I wish Ubisoft had ever made the game it promised with Assassin’s Creed 1, but instead the series just spiralled into a weird identity crisis

Let’s play ‘guess the game’. You’re a meticulous killer in a historical setting. Your targets are high-ranking aristocrats, priests, merchants—men and women of status who go everywhere flanked by a platoon of guards, who sleep behind barred doors, and whose entire lives are lived publicly. These people cannot enter a room without an eruption of folderol: they’re here! They’re here!

Getting a 15-second conversation with them would require weeks of prep. Assassinating them? Next to impossible. Surviving the attempt? Actually impossible. For everyone but you, anyway. You pound the pavement until eventually you know your target’s itinerary better than they do. When the big day comes, you emerge as if from smoke—from the rafters, the floorboards, the crowd—in a display of specific and spectacular public violence, leaving your untouchable target gasping while you make your escape, using your superior agility and parkour skills to disappear while arrows and shouted curses whizz by your ears.

If the game you guessed was ‘Nothing’ then congratulations! You are correct. This is no game that ever got published. Once upon a time it was going to be Assassin’s Creed 1—it was, at least, the game that was suggested by how Ubisoft talked about the project in the run-up to its release: a historical assassination sim focused on careful planning and dazzling execution, where your uncanny ability to climb and swing from things was what separated you from your clanky armoured foes, letting you evade them even after you’d stabbed their boss in the neck in the town square. It’s a game you caught glimpses of in old trailers: Altair was here, an alarmingly young Patrice Desilets talking about the game’s “flower box” approach to player freedom, or Jade Raymond walking you through a mission to silently infiltrate a crusader fortress.

What we got was, well, Assassin’s Creed 1, a game I have a lot of fondness for but whose fantasy of the careful assassin resolved into repeating some mission templates a few times—obtaining key information you probably never looked at and certainly never truly needed—to unlock the final assassination mission, where you never had to do anything but charge at your target, kill them, and then either jog away leisurely or murder entire legions of guards with a seriously overpowered counter move.

The fantasy wasn’t quite there, and AC spiralled into an identity crisis it’s still yet to escape from. Rather than knuckle down and tighten up the elements of AC1 that were truly interesting, that had you embody the role of a diligent master assassin, the series splayed outwards, bolting on more and new systems with every iteration—now you’re building a town, buying Rome, running a guild, or being a pirate.

Don’t get me wrong, some of those systems were great. I loved being a pirate, and I’ve been having fun shinobi’ing about Japan in Shadows, but as Ubi has frantically bolted more and more parts onto AC as a whole in an attempt to get you to love it and, on some level, to reach some internal understanding about what the hell this series actually is, I’ve been more and more mournful for that idea that seem to live and die exclusively with AC1: historical Hitman—a clockwork world where you were a fragile but cunning planner without equal, whose wit and speed, and not the ability to massacre upwards of fifty men in single combat, was what struck fear into the hearts of the medieval haut monde.

The closest we ever got to that idea in the mainline series was AC: Unity—where getting into combat was a genuine risk and you could concoct relatively elaborate schemes to lure targets into scripted executions—but unfortunately that game launched with people’s eyeballs popping out of their heads and, fair’s fair, it was riddled with online nonsense that I never had any interest in. So Ubi retreated and we got the series’ current iteration: ‘what if we made The Witcher 3?’

I don’t think Ubi will ever condense down the great, sprawling identity crisis that is the modern iteration of Assassin’s Creed back to that 2007 vision, but someone should. A true historical assassin sim—where you get to strike fear into noble hearts with your limitless cunning—is too good an idea to leave at the start of the century.