When Did Assassin's Creed Get Bad?

Assassin's Creed sucks now the first time I heard that was in 2011 when Ezio's Monumental popularity was starting to wear thin and fans were getting antsy for an entry in the franchise that would shake things up since then I've heard those four words quite a bit every other year it feels like people are heralding the end of the series and pointing to the faults of the most recent entry as proof the 2020s has started as a decade of controversy for Ubisoft and its Flagship franchise with many a critical eye turned to its business on screen and behind the scenes while Assassin's Creed has remained consistently popular it has also been a series defined by its flaws for the better part of its lifespan both general public and hardcore fan reception has been mixed throughout the years with some longtime fans having denounced the franchise at several points throughout its existence no I'm not one of those fans personally as obviously I really enjoy these games and I like making videos about them but even then as someone who has been playing these games since ac1 in the late odds I remember a time when the consensus was much clearer and more positive so looking back on it when did that change at what point than people's perception of Assassin's Creed go from exciting Underdog to the Pinnacle of AAA greed and laziness discussed in the same breath as yearly FIFA games it's not an easy question mostly because there isn't a concrete answer the series has gone up and down a lot and there are entries that fans have been kinder to in hindsight than others as a result this is going to be somewhat of a history of Assassin's Creed video because I want to explore how the series started and what it has been going through to get us where we are now I'm going to talk about all the mainline games in the series but I am going to ignore a lot of the other media Like Comics and books because while I have read some of them and enjoy many of them they haven't really made an impact on the series overall what I want to do is as a long time fan take a look at the franchise and ask myself a very loaded question when did Assassin's Creed get bad [Music] Assassin's Creed got bad with ac-1 at least that is what a lot of people would have said when the game came out in 2007. it released relatively early in the PS3 360 era and Assassin's Creed was an experimental game by the standards of the time back then Prince of Persia sands of time and its creator Patrice desolate had helped put Ubisoft on the map with its beautiful visuals unique setting and emphasis on linear 3D free running that I don't believe has really been matched to this day after the sands of time Trilogy Ubisoft was looking for a follow-up that could match its quality and reception Prince of Persia assassins would be the idea pitched by desolate instead of playing as the prince he would be playing as his bodyguard an assassin in an open world setting Prince of Persia two Thrones in 2005 had experimented with more wide open spaces and some stealth mechanics and Prince of Persia assassins was going to commit much harder to that idea as The Story Goes the concept was deemed promising enough to be its own franchise entirely and desolate was given the green light to get started on his new IP Assassin's Creed the game would feature The Telltale park or Centric gameplay of Prince of Persia but with an open world spin and an entirely new setting instead of navigating traps and obstacles through a variety of linear corridors Assassin's Creed would be about creating your own path through an entirely open City every Notch of every wall face would be interactive and history would be your playground as they got fond of saying basic gameplay revolves around something called the puppeteering concept in which different parts of the character's body are mapped to different buttons the control scheme feels so familiar looking back on it but at the time it was very unique you would go to Three Holy Land cities during the Third Crusade to track down targets and kill them like in 1191 agent 47. it was an incredibly ambitious and unique game from the get-go and Prince of Persia fans were immediately interested not knowing that this new IP would actually play a large part in the death of our favorite franchise in the very near future but that's really neither here nor there for this video at launch for Assassin's Creed however the general reception was lukewarm at best the setting and concept were almost universally praised but the game was criticized for being half-baked and inconsistent the combat was seen as flashy and realistic but dull and overly simple Mission design was criticized for its repetition with fans and journalists pointing out how little creativity went into actually preparing for the assassinations the modern day was almost universally disliked and overall the game didn't make the splash that Ubisoft hoped it would that said it wasn't without its own following a not insignificant group of people saw ac-1 as fantastic proof of concept the traversal was unlike anything we had seen before and the combat while simple had such smooth realistic animations that did suck a lot of people in mixed reception or not people wanted more Assassin's Creed and Ubisoft was intent to run back some of the mistakes they made with their freshman title ac1 was all about the mechanics build a character who could move fluidly Clash blades with every non-lethal strike and formulaically dismantle his enemies one overheard bench conversation at a time ec2 put a different priority front and center fun how could the team take everything they spent so much time working on an ac1 but make it appeal to a wider audience firstly the gameplay was sped up to improve the pace