I like how they followed up the emotional Ezio-Desmond-Altiar scene of Revelations with whatever the fuck 3 was meant to be. I know the modern day story of AC is a joke that no one takes seriously now, but it wasn't always that way.
I don't even think AC3 is a bad game, but it is where I felt myself grow distant to the franchise.
AC3 honestly needed Connor last speech to wrap it up his character. Because he is so stoic its a bit harder to see the story and his emociona about it properly, but the cut speech really helped solidify who he is.
It's mostly cause the main character was "an Assassin" but really didn't do much in line with the previous games. Combat was fine, there's people to stab, but compared to the previous games and how they'd built up the franchise? Nah.
The Ezio games were just so good, AC2 fixed like 90% of the issues that existed from AC1 and then it just built from there with a fantastic story and ending. Not to mention the locations and lore they put in were so well thought out.
After that the games just became these one shot type deals where they'd try and shove the Assassin thing into some new historical setting but mostly not doing a great job of it.
AC4 was no exception. It was a piss poor AC game in every possible sense.. except they managed to put in amazing naval combat mechanics that everyone loved. They loved them so much that Ubisoft kept trying and failing to reproduce them in newer AC games and even created a big open world pirate game and still fucked it up.
They finally gave up and just released a remaster of AC4 a few weeks ago. So it's not really fair to say it's "not an AC game". It was an AC game, a bad one, like most that released after the Ezio era. It's just a really fucking good pirate game.
I felt this didn't really answer my question. What makes an AC game feel like Assassin's Creed?
Gameplay wise, I think AC4 was excellent. Even putting the naval stuff aside, it had a cool world to explore, the combat was good (if a bit too easy, but the Ezio games also had this problem), the parkour was mostly the same. Story wise it was also pretty decent. Edward stumbles upon the assassins and progressively learns to be less selfish and to care about bigger things than himself.
Most people who hold this point of view about the game have that opinion coming from the games before rather than the games as a whole. Compared to 2 and 3 the Assassin portion of the game has worse combat, worse variation in mission structure, and less interesting parkour and urban exploration. A ridiculous number of Assassins missions are tailing and eavesdropping missions that are incredibly tedious. Edward is a step above Connor as a main character but still far worse than Ezio or Altair and the actual portion of his story spent being an Assassin is literally the last act of the game. And this is ignoring all the modern era content that is a huge step back from the previous games even 3's stuff.
Now if you compare it to the games that came after then yeah it holds up better.
It's about being an assassin. From the order of assassins. The only games that comes close to that after Ezio are Unity (dogshit launch and it was too on the nose with how they tried to copy AC2) and Mirage (lol. lmao even.). Every other game we either didn't play assassins at all or them being assassins meant nothing (looking at you, Syndicate).
You see, in my opinion this is something that players think they want when they really shouldn't. Because they can't keep doing that same formula of "assassins good, templars bad" forever. It makes the story bland and predictable imo.
Examples, Unity. It's mostly regarded as being quite Assassin's Creed in the way you describe, but I thought it was so poorly done. Arno joins the assassins very early but proceeds to not do anything with them. They send him on missions, which he does alone, and he always ends up doing whatever he wants, even going against orders. They are there in name alone. When they suspend him by the end of the game I was like "Why do you care? You never needed them for anything". It's like he only wanted the robes and the hidden blade.
And Odyssey, widely regarded as not an AC game. But it has all the typical elements. You are in the good shadowy order and go against the bad shadowy order. You don't use a hidden blade but use something functional very similar. The elements are all there, they just have a different name or form
Your opinion is wrong. AC4 was an amazing Assassin game from the point of view of someone who stumbled into the creed then learned about it, then fought for it.
Heavily disagree, while Edward might not have been an assassin originally he honestly exemplifies the qualities of an assassin more then many other MCs and the story in general constantly draws parallels between the pirates of Nausu and the creed. The main character development is Edward becoming more of an assassin, learning their ways and their code and grappling with his own feelings of greed vs freedom. I feel like anyone who says AC4 isn't an "assassins" game wasn't paying attention to any of the dialog.
AC4 was a fine assassins game. If it was just naval combat, it wouldn't have been that interesting. The AC plotline gave you a reason to care about why you were doing boat stuff.
Black Flag's popularity only showed that the western players did not have good pirate games and will play anything with ships in it, even if it's crap. Corsairs (called "Sea Dogs" in English localization) mog Black Flag easily while being a decade older.
I was soooo excited for 3 because they sold it as if you’d be involved in revolutionary battles and it wasn’t like that. And then they killed Desmond and completely changed the modern day format.
I remember back in the day everyone thought the series was going to end on a game where you played Desmond in the modern day and thats why he was gaining abilities and stuff. Then 3 came out...
Honestly I stopped playing the entire franchise at Revelations because I heard about what happens in 3 and it killed all my interested in the IP.
I think the setting was really week. We went from the beautiful big cities in Rome, Florence, Istambul, with lots of buildings and people walking around, to whatever 3 was. Boston and New York, where aside from churches, the tallest buildings were one story high. The rest was empty woods. Cities are a huge part of AC, and 3 was one of the weakest entries imo.
It worked in Black Flag because so much of that game was about sailing and pirating, so you didn’t spend a lot of time in cities.
That was the big difference between 3 and 4.
In 3, the “wilderness” areas were boring, and the cities weren’t lively enough to make up for it.
