proto review: assasins creed the series

OK so way late but here's my attempt at talking about games, I settled on assassins creed three since it was a game I finished fairly recently and has actually given me a lot I feel I could talk about.  now when I started writing this down it started becoming pretty big and I know from my analytics that people tend to shy away from my longer posts, but since one of my goals of this series is to try and get into deep discussions about games I didn't really want to cut it down too much so I'm taking a page out of Shamus's book and breaking it up into different pieces, in the future I might look into turning this into some sort of video to make it more assessable (and to save you from my poor writing).  this first part will be my thoughts and experience with the series as a whole and I'll start giving my thoughts on assassins creed 3 specifically next time.  (don't worry no spoilers yet)

the Series

I played the first assassins creed game and it sucked me in instantly,  it had gorgeous visuals, the Pakour elements were still fairly new in gaming and it was the first time I remember it being used in an open world environment. many of the assassinations had a number of ways you could approach your target and make the kill,  and even when there was only one path it didn't feel like the game was railroading you, it simply felt like the target himself was difficult to get close to so it was very organic.  But the absolute best part was the conflict between the templars and the assassins,  it wasn't a traditional good guy and bad guy dynamic.  the two sides were at war, and between the two I would throw my hat in with the assassins, but the templars had a solid case and were fighting for peace, many of the assassination targets (though not all) seemed like good people that I regretted having to kill.

the game wasn't perfect and it's biggest flaw was it's incredibly repetitive nature, before each assassination you had to gather info on your target and there were only a handful of mission types, many of them were immersive, but ultimately not exciting, and you would have to repeat these missions a dozen or so times.  for the sequel ubisoft decided to fix that problem and assassins creed two was stuffed with extra's and different activities and each successive sequel seems to add more. this Ironically has become one of the series biggest flaws as many of the elements they added had little to do with the core engagement and game play of the franchise.  Meanwhile assassinations were becoming more linear to emphasis more "cinematic" moments.  But worst of all in assassins creed 2 templars devolved into bad guys about as complex as those you'd find in a Saturday morning cartoon show, this however seemed to be something Ubisoft noticed as in subsequent games the Templars have been slowly re-gaining some aspects of the previously complex nature.