OG Assassin’s Creed did not have a satisfying ending. You just… Woke up at some point and then you don’t get to find out what’s going on.
Unless there’s like… Something after that that I simply never found? It was what put me off playing another one ever.
I thought of that more as an epilogue. The ending proper is Altair’s ending, I would say, not Desmond’s.
Desmond’s ending was just setup for the next game.
Though I did like how Desmond gets Eagle Vision at the end and sees the doctor as red, but his assistant as blue, meaning she is an ally.
It was a cute use of the mechanics, yeah. Though for the most part the core Templar/Assassin thing is fairly arbitrary other than the game wanting to paint the Templars as vaguely worse than the Assassins.
Eleven games in and it still seems mostly determined to paint people as inherently fairly shitty and corrupt and the Templars and Assassins as two sides of a deeply unpleasant and bloody coin, fighting each other mostly because it is in their nature to do so more than for the sake of the broader ideals they hide behind.
Similarly, eleven games in and the explanation for the importance of these various magical artifacts is just that aliens did it, and they were just as garbage as everyone else. 
It’s a very narrow-minded series, with occasional bursts of humanity in the historical tales. I just remembered I played a decent chunk of Unity, too, which I was apparently in a hurry to forget–I would guess it is the series at it’s most Everyone Is Bad as it leans pretty hard into loyalist sympathies to contort the story into its ultimate shape, keep the revolution as much to the sidelines as possible, and have some kind of cooperative animosity between Arno and Elise.
I think what I liked most about the story in Origins is that it’s dismal thematic baggage felt less nihilistic and more personal.
We see two parents spiral away from each other as they grieve in an action hero sort of way. It’s a bit of a weird have-their-cake-and-eat it framing, as the core fun of the game is doing the things that break the characters down and ultimately cause them to disappear into their new professional mantles of mask and blade … but as such bait-and-switch themes in action games go, I felt it was reasonably well performed and portrayed and it’s a real shame the game is so long with so much stuff expanding in the middle of that relatively simple tale.
I think Origins is also the weird Ancient Aliens stuff at its finest, blending Bayek’s religion, the occupation of the greek dynasty, and the supernatural sci-fi together in a way that hits Bayek’s journey head-on in how it pulls at his motivations and insecurities.
It’s not brilliant storytelling, but it’s definitely my favorite of the AC games I’ve played.
Outer Wilds is one of my favorite games ever. I beat it, maybe 8 months ago and I still think about it. Some people find the controls clunky – I was fine with them – but other than that I think it’s a perfect game.
I’ve tried to get all my friends to play, but none have. It makes me sad.
I played a very early version of it that I don’t believe was “beatable” (indeed, I did not know the final version was). I should probably revisit it.
That’s actually the main reason I don’t play Early Access games much. Rarely have time to play a game more than once, so prefer to just wait for the finished version.
Hopefully without spoiling anything, I’ll say finished is probably more appropriate than beat, though. I loved the ending, though, so I highly recommend finishing it.
This was my issue with the game too. For me the real story was in the Desmond timeline. The assassins’ storylines were basic hero’s quests to frame the wider conspiracy - even the in-game world itself presents the past as a way to learn about the present. But the conspiracy doesn’t really develop, let alone resolve. It’s all vagueries and tidbits.
As a franchise I think AC is really interesting. It’s clear where they hit upon winning formulas and where they struggled - far more than other franchises. The story was the casualty in all the rushing about to hit those regular releases unfortunately. I don’t think having an A and B team helped any - there’s a lot of passing the ball onto the next game!
There’s also about a bajillion people insisting that the modern day sci-fi story stuff is guff and the series should be all about the historical characters, which seems to have increasingly influenced the direction of the writing and is arrant nonsense as far as I’m concerned. I’m right there with you. It was about Desmond, and the modern assassins, and weird magical space artifacts and ancient conspiracies and all that jazz. Not some dude playing stabby Forrest Gump by running into half the famous people in their chunk of history.
You’ve just given me the concept for my next PC.
Haha Blunt but fair!
I do remember lots of interviews with the devs around the time of the first few games where there were aspirations that it would eventually lead to a game where you’d just play as Desmond in a near future setting with no historical part at all. Not surprised to see that never happened!
Personally my favourite part about the historic settings was how you had to do your research before the kill. Finding out weaknesses and where they’d be through side missions was SO GREAT! The idea that your gameplay is aided by actual knowledge was so inventive (Hitman kinda did it, but not quite to the same extent). It’s a massive shame that never survived into the sequels.
I am going to have to go back and give it a stab at some point, now that I am faintly disillusioned with Elite Dangerous (it’s still fine, it’s fine). I just bounced so hard off the platforming elements.
Totally agree! As much as I like(d) Odyssey, the end three hours was basically me highlighting the next person I had to kill, running straight at them, stabbing them in the face, and then running towards a nearby bush (but not TOO nearby) until the “Alarm” level dropped.
Rinse, repeat.
I loved wandering around trying to figure out an effective way to kill the target! And I miss the (admittedly game-y) groups of people you could blend into… I thought that was such a neat little nod to disappearing in a crowd.