of the game the new protagonist Ezio would climb much faster and kill much faster than alsier could the player would have way more freedom in their style of play with the ability to buy and pick up a variety of different weapons instead of being restricted to one primary kit finally the game would jump ahead to Renaissance Italy and focus on a cinematic character-driven story as opposed to the fly on the wall perspective we got in ac1 we all know how that went the game was an absolute hit in a year with such powerhouses as Uncharted 2 Kill Zone 2 Modern Warfare 2 Arkham Asylum Borderlands Dragon Age Origins Left 4 Dead 2 and Infamous Assassin's Creed 2 stood out as a generational masterpiece 2009 was a really good year for sequels anyhow people fell in love with the setting and the main character instantly and a lot of the problems people had with ac1 were addressed combat was still criticized but people appreciated the faster pace and weapon variety taller buildings meant more free running opportunities and the story which spanned 20 years of the protagonist's life resonated with fans around the world on top of that the modern day segment rarely interrupted the action compared with ac1 in some ways Ubisoft sacrificed a little bit of its uniqueness to make a better game Ezio is an assassin sure but his story is primarily a Revenge tale where he plays the part of the Lone Wolf not really committing to the Brotherhood until the Final Act you aren't so much finding Clues and creating assassination opportunities as you are experiencing a linear story with less emphasis on stealthy assassinations in general so the game was built around being more action-heavy and so while it wasn't as novel as ac1 it was much more popular and much more refined some people do have their issues with ac2 but by and large it was one of ubisoft's greatest successes it helped make Ubisoft one of the Premier Publishers of the era and it was the point at which higher up started realizing just how much money this concept had the potential to make them it would be hard to say that Assassin's Creed 2 is where the series got bad because it's such a well-loved game and the same can be said for Brotherhood which more than managed to live up to the high bar set by its predecessor it took the product of ac2 and basically did the same thing again refining it to near Perfection with revamped Graphics streamlined combat a single much bigger city in the form of Rome a whole new emphasis on side content and a level of Polish I really don't think we ever saw again in this series the addition of a new multiplayer mode alone added dozens of hours of playability to the game justifying its own existence in fact as far as multiplayer experiences and single-player games go the unique cat and mouth style of online play Brotherhood created was one of the more memorable however at the same time it is here so early after Ubisoft reached such huge success with the IP that we start seeing a change in perspective on what exactly the franchise was and what it was going for Assassin's Creed so far as we know was always meant to be a trilogy we've heard a wide variety of rumors about what that might have looked like but whatever that was instead of sticking to that plan Ubisoft jumped on the success of ac2 viciously they put in place the development of this new game with a timeline of only one year while work was soon to begin on AC3 the game that would wrap up the series as a whole Ubisoft knew they could get more money out of Ezio and Renaissance Italy when development on brotherhood began Assassin's Creed had a dedicated team desolate had led his team at Montreal in the creation of both ac-1 and 2 and he was continuing that shared Creative Vision through AC Brotherhood but it was during the development of Brotherhood that this team was broken up some say it's due to creative differences in the franchise while other stories point to a general desire for creative freedom as a developer but what we do know is that desele left the team in 2010 prior to the release of Brotherhood we also know that Ubisoft was changing its overall plan for the franchise they were testing out the waters by seeing if they could make a quality game in only one year For Better or Worse their tests were promising Brotherhood is a fantastic game with many people labeling it as one of the best games in the series it may not have had the narrative weight of ac2 but in only one year they managed to make a game that was bigger smoother and better looking than what came before with the departure of desolate the cracks were beginning to show and the first red flags were starting to pop up the game was great but Ubisoft had now successfully completed a full game in only one year and had begun to expand their plans for Assassin's Creed far beyond a trilogy foreign [Music] with the success of Brotherhood Ubisoft wasted no time in getting a new game in development to yet again come out before AC3 the company was already working on a 3DS title called Lost Legacy which would have seen Ezio traveling to massiav to uncover the secrets of Altair now even though we were already in 2011 in our timeline there are some entries in the franchise that I haven't brought up yet handheld games we were only a few games into the series but we already had a sizeable repertoire of handhelds on the market we got a story about Altair in 2008 called altier's Chronicles and both Ezio and Altier got a game in 09 with Bloodlines and discovery the reason I haven't brought them up yet is that they just didn't make much of an impact on the franchise as a whole the handheld AC games never really caught on to a wide audience and in fact all of the franchise's handheld titles came out between 08 and 2012 with none in the last 