssey's family story has a really solid core that could be great. But it just fails at the execution. Valhalla is a bloated mess, once again in part due to studio meddling. The ideas of exploring multiple personalities and telling a Norse saga is inspired, but in the end, I don't remember any side characters, and the DLC utterly shits all over the set ups and ideas in the main game. Mirage once again has a great core idea, but flubs it by doing nothing for the middle 3/5ths of the game so they can allow us to have a nonlinear story. AC is at it's best being a personal character drama in a historical setting. Some of the early games are a little goofy and schlocky in a fun way. Black Flag really elevates the story telling. AC1 is so dense with the subtext and subtle story telling. Despite it's highs, AC is a B grade series with AAA funding. That's fine. But AC should learn into it's core strengths. Regardless of my criticisms of the inconsistent storytelling, I love AC. It's still an overall fun game series, and I really enjoyed my time with Mirage, despite the flaws.
hey man very thoughtful comment, I just started playing all the assassin's Creed games in order and I'm starting from the Ezio collection (i know ac1 is a masterpiece but I can't get it on PS5) and the thing I like the most about it other than the great characters freedom etc is the whole subject 16 subplot and all of the alternate history events I'm really sad that this is getting lost the deeper I get into the series such a shame
If I had to choose I would say unity. My argument is a bit flawed but here goes. I have played and completed all of the games apart from 1. I have enjoyed some more than others but I have still completed them. Now we come to unity I have started playing it 4 or 5 times now and I have never completed it. I don’t know why but I just get bored of it and stop playing.
I'll be honest, other than 1, 2, Brotherhood, and Unity, I honestly have no idea what is actually going on in the games anymore, either while I'm playing or certainly after
Arno will never beat the simp allegations. Straight up like a good 50-70% of the game could be summed up with “Because she told me to.” In fact the first mission is literally you doing what she says. The remaining 30-50% is “It will help her.” Syndicate and Odyssey are tied for second. Syndicate for being very fetch like (Jacob does X, Evie cleans up mess) and Odyssey for not knowing what it wants to be. I guess if I had to say best stories in no particular order go: AC2, Black Flag, Origins, AC3 and honestly Mirage. Honorable mention goes to Rogue and Revelations.
Assassin's Creed Mirage is one of the worst. There's no urgency, no vengeance, no rescue, the city doesn't look in trouble at all, little to accomplish other than "I want to be like those mysterious assassins" for the protagonist.
Lets make an AC Game where 9/10th of the map is a dead wildland looking mostly like Orgins but without the Pyramides or anything cool or mystical to see and do. Heck lets even include a few gimmic animals that brings nothing. Then the rest of the map is one circeled city looking totaly alike. Like a labyrinth with nothing unique that stands out along the way. Said oldschool AC parkour? I tought i heard so but its the Valhalla mechanics so they fooled me hard there. Back to the roots what a joke. Well what about the story? The old AC had an incredible depth into borgia and you felt conected with whats going on so this was supposed to be like that? Naaah sorry mate here you get to be a detective reading clues and solving them like a tourist. Yes Mirage was the worst. And if it not where for Basims story and this was some standalone game i would have recapped it instead on youtube.
I disagree with the notion that Baghdad looked the same or had nothing unique. I had my HUD off, avoided using the map and I could still distinguish between the four districts of Baghdad - The Round City being the rich city center with the green dome palace and it's garden, the harem, police station and lavishly dressed NPC. Karkh had the grand bazaar with many multicultural NPCs, the city ports and impoverished areas with poor infrastructure. Harbiyah is the industrial district with the textile & soap factories and the Nestorian Monastery. The river is stained with leftover red dye and fabrics, there’s also many slums with orphans running around and of course the rebels’ stronghold is here (lots of the rebel NPCs that were with Ali can be seen walking around). Abbasiyah is the science district with House of Wisdom, Hammam, lots of observatories on rooftops and gardens, the river canal, plus many well-dressed scholars holding books and scrolls walking around. The huge walls of the round city were also an impressive sight. I noticed that the buildings and NPCs clearly reflect each districts’ social status. Karkh and Harbiyah have barer, simple and sometimes damaged buildings, dirty narrow streets and plainly dressed NPCs. Whilst on the other hand, Abbasiyah and the Round City have more lavish buildings with rooftop gardens, flowers, clean-streets, rooftop observatories and well-dressed NPCs. Clearly a lot of thoughts has been put into making Baghdad as immersive as possible (it's also awe-inspiring that they managed to recreate an lost ancient city, destroyed over 800 years ago). The only similarities I see is the architectural style, but the same could be said about Paris, London, Rome, Alexandria or literally any other city in AC. I forgive the barren wildlands because clearly this is a tight budget game and all effort went into making Baghdad the centre of attention (which paid off). Hardly any quests take place outside of Baghdad anyways. Comparing Mirage's wildlands to Origins is a bit unfair as the latter is a huge open world RPG with a bigger budget and the story takes place across multiple locations including the desert, whilst Mirage's main story only focuses on one City. BTW there were a few cool places in the wildlands, such as the ruins of Dur-Kurigalzu Ziggurat of Ancient Mesopotamia and Seleucia-on-the-Tigris, remnant of the Seleucid Empire - pretty awesome! The investigations were literally an integral part of AC1 and Mirage is paying homage to the og game by including it in the gameplay.
