I could be wrong, but I feel like Assassin’s Creed was the first game to start this unfortunate trend in mainstream gaming where a publisher will decide to make something a “franchise” before the first game has even been made. It’s why a critical and commercial flop like Homefront is getting a big budget sequel, and the overwhelming feeling towards Watch Dogs was that at least the next game in the franchise would probably be less rubbish. Despite being oft-maligned critically, the original Assassin’s Creed was seemingly planned to be a franchise and later installments did manage to fix many of the problems the first game had.
I quite liked the first Creed even in the face of near-universal scorn, and perhaps that’s why it’s one of the few franchises where I wanted to play the sequels. Despite generally being considered the better game, I was a little disappointed with Assassin’s Creed 2. The main criticism that Creed 1 faced was that it was repetitive: with comparatively small environments and only a handful of assassination missions, much of the game was centred around repeating tasks to gather intelligence about your next target. You’d sit on a bench listening in on people’s conversations, interrogate someone in the know or pay off informants by doing them favours, and you’d do all of these things dozens of times.
Using this information you’d find your target, discover guard patrols and potential escape routes and stitch everything together into one smooth in-and-out assassination. The sequel, alternatively, was so full of potential targets that there was no time for intel, instead relying on visually impressive set-pieces to make up for the lack of intelligent or engaging gameplay. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed Assassin’s Creed 2, but the original game had a tight focus, it knew exactly what it wanted to do and despite crumbling slightly under the weight of overambition it mostly achieved its goals.
The next games of the franchise was Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, which I liked more because despite still being a rollercoaster ride (a game that limits player agency in order to provide a tightly scripted experience) at least the game seemed more self-aware this time. If you’re going to be a rollercoaster, then at least give the player a few fun toys to play with as the scenery flies past. Being able to summon swarms of assassins to take out a particularly annoying guard was just about entertaining enough that the lack of depth never really felt like it made the game boring.
The core gameplay of running up to a dude and stabbing him remained as fun as ever, but with only one year between Creed 2 and Brotherhood I was feeling some shanking fatigue set in. When Assassin’s Creed: Revelations came out I didn’t pick it up for a long time, and when I finally did play it I only got a couple of hours in before stopping. There was nothing wrong with the game, nothing about it that made it less fun than the previous games except that, well, it was doing the same thing. Assassin’s Creed 3 was supposedly a bit of a disappointment, but I’ve heard good things about 4. However I’m almost certainly never going to play those or any new entries in the series.
It was amazing to me how quickly I had gone from really enjoying a core set of mechanics to being utterly sick of them, and this is one of the problems with franchises. Since you don’t want to alienate people who liked the previous games, they almost never are willing to change the core gameplay, so they are stuck with adding more features and making the whole thing bigger and more unwieldy, as happened with Assassin’s Creed 2 versus the original, or change essentially nothing, like with the Modern Warfare series.
This is not a problem unique to games. When I was at university I started reading through all the Discworld novels in order, and despite loving Terry Pratchett’s writing I had to stop after Sourcery, the fifth book. I guess ultimately the solution is just, if you don’t like having the same experiences over and over again then buy different books and buy different games. It’s just a bit of a shame when you’re dumping out a large cross-game narrative that you’re actually quite invested in for reasons other than the narrative itself. Something like Mass Effect kept me interested enough over three games that I never got tired of it, perhaps by making its combat mechanics relatively sedate and unobtrusive, and I got to see the end of my own Shepard’s trilogy.
Maybe that should be the new rule of thumb, if you’re not going to make any significant alterations to the core experience then your story can’t be told over more than three games. Better yet, maybe make a lot more games which are just self contained stories, rather than stretching out the narrative to intentionally try and make players of the first games continue with the series. Otherwise, even the best beginnings will eventually turn into gaming’s equivalent of the Transformers movies.
