Gods, VR, and a freedom-loving murder cult: Assassin’s Creed has the weirdest mythology in gaming
In honor of Assassin’s Creed’s 15th anniversary, here's a guide to whatever the hell is happening in Assassin's Creed
Image: Graphic: Libby McGuire Games Features Assassin's Creed
Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed, one of the most popular and successful video game franchises running today, is famously about hooded killers sneaking through immaculately recreated historical environments and covertly stabbing bad guys. Actually, no, it’s about people in the present day (or near-future) reliving the adventures of hooded killers in historical environments with state-of-the-art simulation technology so they can stop modern bad guys from uncovering ancient secrets.
Actually, no, it’s about a race of beings who pre-date humanity on Earth and survived a cataclysmic event that wiped out most of life on the planet, and they’re trying to prevent similar future cataclysms by gently guiding humanity onto the right path—which they accomplish by presenting themselves to humans as gods. Actually, no, it’s about all of that. And sometimes none of that. Sometimes it’s about people at a video game company making Assassin’s Creed video games.
In honor of the series’ 15th anniversary, Ubisoft is about to release “The Last Chapter,” the final expansion for 2020’s Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, which will hopefully put a nice bow on decades of completely bizarre storytelling … but that doesn’t mean it will be remotely comprehensible for newcomers. That game ended with people living in 2020 having a conversation with a reincarnated version of the Norse god Loki after initially meeting him in a VR simulation of 9th-century England, and if that doesn’t make any sense to you, you’re in luck: We’re here to unpack as much of Assassin’s Creed’s weird lore as we can in the clearest and most palatable way we can—while still trying to maintain some level of accuracy. Which is tough, because we’re talking about nonsense.
It’s all about Desmond Miles, until it’s not
The thing about all of this nonsense is that the various development studios under Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed umbrella have generally been careful about not overloading the player with too much Mythology in each game. So, for a similar reason, we’re going to do the same thing and take this game by game, explaining how each entry in the series has further developed what may be the most complicated storyline in video game history (which is saying something, because we’re talking about a medium that already has Mortal Kombat and Metal Gear).
The first three games in the series have you play as a guy in the present day named Desmond Miles. In Desmond’s world, a company called Abstergo has invented a device called the Animus that allows people to live through their genetic memories—basically, you can re-experience things that happened to your ancestors, and only your ancestors. Luckily for Abstergo, which is evil, a whole bunch of Desmond’s ancestors were members of a secret guild of freedom fighters known as the Assassin Brotherhood, and they spent their lives trying to undermine the evil schemes of the various evil organizations (the Knights Templar being a big one) that eventually became Abstergo.
That means that, through Desmond, Abstergo can learn the Assassins’ secrets and stop them from trying to promote the general concept of “freedom” (people in power historically hate it when the people without power know about freedom). The Assassins follow a philosophy they call—dramatic pause, get ready—“the Assassin’s Creed,” which is: “Nothing is true, everything is permitted.” In other words, “you’re not the boss of me.”
In the first game, you play as Desmond as he lives through the life of Altaïr Ibn-La’Ahad, one of his ancestors who was in the Assassin Brotherhood during the time of the Crusades. As Altaïr, Desmond inadvertently directs Abstergo to a series of mystical artifacts that are still hidden in the present day. In Assassin’s Creed II, Desmond works with modern Assassins to use the Animus to experience the life of Ezio Auditore da Firenze, a roguish Italian Assassin living during the Renaissance who tried to resurrect a fractured Assassins Brotherhood while racing against the Catholic Church and the Knights Templar (both of which are evil) to find a mystical object known as the Apple Of Eden.
At the end of the game, you (as Desmond, as Ezio) have to fight THE POPE to retrieve the Apple, which is eventually revealed to be a device that can control the minds of humans. Then Ezio has a vision of Minerva—literally, the Roman god Minerva—who explains that she is part of an ancient race (eventually named the Isu) that created humanity and that Desmond needs to save the world from a cataclysmic solar flare (a similar thing had largely wiped out the Isu a millennia ago). The game effectively breaks the in-game fourth wall to have a character address a different character who is experiencing the events of the game in a simulation and also therefore you, the player. And this is only the second one.