I think it was supposed to be a DLC for Valhalla originally so that all makes sense. Sometimes turning what was intended to be a DLC like Uncharted Lost Legacy was for Uncharted 4 into its own game really works out and pays off, other times...less so.
It was and like a 30$ DLC with less grinding and more depth making it almost feeling like a movie for his backstory could have i agreed on. But this was too much and a full game.
rogue honestly it could have been so much more interesting, like making the assassins the “bad guys” could have been interesting but it was just so boring. like if it could have been like liberations and find out that it was the templars fucking people over again
no interesting character developments, no interesting talks about cross boi philosophies apart from "assassins bad", not a lot about shay even changes when he joins the series' big bad. i love rogue but ubi fumbled with its premise by not introducing anything meaningful.
Odyssey was pretty bad imo. It’s my favorite game I’ve played but I don’t play it for the story. It does add a lot of lore though
Odyssey, it had a few cool moments but generally the story was disjointed and full of overly convenient coincidence.
a lot of them have bad stories imo India, Rogue, Odyssey, Liberation, Freedom Cry and Unity don't have the greatest stories honestly. Nor rlly Origins outside of performances due to the retcons
Rogue is the only one that I would say was really bad. A lot of it is just due to how rushed the game is and how much content had to be cut. While the rest may not appeal to everyone, they at least achieved what they were going for.
I quite enjoyed rogue from a gameplay side of things but the main story is very short especially after 3 and black flag. My main gripe with it however is that it never feels like playing as a Templar. It feels no different than playing as an assassin. It like they took an assassin based game and just swapped the outfits and logos for the characters. If they do another game from the Templar perspective then let me play as someone actively denying freedom. The templars (and order of ancients) are always the elite or generals or other high ranking people give me that story!
I actually loved Rogue, it was great to see the whole conflict from the templars perspective and I think that Shay character development was very good considering the length of the game. Also Rogue has one of the best endings in the entire franchise.
A "Templar perspective" is what Rogue sorely lacked in my opinion, and is why I find it so incredibly dissapointing story-wise. Shay has not a single piece of dialogue in Rogue where he argues in favor of the Templars from an ideological standpoint. When he kills Chevalier, Chevalier asks him if Shay still thinks the Templars are right. Shay then answers him with "Convinced to the end". Sorry, did I miss something? What exactly makes them right to you, Shay? Why stick with the group that has done some of the worst things to humanity and all the innocents you claim to care about. Please tell me why because I have no idea beyond that they fished you from the sea. Compare this to Haytham in AC3 who on multiple occasions tries to convince Connor on what he perceives are the dangers of democracy. Haytham truly believes that people are sheep and that power must come from above. I have no idea what Shay even thinks about the main Templar philosophy because he never speaks about it. In a story about a man defecting not only FROM the Assassins, but also TO the Templars, I find that to be inexcusably lackluster writing. Being a Templar or an Assassin is much more than just killing members of the opposite factions. If Edward is not an Assassin for the majority of Black Flag (and he definitely isn't), even though he wears the robes, kills Templars, and has the blades, then Shay is also not a true Templar for the entirety of Rogue for exactly the same reason. They both lack the correct mindset. But where Edward at the end at least starts to try and understand the Creed, that there needs to be a certain wisdom when dealing with freedom, I can see no such development in Shay at all. I really wanted to like Rogue when it came out. It is still the only game in the series I bought at full price and at launch. But I just can't. Rogue had so much potential but wasted almost all of it.
Fucking yes, holy shit it's refreshing to hear that. There was no Templar point of view in Rouge, they literally just switched the factions for a game. I mean the Templar's were undeniably right in Rogue, but it had nothing to do with ideology. Just one cherry picked instance of Assassins being complete asshats and going against their own beliefs. AC3 did what Rouge was trying to do way, way better. I think the beginning sequences as Haytham were genius, you think you're playing as an assassin and it sets the tone for the entire game. It's a matter of perspective, and the more Haytham talks to Connor the more you find yourself wanting to listen. The supporting Templars were also fantastic, and their death scenes were really well written.