10 years perhaps observing this Ubisoft did not want to settle for portable Nintendo money so they decided that Lost Legacy would shift gears to become its own fully fledged console game they did it once and they figured they could do it again only now things were not the same as they were before desolate was now gone and the core team that worked on the first three was split up with many of them working on AC3 they had even less time than they had on brotherhood and they were reworking an existing 3DS project into a Mainline title so without that original team at Montreal to work on this new title who did they bring in to carry that weight having a core team working on this new title Ubisoft pulled all the stops and made the game into a six Studio Venture the largest team they had ever put on an Assassin's Creed title with less time to work with the company would make up for it with sheer Manpower the game's cinematic introduction became a meme shortly after its reveal a seemingly endless slew of Ubisoft teams working on this one game now credit must be given where it is due the team succeeded in getting the game out on time and for all intents and purposes it exists as a perfectly suitable ending to the Ezio Trilogy it featured a new setting new characters and some minor gameplay additions to keep things interesting relations was not reviewed as glowingly as the last two but it was a success it was moving narratively and people appreciated the closure for both Altier and Ezio but it was here in 2011 that we got our first real look at what Assassin's Creed was starting to become a franchise on a yearly schedule with studios around the world working to build a passable product piecemeal style to be stitched together at the end looking closer at Revelations the cracks become much clearer than they were in Brotherhood while Brotherhood vastly expanded the different types of content its world was filled with Revelations actively scales back quite a bit here are the pieces of side content that I would classify as missions Beyond being a tutorial or collectible quest in Brotherhood these were massively expanded from ac2 which didn't have a ton of side content then you look at the side missions in Revelations which are just so sparse by comparison the non-mission based content that does exist like Templar Towers multiplayer and buying property those were all copied verbatim from Brotherhood with the primary New Edition being Den Defense which really wasn't that well received due to its dissonance with the rest of the experience you can feel how hard the team struggled to make the Game's plot an appropriate length the game has close to the same number of main missions as Brotherhood on paper but five of The Game's missions are just cut scenes three of those being the entire final sequence of the game three more missions are just this weird repeated Quest where you use Eagle Vision to find a book and pick it up and the two missions that were side content in ac2 and Brotherhood became main content here as a way to beef up the main story content on top of this Desmond essentially sleeps through the game because they wrote themselves into a corner with his character giving him no room to do anything of note given that AC3 was already deep in development now while these problems are crystal clear in hindsight at the end of the day the game is a scaled down more unique looking version of Brotherhood and people who were looking for more of what they already got weren't going to be disappointed as I said reviews were more lukewarm than the prior two games but they were by no means bad as cobbled together as this development process was the game was what it needed to be plus fans knew this was an in-between game expectations were high for AC3 the true sequel to Assassin's Creed 2 that would finally push the series forward narratively and technologically Assassin's Creed Revelations had the luxury of being a very derivative game whatever flaws it had it was still built on the foundation of two immensely popular titles the same cannot be said of Assassin's Creed 3. as the revelations teams were scrambling to turn a 3DS game into a Mainline title the new game set during the American Revolution was already hitting its stride in Montreal fans had been anxiously waiting for the conclusion to The Desmond Saga for five years and AC3 was supposed to be the game to give us that Assassin's Creed was not the same franchise that it was when it was initially put together the three-game Saga had become a five-game saga and by the time AC3 was actually getting made they had no intention of stopping there instead of being written as a concluding Arc it was written as a series reset there would be no apocalypse the Assassin Templar conflict would not budge and the ISU would hardly be fleshed out at all Desmond's Story would end but the series would go on and boy did they end Desmond's Story Assassin's Creed 3 along with Mass Effect 3 May 2012 an Infamous year for terrible video game endings the finale of AC3 was seen as abrupt anti-climactic and disappointing there would be no epic conclusion because the company already had years worth of Assassin's Creed games planned after it it was a disappointing follow-up not only to the games but also to the really interesting graphic novels that had been released starring brainwashed Templar Daniel Cross and his assassin ancestor Nikolai orloff Desmond cross and modern day villain Warren vidic were thrown away with little to no Fanfare in one of the greatest fizzlings of a half decade long story I've ever seen ideas that had been built up like the rebellion of Adam and Eve the secrets of subject 16 and abstergo's upper level operations had at this point been abandoned as casualties of this