In every Assassin’s Creed game we have had to endure future segments as they were what held the game together. It started off with Desmond but changed in Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag when we experienced the game in a new first-person perspective. These sections were not in Unity, and apart from a few animus glitches, we stayed in the same time period for pretty much the entire game. This will not happen again according to lead writer Darby NcDevitt. Assassin’s Creed will be returning to the modern day exploits of Abstergo and the Assassin Order in greater depth.
We can also expect to see more from the glowing first civilisation, which always kind of confused me and pulled me out of the emersion. Nothing was ever explained and then it just went quiet. Hopefully they explain more and make the story with them even more interesting.
We can expect to see more future sections in the next games…which is great for people who enjoyed that…but did anybody actually enjoy them? For me, I hated being pulled out of the animus and I would rush the story to get back to whatever mission I was doing with Ezio and the other Assassins. It makes me quite sad to know that this will be happening even more in greater depth. Hopefully they will do it in a way that will keep me interested while outside of the device.
Ideally, I would like the next game to ignore the animus completely, and to play as one person in the one time zone. This would also give us more freedom as we would no longer be playing memories of an ancestor. More times than not I care about the ancestor’s story a hell of a lot more than I do Desmond’s, or whoever I play from the future. It could go a step further and give us the freedom to choose what our character says, like Dragon Age and Mass Effect do really well. You could have an Assassin that is purely good, or you could be an asshole. Assassin’s Creed is truly a free roam game, but when playing the story, it shows next to no freedom of choice. This became even more apparent in Unity, which is a great shame.
What do you think? Are you happy that we will be getting more modern day exploits? Or did you not care for them much? Let us know in the comments below.
Bezz contributed 14 articles to ICXM in 2015, covering game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news with a focus on hands-on impressions and verified-source reporting. Their bylines on the site span the Xbox One’s first full year of post-launch coverage, including the early days of Backwards Compatibility and Windows 10 gaming. They post on X as @BezzJunior.