Remember those iconic games before 2014? The OG, while dated was really unique for its time, the Ezio Auditore Trilogy that became the standard for the franchise, 3, that was very ambitious (probably too much) with it’s setting and story telling. Even 4, although it was the first time AC escaped from the base of what an assassin’s creed game is supposed to be.
Unity was the very first big misstep and since then the franchise has become unrecognisable, taking gameplay and mechanics from batman games and now went into unnecessarily long, repetitive and bloated RPGs than the real fans of the series couldn’t care less, especially since the core legacy mechanics of parkour and missions were gone. Not only that but they completely threw the modern day story on the trash since Desmond’s death…
AC was one of the last original franchises a triple A company gave us and now is just a Witcher wannabe.
“Oh wth are you talking about, it sells well” sales doesn’t equal quality. The last games are such a step backwards for the series.
They’re churned out year on year with tens or possibly hundreds of hours worth of completely shallow, boring, meaningless busywork gameplay. Forgettable characters, bad voice acting, badly written stories, etc. They’re quantity over quality games these days. Everything feels so generic and formulaic.
For me, killing off Desmond in AC3 was the beginning of the series’ narrative decline. We got one more great game in Black Flag, but after that, it began to go downhill rapidly.
They’re just not fun anymore, and I especially hate the RPG elements they shoehorned into Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla.
That’s just my opinion on the series, feel free to disagree.