Board Thread:Assassin's Creed general discussion/@comment-5174994-20150710183750/@comment-4975789-20150714171658

I have also lost interest in the series. Unity, as many have said, was bland and boring with a horrifically underused setting, poorly done characters and a pretty woeful story. But it's not just the story that breaks it, the mechanics are also buggy and don't feel right (sure the fights are challenging, but I don't think they're challenging in the way Ubi wanted them to be).

I think I can attribute my loss of interest in AC to four reasons: the failure of Unity; the failure of Syndicate to really stand out from Unity; brand saturation/lack of innovation; and things done right in other media that really contrast with AC in how good they are compared to AC.

I've already mentioned how Unity was bad and so much has been written about it that there's no point me even explaining any further why Unity was so off-putting. The thing is that Syndicate seems to be heading down the same road - I have been anticipating a Victorian London setting for years, but when Syndicate was revealed, I just felt disappointed. The story seems lacking and to an extent hypocritical (I don't care about controlling street gangs, I want to know how the Templars are shaping industrial technology and politics to fit their will. Also, the Templars are controlling the street gangs to control the masses - ok, that makes sense; but the Assassins now want to take control of the street gangs from the Templars to be heads of the street gangs themselves, in order to free the masses? What?). The grappling hook just seems to defeat the whole point of parkour, although it does seem useful in crossing the wide streets by rooftop. And the carriages just seem thrown in as a feature so that Ubi can advertise something (I would say the same of Evie, except she only has a single minute-long trailer to her name, which is even less publicity than the carriages). The fighting looks like no improvement on Unity's buggy mess, and may be worse (I know all we have seen is Alpha footage but even so, the number of animation repetitions is such a bore).

Furthermore, since Desmond's death, Ubi seem to have given up on what was my favourite aspect of the series - the historical conspiracies and how they tie in to the modern story. The glyphs of AC2 and rifts of Brotherhood were some of my favourite things in the whole franchise, but since then there has been very little like them (although Black Flag and Rogue had some amount of historical conspiracy through the mainframe hacking). In Unity the modern day was practically non-existant. Add to this the fact that they've said practically nothing about the modern day of Syndicate and you can see why I'm pessimistic on this front.

Finally, since reading all of the Song of Ice and Fire books and playing The Witcher 3, I have seen incredible levels of storytelling and, in the case of The Witcher, incredibly well-crafted game mechanics. Unity pales into comparison, both story-wise and gameplay-wise. Black Flag and AC3 were again lacking in story, which used to be one of the main draws for me to the franchise. Syndicate looks to be continuing this trend, as I have already discussed, and so overall nothing about it really stands out to me when compared to other ACs, and especially when compared to other games or other entertainment. Ubi have really given me nothing to get excited about, which is terribly sad considering that AC was once my favourite entertainment franchise, let alone game franchise. The saddest thing is that they can inovate and create excitement and good entertainment experiences, as Black Flag showed after the disappointment of AC3; Ubi just don't seem willing to do this though.

TL;DR: Aside from Black Flag and to an extent Rogue, AC has been on a downward slope since Revelations, and from what Ubi have shown of Syndicate, I don't expect this trend to stop. Especially when compared to other games and entertainment, AC just doesn't stand out any more, and unless Syndicate somehow pulls it out of the bag and draws widepsread acclaim, I may stop following the series altogether after this year.