This article is about the franchise. For the first game in the series, see Assassin's Creed (video game). For the book series, see Assassin's Creed (book series). For the 2016 film adaptation, see Assassin's Creed (film).| Assassin's Creed | |
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| Publisher(s) | Ubisoft |
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| First release | Assassin's Creed November 13, 2007 |
| Latest release | Assassin's Creed Odyssey October 5, 2018 |
Assassin's Creed is an action-adventure stealth video game franchise created by Patrice Désilets, Jade Raymond and Corey May, developed and published by Ubisoft using the game engine Anvil Next. It depicts in the centuries-old struggle, now and then, between the Assassins, who fight for peace with free will, and the Templars, who desire peace through control. The series features historical fiction, science fiction and characters, intertwined with real-world historical events and figures. For the majority of time players would control an Assassin in the past history, while they also play as Desmond Miles or an Assassin Initiate in the present day, who hunt down their Templar targets.
The video game series took inspiration from the novel Alamut by the Slovenian writer Vladimir Bartol,[1] while building upon concepts from the Prince of Persia series.[2] It begins with the self-titled game in 2007, and has featured eleven main games. The most recent released game is 2018's Assassin's Creed Odyssey.
A new story and time period are introduced in each entry, and gameplay elements evolve from the previous one. There are three story arcs in the series. For the first five main games, the framing story is set in 2012 and features series protagonist Desmond Miles who uses a machine called the Animus and relives the memories of his ancestors to find a way to avert the 2012 apocalypse. In games till Assassin's Creed Syndicate, Abstergo employees and Assassin initiates recorded genetic memories using the Helix software, helping the Templars and Assassins find new Pieces of Eden in the modern world. The latest two games, Assassin's Creed Origins and Assassin's Creed Odyssey follow ex-Abstergo employee Layla Hassan as she is recruited into the Assassin's Creed.
Main games of Assassin's Creed are set in an open world and presented from the third-person perspective where the protagonists take down targets using their combat and stealth skills with the exploitation of the environment. Freedom of exploration is given to the player the historical settings to finish main and side quests. Apart from single-player missions, some games also provide competitive and cooperative multiplayer gameplay. While main games are produced for major consoles and desktop platforms, multiple spin-off games were also released in accompany for consoles, mobiles, and handhelds platforms.
The main games in the Assassin's Creed video game series have received generally positive reviews for their ambition in visuals, game design, and narratives, with criticism towards the yearly release cycle and frequent bugs. The spin-off games received mixed to positive reviews. The video game series has received multiple awards and nominations, including Game of the Year awards. It is also commercially successful, selling over 100 million copies as of September 2016, becoming Ubisoft's best-selling franchise and one of the highest selling video game franchises of all time. Assassin's Creed was adapted by its self-titled film, which received negative reviews. A book series of art books, encyclopedias, comics, novelizations, and novels is also published. All of the media take place within the same continuity as the main video game series.
The Assassin's Creed series originated out of ideas for a sequel for Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, a full 3D adaption of the original Prince of Persia games, which was made for the sixth generationand included a number of parkour moves and combat. The Sands of Time was a critical and financial success, leading Ubisoft to request Ubisoft Montreal to develop a sequel, aiming for the next console generation. The Ubisoft Montreal team decided on taking the gameplay from The Sands of Time into a open world approach, taking advantage of the improved processing power to render larger spaces and crowds. Narratively, the team wanted to move away from the Prince simply being someone next in line for the throne but to have to work for it; combined with research into secret societies led them to focus on the Assassins, heavily borrowing from the novel Alamut.[3]
They developed a narrative where the player would control an Assassin that served as a bodyguard for a non-playable Prince, leading them to call this game Prince of Persia: Assassin. Ubisoft was not happy with a Prince of Persia game without the Prince as the playable character, but this led to the marketing division to suggest the name Assassin's Creed, playing off the creed of the Assassins, "nothing is true; everything is permitted". Ubisoft Montreal ran with this in creating a wholly new intellectual property, eliminating the Prince and creating the conflict between the Assassins and Templar Knights. Further, in postulating what other assassinations they could account for throughout human history, they came onto the idea of genetic memory and created the "Animus" device and modern storyline elements, which further allowed them to explain certain facets of gameplay, such as accounting when the player fails a mission, in the same way they had done in The Sands of Time.[3]
Following release of the first Assassin's Creed in 2007, Ubisoft Montreal and other Ubisoft studios use the series to present games from various historical periods, striving for historical accuracy while conceding some elements for gameplay.[3]
The Assassin's Creed games primarily revolve around the rivalry between two ancient secret societies — the Assassins and the Knights Templar— and their indirect relation to an ancient species pre-dating humanity, referred to within the games as "those who came before", whose society, along with much of Earth's biosphere, was destroyed by a massive solar storm thousands of years before the games. The games' real-world chronological setting begins in the year 2012, but most of the gameplay is in historical settings.