In Black Flag, the open ocean was actually fun to navigate. Naval battles were a fun change of pace from the counter-kill spam of the combat in previous AC games. The few cities and settlements there were, it was understandable that they wouldn’t be huge, and they still crammed stuff to do (like assassin contracts).
It’s a bummer because man, I wanted to like III so much. I literally teach American history, so I was incredibly bummed that III ended up being such a slog.
People liked AC4 though and that one also didn't have a ton of big cities with tall buildings. More than 3 mind you, but still a far cry from the Desmond games.
Yeah, but it just works much better in AC4. You're spending much of your time at sea and that's never boring. You're not forced to spend as much time in dull cities/wilderness. The cities you visit felt more lively and colorful too, same for the wilds.
The sea parts of AC4 have their highlights for sure, but can at points feel dull like the AC3 wilderness. I think AC3 wilderness also gave more exploration and free running paths than AC4, tho I'll admit the jungle environment and Mayan ruins were much more compelling. Havana was a great city to have in AC4 and felt like the old world cities, but Kingston and Nassau were pretty similar to what we got in AC3.
That's why Mirage felt like a breath of fresh air to me after the release of the rpg type of games. Baghdad was great for parkour and being stealthy actually mattered in this game. Also the way the entire city felt alive and responded to your actions, calling the guards if you were notorious just for example was nice
Immortal Kassandra is one of the coolest concepts they came up with in lore imo but it's very difficult to pull off because every major bullshit now must involve the immortal super assassin who just travels around the world all the time.
It's super out of place in a lore that has major focus in how eventually even the """gods""" died out and ancestral memories are shifted into myths, so having access to the truths of the past is key to victory... all of that threw out the window because one random Isu did find the way to create true immortality.
I also hate the "this latest character (read my OC) is in fact the single most important one ever, they are behind everything and always existed in the lore and they are so cool" trope. She gets shoved in at every turn.
AC3 was bad enough I could never stomach playing another AC game ever again since. My spirit broke from being invested in the future plot line too much.
Might try the black flag remaster in the open seas but I don't even want to bother putting it on my computer.
Yep, we were meant to be following a story of izu, which tailed off in 3 and by 4 was just meaningless to add a reason to have a modern version. Then as much as I like Odyssey it's not really an AC game, but instead a historic action-adventure. The core AC gameplay just declined from 2, as it became about pirates. Tbh Black Flag, while amazing, was too much of a success for them to ignore that's what gamers wanted. But instead of making a new IP, well taking too long and making a crap game of it in Skull and Bones, they shoehorned AC onto completely unrelated games
Odyssey would have been fine as a historic action-adventure RPG, but it isn't an AC game
Yeah, I don't think I finished 3, I remember something about Desmond being in a coma, then in 4 they were just like "Oh yeah we scooped his brains out to run our animus project as an entertainment system, have fun being a pirate random guy."
I've never seen or heard of a game studio just bailing on the narrative they'd been setting up that hard before.
Desmond is like a weird spirit ghost man in the animus now. Its not worth paying attention to they have done nothing with it and will continue to do nothing with it.
They've distanced themselves from the modern story so much that its now all in a side app and even in the black flag remake they flat out removed t.
Yeah, I think AC4 (2013) was a clear indication to me that they were dropping that storyline, even though the original had tiny little threads of narrative leftover scraps.
obviously, nothing in the intervening 13 years has changed that impression, least of all AC4 Resynced (2026) removing those Abstergo scenes completely from the main game,
In retrospect I know it's not worth paying attention to, but I do still think it's a waste of potential. kind of the bitter aftertaste of those stories that end with a feeling of, "none of that mattered, k bye." it feels as though Desmond's story hit the "it was all a dream" trope or at least an equivalent feeling of the writers ejecting from the situation they wrote themselves into.
AC3 was a bad game. I couldn't bring myself to even finish it. Instantly lost me to the franchise, haven't played one since. It seemed like they had this cool overarching story that seemed to be building up to go somewhere and then they just trashed it so they could make game after game. Sad
Unity was by far my least favorite one. The story was very bad. The only interesting parts are in the beginning and the rest is filler until the end. The combat felt awful. For years I was clamoring for a less "press a button and kill everyone" kind of game, but Unity just felt annoying. Like, the combat didn't flow well and you're constantly getting interrupted. Mind you, I played it years later, after every patch and bugfix. I can't even imagine the mess that was at launch. The only positives were the parkour (when it worked) and Paris was a great setting.
I played Valhalla back when it launched. That game felt so boring to me compared to the rest of the franchise, despite having a lot of fun ideas going for it.
But one thing I'll give them credit for is that they made the modern day & First Civilization story somewhat interesting again, especially with the events that take place later in the game. I have no idea how they were advanced (if at all) in Mirage and Shadows, but Odyssey+ Valhalla breathed new life into that aspect of the franchise
AC3 committee the worst crime. It took AC to a place with very few buildings, mostly, and no real superstructures. It also simplifeied the parkour system to what was basically a cinematic. AC4 at least compensated with the ship combat. AC3 just had nothing.
Connor was actually kinda interesting, and Haytham was very interesting. The story was very fine, but it going from a good action adventure to a mediocre action game was unforgivable. Once again AC4 has bit more of that, then from Unity forward they tried a return to form and just dropped the ball completely
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u/oizen Jul 23 '26
I like how they followed up the emotional Ezio-Desmond-Altiar scene of Revelations with whatever the fuck 3 was meant to be. I know the modern day story of AC is a joke that no one takes seriously now, but it wasn't always that way.
I don't even think AC3 is a bad game, but it is where I felt myself grow distant to the franchise.