It’s hard for the real story to be about something that even in the early games existed only briefly in the periphery. Even in the first game, Desmond was a non-entity in a largely empty room who you spent maybe an hour with in a 15+ hour game. Assassin’s Creed 2 featured Desmond being a Cool Assassin Boi during checks notes the actual rolling of the credits.
If they had done more to make the modern day bits an interesting part of the story and have the two feed back into each other and especially if they had done something to make the core Assassin/Templar thing function I’d have been all for a modern focus or a split historical/modern venture. The trouble is from the word “go” they really failed to do that for me whereas they managed to occaisionally squeeze some humanity and some actual story beats in between the stabbing in the rest of it and let you do more pace around in small rooms and occaisional hit Abstergo employees over the head a bit.
I don’t think it’s that fans turned on the story leading Ubisoft so quietly put it to death. They never really gave it proper attention to begin with. Don’t blame the audience for poor storytelling. :\
I think it’s consistently the best and most interesting storytelling in the series. Sure, it’s never been the majority of said storytelling (and best doesn’t mean it’s necessarily all that amazing), but it’s also gotten heavy pushback from the very start that’s never turned on the historical storytelling, despite that being much weaker in my book. So, I don’t blame the audience for poor storytelling. But I do blame them for preferring it over the good bits.
I guess I’m struggling to see what’s so much better about Desmond’s story. We never really get a sense of what drives the modern Assassins and the Templars–again, 11 games in and even the more detailed historical Assassin/Templar baggage is mostly just personal greed all around with an extra layer of cartoon villainy on the Templars–and their actions are driven entirely around contorting to need the next bit of historical DNA romping. Desmond is a fairly blank slate of a character whereas a few of the characters the game spends more time on have something resembling a personality and relationships.
Personally I’ve encountered a lot of criticism of Assassin’s Creed storytelling in the historical bits, too, especially with Ubisoft’s dedication to maintaining an apolitical veneer while telling politically charged stories that are inherently and intentionally focused on historical revisionism–as in, not just historical fiction, but historical fiction where modern historical and religious understanding is explicitly cast as a revision of the story’s truth.
Edit: I also think the non-modern bits do more with the gonzo sci-fi than the modern bits. Sure, there’s the animus. But most of the weird stuff with the ancient aliens and their hyper-technology happens in the Animus. Desmond doesn’t have a punch-out with he Pope and learn the Greeks worshipped space aliens, Ezio does. The mordern bits revolve around the animus without really doing much with it as a piece of science fiction except use it to get to the next historical bit. Maybe more interesting stuff happens with him after AC2, but that would in turn suggest that Ubisoft didn’t some how forget about it, either.
I guess I specifically mean the gonzo sci-fi stuff over the historical stuff, rather than comparing Desmond to whatever protagonist he’s inhabiting in the animus, since it’s probably fair to suggest that he, as a character, isn’t that much more exciting (or actively less exciting) than his ancestors. I’ve seen so much complaining about the sci-fi even being an element. I do think the framing narrative of the modern day stuff is key to the sci-fi narrative, even if many of the biggest moments you run into it are in the past, and I like Rebecca and Shaun (especially Shaun’s snarky codex comments) better than anyone in the historical narratives. IMO they get way more development (and that’s not necessarily saying much) than the characters in the past. Even Ezio, who gets three games dedicated to him, is basically a cardboard cutout of a “suave Italian man” who gets bounced off various historical figures.
And yes, they do more with Desmond. YMMV whether it’s good stuff. I definitely didn’t find the culmination of his story arc satisfying.
I really liked this about the first AC, though I hated that the side missions were so repetitive, pretty much always being the same six missions, three of which you needed to do in order to unlock the assassination, the others just giving more info. But it was great getting a map of the area with a suggested route, indications of where guards would be, where exactly the target is, etc. That was a great feature that I don’t think got used again at all. If they had just varied the side missions for the intel gathering, it would have been fantastic.
They added a number of additional mission types in the PC release, as I recall.
Wouldn’t know. I played it back on my PS3 after initial release, and though I finished it, I never replayed it, which seems to be my pattern for AC games. Still haven’t finished Black Flag, and though I own it (it was on sale for $8) I have never played Unity, and do not own anything past there.
The problem is that in later games, you have a bit more done with Desmond (sorry if I get confused, I cannot remember if it was AC 2 Revelations or AC 3: after AC2 everything does get a bit blurry), and they failed at making it interesting. The bits were Desmond had to explore the house where they were hiding was fun, but the bits where Desmond (in AC3, I think) was climbing ramdom rocks in caves, that sucked. They became mere puzzles were strob ligths and easy programming gave them a bit of a different edge. I think they missed a big chance there to actually move on.
I did play Black Flag and that was a blast, but the historical parts greatly overtook the present time ones. After that, a bit of the one where you play with the Templars in North America and the one set in the French Revolution (which probably could have had a bit more of the WWII flashbacks) became so generic and repetitive that I lost interst in the series.