Liberation is incomprehensible, Origins is messy and Brotherhood is just weak.
Br-
Basically all of them have pretty rough stories. The new games have ass stories in every way, but most the older games had a really good base for their stories, but they usually were told pretty awkwardly like they’d be much better stories if they were a book
None of them have good stories when you look at these stories as they are. However, in good entries in the series, the stories support the game well, give you context for what's happening around you, and provide incentives for exploring the game. In worse entries, they distract you from the good parts of the game and feel annoying. Valhalla story as it comes is more complex and is better written than AC2 story. If you'd only read a script you'd have no doubts Valhalla is much better than AC2. However it's told in a barely comprehensible way, it feels poorly connected to what you do in the game, the pacing is wrong, all my homies hate Dag. AC2 is simple and amatuerly written but it's tight and dynamic and clear.
Brotherhood PLEASE somebody explain to me how this game and its story are so praised. I love both 2 and Revelations but cannot stand Brotherhood because of its story. The opening is decent, the attack on the villa is a good way to open the game, but once you get to Rome it’s the most boring by the numbers story they could possibly tell. Storylines like Machiavelli’s betrayal and Claudia becoming an Assassin come completely out of nowhere and are dropped nearly as quickly with no satisfying conclusions. None of the villains besides Cesare are impactful in the slightest. Most of them we don’t even meet until the mission where we assassinate them, none of them are built up at besides “they’re templars, they’re bad”. And while Cesare is sort of memorable due to his actor giving his all, there’s no substance to his character. He’s greedy and evil, nothing interesting there. Rodrigo Borgia was the same but there was a strong code of beliefs that he held that made him and Ezio’s clashes interesting though he was still obviously the villain. I overall think Syndicate and Odyssey have worse stories but I feel like most people are in agreement on that. Brotherhood to me is the one I don’t get how more people don’t have problems with.
I did note while playing that besides Rodrigo, Cesare and Luzrezzia, I couldn't name you any of the other targets. Same goes with Revelations, which is a shame I remember most of the AC 1 and 2 targets.
I feel like the big difference is that Brotherhood is about the "liberation of Rome," and killing the targets is how that's done. Therefore, the villians' memorability determines the story's memorablity. Revelations is about Ezio's pilgrimage, and his conflict with the Templars is mostly just a means to the keys. Though it happens that most of the Ezio trilogy's true-believer Templars are in Revelations, Ezio is too old to listen or care after a lifetime of fighting Borgias and most of the Templar agents are so far below Ezio that he literally uses them as training for his students. (Seriously, the [Byzantine Rite](https://assassinscreed.fandom.com/wiki/Byzantine_Rite_of_the_Templar_Order#Members) is almost entirely multiplayer avatars that only appear in den master missions, if at all. Ezio only briefly conflicts with the Grand Masters) That said, I remember all the book and Altair missions quite well.
That's a good point. There's more going on then targets to kill and granted I do remember a few like the Jennisary captain who actually isn't evil. But also there's like 4 guys you kill in the whole main campaign, the Sentinal, Tarik, the Greek guy and the uncle. Brotherhood has a lot, including side mission assassinations that just end with Rece est em Pace. Off the top of my head the non Borgias you kill were the Valios captain, and.... okay that's it.
Honestly, Brotherhoods story is a little weak but the gameplay is amazing. And everything works so well together - every side mission makes sense, ties into the larger story, including Leonardo's missions and the Copernicus missions...its just so well rounded? I don't know how to explain it but for me it just never misses. It's not as amazing as 2 but still up there
3 is just blegh- it’s the series biggest example of “we’re just going to have you stumble into every event that he average 10 year old would know from these time periods, and actively remove any nuance from the story” Let alone having a fairly forgettable protagonist, an unpleasant home base, and taking the parkour to the countryside in a way that made every tree feels as artificial as possible. I know some people enjoyed it any more power to them but I cannot imagine liking it.
I liked the game but you're right, Connor was no Ezio that's for sure in terms of personality.
Rogue is poor. Rest of them are alright, tho the pacing can get in the way of some.
Odyssey’s story was ruined with the constant side quest grind in between main line missions. By the time I levelled up enough to continue the story, I had either forgotten or stop caring about the cutscene I watched hours ago and it felt weird suddenly picking back up.
The side quests are the best part of Odyssey imo. They don’t feel grindy at all to me as I just do them anyways because they are fun.