change in focus on top of that the game just wasn't particularly well loved it was a buggy mess and the Polish that Brotherhood worked so hard to instill in the series was long gone while the themes of the game were praised for being more mature than what the series had historically tackled the dialogue and pacing of the narrative were criticized for failing to do those themes Justice response to gameplay was mixed with some appreciating the simplified mechanics and others lamenting the reduced complexity little details that hardcore fans appreciated like consistent parkour Jacks and realistic blade clash in combat had been left in the past that's not to say that the game was panned it does have its merits and it retains its own following to this day it was hugely ambitious compared to what came before and the scenery was gorgeous as is expected for an Assassin's Creed game but after years of waiting AC3 left a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths this was supposed to be the game that put the last two entries to shame and instead it was largely seen as a low point for the whole series Assassin's Creed III liberation came out at the same time as AC3 for Playstation Vita and while it was a technical Marvel and a big release for the platform it was still just a handheld title at the end of the day it came out to middling reviews as well with many fans not picking it up at all due to the limited popularity of the Vita and Liberation ended up being ubisoft's final Earnest crack at making a handheld tie-in game to this day the fans waited patiently and their faith was not rewarded even more concerning was the fact that Ubisoft was not done after launch fans were informed that they could expect the next installment just one year later we have reached what should have been a Breaking Point a disappointing entry That was supposed to usher in a new era of Assassin's Creed failed to hit the mark and that was getting a direct follow-up within a single year in addition to that the lead up to the release of this new game was hampered by behind the scenes drama once again as I stated earlier desolate left in 2010 to go to THQ Montreal and work on some new passion projects but as fate would have it Ubisoft ended up acquiring THQ Montreal leaving him in pretty much the same place he was before now in 2013 desele was fired from Ubisoft for good the company claimed that they could not come to an agreement with him while desilee himself claimed that he was baselessly fired and escorted out of the building by security by this point Ubisoft to distance itself pretty far from the people who put Assassin's Creed on the map and hopes for any new games were not running especially High miraculously Assassin's Creed IV was fantastic there was no pressure of ending a long-running storyline for the first time in a while Assassin's Creed was free to Branch out and be creative what stood out first was the Polish the game was not without its unintended portals to the underworld but this was a much more stable experience than Assassin's Creed III instead of starting from scratch like the last game the team had a skeleton that they could build off to create something completely new the graphics were so much cleaner the color is so much more vibrant and the gameplay much more responsive side missions were more varied and abundant and the game overall was much more cinematic it had many of the same gameplay issues that AC3 did but it massively improved the stealth with new tools and a better detection system its biggest move however was Shifting the gameplay to feature a new focus on Naval traversal and combat taking place decades before AC3 AC4 sees the player take the role of Edward a pirate and grandfather of raduna gedu this was a bold move that is somewhat controversial to this day some hardcore fans see the game as too big of a jump from tradition and an invitation to dulling the core mechanics that were established in ac1 however the vast majority of fans and critics lauded AC4 it was unique while retaining the primary gameplay elements of previous games and it addressed a lot of the sloppiness of AC3 it was still built on shaky Foundation but it managed to debatably be the best pirate game of all time and a strong entry in the franchise Ubisoft was starting to find a flow in having its different Studios handle different projects simultaneously while giving them time to maintain a fast release schedule perhaps Ubisoft really could pull off yearly releases if the quality had the capacity to be as high as Black Flag Assassin's Creed was unabashedly good again and fans who could stomach the naval combat were rewarded with a year of enjoying an entry that was getting some pretty good press and oh how short that felt [Music] Ubisoft wanted to know how much they could get away with in 2014 the new generation of consoles was upon us and the company had to decide how they wanted to handle the transition they came up with a lucrative idea release two completely new games on the same day one for the last generation and one for the new one for PS3 and Xbox 360 we got Assassin's Creed Rogue a game set between three and four that would Branch the two stories for PS4 and Xbox One we got Assassin's Creed Unity an x-gen experience set in Revolutionary Paris that promised to take the franchise to the next level Rogue ended up being the Forgotten child with a smaller budget and minimal marketing attention it was like revelations in many ways a rehash of other games that had come before however unlike Revelations Rogue did feature an original character and it actually expanded its content quite a bit adding things that 3 and 4 didn't have playing as a Templar was a fun gimmick and while it was derivative it did review well enough