Assassin's Creed: Syndicate has to be a gamechanger

Assassin's Creed should be a Metal Gear Solid or an Uncharted.

But it's not.

And how could it be? Its meteoric rise following the second and third installments (which were brilliant in their own right) has been marred by cruddy endings and cash grab attempts. It's one of the things that makes me ambivalent, because in the midst of being nostalgic about the dreamy soundtrack and immersion of AC2, I'm immediately reminded of its cheesy cliffhanger ending and how it was completely obvious that Ubisoft wanted to milk their great idea for another seven games. I'm reminded of the hidden blade toys, $100 Desmond hoodies, and microtransactions that offered me new characters and free viewpoints everytime I booted up my PlayStation 3.

Ubisoft is a thinktank. Splinter Cell, Far Cry, Ghost Recon, The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind, and even Watch Dogs had some great ideas behind them. With their upcoming line up between the new Rainbow Six game, For Honor and The Division, its obvious that Ubisoft is accomplished in spite of some disagreeable decisions with their games in the past. When I first picked up Assassin's Creed, it was a super redundant game that saw you do the exact same thing for every level, but there was a glint of hope. The character designs felt original, the hidden blade was a fresh trademark, and this weird sci-fi plot between two separate timelines was enticing to me. Desmond was relatable.

And the end was a shining example of how Assassin's Creed could create those 'wtf?' moments that made you want the next part of the story.

Unfortunately that was short-lived when 2 offered its 'find out on the next episode of DragonBall Z!' styled cliffhanger ending. The game, however, was great in spite of that and Brotherhood brought it even further. Revelations saw people growing tired of Ezio but was a great game in my opinion, and the last of the series. Sure, we got this story-stalling plotline about Ezio having to find the five keys or whatever, but its glimpses into the past with the Altair missions kept me curious. These were the golden days of Assassin's Creed for me, the days when I'd scroll through Ubisoft's forums and skim the hours of research that curious players poured into deciphering what the next game would be about.

Then Assassin's Creed 3 came along.

Metacritic will tell you that Assassin's Creed 3 just added on to an otherwise great series. It'll tell you that the game lived up to the glory of its predecessors. Metacritic is wrong. On PlayStation 3, Assassin's Creed 3 played like a terribly optimized PC game. You had countless glitches and terrible redundancies such as the underground tunnels that you had to explore and connect.. It starred its whiny protagonist, Connor, who lacked the machismo and initiative of his predecessors -- a spitting image of the game and its place in the series. He constantly nagged, he messed things up, and while the most human of AC's heroes, it seemed that Connor was also the most devoid of emotion.

Or at least his voice actor was. Seriously, go back and listen to that side mission dialogue.

This was the point where we began to see a lot of microtransactions online. I feel like Ubisoft would've made us pay a monthly fee for online multiplayer if they could've gotten away with it. Assassin's Creed 4 was the polarizing follow up that saw you get really immersed...if you were into pirates. Otherwise, there was a lot of naval combat with a heavily emphasized RPG element on building the ultimate ship. The game felt so oversaturated with pointless side quests that I honestly said 'screw this' and found myself speeding through the story to finish it. It was the first game in the series where the story failed to truly captivate me and I was left with the perception that this series had truly begun its downhill spiral with the release of Revelations.

This is the point where Metacritic stops revising history. It's the point where not even incidents like these http://www.inquisitr.com/47... can garner an overwhelming positive reception for an otherwise mediocre effort. Assassin's Creed: Unity was released as a standalone game with a plot that did nothing to really push the story forward -- not that 3 or 4 had done similar aside from replacing a few important characters. It felt like everyone had my experience with Assassin's Creed 3 when it came to this game -- from the glitches to the overall dissatisfaction with what it had to offer. I will say though, generating crap tons of in-game cash and buying the best sword in the game to two shot the enemy A.I. and speed-run through the story in a matter of hours?

Priceless.

Unity was ridden with those pesky microtransactions, which locked weapons, armor, and constantly dangled them on your screen like every car you don't care to buy with real life money in Forza. It was symbolic of the new direction Assassin's Creed had taken, pumping out these yearly releases and doing what they've done since they struggled to convincingly extend the story of the earlier iterations -- milking a great idea for a fair bit of coin. I can't consider Assassin's Creed a respectable series because it feels like Ubisoft lacks the passion to give it good games or some of the games a good ending -- they want to prolong it with the Call of Duty syndrome where it indistinguishably holds on to every element of the core gameplay and streamlines a few mechanics to the point of brainless simplicity.

***SPOILERS BELOW***

They've always neglected to take risks with the story, and the few they've taken they've been confused on. Remember when they killed Desmond? What happened afterward? First person silent protagonist for every other modern sequence of the game afterward.

**^SPOILERS ENDED**^

Remember when fans were proposing a modern Assassin's Creed like they gave us a teaser of during 3? One of the developers literally said the game would be too hard to make.

"I doubt we would do a modern day AC. There are just too many mechanics we would have to develop to make it believable ... vehicles, plausible modern cities, a huge array of ranged weapons, etc. The modern day will most likely remain as a "context" for all future games, something to tie them all together," said Assassin's Creed developer Darby McDevitt during an AMA for AC4 ( https://www.reddit.com/r/IA...

If this is your passion, surely you don't stray away from rising to one of the greatest challenges of all. Hell, we could've even seen the developers expand on the model of Watch Dogs for it but no one wanted to bother risking the yearly quota to explore the idea. So now what? Now we have Assassin's Creed: Syndicate, a game that comes as this series stands on the precipice of its success, threatening to plummet into the depths of its own devolution. What Assassin's Creed needs is something that will move this story, something that will shift the focus of the narrative back to matters of relevancy, such as the future of Abstergo and whether or not the Brotherhood can truly stand up to them at their peak.

And how ironic is it that a creator of some of PlayStation's greatest heroes is now in need of one of their own?

It feels as though there's a greater war than that of the Assassins and Templars when it comes to Assassin's Creed, and it seems to be between Ubisoft Montreal and a glass ceiling. I believe that Assassin's Creed can win, though. I believe that this next game can do something -- anything -- to restore interest to a series that has grown stale, whether critics want to be honest about that or not. Syndicate has the potential to push this series (and Ubisoft) forward in a big way, and if all goes well, the series could become a Metal Gear Solid or an Uncharted. It could redeem its legacy.

The question is...

Will it?