The parkour-stabbing simulator you remember from 2007 now wants you to grind for gear drops and manage skill trees. When did that happen?
Somewhere between Ezio's retirement and Bayek's origin story, Assassin's Creed underwent a transformation so gradual that many players didn't notice until it was already complete. The franchise that once defined a generation of stealth-action games has become something fundamentally different, not necessarily worse, but undeniably unrecognizable from its original vision. This metamorphosis reveals something fascinating about modern AAA development: how a series can abandon its core identity while retaining its brand recognition, and how players adapt to changes they never explicitly agreed to.
The Origins of Everything (and Nothing)
2017's Assassin's Creed Origins serves as the franchise's most significant inflection point, though not for the reasons Ubisoft might claim. Yes, it explored the formation of the Hidden Ones, but more importantly, it marked the moment when Assassin's Creed stopped being a stealth game with RPG elements and became an RPG that remembered it used to involve assassinations.
The changes were comprehensive. Gone was the binary detection system where you were either hidden or exposed. In its place: enemy levels, damage numbers floating above heads, and the bizarre reality that your assassination blade might not actually assassinate someone if their level was too high. The hidden blade—the series' most iconic tool and philosophical symbol—became a stat-dependent weapon that could fail at its singular purpose. It's difficult to overstate how conceptually jarring this shift was. Imagine if the next Mario game introduced a jump meter that depleted based on how many Goombas you'd stomped, and you'll understand the cognitive dissonance.
Origins introduced loot tiers, ability trees, and gear management systems lifted wholesale from Destiny and The Witcher 3. Social stealth, the series' original mechanical identity, became vestigial. Why blend into a crowd when you can charge into a fortress, tank arrows, and heal mid-combat? The game actively discouraged the playstyle it had once been built around.
Burying the War in the Noise
The Assassin-Templar conflict, once the ideological spine of the franchise, became background radiation in the modern trilogy. Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla are each massive games—100-plus hour experiences—yet the philosophical war between freedom and control receives less screen time than gear upgrade tutorials.
Assassin's Creed Odyssey took this to its logical extreme by setting the game before the Assassins even existed, reducing the conflict to easter eggs and dlc footnotes. You play as a mercenary with tangential connections to ancient Isu artifacts, pursuing a family drama that could exist in any historical RPG. The game is perfectly competent on its own terms, but it's Assassin's Creed in name only—a historical action RPG wearing the franchise's branding like a costume.
Assassin's Creed Valhalla continued this trend, making the Hidden Ones a minor faction you occasionally assist between Viking raids. The game wants you to build settlements, manage your clan, and conquer England. The Assassin's Bureau is just another building in your village, competing for attention with the fishing hut and the tattoo parlor.
This wasn't narrative evolution, it was narrative abandonment. The series stopped asking interesting questions about the tension between individual liberty and collective security because those questions don't fit comfortably into 100-hour open worlds designed around engagement metrics and player retention.
The Desmond-Shaped Hole
Nothing symbolizes Assassin's Creed's identity crisis more than its treatment of Desmond Miles. The modern-day storyline was always divisive, but it provided narrative structure and thematic purpose. Reliving ancestor memories meant something because Desmond was training for a specific confrontation, and because the past and present were in direct conversation.
After Desmond's unceremonious exit in Assassin's Creed III, the modern-day segments became apologetic interruptions. The series has cycled through nameless researchers, first-person player avatars, and Layla Hassan—a protagonist introduced without fanfare and concluded without impact. The modern storyline went from the reason you were experiencing history to an obstacle preventing you from getting back to the content you actually purchased.
This decision severed the franchise's connection to its original premise. Assassin's Creed was conceived as science fiction using history as its canvas. The Animus, genetic memory, and the Isu civilization weren't window dressing—they were the conceptual foundation. By marginalizing this framework, Ubisoft transformed the series into historical tourism with light fantasy elements, which is fine, but it's not what Assassin's Creed was.
Mirage: The Return That Wasn't
When Ubisoft announced Assassin's Creed Mirage as a return to the franchise's roots, longtime fans felt cautiously optimistic. A focused experience in a dense city, emphasis on stealth and parkour, a protagonist who's actually an Assassin from the beginning—on paper, it sounded like the course correction people had been requesting.
In practice, Mirage felt like a cover band playing Assassin's Creed's greatest hits. The ingredients were there, but the recipe had been forgotten. The parkour was floatier, the stealth less nuanced, the world design less organic. Baghdad was beautiful but felt like a theme park compared to Renaissance Italy or Revolutionary Paris—a setting designed for parkour playgrounds rather than a lived-in city.
More tellingly, Mirage couldn't escape the design philosophies of the RPG trilogy. Ability points, gear upgrades, and skill unlocks remained, just in reduced form. The game was shorter and more focused, but it still operated on the assumption that players needed extrinsic progression systems to stay engaged. The social stealth that defined Assassin's Creed II was present but felt mechanically vestigial, a nostalgic gesture rather than a core system.
Mirage's greatest problem was that it revealed an uncomfortable truth: Ubisoft may no longer know how to make an Assassin's Creed game in the original style, not at a AAA budget with modern expectations. The institutional knowledge, the design philosophy, perhaps even the creative desire—all seem to have moved on.
The Ubisoft Formula Eats Its Own
This transformation didn't happen in isolation. Assassin's Creed became a victim of Ubisoft's successful creation of a proprietary open-world formula—one they've applied to Far Cry, Ghost Recon, Watch Dogs, and every other major franchise they own. Climb towers, reveal map icons, clear checkpoints, collect resources, upgrade gear, repeat.
The formula is effective at generating content and engagement, which is why Ubisoft keeps using it. But it's also creatively homogenizing. When every game follows the same structural template, franchises lose their distinctive identity. Assassin's Creed, which once felt unique in the AAA space, now feels like historical Far Cry.
This is the cannibalization referenced in the title. Assassin's Creed's original identity—focused stealth-action games about ideological conflict explored through historical science fiction—couldn't survive contact with Ubisoft's broader commercial strategy. The franchise was too valuable to abandon but too creatively specific to scale infinitely. So it was transformed into something more flexible, more generic, more compatible with the open-world template that Ubisoft had perfected.
What This Tells Us About AAA Development
Assassin's Creed's evolution illuminates a broader trend in modern game development. Franchises no longer end—they metamorphose. When a specific creative vision becomes commercially inconvenient or difficult to scale, publishers don't retire the brand; they hollow it out and fill it with more commercially viable design philosophies.
This creates a strange dissonance. The name "Assassin's Creed" carries expectations built over multiple games, but the current iterations of the franchise actively work against those expectations. New players encounter the series without the context of what it once was, while longtime fans are left mourning a version that may never return.
The question isn't whether Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla are good games—by many measures, they are. The question is whether they're Assassin's Creed games, and what it means when a franchise can fundamentally change its DNA while keeping the same name on the box.
Perhaps that's the real lesson here. In an industry driven by recognizable IP and risk-averse decision-making, creative identity is negotiable but brand recognition is sacred. Assassin's Creed can be anything now—a Viking epic, a Greek mythology adventure, a Baghdad stealth game—as long as it continues to be Assassin's Creed in name.
The parkour-stabbing simulator from 2007 is gone. In its place is a suite of historical action RPGs that share a name and little else. That transformation happened quietly, incrementally, until one day we looked up and realized we'd been playing something completely different all along.
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