Within the franchise, Abstergo Industries is a mega-corporation conglomerate with multiple branches, secretly run by modern Knights Templar. The company is the present-day main antagonist of the franchise. Abstergo secretly created the "Animus", a device that allows its users to "re-live" and experience the memories of their genetic ancestors within their bloodline through a virtual simulation. Overexposure to the animus causes the "bleeding effect", which results in giving the user skills and abilities of his ancestors, but is also dangerous for the user as it can damage their mind, causing symptoms such as dementia, insanity, dissociative identity disorder or brain damage. Abstergo is seeking to discover the location of several historical artifacts, known as the "Pieces of Eden". Such artifacts hold great power, and are capable of controlling free will. Abstergo seeks to use them to remove free will and bring humanity into one single unified group, while the Assassins oppose them. In order to find the Pieces of Eden, Abstergo is abducting people whose ancestors are suspected to have had historically confirmed or suspected interactions with such devices, forcing the kidnapped person into the Animus and searching for clues on their ancestors' memories within the Animus.
Desmond Miles is a bartender who is a descendant of several lines of prominent Assassins; though raised as an Assassin, he left his nomadic family to seek out a more common lifestyle. He is initially kidnapped by Abstergo, which is aware of his ancestral lineage. Desmond is forced into the Animus and is revealed to be subject 17; many of the sixteen previous subjects died as a result of Animus over-exposure.
Desmond is later rescued by a small team of modern-day Assassins and agrees to work with them, continuing to experience the memories of his ancestors to discover the locations of additional Pieces of Eden so they can be recovered before Abstergo can do so. From the bleeding effect, Desmond gains some of the Assassin skills of his predecessors at the cost of living with multiple sets of memories and personalities in his mind.
Within the Animus, Desmond explores the memories of a number of Assassins, including Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad, an initially disgraced Assassin working to redeem himself during the Third Crusade; Ezio Auditore da Firenze, an Assassin in Italy during the late 15th and early 16th centuries of the Italian Renaissance; and Ratonhnhaké:ton, otherwise known as Connor, a half-Mohawk, half-British Assassin during the American Revolution.
Throughout these events, Desmond learns of allusions to the prophetic end of the world in 2012 from a former Animus test subject, Subject 16; the event turns out to be a repeat of the disaster which wiped out the ancient civilization, and he finds out that his memories hold the key to Earth's surviving a second solar storm. During his experiences, Desmond is aided by holographic projections of three of the ancient race's rulers: Jupiter, Minerva, and Juno.
After Desmond dies to ensure Earth's survival, his memories, which have survived through genetic samples of his DNA,[4] are accessed by Abstergo, which hires a new subject to enter the Animus. The new subject relives the memories of Edward Kenway (grandfather of Ratohnhaké:ton, otherwise known as Connor Kenway), a privateer-turned-pirate during the Golden Age of Piracy.[5]
While the games are often presented through protagonist Desmond Miles, the bulk of the game is played as Desmond experiences the memories of his ancestors through an advanced device called the Animus. This provides a means of a diegetic interface, showing Desmond's ancestor's health, equipment, goals, and other features as part of the Animus interface. The Animus is based on the player controlling the assassin to maintain the synchronization between Desmond and his ancestor's memories. Performing actions that go against the Assassin's way or dying breaks the synchronization, effectively requiring the player to restart at a previous checkpoint. Furthermore, the player cannot explore outside areas that the assassin has not experienced yet. There are also abnormalities within the Animus from previous users of the device.
While playing as the Assassin characters, the games are generally presented from a third-person perspective in an open world environment, focusing on stealth and parkour. The games use a mission structure to follow the main story, generally assigning the player to complete an assassination of public figureheads or a covert mission. Alternatively, several side missions are available, such as mapping out the expansive cities from a high perch followed by performing a "leap of faith" into a haystack below, collecting treasures hidden across the cities, exploring ruins for relics, building a brotherhood of assassins to perform other tasks, or funding the rebuilding of a city through purchasing and upgrading of shops and other features. At times, the player is in direct control of Desmond, who by nature of the Animus use has learned Assassin techniques through the bleeding effect, as well as their genetic ability of Eagle Vision, which separates friend, foe and assassination targets by illuminating people in different colors. Through the Animus interface, the player can go back to retry any past mission already completed; for example, in Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, the player achieves better synchronization results by performing the mission in a specific manner such as by only killing the mission's target.
The games use the concept of "active" versus "passive" moves, with "active" moves, such as running, climbing the sides of buildings, or jumping between rooftops, more likely to alert the attention of nearby guards. When the guards become alerted, the player must either fight them or break their line of sight and locate a hiding place, such as a haystack or a well, and wait until the guards' alert is reduced. The combat system allows for a number of unique weapons, armor, and moves, including the use of a hidden blade set in a bracer on the Assassin's arm, and which also can be used to quietly assassinate targets.
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