Sailor Star Dust wrote:Assassin's Creed too. While the historical events are still fun, the latest installment (
Unity) really makes me wonder if they've just given up on the modern day events.
That's probably because most of the criticism since AC2 was about how the present day plot wasn't very interesting compared to the historical plot, especially once the First Civilization guys showed up. The missions where you play Desmond in AC3 was their last ditch effort to make it more interesting, but it still failed, so they concentrated on the historical events.
The problem with the present day is that to make it interesting, they will have to make a whole game about it, since the gap in gameplay between historical and present day periods is too wide to make a 2-in-1 game (game mechanisms to use swords won't serve much in present day, and on the hand modern firearms and vehicles don't have any counterparts in any time period earlier than WWI)
In fact, I'm sure that Watch Dogs was Ubisoft's attempt to make an Assassin's Creed in the modern era without having to admit it.
Sailor Star Dust wrote:The Assassins vs Templars
really seemed like window dressing for bigger events (Spoilers if I say anymore) that have had no continuation, let alone any resolution. Uh.
I think that it's the point: all of their conflict history boils down to an endless cycle of one faction taking control of a region or country, then losing it to the other faction, spending some time at the brink of collapse, then successfully regrouping behind a leader and retaking all the territory, rinse and repeat. The Ezio Trilogy (AC2, Brotherhood and Revelation) was the Assassins at the brink of collapse successfully regrouping behind Ezio as a leader and retaking Italy then most of the Mediterranean from the Templars, the North American Trilogy (AC3, Black Flag and Rogue) have two of these cycles: Black Flag is the Assassins taking the Caribbean Islands and the 13 Colonies from the Templars, the beginning of AC3 and Rogue is the Templars retaking everything behind Haytham as the leader, and the second half of AC3 is the Assassins retaking again control of the 13 Colonies from the Templars by rallying behind Connor. (and then completely failing to establish their influence, letting the newly created USA do as they please and steal all the lands of the Indians...)
The worst being that while in AC1 they were two factions influencing events for ideological reasons, to reach peace the way they think is right (control for the Templars, liberty for the Assassins), as time passed it degenerated into a turf war of worldly proportion where most of each faction actions were almost exclusively to capture and/or secure their hold in a region of the world and prevent the other camp from taking it from them, most of the time without even realizing the consequences of what they were doing: the Assassin supported the pirates to gain influence on the New World and ended with the Golden Age of Piracy where pirates roamed the seas and attacked whoever they pleased, the French Revolution was used by two different currents among the Templars to settle their differences once and for all and ended with everyone's head at the end of a spike...
And I think that was intentional from the creators: first the Assassins and Templars were agents of influence and progress for the world, but got so warped in their war against each other that they ended almost as a cancer that can do as much harm as good (and more than once ended doing more harm that good), I really don't think that the growing emphasis on how Assassins and Templars aren't that different and how their schemes tends to slip more and more out of control as we advance in the time periods is a coincidence.
And the remaining of the Fist Civilization took full advantage of it.
Everybody seems to agree that Final Fantasy is/was on its death bed but nobody seems to agree on why.