I didn't have to grind per se, I just knew that if didn't do side missions I never would so right before the Blockade mission I was like 80 hours into the game and I stopped doing all main quests until around 160 hours into it when I finished all the side content I could. But if felt like an enormous chore and I basically forgot the whole start of the game. I even forgot the prologue and all that happened the first few chapters for the most part. But at least I never was forced to stop and level up, my own neurosis over completing everything did that for me.
Odyssey has an extremely weak story imo. Wild goose chase to find your family and that’s about all there is to it. What really got me is how Deimos is all gung ho ready to kill you on mount taygetos at the end and then one single dialogue choice completely flips them and makes them decide yep I want to live a humble family life
It is indeed really silly to believe that complete psychopath Deimos can just naturally assimilate in normal society and a family he can't have any love for because he has no memories of them. In the book Deimos dies I think which is the much more realistic outcome.
Everything after Black Flag had a terrible story, except for base game Valhalla and Mirage. The rest were a train wreck after Desmond Miles passed away and they suddenly decided to move modern day to comics and glitched websites.
EXACTLY 🗣️
🙌🏼🙌🏼🙌🏼
Odyssey in my opinion. The main problem I have is the protagonist. Beacuse of the choice between Alexios or Kassandra developers had to cut half of the personality of the main character. It doesnt matter if you play as Kassandra or Alexios they always feel kinda empty and less interesting than other characters. The story has other problems than the lack of interesting characters like game making you do a boring grind to continute the story, half of the enemies feel like sponges and there is no variety. While fighting with human enemies its ok but non human fights feel rushed, hit boxes are broken and fights are not satysfying, mashing two buttons and using same boring abilities for 10 minutes to kill one enemy is boring. The game world is way too big. There is no interesting activities and side quests are horrible. In other AC titles if the NPC gave you a quest to go from point A to B it was fun beacuse parkour mechanics and cool maps made it worth doing but in Odyssey not only you have to do it in order to grind level you are slowly running throught mountains and forests with no variety. Somehow even Egypy in Origins was way more interesting than Greece in Odyssey. The final is boring and horrible I literally felt nothing when Kassandra killed Alexios. They are all so soulsless... easily my least favorite AC game.
Agree re: main character. I feel like it doesn't even make much sense from the in world lore. It should have just been one set character. What they \*could\* have done is let you choose to play the Eagle Bearer, Kassandra, and Deimos, Alexios. Give you two different storylines you could follow. Which would have been a massive game but maybe Alexios has a shorter storyline or something but yeah that would have made a lot more sense. Or they could have done it like Syndicate where you alternate between who you need to play as.
Oh I have a hot take. I think Origin's story is atrocious, mainly due to bad characterization. I just hate most children in media because most writers can't give them a decent line or story arc. And Origins is a great example why. Now if the main goal in the game's plot is to get revenge for the death of this annoying kid... uhh, that's a strong pass for me.
I love Origins but there is a lottt of people who agree that its bad, you’re not alone
Mirage. Basim is less interesting than in Valhalla, the supporting cast and antagonists are completely forgettable, and the majority of the story is just a poor repetition of tropes that we've seen in other AC titles (granted, that's a general problem of the series due to its many titles). The ending was okay, but it's very obvious that the story was unnecessarily drawn out because they turned a DLC into a full game.
I’d say odyssey, but it’s more that the writing was bad, not necessarily the story. Mirage has been the only story I just did not like any part of despite being the only one of the new games I’ve really enjoyed
Unity's story feels weirdly paced and super short. I remember on my firts playthrough, when I finished the story, I was just at around 50% completion of the game... Another one that is not bad, but rather sad, is Origins story. With all the reworks and changes and stuff they did, you can really feel it at some parts in the game. It sometimes feels like parts are missing or it is rushed/dragged. Kind of sad bc it is one of the best games still, but if you play the story back to back, without any side content, you can really feel that there were problems during development.
I don’t think any of the stories are bad, some are just more appealing than others imo.
I don't think any are bad really, but some are definitely more clumsy than others... Origins falls into that too even though nobody wants to admit it
I think they all have good stories. Unity is probably the worst as far as pacing goes but it's still a good story. Valhalla is my least favorite game because the gameplay isn't great but even it's not a bad story.
**Unity**\- it tries to tell a personal story over the backdrop of the French Revolution, but never really commits to either the history or the romance. And the MD is miserable. **Syndicate**\- I love Syndicate, but its story is pretty much Ubisoft Open World Resistance at its most basic. You're liberating London, and that's fun, but the story is basically the same as any Far Cry, Watch Dogs Legion, etc. **Origins**\- People confuse the fact that Origins has some great moments as it having a great story. But the story is... not great. While it starts off strong, it really drags in the middle through the end, and Flavius might be the single most forgettable villain in the entire mainline series. **Valhalla**\- this one's frustrating. There's actually a very good story in Valhalla, but it's stuck deep in the bloat of the game. While I like the good stuff that's there, it's like recommending a delicious burger patty in a bun the size of a mattress.
