I would like to be able to say Assassin's Creed III is the worst game in the franchise. That was certainly the case back when I played it, when Black Flag was just coming out. However, the series is still around, and it's only gotten worse, losing its identity, becoming greedier and more unfocused. ACIII was simply when the signs began to show.
There are a lot of reasons why ACIII is disliked, one of which is that the story spends a lot of time outside the Animus trying to continue the Desmond plot after the messy ending Revelations left us with, in a very boring, tell-don't-show story that's at its best when it's not happening.
The last time Desmond was an interesting character was, well, never. He used to be the POV character when he was being held by Abstergo, and it worked, but he slowly started to morph into a power fantasy self-insert character. III doubles down on the bullcrap, propping him up to be a messiah, the saviour of humanity or some crap. The writer of ACIII is really desperate to make you think he's a badass, and that makes everything so much worse.
Revelations had introduced the reviled platforming sections that expanded on Desmond's backstory. III takes it a step further: every now and then you're taken away from the Animus (aka the part people buy the games for) to play the Desmond Missions, atrocious levels that put you in control of The Man Himself and task you with retrieving some deus ex machina MacGuffin from the templars.
These missions are capital 'b' Bad. They are home to, far and away, the worst level and environment design in the game, to the point of eliciting a surreal, dream-like feeling. I vividly remember a mission where Desmond arrives in Brazil from a subway station, which has no exit to the surface and leads straight into a crowded... MMA arena? Remember when this series was praised for historically accurate landmarks and realistic environments? I don't recall what city it's supposed to be, but I'm fairly certain such a thing does not exist anywhere in the world.
Rest assured, though, these missions are also a failure of storytelling. Eventually, the game has Desmond single-handedly breaking into Abstergo's headquarters, killing several people in the process, including one of the main antagonists. You know, the places we previously established were highly surveilled and dangerous, from where we needed insider help to escape, and were then hunted to the ends of the Earth when we managed it? The last bastion of the Assassins think to send one guy in there, and he walks in and out like he's visiting a Starbucks.
And that's just ACIII's shtick: it's desperately trying to escalate its own narrative, and in doing so, constantly sabotages not only its own storytelling, but the things previous games established. With what they did to the Abstergo plot, nothing feels like a threat anymore, we're just following the script to the end of the game, a feeling reflected in Connor's story just as much as it is in Desmond's.
In our time in the Animus, we're presented with a brief playable section with a man called Haytham and what I believe was a very well-executed twist. Then, we switch to Ratohnhaké:ton, or rather, Connor, the actual protagonist for the game. He's Haytham's son, born to a tribe of native Americans.
Connor is... bad. The least of his problems being that he's basically an anime protagonist: an orphan who's rather angsty and has nothing special about himself, but has an extraordinary destiny awaiting. He finds someone who's willing to train him and becomes a killing machine. It's pretty lame and unearned, and he pales in comparison to lovable playboy Ezio who preceded him.
But no, the real issue with Connor is how inconsistent he is. He follows the convenience of the plot, even when it doesn't make sense for him as a character. Again, he's a native American, but he spends most of his time fighting the British, for American independence? Why? I can only think it's meant to appeal to the patriotism of the American audience, because, um, the thing about American colonists and Native Americans... well, it didn't end well for the Natives.
More to the point, though, the series used to be about Assassins versus Templars, the freedom fighters and their powerful enemies who were everywhere and nowhere in the same time, holding entire cities in vicegrips, ruling through fear and money. Every event in the games prior was a part of the long story of conflict between the two factions.
Not anymore. Not only did Desmond establish that Templars are actual pushovers, but Templars in this particular setting are like, an squad of five clowns, whose leader openly admits he doesn't give a crap about the conflict with the British crown. Connor just... goes through the motions, like the cardboard cutout of a character he is, and his story eventually comes to an underwhelming conclusion that means nothing. All in all, if you ever cared about the plot of these games, ACIII made sure to kill your interest in the franchise.
You'll notice I didn't mention the gameplay much, though, and that's because... it's alright? There's some bullcrap, like a new version of the Assassin Recruits system that feels even more impersonal and forced than the one in Revelations, and a hunting system that, aside from being somewhat tasteless, means, in practice, that you're likely to get mauled by a bear out of nowhere when doing random sidequests.
