5) Assassin’s Creed: Origins
For the sake of honesty, I’ll go ahead and say right now that I’m not the most knowledgeable when it comes to dissecting Assassin’s Creed‘s long, often convoluted, narrative. Neither am I particularly interested in it, either, but that certainly hasn’t always been the case.
What began as an intriguing, beautiful distortion of history in Ubisoft’s original game with Altair – and subsequently developed further with its fantastic Ezio trilogy – the science-fiction-spliced historical series’ tale of secret societies and conspiracy quickly devolved into generic storytelling, following the conclusion of Desmond’s story. That’s not to say I recognize the ancestor of, apparently, every badass assassin that ever lived as an integral lynchpin of the narrative (the best characters are those that live in the past), but his death at the end of Assassin’s Creed III certainly marked a turning point for future titles.
That loss of meaningful story progression, I feel, perfectly mirrors a similar issue with the series’ underlying gameplay structure, which, while having been expanded with each new game up to and including 2015’s Syndicate, often felt like a rehash of every other entry, only with a different setting to mix it up.
It’s that same stagnation and burnout that, if not caused, certainly contributed to, Ubisoft’s putting the mainline franchise on hold, it ultimately having decided to skip 2016 entirely in order to give everyone involved a breather. Now, though, the vacation period is over, and Assassin’s Creed: Origins, for all intents and purposes, represents a fresh start for the Order of Assassins.
How well the hiatus will pay off for Ubisoft remains to be seen, but as a mildly jaded Assassin’s fan myself, Origins is the first entry since Black Flag that has my interest piqued, and that can only be a good sign, right?