Though there were some spin-offs along the way, Assassin’s Creed III puts Desmond (and you) in the virtual shoes of Ratonhnhaké:ton (a.k.a. “Connor”), a Native American ancestor of Desmond’s who joins up with the American Revolution to stop the British—as a front for the evil Knights Templar—from taking over the world. In the present day, another member of the Isu called Juno (literally the Roman god Juno, a.k.a. Hera to the Greeks, and various other similar deities in other cultures) is trying to help Desmond, but she has ulterior motives. Juno liked things better when the Isu ruled the planet and the grubby little humans were their slaves, but she doesn’t want the planet to be destroyed by the cataclysmic solar flare, so Desmond agrees to work with her and figure out how to stop her scheme later. People do later stop Juno in some side stories and spin-offs, but Desmond dies in the process of saving the world.
Dialing back the weirdness
Desmond’s consciousness is later saved in what is essentially the Isu version of WiFi, and Abstergo swoops in and uses his corpse to create a replica of his genetic memories, allowing anyone to relive the experiences of his ancestors, thereby eliminating the need for one single protagonist in the present day with a genealogical connection to multiple ancient murderers. In one of the great twists of his series, Abstergo uses that technology to make … Assassin’s Creed video games. They’re not called that, because the Assassins are bad guys to Abstergo, but they are absolutely supposed to be Assassin’s Creed games in everything but name.
That brings us to Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, which is both a story about Desmond’s pirate ancestor, Edward Kenway, and a story about a random guy in the present day who is essentially a beta tester at Abstergo’s video game division (an evil … or more evil satire of real Assassin’s Creed publisher Ubisoft). At the end of the game, your Abstergo bosses reveal that all of the simulated pirate adventures you had as Edward weren’t really about saving the world or finding mystical artifacts, they were just used to collect footage that could be put into a hacky video game trailer. In other words, despite the millennia of freedom-fighting that the Assassins had been through, the only thing they had tangibly accomplished was allowing themselves to be commodified by their enemies—who, again, evolved from being agents of organized religion, specifically Christianity, to being a major media company that also happens to make Assassin’s Creed games.
It’s like the games are biting the hand that feeds them and then also biting the hand that bit that hand, and for a brief time, it was glorious. Very funny and silly and self-aware. But then people started to demand more Assassin’s Creed in their Assassin’s Creed games and less snotty meta-commentary, so the next three games, Rogue, Unity, and Syndicate, dialed back the present-day nonsense in favor of (in theory) more straightforward stories that were actually about Assassins.
Those three all also happen to be, arguably, a little boring because of that. Nonsense is the glue of Assassin’s Creed, and without it, the games start to feel hollow.
How about fewer Assassins and slightly more nonsense?
The series got a reboot with the action-RPG-flavored Assassin’s Creed Origins, which was set in Egypt many years before anyone decided that a group of people fighting against a conspiracy to rule the world should have some kind of specific guiding principal (or “creed”). Origins launched a new trilogy and introduced a new modern-day protagonist named Layla Hassan, an Abstergo employee who realizes that she’s important to the future and that her bosses are actually evil by living through the memories of a Medjay named Bayek (basically a desert cop) and his wife, Aya.
Layla comes back in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, having been radicalized by the Assassin’s cause, and lives through the life of a Greek woman named Kassandra (or, if you’re basic, you can choose a man named Alexios) who is Aya’s ancestor and is descended from none other than King Leonidas of Sparta—Kassandra even inherits his mighty kick from 300, which is one of the best moves anyone has ever had in a video game. Kassandra’s story is almost completely unrelated to the early days of the Assassins until she discovers Atlantis, learns about the Isu, and obtains a magic artifact known as the Staff Of Hermes Trismegistus—a.k.a. the Caduceus, a.k.a. the thing from the doctor symbol with the snakes wrapped around a staff, but, like, the real one.