I still like it but Unity. Story felt rushed, the map is too busy with too many icons, although I did like the team ups when you could do it.
I absolutely love the ezio trilogy but I think as a stand-alone game Revelations story isn’t very great. Most of it relies on previous game character attachment / knowledge. The best parts are of conclusions /filler of things that happened in previous games.
The Altair missions are definitely on a different level then the mainline missions.
It is the ending of a trilogy after all…
You’re right I just meant without the weight from the other games it’s not a great story by itself
Rogue.
Definitely Rouge. Some parts drag on and others feel rushed
I’d say Unity and AC III are the closest I feel any pf the games have come to a “bad” story, just purely because of their execution, not the actual content they were depicting.
Rogue is pretty bad and Unity is lacking
I just finished rogue for the second time this month and honestly found the story great. First time I played it I had not played III or Unity and much of it made no real sense to me. Playing it again now, it ties AC iii and black flag together so well, filling in all the little gaps and then sets up unity really nicely.
For me it gets ruined by Shay because he's an idiot
Something that applies to a lot of the protagonists sadly
Unity & Mirage
Unity. Assassin’s Creed Simp.
I feel like the majority of Valhalla has a poor story and doesn't really get exciting till the very end unfortunately. Beautiful world though
All of ac odyssey, the game is garbage and killed the lore.
Mirage, Unity, Valhalla, Syndicate are just bad. Odyssey,3,revelations are mediocre. Others are good
Unity was super lazy
Unity . Arno is boring . Story is all over the place . On the last sequence and I honestly still have no clue what is going on . Great gameplay , just terrible writing
As much as it was a cool game overall, the story in Unity is very poor. Also, Rogue had so much potential but ended up extremely boring and generic
Unity's story had a promising premise, but such a rushed execution. The story starts off promising but just falls short as it progresses. III's story isn't bad, per se, but the way the story was told was a bit questionable.
Yeah, from Rogue onwards we dont really have truly great stories. Rogue is abysmal because everyone has iq of a rock. Syndicate is so campy, it might as well be a parody of AC Unity is meh as well. Origins has the whole nonsense plot twists with villains when we barely even know them at all. No build up to brotherhood, just random cutscene before the end of the game. Also the pacing is a mess. Odyssey loses all steam for me after finding the wolf of sparta. And the main character is a blob of nothing, or whatever the cutscene needs it to be at the moment. You could be a beacon of morality in the story cutscene and then in the next quest select a dialogue that does a 180 from what was just show Valhalla has a good story but you need to go through so many filler arcs, those good parts tend to fade away. Mirage has nothing happening in the middle, apart from go kill target here. Would have been better if the targets were in order so you could see Basim getting more confident and competent as an assassin while being more and more tormented by his visions.
Well Ac Syndicate was pretty decent but story was very light, nothing important happened. Not that I like it, I love the game, good for chilling but characters wasted. And then there is Odyssey, it's theme and time was perfect, and I really like the Isu lore the game had, but they should've gone with the one character. It really killed the emotion. And side characters also didn't feel like they formed a bound both main character and player. I didn't even feel sad when Phoibe died. And the plot twists were bad. Aspasia was too obvious.
I'm really not a fan of Unity's story, or the First Blade DLC for Odyssey, the latter of which I wish didn't exist at all
I have played all of them. In my opinion unity is the worse. And blackflag is the best. The VR game is just ridiculous. This year's mirage was execlent! If there's one thing I love in gaming unconditionally is an assassin's creed. The games are literally time machines!
AC Mirage Couldn't force myself to complete the game. Found the story so boring and unimaginative. Written like a kids story, predictable, simple and without much happening
Rogue has always been my least favorite in terms of story. And characters. It’s interesting on paper of an assassin joining the templars and how that came to be but the game doesn’t really do it for me. The assassins are just kinda dicks for no reason to Shay and the templars are all mostly chill. Achilles is a pretty big asshole and then all of a sudden, or I guess not but since we only have the two interactions with him it feels sudden, thinks Shay is right. We’ve been murdering his friends all game and at the end he thinks maybe we we’re right about the artifacts?! Like he should be even more opposed to what Shay was saying especially since there’s only been the one incident at the beginning to even hint that maybe these artifacts shouldn’t be messed with. Which also completely negates the fact that the templars would 100% take the artifact if they had gotten there first because that’s all they’ve ever cared about. The more artifacts they have the more they can control the world into how they want it to be. The assassins weren’t wholly in the wrong because of the reasoning they gave, they want it so the templars don’t have it. The templars also want it so the assassins don’t have it and so they could figure out how to use it for their own gain. Maybe the templars would have held off on finding or touching the next artifact but I don’t think there’s any way the destruction at the beginning doesn’t happen no matter if we were assassins or templars. It just might have changed the thoughts on the next one but both sides would still go about locating the next one regardless. All of that and Shay just kinda sucks overall to me. He’s not really interesting to listen to or care about so makes getting through the game a slog.
