'Assassin's Creed,' Please Stop With The Future Story Crap

Back in 2005, Ubisoft presented Assassin's Creed, a game set in the good old '1100s that combined Prince Of Persia's parkour with something even better: making use of parkour to kill crusaders. Ubisoft kept hyping up the game via cool trailers that didn't make mention of the fact that a considerable part of the game takes place in a more futuristic version of present times. Was Ubisoft scared players wouldn't like finding out that they're actually playing as Desmond, a regular 21st-century dude who relives the lives of his ancestors by hacking into the memories contained in his DNA, or worse, Was Ubisoft keeping it from players because they thought that the dumbass reveal would blow everyone's minds?

These segments are completely jarring, always take the story in convoluted and uninspired directions (it's all about an Illuminati god who wants to end mankind), and just aren't fun to play. Desmond learns the moves of a lineage of people who are basically Jedi who f**k and still ends up with no cool skills beyond some basic acrobatics. No player ever praised the current-day segments, so the devs decided to kill off Desmond and put an end to his story – to start off yet another dumb current-day plotline. Though the latest Assassin's Creed titles don't focus so hard on plots with a near Kojima-level of bonkersness, these segments are unwelcome at best.

The good part is that there are various possible solutions to the problem. For starters, you can just set the entire game in the past. Imagine how much cooler it would have been to have experienced the tale of Bayek, the first assassin, feeling as if his part in history was so secret no one else in the world would ever be privy to it.

You could try to balance things out and include a present-day segment so long as you keep it apart from the main plot. Present-day can be done right. In fact, Ubisoft's already doing it very right with the Discovery tour mode. Credit where credit is due, the team deserves serious praise for working so hard on a really cool way of enticing young folk to learn about actual history ... and about, uh, riding a Pegasus.

The third option would be, well, Ubisoft just making a game set entirely in the present day. Those traitors have already made a spinoff where you play as a templar, so why not a separate entry where you get to gauge how many people actually care about that timeline? Hell, go crazy. Set it not in the present but in the future, have us play as a badass Assassin called 3zio who'd normally be able to kill his enemies with laser bees but is forced to hack himself back in time to live as a random bartender until he finds the password of the family's laser beehive.

Top Image: Ubisoft