The staff is one of those long-lost mystical artifacts we keep talking about, and it makes its owner immortal, so in another one of the series’ best twists, Kassandra then shows up in the present day. She looks just like she did in ancient Greece (aside from wearing a killer suit), having spent the last few centuries covertly helping the Assassins, and she gives Layla the staff and tells her that she needs it in order to prevent another cataclysm. Kassandra then dies, having exhausted her usefulness to the plot.
By the time of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Layla is working with some of Desmond’s old friends from the earlier games to investigate a mysterious archeological discovery: The remains of a legendary Viking warrior named Eivor have been found in North America, even though the historical record says that Eivor fought alongside an early sect of Assassins in Britain, and her death has something to do with the new cataclysm. Layla decides to hop into the Animus to explore Eivor’s life, but prolonged exposure to the staff and the Animus is causing her to have weird visions that make it difficult for her to differentiate her life from Eivor’s life.
Meanwhile, in the past, Eivor is also having weird visions that make it difficult for her to differentiate her life from the life of Odin, the All-Father of Norse Mythology (a.k.a. another Isu guy that ancient humans decided was a god). The reason for that is textbook Assassin’s Creed stuff: Eivor is actually Odin reincarnated, having preserved his genetic memories in the Isu wi-fi (as visualized by a simulation of the eternal Norse warrior paradise Valhalla) with a machine called Yggdrasil.
Unfortunately, the Yggdrasil has also reincarnated classic Norse troublemaker Loki, who has been Eivor’s Assassin buddy Basim this whole time (he was acting really shady for the entire game, to be fair), and he tries to take control of the machine for himself. Eivor beats him up and traps him in the machine, which helps Layla and her friends realize that the machine is now malfunctioning and will trigger this latest planet-destroying cataclysm.
Layla travels to Norway where the machine is hidden and jacks herself into the Isu WiFi to fix it, killing her physical body in the process. She meets a being called The Reader who is actually Desmond’s backed-up consciousness (remember him?), saves the planet for now, and inadvertently frees the 1000-year-old corpse of Basim … whose mind is redownloaded into his body by Yggdrasil and he is fully reborn when he then comes into contact with Layla’s immortality-granting Staff Of Hermes Trismegistus. See? It’s all coming together!
Only sort of, though. Basim, now alive in the present day and aware that he’s basically Loki, meets up with Layla’s friends (he now has a hip modern man-bun and a wolf moon T-shirt) and convinces them to let him use their Animus so they can continue trying to unpack the mystery of Eivor’s death—because still nobody knows how or why she ended up in North America. So, for the remainder of the game, you’re playing as Basim while he’s playing as Eivor, which is kind of weird and unsettling in a way that only Assassin’s Creed, through decades of bizarre lore, could really capture.
The future of Assassin’s Creed
And now you understand all of it! At least until next year, when Ubisoft will release a standalone spin-off game called Assassin’s Creed Mirage that will be about Basim from Valhalla as a young man learning the ways of the Assassins. It’s supposed to be a more traditional Assassin’s Creed game that goes back to the stuff that people like (or the stuff people think they like, at least) from the old games, which might mean a dramatic reduction of weird nonsense.
Or maybe it will mean a more careful introduction to those ideas so the people who aren’t quite up to speed won’t get freaked out or confused by the fact that the man you’re playing as in ancient Baghdad is actually a reincarnation of the Norse god Loki who is still alive in 2020. But now it all at least makes perfect sense to you, and we all completely understand what’s going on in the world of Assassin’s Creed. More or less.
28 Comments
Yeah that’s pretty much what I thought was going on.