There's a lot of good, though, like how the game broke off from the series' traditional control mapping and improved combat controls significantly. Also, The Homestead, ACIII's version of rebuilding Monteriggioni and Rome, has you building a village and seeing it become more alive, which is pretty satisfying. Plus, there's the naval missions, ship battles so fun that they decided to make the sequel revolve around sailing.
Other than that, it's pretty much your standard Assassin's Creed: you roam around, jump between buildings, collect sharp, pointy weapons and get stabby. This is also one of the last normal-ish ACs, as in, the ones without the loathsome Helix Store. And to think my other by gripe with ACIII, aside from the storytelling, was that the multiplayer got monetized.
Assassin's Creed multiplayer began with Brotherhood, and it's really one of the few online modes I spent a considerable time on in my life. For those who are unfamiliar with it: in a match, everyone (up to eight players) is placed randomly on the city map. Each player picks a character, and while only that player (or that team) uses that character, there will be several NPCs walking around with the same model.
Each player receives a contract, which is another player they have to kill, and has a pursuer, another player whose contract is this player. Your objective is to detect and evade your pursuer while singling out the player you're after in the crowds and getting stabby on their faces.
What makes the multiplayer interesting is how it encourages stealth and slow movement. If you kill someone while performing high profile actions, you get less points, and those actions can also expose you to your pursuer. This creates a really tense atmosphere where, instead of being trigger-happy and leaping into action, you had to remain patient and observant at all times.
Online AC, taking after other popular multiplayer games of the time, was progression-based and very grindy -- unlocking the most useful items took a lot of time. In previous games, this was mostly seen as a way to increase playtime and increase perceived value -- an annoying, but harmless aspect of the game.
This all changed when III began to monetize everything -- now, not only was progression a lot more confusing, but there was a perverse incentive for those perks to be locked behind higher levels, and for leveling to take long. This $60 experience, which, mind you, had an online pass (remember those?), was now becoming ever more predatory.
This was a big deal at the time, but it's nothing compared to the franchise post Assassin's Creed: Unity. The series has degenerated into a storefront for microtransactions, its mechanics getting warped into something akin to mobile games, optimized to annoy people into spending money. We're seeing not only microtransactions baked into the single player, but also loot boxes, and cryptotrash looks like it's on the way. It can always get worse.
One more day in the gaming industry, I suppose. We just can't have nice things.
There are a lot of reasons why ACIII is disliked, one of which is that the story spends a lot of time outside the Animus trying to continue the Desmond plot after the messy ending Revelations left us with, in a very boring, tell-don't-show story that's at its best when it's not happening.
The last time Desmond was an interesting character was, well, never. He used to be the POV character when he was being held by Abstergo, and it worked, but he slowly started to morph into a power fantasy self-insert character. III doubles down on the bullcrap, propping him up to be a messiah, the saviour of humanity or some crap. The writer of ACIII is really desperate to make you think he's a badass, and that makes everything so much worse.
Revelations had introduced the reviled platforming sections that expanded on Desmond's backstory. III takes it a step further: every now and then you're taken away from the Animus (aka the part people buy the games for) to play the Desmond Missions, atrocious levels that put you in control of The Man Himself and task you with retrieving some deus ex machina MacGuffin from the templars.
These missions are capital 'b' Bad. They are home to, far and away, the worst level and environment design in the game, to the point of eliciting a surreal, dream-like feeling. I vividly remember a mission where Desmond arrives in Brazil from a subway station, which has no exit to the surface and leads straight into a crowded... MMA arena? Remember when this series was praised for historically accurate landmarks and realistic environments? I don't recall what city it's supposed to be, but I'm fairly certain such a thing does not exist anywhere in the world.
Rest assured, though, these missions are also a failure of storytelling. Eventually, the game has Desmond single-handedly breaking into Abstergo's headquarters, killing several people in the process, including one of the main antagonists. You know, the places we previously established were highly surveilled and dangerous, from where we needed insider help to escape, and were then hunted to the ends of the Earth when we managed it? The last bastion of the Assassins think to send one guy in there, and he walks in and out like he's visiting a Starbucks.
And that's just ACIII's shtick: it's desperately trying to escalate its own narrative, and in doing so, constantly sabotages not only its own storytelling, but the things previous games established. With what they did to the Abstergo plot, nothing feels like a threat anymore, we're just following the script to the end of the game, a feeling reflected in Connor's story just as much as it is in Desmond's.