as a game at the end of the day people just weren't paying attention to it and why would they when Unity looked as good as it did a one-to-one recreation of Paris smooth and unrivaled parkour animations and amazing mocap work it really felt like this game was going to make a splash and splash it did Splash and sputter under immense technical failures the game's launch is among the most famous Bosch jobs in gaming keeping company with cyberpunk 2077 and no man's sky images of character models with their faces melted off and NPCs glitching through walls where all people could find on the game and it was unforgivably broken before it got patched in the time since reception has softened slightly as some technical fixes made the game much more tolerable but issues like that do not happen in a bubble a broken game doesn't just end up being pristine in every other category and unity reeks of missed potential even without considering the bugs the game was full of companion app content that nobody asked for and while thousands of NPCs could be rendered on screen at a time their novelty was diminished by how unstable these crowds made the game even on PC the ambitious free running system remains unlike anything the gaming world has seen to this day and yet it simply wasn't ready yet things like parkour down work perfectly and should have been in every subsequent game but basic forward and upward movement was inconsistent and unpredictable janky is the word people use to describe it and it is as apt as any practice can make the system a lot of fun but you need to put hours into this game just to make it playable not even Master it getting good at the Parkour in unity really feels like learning how to fight its broken mechanics more than anything else combat was finally more deep and complex but the vicious input delay and tendency for enemies to just pull out guns if you get surrounded made the difficulty feel artificial especially given how heavily telegraphed and easy to counter most attacks were this did its job of pushing players towards stealth but even then the sticky cover system and questionable detection system kept that from being great especially just one year after the same company released Splinter Cell Blacklist narratively it started strong with interesting characters and a good premise but it falls apart so quickly the ideas were there throw a non-believer into a world where assassins and Templars have grown politically complacent with one another and set that against the backdrop of one of history's most famous and bloody revolutions unfortunately a lot of that was sidelined in favor of a half-baked love story almost every good thing in Unity comes with a caveat and no amount of patches could have saved how horrendously rushed this game was hurt so much was that on paper the game was everything Assassin's Creed fans had wanted from the series after ac1 the game's had stealth sure but they had shifted their focus to being open world action adventure games above all else Unity was supposed to be the one to bring us back to that and that commitment to the franchise's original promise is what has led to its recent Resurgence in popularity but no matter how Immaculate the City of Paris is or how inspired the parkour changes are once you can work around the Brokenness of them the game remains one of ubisoft's greatest embarrassments had they allowed their team the time and resources to cultivate some of the amazing creative ideas they had while developing the game maybe the franchise would be in a very different place today but instead Ubisoft wanted its double dipping money fast and as it stands this was the point where casual audiences really began to Discount Assassin's Creed as just another addition to the soulless yearly release Club two Duds in one year was a big disappointment [Music] foreign at this time Assassin's Creed had a bit of a pattern going Assassin's Creed 1 did not deliver and ac2 refined it three didn't deliver and four refined it now Unity had come out and Syndicate did indeed refine a lot of it but this time it just wasn't enough in truth neither one nor three were fundamentally as broken as Unity was and there were many things Syndicate could only hope to mask not fix the ideas behind the free running were amazing but simply too complex for the team to figure out in the given time so Syndicate ended up bypassing them as much as possible London has fewer obstacles for the new twin protagonists to navigate and they were given a new tool a rope launcher to quickly cross London's wide streets the huge crowds that Unity tried to implement simply weren't stable and so Syndicate heavily scaled that back as well the challenge of unity's combat felt artificial so Syndicate generally removed difficulty altogether Syndicate had a lot of damage control to do more so than the series was used to however there were many successes the city was much more lived in with a ton of interesting side content and ways to interact with the city of London something Unity was sorely missing the story was much lighter in tone which turned off a lot of people but it was also much more focused than Unity allowing its heroes and villains a lot more time to develop today a lot of people criticize Syndicate for making unity's mechanics shallower instead of trying to get them working but at the time it was appreciated that Syndicate was a much more stable and focused game than its predecessor but despite better reception the game didn't blow any Minds its reviews were fine and it didn't stir up any drama but it wasn't raking in the cache that its predecessors had audiences hadn't forgiven Ubisoft for Unity and the interest in Assassin's Creed had simply waned Syndicate sold roughly 5.5 million copies by 2017 