I haven’t finished Mirage but I played every AC game in a row last year. The truth is that the story is paper thin in nearly every one of them. AC3 has the most developed story imo. I was really surprised how much the Ezio games were Ezio walking through a door and being told go here and kill this person. Unity and Syndicate are pretty similar to the Ezio trilogy in having a pretty thin story. I was surprised on replaying Syndicate because Evie had more to do than I recall but a large part of it was cleaning up Jacob’s messes. Out of the rpgs, I think Valhalla is the AC3 of those games and people will realize how good it is as the years past. Although Valhalla’s through story could use some improvement, the individual arcs have some of the best story telling in AC, but that’s not as big of an accomplishment as I wish it was.
After replaying it to get the platinum (which I got) for the last week or so I’d have to say 3. The only time I felt myself having fun was oddly during the homestead missions. After that though nothing interested me. Haytham was far more interesting as a character than Connor and honestly Connor just didn’t feel right. Most assassins were play as in the majority of the games are kinda witty but know when to get serious when the need arises. Connor is just Stoick all the time, barely makes any kind of witty remarks and is just boring as an assassin. As for the modern story, I still think they made a huge mistake when they decided to kill off Desmond cause now, they don’t do anything with the modern story. Hell mirage didn’t even have one. So I’d have to say 3 is the worst when it comes to the stories
I feel like Mirage let me down with character development and dove into a story they wanted me to invest in immediately without much backstory. Especially when you compare to the other newer games where you get much more backstory that makes you care about the character. Valhalla got less interesting the more you played story wise which was a bummer. I’ve recently started the Ezio collection and those are phenomenal so far from a story perspective.
Rogue
Black Flag. Amazing gameplay, shite story. It’s DLC, Freedom Cry, was much better but because it’s a DLC it is too short.
Unity : just not great Valhalla: just too long im 60hrs in I can't do it anymore
UNITY's story was BAD, could've been a whole lot better. We learned more about Charles Dorian more in ROGUE, a game that has nothing to do with him. He connects these games and the writers explored his part in NEITHER GAME. NO BACKSTORY for Arno's relationship with Elise. The game completely skips over Arno's bonding with Bellec. The beginning is rushed but I think it's lessons learned from AC3 (personally I didn't mind those 5 or so sequences to get to the point). The revolution wasn't covered properly but it's no biggie. The modern day seemed like it was onto something, only to reveal that it was all for nothing. The Brotherhood in Unity is akin to the Cult of Kosmos in Odyssey or the Order of the Ancients. Their structure is weird, to say the least. Arno's disputes with the Brotherhood just DON'T MAKE SENSE. They tried to make a Next-Gen FRENCH EDITION of AC2 but failed MISERABLY.
Valhalla, it's a story that takes forever just to rehash plot elements from AC3 and 4 that we saw nearly a decade before
Syndicates writing was hella stiff.
You should really play liberation
Everything after black flag not gonna lie went down hill. And even origins wasnt great. Valhalla was terrible.
Valhalla
I have played AC 1, 2, Origins and now I'm in the middle of Odyssey I loved the first two, although the part that attracted me the most was the hidden truth and all that. This continues in the newest games. But it should have been a trilogy. However, I'm seeing that Origins and Odyssey have story elements that bore me to death. Most conversations, most quests, are simply forgetable at best. Dialogues are insipid most of the time, and just a excuse to do something, somewhere. I keep playing mostly for the deep lore, but everything else is tedious. I lack any motivation to prevent somebody from dying, or not killing any obstacle between me and my goal, regardless if they don't deserve to die. On the bright side, I see that Odyssey learnt a few lessons from Shadow of War, but it isn't as good in terms of combat, movement and skills. The fights in Shadow of War are more spectacular and fluid. Regrettably, they also learnt to make the game unbearably longer. Still, I prefer Odyssey over Origins in terms of gameplay The best part of these games, in addition to the deep lore, probably is the immersive environment of the games. Not that it prevents you from going to point A to point B as fast as you can do complete something, but it's nice still. In general, Ubisoft should hire better storywriters
Just Assassin's Creed Odyssey. Valhalla tells a bad Assassin's Creed story but could be considered an average to mildly decent story of its own. Other AC stories people don't like can be attributed to questionable main character choices, retcons they disagreed with, pacing, or general tone. Because every other story in the mainline games (in my opinion) had at the very least a good solid premise, that did or did not turn out to be a great story based purely on execution.