I haven’t played one of those games in a long time, partly because the non-assassination mechanics (tower defense and squad-based shit in the later Ezio games, sailing in Black Flag) were less fun than climbing and stabbing, but also because fist-fighting the Pope was one of the best final bosses in gaming history, and the franchise simply wasn’t going to top it. That ending is so hilariously insane that it compensates for the beginning of the game, which shifts very quickly from Ezio seeing his ten-year-old brother executed for treason to Ezio’s uncle Mario shouting, “It’s-a-me, Mario!”
Oh man, I ADORE the bonkers modern stuff in AC, your description of the nonsense as glue is so spot on. It’s such a shame that Ubisoft are so morally bankrupt I can’t continue to justify giving them my money and that I will, for the first time since the series launched, miss the next entry. I just can’t.
I was playing Assassin’s Creed 2 many years go, and a friend walked into the room during one of the Desmond segments. Rather than being bored (which is the typical reaction to the framing narrative) she was fascinated by the idea of a video game about time travel, and she wanted me to hurry up and finish some assassinations so we could see what Desmond was up to. She got it, evidently.
Man, I still remember all the hype back in 2007 for this game! I remember them talking about how ANY horizontal surface that stuck out more than 2 in-game inches was a climbing handhold. And then, I remember game sites collectively losing their shit with speculation when the sci-fi themed main menu was leaked. Because that was the first indication that it wasn’t entirely set in Levant during the Crusades. Also, I was a college freshman the year it came out, and one of the on-campus fraternities had managed to arrange for Ubisoft to host a release day demo event at their chapter house
They never did a very good job of hiding the modern-day angle of the game. I remember circa 2005 reading a magazine that was basically a puff piece for the upcoming Xbox 360 launch, and talked about games coming up in the near future. There was mention of “Project Assassin”, which the magazine described as something along the lines of ‘a crazy person from the modern day thinks they are an assassin in The Crusades’ (I wish I could remember the exact blurb, but I believe it was pretty close to that). Even back then, when Ubisoft was probably just teasing pre-rendered cinematics to the press, the secret was already out.
I’m sad that “climbing a tower to sync the map” has become a gaming cliche over the past 15 years, but the ability to run around throwing knives on the load screen has not. Actually my distaste for Desmond might be entirely that his load screen activities were so limited.
I kept playing through the Ezio trilogy, but I had largely mentally checked out when they offed Kristen Bell’s character.
I guess that Bell was tied to a contract for three games, and when they decided to make direct sequels to ACII (based on the ton of unused concepts that they hadn’t time to implement in this game), the plans to make the whole series a trilogy with each game taking place at a specific time in history and involving a new hero were out of the window. It’s also very likely that Bell wasn’t interested (either because of the money offered or the work involved, she actually just recorded her lines without any motion capture for her last game, it was the lead actress from Liberation who did the job there) to make more entries, hence her death in Brotherhood and the subsequent revelation (in some DLC for Revelations, which never featured her voice or even her face) that Lucy had always worked with the Templars, which made zero sense otherwise. As the Desmond-Lucy relationship had been integral to the modern day plot, it was a good thing to get rid of Desmond next, as the character was a bore in Revelations and III.I’m also a little surprised that there’s no mention of the countless ciphering puzzles modern day from II (where you have to unlock small bits of some video) which were often very difficult, and that I didn’t really miss, while I was extremely disappointed when they stopped unlocking secrets inside large famous buildings you had to explore à la Prince of Persia.
I really love these games in spit of the toxic dumpster fire that is ubisoft. I enjoyed the modern day stuff more in the older games, perhaps because it broke up the slightly more linear game play of those games. In the newer, more open world games, with less of the modern day stuff it seems like more of a distraction, instead of a nice change of Pace. I liked the Basim stuff in the new one, and the return of Shaun and Rebecca. I never got too caught up in the lore, though, beyond a “whatever, I’ll roll with it” shrug.
