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Paying attention to the Ubisoft/Assassin's Creed discourse has me convinced of a few things. One is that Ubisoft Montreal didn't like ACOdyssey, and in their desire to ignore/avoid it, ended up making a worse game than they could have.
Now, I like Valhalla, I like Eivor, and I mostly like the story of Valhalla until we get to the modern day stuff, which is a constant lament I've had ever since AC III. Frankly, the modern day Assassins/Templar stuff is bad, and it always has been bad.
But clearly Ubisoft Montreal wanted to ignore Odyssey and recenter the game on the Assassins/Templars and how they came to be, how the Hidden Ones and Order of the Ancients became Assassins and Templars. In the process, they tossed out GAMEPLAY solutions from Odyssey.
Specifically, the sheer volume of endgame content, the really amazing rollout window for DLC's, the lost tales of Greece story missions which were free content, the new Mythical creatures, the mercenaries and ships, there was just a LOT of endgame for Odyssey. Valhalla lacks this
Now, we're getting some stuff soon, and clearly the pandemic had an impact here -- we'd be fools to ignore that Valhalla has two expansions and the river raids in the pipeline. But Odyssey also had a much more robust leveling system and better gear options than Valhalla.
A lot of this feels related to the dichotomy of the AC fanbase right now. A lot more people came to AC with Origins and Odyssey than were here back in AC2, or 3, or Black Flag/Unity/Syndicate. And those people LIKE the rpg elements of the newer games. But the OG fans HATE them.
Of course some of this is just vocal minority syndrome, but it's still got me wondering -- perhaps Ubisoft should make an open world RPG in the WORLD of AC, but that doesn't CALL itself an AC game, and let AC go back to being stealth games with limited story?
Would RPG fans like me be better served by a game where the Isu stuff is all there, but there's much less focus on the Assassins and Templars? Maybe somebody ELSE could find an Isu artifact and try and save the world for a while. Let the AC games go back to being what they were.
Now, I expect that would kill Assassin's Creed as a brand. The majority of people buying these games now came in with Origins and Odyssey. But it's one way forward for Ubisoft -- let Montreal make the AC games from 2008, and let other studios like Quebec, Singapore, etc make RPGs
And maybe then we could get a modern day game with a likeable protagonist who is actually DOING SOMETHING instead of spending most of the time laying down playing a 'ancient genetic memories simulator' game about back when people actually did things. Maybe then I'd care about it.
Why can't we get an AC game where, instead of spending all of our time in a holodeck episode, we could maybe WEAPONIZE the Animus? Like, imagine if you play someone in the modern day, and you go into the Animus for like a mission to learn how to do something and then do it?
Imagine your character, a fully customizable RPG character where you pick your gender and appearance, using the Animus to learn how to do things and then ACTUALLY DOING THEM, like for an entire game, not just a weird tagon at the end that interrupts Eivor and Sigurd's story?
Heck, you could make Animus missions a special way to introduce all the lore of the setting. "I need to find this Isu relic in Crete, so here's Kassandra finding it. Now I need to use it to open the vault in Italy, here's Ezio sealing that vault so I know how to do that."
And by making that game not an Assassin's Creed game by name, the hard core OG AC fans wouldn't feel like they had to play it. So it could have all the RPG elements they hate, like branching dialogue, player choice, consequences of your decisions, different endings, etc etc.
Also, originally the Animus needed the user to be genetically related to the people it was used on, so Desmond is a descendant (not an ancestor, a descendant) of Ezio and Altair. But clearly Eivor is not related to Layla Hassan and the Animus can work on her, and Basim uses it.
This means that you can use the Animus to read ANYONE's genetic memories. Well, you could use that on LIVING PEOPLE. You need to find out where this Templar hid the apple of Eden you need? Use the animus to retrace the last month of his life.