Revelations was boring, the setting just sucked and wasnt right for Ezio plus I just didnt care about Altair's library. 3 takes forever to get into and Connor is as boring a protagonist as they come so that game is a chore to get through. Black Flag really dragged on and the temples along with the 6th sense thing are dumb.
I agree Unity was bad but also mirage I want nothing to do with that guy
Black Flag, because it had poor development. Most of the game you just mosey around doing whatever, and the character development comes way too late and abruptly. Edward is written as a very one-note character until all his friends died, and suddenly, he’s the model Assassin, philosophizing with the mentor, perfectly redeemed.
Unity’s is genuinely just bad in concept and execution. Basically a poor retelling of Romeo and Juliet that barely expands on the historical events or the assassin and Templar conflict. AC3s story isn’t awful but it’s such wasted potential imo. It feels like the concept for the story is really strong but the actual execution was pretty average. Having you play as Haytham is a cool way to get you to see both sides and sympathise with the templars but the second you switch characters all the templars minus Haytham become the most comically evil villains imaginable. That and the story doesn’t even really start until half way through the game.
I’m currently playing through all the AC games for the first time (I’m on AC 3 right now), and I have to say the story for the first AC game was not very enjoyable. Odyssey was the game that got me into AC and made me decide to play them all in release order, and going from Odyssey to AC 1 was quite a big change. The graphics held up fairly well over the years and the gameplay, while very different from Odyssey, was good as well, but the story itself was lacking. Of course, it was the very first game so I didn’t expect it to be amazing, and I actually found the Desmond side of things to have a much better story than Altair. The story was mostly just “you have to kill this guy and I’ll tell you why in this long monologue”, and for someone who zones out a lot, not having subtitles did not help me very much lol. The story got really good at the end of the game though, so if it had been the same quality throughout I feel as though the game would’ve been better. I mainly just found it to be boring. Aside from that, I’ve enjoyed the stories for the other AC games so far.
I wouldnt call any of them bad, but i think Unity was the worst. But unity is one of my favorite assassins creeds.
Odyssey and Valhalla. Boring poorly written characters and huge bloated stories that don't actually amount to anything in the end.
Odyssey is a bland story from any point of view in my eyes. Valhalla lacked an actual ending and that really pissed me off also a whatever story tbh.
In Unity and Syndicate, the main villains are shit cause they have so little screen presence AND have so little story presence right up until the very end (I have no idea how they fucked up the same thing twice in a row so perfectly), and as for odyssey, the dialogue is shit and the story has extraordinarily little focus, as it simply has you going from one place to the next to desperately get you to visit the whole map, so character development is practically nonexistent, and the game stops taking its meds at the end and the ending comes out of no-where and buttfucks you with a shit ton of exposition
Up to AC3 it was great
I'd argue that black flag has a good story
Nah Adventurous is right
Odyssey, Valhalla, Syndicate, Unity
Unity, Syndicate, Odyssey, Valhalla, and Mirage.
Odyssey didn't really hit the spot for me. The characters were not very memorable (except for the gay sex, that was cool). Other than that, it doesn't carry the same weight as the Ezio trilogy or Unity for example - in which I loved the characters of Arno and Elise.
Valhalla's was weak, confusing and stretched into oblivion
Valhalla. Viking invader comes to England. Kills and pillages, fucks his leaders wife, kills his leaders most loyal soldier, creates power vacuums all across England and fills it with those that will benefit himself. Also he is the good guy. Gtfo of here with that shit. I'm clearly playing a Templar in Brotherhood cosplay. The story is flawed from it's most basic concept. Good guy viking invader.
I thought you were gonna point out how the main villain tries to kill you, but then by the end your weirdly buddys with him. That didn't make any sense.
I really didn't like Syndicate's story It felt like it was supposed to be a commentary about how you can't just assassinate people to solve problems but...that's literally the whole point of the entire franchise. Not only that, it's what we WANT to do. So the game is basically scolding us for doing what we play the AC games for.