I never played the AC games until about 5 years ago, having spent the decade prior to 2017 having only a Linux machine with limited ability to play games (but I could play the important one, World of Warcraft, and that was all that mattered). Then I started a job where they gave me a high-end gaming laptop and a $150 monthly stipend for buying video games, so I quickly added the preceding decade’s worth of top games to my Steam wishlist, and started catching up.The AC series was one of my first stops, and I really enjoyed it, especially the first three games (AC, AC2, Brotherhood). Revelations was also good although it did feel like it was starting to make a turn toward other game mechanics which were less interesting (tower defense!), and the less said about the mess that is AC3, the better. Black Flag was a ton of fun (the ship mechanics were so good that I didn’t mind how little actual assassination I was doing). Rogue was basically more Black Flag but with a much less interesting story and characters.
Unity and Syndicate were pretty but boring. I didn’t finish either one.Origins was great. My only real complaint was the emphasis on direct combat with powerful foes; I want assassination and sneakiness and intrigue, not dodge-roll mechanics against bosses who can survive getting stabbed 30 times before they fall over. Get out of here with that shit. Otherwise, Origins was just a wonderful, beautiful world to explore.I haven’t bothered with Odyssey or Valhalla because, well, I get it. The modern-day stuff was a lot less interesting after Desmond died, so even though it continued being weird, I had no idea where it was going and didn’t really care about any of it. And the games’ continued emphasis on things besides assassination left me bored, especially because the Hitman “World of Assassination” trilogy existed and scratched my stealth/assassination itch way better than the later AC games did.
The Caduceus is NOT the symbol of medicine. The Rod of Asclepius (with only one snake and without wings) is. The use of the Caduceus in American medical societies ( like the US Army Medical Corps) is actually erroneous.
If I remember correctly Shaun Hastings points this out in one of his database entries.
I tapped out of the series midway through 4, when it egregiously violated its own canon. Also I’m apparently weird and detested the ship combat.The article kind of makes it seem like AC2 was one game, when it was actually 3 full-length games. They were amazing and awesome, and then they followed it up with the turd that was 3.
Where 1 wasn’t great about geography and where things were in relation to each other, 3 gives the distinct impression that Valley Forge is a 15-minute run due west of Boston. Also, amazingly, Valley Forge has no river. It’s not like this is a mythical place you can’t visit, I can bike there in 30 minutes. The whole point of the encampment was its strategic location right on the Schuylkill.
And don’t even get me started on how downright insulting 3’s version of Ben Franklin was. It’s almost like the designers were like “let’s make a game that’s designed to piss off all of Philadelphia.”
And that mission where they require you to brutally kill Gritty was really unnecessary.
Yeah, because you can’t finish it. Nothing can kill Gritty. It’s just a time sink. And the microtransactions that lead you to believe you can buy your way to a win? Unbelievable. But what do you expect from Ubisoft?
I found the ship combat in AC4 exactly as much fun as using the gun in AC2. The only thing better than acrobatic leaping and hilariously brutal stabbing animations is lining up a beam of UI light, firing, and then waiting a few seconds to reload.
Yes! They would have been good in small doses. I did like the occasional mission that required the gun, and the occasional ship mission from AC3, but AC4 made it a huge part of the game.
But from what I’ve heard, people went nuts for that. No idea what the appeal is there, but then again, I play games very much for the story and very little for the gameplay. It’s rare when the gameplay actively annoys me. (For example, I actually liked Mass Effect: Andromeda).
I’m probably in the minority in that I absolutely hate all the modern stuff and having to deal with 45 minutes of it in Assassin’s Creed 2 made me stop playing.
Tomorrow’s the big night. You ready to be offended, Sammie?
