Assassin’s Creed has long had a problem with repetitiveness, and we all know it. As a long-standing, big-budget franchise, it’s widely considered ‘too big to fail’ – despite putting out a number of relative flops, Ubisoft continues to launch game after game after game, staying relevant by slightly changing its mechanics and exploring a new setting with each release.
Assassin’s Creed hasn’t been good in years. The magic of the Ezio Auditore era is long gone, and the series has never been able to produce a character more loved in the decade following. The series’ focus on well-fleshed-out character arcs and witty dialogue has been replaced with tedious side quests to pad gameplay hours and an obsession with microtransactions. The original stealthy gameplay and smooth parkour movements have been abandoned despite this ostensibly being a game about assassins, with a new focus on power levels and gear to take out your enemies. Of course, this motivates players to purchase better gear through a real-money store instead of grinding for higher levels, garnering Ubisoft more profit.
There are rumours that Assassin’s Creed Mirage will go back to its roots and be smaller than its recent predecessors, though we have very little information as to what that actually means in terms of gameplay, story, and design. The early games are definitely outdated now, and we certainly have better ways to design open-world games in the present day, but whether this is a sign that Ubisoft is ready to actually innovate for the first time in years is yet to be seen. Because the majority of Assassin’s Creed’s changes have been moving further from the initial pillars of the series and further into attempts to squeeze as much money as possible from its player base, I find myself questioning how far Ubisoft is really willing to go when it comes to Mirage.
Assassin’s Creed Infinity is also supposed to be releasing soon. Infinity is a live-service platform primed for Ubisoft to fill with pointless bloat while requiring subscriptions from players – it makes perfect sense that they’d try to shoehorn Assassin’s Creed into the live-service market considering its current popularity. Whether this will result in an experience that’s actually fun for players or end up yet another mess of repeated world events, fetch quests that add nothing to the narrative, and manufactured problems that Ubisoft then sells you the solution to, remains to be seen.
In both cases, the right move for Ubisoft is to move back to its roots, focusing on lovingly-created characters that actually develop over time, narratives with complex themes, and cutting back on the size of the games so players aren’t wasting their time with pointless quests. Despite its assurances, I don’t think Ubisoft will do this successfully, and that’s a disservice to players everywhere who are sick of microtransactions and overly-long games. I’m still hoping Mirage and Infinity prove me wrong, but in the meantime, I might go back and play Assassin’s Creed 2 again.