compared with unity and Black Flag which had both surpassed 10 million sales were declining and the existing model had to change after seven games in seven years the yearly release schedule would finally end if there was ever a time that the general consensus was that Assassin's Creed had gotten bad this was probably it [Music] for the first time that decade Assassin's Creed took a year off they were going back to the drawing board with the intention of reinvigorating the franchise with new creative ideas in the meantime we got the Assassin's Creed movie in 2016 which managed to solidify worldwide distaste for the franchise even further it was a bad movie in 2015 and 16 we got the Assassin's Creed Chronicles games a Trilogy of side-scrolling games that got mediocre reviews in other words the saturation of Assassin's Creed remained high but opinions were not Rising then at E3 2017 Assassin's Creed Origins was announced aside from a backwards jump of a few decades for AC4 back in 2013 the franchise had always gone forward in time now we would be experiencing ptolemaic Egypt to witness the birth of the Assassin Brotherhood as we know it there were two very pervasive criticisms of the old games from their detractors the stagnation of creative ideas and the shallowness of their mechanics therefore Origins was built from the ground up from a design perspective RPG mechanics and player choice would be emphasized from their inclusion in unity and syndicate instead of being set in a single City Origins singular map would span a vast majority of the country of Egypt combat would no longer be based around paired animations instead opting for a traditional hitbox system the animations would no longer mesh seamlessly although we hadn't really gotten that since Ezio's days anyway and visual Flair would be sacrificed for mechanical depth where range dodging and weapon type would matter more than ever so for the first time a 1v1 fight could actually pose a challenge in the series meanwhile freerunning was further scaled back to fit the smaller cities of Egypt and to avoid the frustrations of unity's free running social stealth was removed given the lack of large crowds and a new emphasis on Fort infiltration and scouting was provided while the RPG mechanics were certainly light compared to some fully fledged RPGs they were enough to make the game feel radically different to some people even if the basic gameplay Loop was relatively unchanged looking back at early reactions fans were cautiously optimistic at the time almost everybody knew they wanted something fresh and Origins looked like it could be it but at the same time stylish animations crowd blending and dense Urban environments had become the norm and the more traditional combat and stealth systems felt dissonant from that identity but at release Origins was a hit fans and critics alike had fallen back in love with the franchise with special praise directed toward the world design and its main character bayek played by Abu Bakr Salim people who hated Assassin's Creed for being a shallow tailing simulator were pleased with the changes while the game remained focused enough on its roots to excite most old players as well most but not all when Assassin's Creed 2 and Assassin's Creed IV saved the franchise in their respective eras they did so while keeping the previous game's basic mechanics identical and simply refining them Origins was a whole new beast and while the jump from Syndicate to Origins was certainly tame compared to the genre jumps a lot of other franchises have made in the past there were some things that just didn't sit well with all players some people had spent hours digging into unity's traversal system and they learned how to work around the broken core experience to get something deep and beautiful out of it there was a lot less room for that kind of exploration in Origins even if it was a much more functional game people missed hiding in plain sight even if the traditional stealth mechanics were solid Origins was a very popular game and it reignited interest in the franchise worldwide but there was now a growing sect of the fan base that was happy with the way things were and distinctly upset at the direction Assassin's Creed was now going [Music] whatever it was that Ubisoft thought caused origin success they definitely didn't think it was the extra Dev time during the development of Origins Ubisoft had already put in motion a plan for a 2018 installment that would go even further back in time to Classical Greece the origins experiment was a success and the team was willing to go all in on the RPG mechanics that in Origins had remained relatively minimal players would now get gender Choice dialogue options romance a more fleshed out skill tree and multiple endings for the first time in the series it would be built on the skeleton of Origins but this would be no copy paste job like Revelations or Rogue Odyssey would bring back naval combat in full force to explore the islands of Greece and the overall gameplay Loop was revamped from the previous game to put it lightly this caused a Schism in the franchise Odyssey was a very polarizing game and when I say polarizing I mean polarizing a lot of people use the word to refer to things that are generally disliked but have a cult following of people who think it is misunderstood or underrated that's not what Odyssey is Odyssey was an absolute hit critically with many critics and fans putting it at the top of their all-time Assassin's Creed lists it created its own Community to an extent that we had never really seen before or since with a very active subreddit on its own built just for people who had an interest in that game and even with valhalla's release the game maintains a much more loyal