Hating Desmond is to hate what made 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Assassin's Creed great. Without him, the series is sailing the Atlantic on a plank of wood. No compass, no ship, just desperately chucking water behind it to drift forward. Not even a paddle. That’s what the series has been for over a decade now, with the one attempt to claw back a main character worth caring about ✃falling completely flat.
Assassin’s Creed’s historical stories are usually about someone significant taking down a cult, but the very first game showed us that the Templars clawed back unbelievable power in the present day. All our efforts in the past lead to the same place, so in every iteration past and future, we know the end of this story. That doesn’t diminish the quality of the narrative—168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Ezio’s turn from an immature street kid to a charismatic and empathetic leader is captivating regardless of the fa🐭r-flung fu🅺ture’s outcome—but it makes every sequel feel increasingly aimless.
Desmond’s trilogy didn’t just push forward the stories of his ancestors, but his world too. He went from a kidnapped nobody to an assassin willing to risk his life for the betterment of the world, an arc on par with Ezio’s. Since then, we’ve been put in the role of literal blank slates, mindlessly venturing into the animus for god knows what reason. It used to be that it helped us find artefacts that could be of use in the modern day or to simꦬply train as an assassin, but since Desmond’s death, ജthe modern world has stayed the exact same, and so it feels like every step is pointless, leaving his ending as a snipped thread never to be continued.
Layla was an attempt to curb that trend and bring back the Desmond archetype, but over the course of Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla, we barely see her꧅. These are 40-70 hour games, longer if you explore everything, and yet we only see her a handful of times in brief snippets. And the times that we do see her are completely disjointed. She wants to make it big at Abstergo, but her friend is abducted, so she goes back to the animus. Then she’s suddenly meeting William Miles. Cue the next game where she’s an assassin, but we never see that transition. It’🥀s hard to get attached to a character with such a brief presence and so little in the way of development. We don’t know a single thing about her.
With Desmond, we spent nights with him when he was kidnapped, sneaking around Abstergo to dig up dirt, finding out who they are and what they’re planning. He eventually breaks free, but we don’t just jump to him being a member of the assassin's team, we see that happen in the opening of AC2. We flee the building we were held in during 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:the first game, fight a bunch of guards in the car park with everything Altair 𓆉taught us, and then get shoved into the trunk of a car before arriving at Assassin HQ to meet the gang, reluctant and beaten down. Spending time with Desmond means we get to see him grow, and part of seeing him grow is seeing his impact on the world around him. The modern AC♌ story is now, by comparison, at a standstill. The characters of old are reduced to cameos to lull us into believing that there’s anything worth caring about here.
Mirage🌠 won’t even have a modern-day segment. No Layla, no connectivity,😼 nothing. We’re an assassin doing assassin-y things in the past, with th⛦e ultimate end being a modern day that has stagnated, the Templars still in control. With even more games on the horizon—a VR title, a mobile spin-off, another mainline as the first part of the Infinity platform—it’s clear that Ubisoft is more concerned with milking the franchise dry rather than finishing what was once a compelling story.
When will we finally take the fight to the Templars of the 2020s? What did Desmond’s sacri💮fice mean? Why are we exploring all of these people’s lives? I have a feeling we’ll never truly get answers to any decade-long lingering questions, and Assassin’s Creed will continue to leave Desmond’s death as a footnote tucked away in optional files.