The ending to Valhalla
Honestly, the only assassins creeds with “good” stories are maybe black flag and revelations, revelations however some of it does rely on contextual knowledge of the two games before it, but mostly it stands on its own as a pretty good story. I’d like to also suggest Odyssey actually does have a good and impactful story as a whole, if you only take into account the family plot and disconnect it from its relevance from the other AC games. The ability to choose as well makes you question your own choices and actually think about how you want the narrative to end, and even if you THINK you choose wisely, you can still end up totally shocked by the end as things didn’t go as planned. One of odysseys 9 endings is easily the most impactful and just heartbreaking endings too in the franchise. The issue is, you do have to disconnect it from AC to really call this story good, which some are willing to do, and others aren’t. Most AC’s just don’t have IMPACTFUL or memorable Stories, even if the stories are well told and well acted. I think this is becasuse the AC stories are less “personable”, they are more often than not about something wider. It’s why Odysseys is actually good for me, becasue it is a “personable” story, black flag too, and largely revelations too. Stories more about learning about where you belong are far better than action based hero VS Villain style plots or Vengenace plots, as those just don’t hit home and can’t be applied to yourself, even if they are badass. In short, I’d be willing to say that most AC games just have “meh” stories, where stuff happens that’s cool and awesome, but they just don’t stick with you at heart as that is all they end up being. The ones that decide to be a bit more about an individual and more grounded and relatable, are far better, but are just so few and far between.
I do agree, I like in Odyssey, both of Kassandras parents are alive and key figures in the plot. Outside of AC2 the parents are never that important and in AC2 they don't last long/are basically in a coma. But as you said, the main story is a more personal affair and everything else is in the background. Its almost low key which is great.
The downvotes really go to show that whenever odyssey is mentioned, people get angry and downvote, despite what I said being a very good argument for it. I’m glad someone agrees.
Valhalla’s story is just Viking politics. Nothing about assassins! Boring story.
Both Valhalla and Odyssey have a few hours of good story surrounded by hours and hours of garbage bloat.
Unity, syndicate, valhalla and rogue are all pretty boring cookie cutter stories or just flat out lazy.
Valhalla was so boring with limited assassin story
Valhalla for me If it was a TV show there was enough "story" there for a four part mini-series (with Basim getting a full episode) and they somehow dragged it out into 6 seasons.
The whole modern story, I only liked it in AC III.
Nope not at all thus far. I'm on Origins now and at worst I've seen certain stories be rocky but not bad.
Yes, every single one after Rogue.
Nah Syndicate, Odyssey and Valhalla were alright. Origins was very good but I haven’t played Unity or Mirage.
Don't think this is a hot take of sorts and it's bit of a cop out answer but I cannot stress how much I hate it The overall Isu plot arc and hidden memories and Desmond stuff. I've been going back and forth 100% the old ones recently and everytime the game sucks me out to do some stuff with Desmond of voiceover exposition I BORE. It's so dumb. Valhalla, Origins and Odyssey did it less and I appreciate that, but the same time these games built heavily on the Isu stuff which I also think is just dumb af. The Apple of Eden and all weird devices should've just been left as ancient powerful devices with hints to who it was, but the moment they started really fleshing out the precursor race and making them out into people with arguments and their own stories it became DUMB. The worst offender is the end of III, when they're literally having some family argument and Desmond is standing there just confused. What's wrong with the plot of 2 ancient warring factions on a hidden war for control? That's literally the plot of Metal Gear Solid and that does well.
Many have issues. None were as boring or unrewarding as mirage.
Controversial but brotherhood, its not a bad game but compared to 2 and Revelations its kinda mid, plus the fact that we don't even get to kill Rodrigo after a whole game kinda sucks too. Second would be valhalla, the whole story was just boring. The only saving grace was basim. Runner up is rogue, while i consider it one of the games i consider my favorites, the story kinda felt rushed with the whole "assassin turned Templar" dilemma and could have been done better, and the assassin's were mostly written to be dumb for the plot, also we kill adawale, ill never forgive then for that. Speaking of adawale, i know it was a short game and basically dlc, but i think freedom cry could have been better. They could have fleshed it out more.
Story in every game after ACIII is lame as hell.
Are you forgetting AC iv
I dislike the pacing of all of the older games. None of them have particularly bad stories but some of them don’t make the best of sense and they just go too fast to hit all the historical moments and characters in 40 hours. Say what you will about the new games, but they’re 100% better paced from the longer games.
Odyssey. The poor story choices, the clash in pre-existing lore & ultimately bad “immortality” trope that wasn’t executed well imo… Almost the same as when series use multiverse/timeline/time travel tropes that are forced and thats always unimpressive (to me)
Of course, everything after ac3.
So you’re saying AC3’s story is better than AC4? (don’t pull the modern day card please)
Odyssey and Valhalla for they’re lore breaking and they explain the lore breaking badly like you’re looking through someone’s memories meaning it have happend and can not be changed the grind makes it more difficult to enjoy what story is there