player base at the other end of the spectrum many fans also put it at the bottom of their all-time lists the changes to the established formula had shot off from what Origins did and on top of that there were basic gameplay issues that people didn't like the dialogue and gender choices made the game feel less focused the map and side missions expanded to the point of being overwhelming and the combat and stealth had so many over-the-top powers that it was hard for some people to feel grounded Plus Quebec was back in control after having made Syndicate and the relaxed humorous tone just wasn't what some people were looking for on top of that some people felt alienated and feared that the gameplay style they grew up with would be unceremoniously left in the trash this was highlighted further by the release of Assassin's Creed Uprising a run of comics that actually wrapped up the modern day story told in AC4 and Rogue people were upset that Juno and other modern day plot points had been relegated to a comic that barely anyone even knew existed a it felt like there were aspects of Assassin's Creed that Ubisoft wanted to leave in the past this was not Splinter Cell changing the formula only for the franchise's popularity to go down along with that divide Assassin's Creed was more popular than ever helping to push Ubisoft over 2.2 billion dollars in returns for 2018. but the detractors were now no longer a small vocal part of the fan base but instead a very loud and constant presence in any discussion about the franchise Assassin's Creed had become loved and hated in almost equal measure [Music] Valhalla came out in 2020 once again in the hands of Montreal I've made my own opinions clear in my review of Valhalla on the channel but honestly regardless of your opinions on the game it really didn't do much to push the series in a positive or negative Direction it attempted to appeal to both sides of the fan base in a way that didn't really change anyone's mind with the RPG mechanics getting toned down but the stealth and visual Flair really not improving enough to match it reviewed fairly well with neither the highs nor the lows of odyssey that said it seemed like the conversation had made its way to Ubisoft and how could it not when the game was announced people were hounding boss logic's art announcement stream with a single phrase no RPG repeated over and over again Ubisoft was aware of the Schism even if Valhalla wouldn't be the one to fix it the game was also the first to have a full two years worth of post-launch support Ubisoft wanted to see how much money they could milk out of one game and that came in the form of eight content updates including three major paid expansions Ubisoft was continuing to zero in on which model would make them the most money however the real meaningful drama was happening behind the scenes in July of 2020 Bloomberg released a huge report detailing allegations of sexism harassment and misconduct within Ubisoft the creative director of Valhalla was let go prior to release while a variety of firings LED all the way up to the company CCO Ubisoft like many other companies in the gaming world was painted as toxic and sometimes a dangerous place to work according to the article if a creative team wanted a woman to be front and center in their next Story the idea was not going to get through Ubisoft higher-ups unscathed women don't sell was allegedly the Mantra thrown around by that aforementioned CCO and apparently it was the lens through which Ubisoft viewed all of its projects from a marketing perspective this was already kind of obvious given that in the three Mainline games where you can play as a woman the only time a woman has actually been on the front cover of the game was Evie which is kind of standing in the background while Jacob takes Center Stage the male characters get the cinematic trailers and a vast majority of the promotional materials even when they aren't Canon to the game's story now representing women in video games is one thing widespread allegations of harassment and employees feeling like they couldn't trust HR or the company as a whole is a whole nother thing this obviously wasn't a story about 2020 but rather a reflection on an ongoing culture at Ubisoft that simply hadn't been looked into before the exposure of this culture was just one of many struggles Ubisoft was having to start the decade cut ahead to 2023 and the company is struggling more than it has in a long time a myriad of canceled games and poor performances led to a 38 dip in share price in 2022 leaving the company's financial future uncertain and in this time of uncertainty they have put their faith in an old and very reliable IP to try and get them back on track we have a whopping five confirmed games in development right now as of March 2023 which is unprecedented for Assassin's Creed and if I'm being honest I've never really heard of anything like that happening in any franchise Assassin's Creed Mirage is set to take players to Baghdad at the end of the year with code name red and codename hexade to feature feudal Japan and the European Witch Trials respectively in the following years the mobile game set in China called codename Jade has already had some gameplay leaked and we know that a multiplayer title codenamed Invictus is on the horizon too this is a bafflingly full docket on its own but in a recent Insider gaming article it was reported that even more titles may be in development it is expected that project Nexus a VR title will be released this year and already has a sequel planned two further multiplayer games going by project raid and project Echoes may be in the pipeline and project nebula is a rumored single player title take all that with a grain of salt but even ignoring The