In our time in the Animus, we're presented with a brief playable section with a man called Haytham and what I believe was a very well-executed twist. Then, we switch to Ratohnhaké:ton, or rather, Connor, the actual protagonist for the game. He's Haytham's son, born to a tribe of native Americans.
Connor is... bad. The least of his problems being that he's basically an anime protagonist: an orphan who's rather angsty and has nothing special about himself, but has an extraordinary destiny awaiting. He finds someone who's willing to train him and becomes a killing machine. It's pretty lame and unearned, and he pales in comparison to lovable playboy Ezio who preceded him.
But no, the real issue with Connor is how inconsistent he is. He follows the convenience of the plot, even when it doesn't make sense for him as a character. Again, he's a native American, but he spends most of his time fighting the British, for American independence? Why? I can only think it's meant to appeal to the patriotism of the American audience, because, um, the thing about American colonists and Native Americans... well, it didn't end well for the Natives.
More to the point, though, the series used to be about Assassins versus Templars, the freedom fighters and their powerful enemies who were everywhere and nowhere in the same time, holding entire cities in vicegrips, ruling through fear and money. Every event in the games prior was a part of the long story of conflict between the two factions.
Not anymore. Not only did Desmond establish that Templars are actual pushovers, but Templars in this particular setting are like, an squad of five clowns, whose leader openly admits he doesn't give a crap about the conflict with the British crown. Connor just... goes through the motions, like the cardboard cutout of a character he is, and his story eventually comes to an underwhelming conclusion that means nothing. All in all, if you ever cared about the plot of these games, ACIII made sure to kill your interest in the franchise.
You'll notice I didn't mention the gameplay much, though, and that's because... it's alright? There's some bullcrap, like a new version of the Assassin Recruits system that feels even more impersonal and forced than the one in Revelations, and a hunting system that, aside from being somewhat tasteless, means, in practice, that you're likely to get mauled by a bear out of nowhere when doing random sidequests.
There's a lot of good, though, like how the game broke off from the series' traditional control mapping and improved combat controls significantly. Also, The Homestead, ACIII's version of rebuilding Monteriggioni and Rome, has you building a village and seeing it become more alive, which is pretty satisfying. Plus, there's the naval missions, ship battles so fun that they decided to make the sequel revolve around sailing.
Other than that, it's pretty much your standard Assassin's Creed: you roam around, jump between buildings, collect sharp, pointy weapons and get stabby. This is also one of the last normal-ish ACs, as in, the ones without the loathsome Helix Store. And to think my other by gripe with ACIII, aside from the storytelling, was that the multiplayer got monetized.
Assassin's Creed multiplayer began with Brotherhood, and it's really one of the few online modes I spent a considerable time on in my life. For those who are unfamiliar with it: in a match, everyone (up to eight players) is placed randomly on the city map. Each player picks a character, and while only that player (or that team) uses that character, there will be several NPCs walking around with the same model.
Each player receives a contract, which is another player they have to kill, and has a pursuer, another player whose contract is this player. Your objective is to detect and evade your pursuer while singling out the player you're after in the crowds and getting stabby on their faces.
What makes the multiplayer interesting is how it encourages stealth and slow movement. If you kill someone while performing high profile actions, you get less points, and those actions can also expose you to your pursuer. This creates a really tense atmosphere where, instead of being trigger-happy and leaping into action, you had to remain patient and observant at all times.
Online AC, taking after other popular multiplayer games of the time, was progression-based and very grindy -- unlocking the most useful items took a lot of time. In previous games, this was mostly seen as a way to increase playtime and increase perceived value -- an annoying, but harmless aspect of the game.
This all changed when III began to monetize everything -- now, not only was progression a lot more confusing, but there was a perverse incentive for those perks to be locked behind higher levels, and for leveling to take long. This $60 experience, which, mind you, had an online pass (remember those?), was now becoming ever more predatory.
This was a big deal at the time, but it's nothing compared to the franchise post Assassin's Creed: Unity. The series has degenerated into a storefront for microtransactions, its mechanics getting warped into something akin to mobile games, optimized to annoy people into spending money. We're seeing not only microtransactions baked into the single player, but also loot boxes, and cryptotrash looks like it's on the way. It can always get worse.
One more day in the gaming industry, I suppose. We just can't have nice things.