Why Assassin's Creed 2 and 3 Had the Best Writing the Series Has Ever Seen
One of the most memorable moments in the entire Assassin’s Creed series happens near the start of Assassin’s Creed 3, when Haytham Kenway has finished rounding up his band of assassins in the New World. Or at least, the player is led to believe they’re assassins. Haytham, after all, uses a hidden blade, is just as charismatic as previous series protagonist Ezio Auditore, and has – up until this point in the campaign – played the part of a hero, busting Native Americans out of prison and beating up cocky British redcoats. Only when he utters the familiar phrase, “May the Father of Understanding guide us,” does it become clear we have actually been following our sworn enemies, the Templars.
To me, this surprising setup represents the fullest realization of Assassin’s Creed’s potential. The first game in the series introduced an intriguing concept – find, get to know, and kill your targets – but fell short in the story department, with both protagonist Altaïr and his victims being utterly bereft of personality. Assassin’s Creed 2 took a step in the right direction by replacing Altaïr with the more iconic Ezio, but failed to apply the same treatment to his adversaries, with the big bad of its spinoff Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, Cesare Borgia, coming across as particularly underdeveloped. Only in Assassin’s Creed 3, set during the American Revolution, did the developers at Ubisoft devote as much time to fleshing out the hunted as they did the hunter. It lent the game an organic flow from set-up to payoff and, as a result, achieved a delicate balance between gameplay and narrative that as yet hasn’t been replicated since.
While the current RPG era of the series has largely been well received by players and critics, a wealth of articles, YouTube videos, and forum posts agree that Assassin’s Creed is in decline, and has been for some time. What exactly is responsible for this downfall, however, is subject to debate. Some point to the increasingly unrealistic premises of the modern games, which have you face off against gods like Anubis and Fenrir. Others take issue with Ubisoft’s implementation of a varied spectrum of romance options or, in the hotly-disputed case of Assassin’s Creed Shadows, replacing its hitherto fictional protagonists with a real-world historical figure, an African samurai called Yasuke. My personal nostalgia for the Xbox 360/PS3-era games notwithstanding, I’d argue it’s none of these. Instead, such decline is a result of the series’ gradual abandonment of character-driven storytelling, which has by now gotten buried deep inside its sprawling sandbox.
Over the years, Assassin’s Creed has padded its original action-adventure formula with a slew of RPG and live service-ish elements, from dialogue trees and XP-based levelling systems to loot boxes, microtransaction DLC, and gear customization. But the bigger the new installments have become, the emptier they have started to feel, and not just with regard to the countless climb-this-tower, find-that-object side-missions, but also their basic storytelling.
Although allowing you to choose what your character says or does should theoretically make the overall experience more immersive, in practice I’ve found it often has the opposite effect: as scripts get longer and longer to account for multiple possible scenarios, they feel like they lack the same level of polish as a game with a more limited range of interaction. The focused, screenplay-like scripts of the series’ action-adventure era allowed for sharply defined characters that were not pulled thin by a game structure that demands its protagonist be compassionate or brutal on the whim of the player.
Thus, while a game like Assassin’s Creed Odyssey technically has more content than Assassin’s Creed 2, much of it feels wooden and underbaked. This unfortunately breaks the immersion; it’s too often very obvious that you are interacting with computer generated characters rather than complex historical figures. This is in stark contrast to the franchise’s Xbox 360/PS3 era, which in my humble opinion has produced some of the finest writing in all of gaming, from Ezio’s fiery “Do not follow me, or anyone else!” speech after besting Savonarola, to the tragicomic soliloquy Haytham delivers when he is at long last killed by his son, Connor:
“Don’t think I have any intention of caressing your cheek and saying I was wrong. I will not weep and wonder what might have been. I’m sure you understand. Still, I’m proud of you in a way. You have shown great conviction. Strength. Courage. All noble qualities. I should have killed you long ago.”
The writing has suffered in other ways over the years, too. Where the modern games tend to stick to the easily digestible dichotomy of Assassins = good and Templars = bad, the earlier games went to great lengths to show that the line between the two orders isn’t as clear-cut as it initially appears. In Assassin’s Creed 3, each defeated Templar uses their last breath to make Connor – and, by extension, the player – question their own beliefs. William Johnson, a negotiator, says the Templars could have stopped the Native American genocide. Thomas Hickey, a hedonist, calls the Assassins’ mission unrealistic and promises Connor that he’ll never feel fulfilled. Benjamin Church, who betrays Haytham, declares it’s “all a matter of perspective,” and that the British – from their point of view – see themselves as the victims, not the aggressors.
Haytham, for his part, tries to shake Connor’s faith in George Washington, claiming the country he’ll create will be no less despotic than the monarchy from which the Americans sought to liberate themselves – an assertion which rings all the more true when we discover that the command to burn down Connor’s village wasn’t given by Haytham’s henchman Charles Lee, as previously thought, but Washington. By the end of the game, the player has more questions than answers – and the story is stronger for it.
Looking back on the franchise’s long history, there is a reason why one track from the Jesper Kyd-composed Assassin’s Creed 2 score, “Ezio’s Family,” resonated with players to the point of becoming the series’ official theme. The PS3 games, particularly Assassin’s Creed 2 and Assassin’s Creed 3, were – at their core – character-driven experiences; the melancholic guitar strings of “Ezio’s Family” weren’t meant to evoke the game’s Renaissance setting so much as Ezio’s personal trauma of losing his family. As much as I admire the expansive worldbuilding and graphical fidelity of the current generation of Assassin’s Creed games, my hope is that this out-of-control franchise will someday scale itself down, and once again deliver the kind of focused, tailor-made stories that made me fall in love with it in the first place. Sadly, in a landscape dominated by sprawling sandboxes and single-player games with live service-style ambitions, I fear that’s just not “good business” anymore.
Tim Brinkhof is a freelance writer specializing in art and history. After studying journalism at NYU, he has gone on to write for Vox, Vulture, Slate, Polygon, GQ, Esquire and more.
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