Insider gaming article that is an absolutely ridiculous amount of resources to be pouring into one series these titles might be really cool and I am 100 going to play them as they come out but Assassin's Creed has a history of trying to do too much whether that be cramming two whole games into the middle of an existing Trilogy or trying to pump out two games on the same day to take advantage of a console shift despite this three-year Hiatus we find ourselves in it doesn't feel like Ubisoft thinks reigning it in would be in their best interest making me question if Ubisoft has learned anything at all from the past decade of Assassin's Creed [Music] and that brings me back to my original question when did Assassin's Creed get bad as a fan of the series who still very much enjoys the games that have been coming out I think it is healthy to be critical and identify when the existing problem started was it the breakdown of the original trilogy was it when Syndicate came out and no one cared was it when Odyssey came out and broke the fan base in half obviously for some people it was one or all of those things anyone who no longer likes Assassin's Creed has a point at which it stopped doing the things that they liked in the series and started to feel alien to them but as for me I'd actually put that line right here at the height of the franchise's critical popularity between ac2 and AC Brotherhood why there between two games that I consider to be fantastic because for me even if the subsequent games were solid that is where the shift and mentality occurred that was when the question stopped being how can we tell a great three-game story and instead became how can we keep this IP going for 10 years not everyone liked ac1 and ac2 but if you didn't like them then that was because you disagreed with the creative Direction and mechanics of the games ever since then the problems and quality have been directly tied to corporate mismanagement 2010 was when Desiree left and the core team was broken up it was when Ubisoft started Outsourcing work to smaller Studios to speed up Dev time it was when the series started having multiple games in development at the same time it was when Ubisoft started importing assets on mass to make each new game and it was when the idea of a contained Trilogy was dissolved to make room for 10 years of Assassin's Creed titles you could feel the human element in the first two games so clearly they were games made out of passion for the industry and excitement for new creative ideas that could help shape the medium that's not to say that the human element is gone there are still amazing people doing amazing work on these titles creating beautiful worlds and stories for people to experience but as the games became more mechanical in their development that human touch got harder to find looking at how unceremoniously they fired Desiree it felt like Ubisoft didn't care about the human beings making their games back in 2013. knowing what we do now about Ubisoft 10 years later it feels clear that they never cared in the first place I think back to 2009 when I hit credits on ac2 and I sat in awe wondering what the series would do to end their amazing trilogy I never really felt that way again Assassin's Creed became popcorn fun at best a guilty pleasure at worst and there's nothing really wrong with that yearly bouts of mindless fun have their place but in 2009 it had the potential to be more and I missed that looking at a future where Assassin's Creed is this multi-genre Extravaganza with multiple releases per year acting as the company's Lifeboat in a difficult Financial period it's hard to have hope that we will ever get those kinds of passion projects again in this series it's certainly more lucrative to do it the way they've been doing it and who am I to say that consumer friendliness should guide their business plans but as a consumer I miss the days when I looked at Ubisoft and naughty dog and legitimately couldn't pick a favorite while I wouldn't personally call assassins create a Bad series it really doesn't matter what I think the objective truth is that Ubisoft has lost the respect of a lot of the people who grew up with these games and they don't seem to have any idea of how to really fix that 2010 didn't transform the franchise into a Bad series overnight we have had a ton of fantastic games in the last 10 years and I cherish my dime with multiple entries in this franchise but 2010 is when Ubisoft stopped treating it like a great series they stopped putting Manpower and resources into individual experiences and an overarching plot instead opting to distribute their resources in a way that maximized product output regardless of what the quality of that output was I am sure these games will continue to be a massive success but from a consumer's perspective Assassin's Creed will only have the chance to become truly great again if the creativity ambition and passion of ubisoft's team members is something that the company cultivates instead of something that slips through the corporate cracks maybe someday we will get back to a place where an experienced team of developers and artists is showing us their plan for one great game instead of some guy in a suit showing us a road map for 10. thank you for watching I am sorry for another cynical video but I wanted to talk more broadly about the series and I hope you did get something out of it if you have more things that you wanted me to talk about please let me know in the comments but otherwise do have a great day and take care of yourself foreign

Channel: So Says Jay

Views: 503,044

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Id: pxWatCakx-0

Length: 46min 14sec (2774 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 10 2023