Before the very firstAssassin’s Creedreleased way back in 2007, Kristen Bell (remember when she was in these games?)let slip a major spoiler. The information she revealed wasn’t anything about the twists and turns of Altair’s story, but instead a spoiler for the narrative framing device that Ubisoft was trying to keep quiet.
Turns out,Assassin’s Creed wasn’t set in ancient times; rather, the series was actually set in the modern day as an evil corporation mines a guy’s brain for memories of his ancestors. It’s a pretty cool idea and future games would do an excellent job of tying the series’ wider mythos together even when the historical settings were centuries apart.
Flash forward 18 years and the modern-day story in Assassin’s Creed has, at best, turned into l an afterthought and, at worst, done nothing but perplex and confuse me ever since Ubisoft killed off 95 percent of the main cast. It’s had a good run, but now it’s time for Ubisoft to leave it behind for good.
There Was A Time When All This Made Sense
When Kristen Bell was in Assassin’s Creed as Lucy, the modern-day part of the story made a lot of sense. It told a direct narrative that occasionally interrupted the past timeline, and the story wrapped up at the end ofAssassin’s Creed 3when the main character, Desmond Miles, dies saving the world. There’s a real sense of finality to the modern storyline, but Assassin’s Creed was too big to stop there. The games kept coming out and kept going with the modern story, even though its main cast was mostly dead.
From there, the modern-day story was a minimal part of the Assassin’s Creed experience on account of not having a main character anymore. But when Assassin’s Creed Origins released in 2017,Ubisoft crowned a new current-day lead with Layla Hassan, only to write her out of the story at the end of Valhalla. Now, inShadows, the current-day storyline is so unimportant it’s gone back to being something most players will just ignore.
Does Anyone Even Know What’s Going On?
In the“Modern Times” entry in the Assassin’s Creed Wiki, the story summary is over 50,000 words long. I have played almost every mainline Assassin’s Creed and I couldn’t tell you what’s been going on in the story sinceDesmond died in 2012, even if you threatened my entire family. Characters get killed and resurrected, assassins from ancient times get transported to the modern day, characters are revealed to be gods, magic is real – this thing is all over the place and impossible to follow. It feels like you need a college degree in Assassin’s Creed Alternate History to follow the plot through the games and comic books and random bits of lore found in every corner of the series.
From what I’ve seen online, it feels safe to say thatno one really knows what’s going on in the modern-day story of Assassin’s Creed, even the most diehard fans. Additionally, it seems like Ubisoft doesn’twantmost players to know what’s going on since it hid the majority ofAssassin’s Creed Shadows’ modern-day story behind a battle pass. To be fair, the battle pass is free, but you’re able to only progress it little by little over the course of real-world weeks, so the modern storyline isn’t something that most casual fans will get anything out of.
I’m not entirely sure who a story like this is serving at this point. Fans don’t like it and are left completely confused and baffled by its convolution and Ubisoft doesn’t even seem to be interested in telling the story since it’s gating it behind optional objectives spooned out over the course of months that most players won’t even see.
Requiescate De Pache
Ubisoft has admitted that it struggled to find a place for the modern-day storyever since Desmond died, but that was over a decade ago. Desmond bit the dust when I was a freshman in high school, and now I’m almost 30. Ubisoft has had plenty of time to get its act together and make a cohesive narrative about secret assassins in the modern day, but for some reason, it just can’t. At this point, it’s time to drop it.
There area few spin-off Assassin’s Creed gamesthat are standalone narratives set in different time periods that work as isolated, contained stories that tell pieces of the overarching narrative about the assassins and templars. Those work just fine and they feel like the way to go for Assassin’s Creed moving forward: by identifying the story threads that work with the Ancient Ones and Templars and cutting all the rest.
There’s really not much Ubisoft could do to get me on board with the modern-day story at this point. That is, unless they dropped all the Layla and Basim stuff and focused on a new protagonist: Agent 47. Either do a crossover or let the modern-day thread fade away.