So, I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: they need to bring back the basic mission loop (obviously, improve the mission variety) of the original AC, where missions involve investigating targets, figuring out the best ways to get at them. It would also fit the story of Basim learning how to be an Assassin Syndicate had a really watered down version where investigating was a side objective in the chapter-wrap-up assassination mission
My unnecessary summary of the AC series:AC1 – Looks great (for its time), and feels like it set the direction for current AAA games in many ways. Otherwise – boring characters, very repetitive gameplay loop. Get used to hearing ‘curse the Christian king and his infidel army’ a lot.AC2 – My personal fave. The music, setting and characters are all interesting. Arguably the pinnacle of the series’ mystery box-style storytelling.AC Brotherhood – Eh, it’s fine. I like that you can stick people to the walls with spears – a feature I’ve enjoyed since I first experienced it in ‘Messiah’. Looks like Kristen Bell’s contract is up.AC Revelations – I can make my own bombs!? Wow. Great. Can we move on, please? I felt like Ezio at the end of the game, who’s just like ‘okay, I’ve had enough of all this’.AC III – I love the experience of exploring the wilderness in Colonial times. Otherwise, I think it inherited too much of AC1’s flaws – a boring, sullen protagonist, and an unnecessarily overlong campaign with too many repetitive missions. AC IV – 2nd fave. Thought this would be another wheel-spinning entry coming just a year after AC 3, but it’s not at all. I don’t care much for the ship combat, but I like the sailing, the mission and the characters. My interest in the story of the Isu and all of that has waned quite a bit, so I appreciate that it’s been basically kicked to the background in the modern day segments.AC Unity – Never played it! Overloading on AC IV, coupled with the bad reviews, made me hesitant. I just purchased a copy recently with the intention to try it out.AC Rogue – Some decent filler if you want more AC IV-style gameplay. A bit too repetitive mission-wise. I grimace every time my characters jumps into the frozen water.AC Syndicate -It’s nice going back to a large, condensed city, where you can focus more on rooftop running and the parkour staples of the original games. This one arguably has the most refined ‘old-style’ gameplay mechanics as well, and it’s your last chance to enjoy that before AC takes things in a new direction.AC Origins – I don’t dislike a lot of changes that they took with the new AC games. Origins looks amazing, and the general gameplay is fun. I just feel that it is all artificially inflated with the RPG elements (nominal gear upgrades, enemy levels, etc.), and way too much map clutter. That said, this one is my favorite of the ‘new trilogy’ – I like Bayek, his wife and the Egyptian surroundings on the whole.AC Odyssey – People seemed to like this one a lot, but it felt to me to be something of a placeholder entry, borrowing many things from Origins and not cutting a clear identity for itself. AC Valhalla – A whole lotta game. I’m glad they supported it for a few years at least before moving on to the next entry. I still find myself frustrated by the RPG elements, where I seem to hit a dead-end with raids or other side quests unless I grind on other things I don’t necessarily want to do.
I’ve said it with the first game and every other AC game I played but the “modern” story is terrible and it kills my enjoyment of the game. I don’t want to be pulled out of the historical killer simulator every few hours to run around and read someone’s email until I trigger whatever is needed to get back to the real game. Even if you insist the modern world stuff matters, just shows us a cut scene. Don’t make me play that boring shit
I’m entirely ignorant of basically [waves hands] all of the above, but I got Origins because it looks fun and I was curious what AAA games are like these days. It’s pretty great (and the walk-around-Egypt-as-a-tourist mode is wonderful), and then every so often I’m in the present day and— what? I skipped past those parts as quickly as I could and tried not to think about them. I’m here to ride camels and meet Cleopatra and have fun on the Ides of March.
Exactly
Eh, I liked the Desmond storyline. Once he was gone, completely agree, present-day stuff was boring.
If you watch shows like Ancient Aliens and other documentaries about secret societies, you see where a lot of AC’s “nonsense” comes from. Pre-human advanced civilizations, the survival of the Templars, Atlantis…these are all theories that are out there. I’m not saying it isn’t nonsense, just that Ubisoft didn’t invent it out of thin air. Also – and maybe I’m biased because I’m from New England – I actually like AC3.
I think odyssey was a real reach for these guys but I loved it. I started the series with Altair in 2007. It was very unusual but fun. I liked the interaction between Desmond as well.
I read the book AC IV and absolute loved the game. It was in my view the best of series. Still feel that way.