No matter one’s personal tastes, Assassin’s Creed is undeniably among the most recognizable gaming franchises, with plenty of standout elements to instantly set itself apart. While only a few fans can flawlessly retell the series’ deep lore, spanning almost two decades and featuring the Assassins vs. Templars rivalry, ancient races and artifacts, and memory manipulation, for many, that’s not even the essence of the franchise. From the signature hidden blade for assassinations and the assassins’ hooded appearance to the emphasis on stealth and parkour mechanics, special vision, and, of course, the leap of faith, Assassin’s Creed games constantly change historical settings, protagonists, and even genres, yet some things remain set in stone.
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Despite certain staples, few entries dare to challenge the most constant rules of the Assassin’s Creed series to broaden the horizons and offer something entirely fresh, dictated by either the setting or the game’s story. Granted, not every long-term fan is fond of the drastic changes that modern Assassin’s Creed games have gone through, but it’s undeniable that such an evolution resulted in the rise of AC popularity, with Valhalla and Odyssey being among the best-selling Ubisoft titles. Today, we’re exploring Assassin’s Creed games that broke the franchise’s own rules for better or worse, but to this day stand as unmatched titles in the long-running series, even if they went against the tide.
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Assassin’s Creed Rogue
More Like Templar’s Creed
On a conceptual level, Assassin’s Creed Rogue might just be the most unique AC game to date. No more hiding in the shadows or public Templar assassinations; the protagonist, Shay Patrick Cormac, defects from the Assassins to become the first playable Templar protagonist in the series history. He actually hunts his former allies to brutally slay them and cripple the entire Assassin Brotherhood. Such an unexpected angle makes Rogue a truly special offering, boldly turning the tables and portraying Assassins and Templars in an entirely different light.
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Not only that, but Assassin’s Creed Rogue is also notable for breaking another series’ rule: no penalties for killing civilians. In any previous game, killing a peaceful NPC results in instant memory desynchronization, explained through an Animus glitch. In AC Rogue, though, given the protagonist’s ruthless nature, players are free to kill civilians with no desync pentaly. If only Assassin’s Creed Rogue were bolder and more memorable as a game to support such an intriguing concept that still remains unique in the whole franchise.
Assassin’s Creed Origins
“Be My Eyes”
While not as recognizable as white hooded robes or hidden blades, the special “assassin” vision has long been a staple in the series. In past games, players could switch their vision to easily identify enemies and targets in crowds or to highlight various points of interest and key items in their surroundings. The feature, however, is absent from almost all the later AC games, as Assassin’s Creed Origins brought some notable changes to how the vision mechanic works.
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AC Origins introduces a bird companion, Senu, who serves to provide eagle vision in the open world. Players are able to switch to the bird’s POV at almost any given moment to scan their surroundings from above, highlight enemies, keys, or anything worth picking up. It’s also a good way to plan approach or escape routes. Origins even introduced enemies that would shoot at Senu, blocking the player’s access to eagle vision until they dealt with those targets. Ever since Assassin’s Creed Origins, the bird companion has become a new staple, also appearing in Odyssey, Valhalla, and Mirage, before AC Shadows brought back the traditional assassin vision for Naoe, with no feathery friends in sight.
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey
Where Did I Put My Hidden Blade?
To this day, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey remains the AC game set in the most ancient historical period: the Ancient Greece of 422 BCE. Given that the Assassin Brotherhood was established around 47 BCE, this makes Assassin’s Creed Odyssey less of an Assassin’s Creed game and more of an open-world action-RPG, unshackled by the franchise’s old rules. The game embraces its nature with pride, offering robust RPG mechanics, options to choose a character at the start, dialogue choices, and more robust leveling, progression, and loot elements than ever before. With all that, some signature AC elements were inevitably lost to time, including the franchise’s sacred icon: the hidden blade.
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Every Assassin’s Creed game has a hidden blade as a staple of playable characters, but not Odyssey. The game, however, still allows for an aggressive stealth playstyle with a focus on assassinations, but instead of a hidden blade, in Odyssey, the protagonist wields the tip of the Spear of Leonidas, a powerful ancient relic with unique abilities. The Spear is used pretty creatively in AC Odyssey, allowing for brutal takedowns and even some OP abilities like teleportation to an enemy. It should be noted that the hidden blade made its appearance in AC Odyssey after all, in the Legacy of the First Blade DLC, but it was left entirely outside the base game, so not every player gets to witness it.
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla
Was Eivor Male Or Female? History Is Silent
For quite some time, Assassin’s Creed games were focused on one protagonist (well, two actually, if we’re considering the modern-day parts), which was tied to the franchise’s overarching lore of reliving the memories of one’s ancestor. Later entries started experimenting with that, retconning the entire process of how the Animus works with memories and changing some long-term rules on the fly. In Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, for instance, players take control of twin protagonists, Evie and Jacob Frye, playing as each in dedicated sections or switching between them in free roam. Later, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey became the first to fully embrace RPG elements, including character selection at the start of the game. Players can play the entire story as Kassandra or Alexios, with the second becoming the antagonist. However, things get even weirder in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
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In AC Valhalla, players can not only choose whether Eivor of the Raven Clan, who is none other than Odin incarnate, is a man or a woman, but cab even change the character’s gender with a single buttonpress at any given moment, depending on how they might feel today. The Animus’s explanation for that is rather vague (through a reconstruction anomaly caused by the mixed DNA of Eivor and Isu DNA from Odin), but it was apparent that Ubisoft was willing to sacrifice some old lore establishments for the sake of flexibility and making Valhalla more modern and approachable.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows
No Faith, No Leap
Even the fierce Viking warrior Eivor, with gender-swap action, wasn’t the most unlikely protagonist in the series so far; Assassin’s Creed Shadows pushed that even further. There are two playable characters in AC Shadows that players can mostly switch between as they like, excluding some mandatory sections for each. While the swift shinobi Naoe represents the assassin side of the game, embodying every quality that AC players have grown used to — such as flexible traversal and a classic emphasis on stealth — Yasuke is an entirely different story. This samurai warrior is a far cry from any previous Assassin’s Creed character, making Eivor look like an exemplary Assassin by comparison.
Yasuke in AC Shadows plays like no other character in the series to date, for better or worse. In combat, this samurai is pretty much unstoppable, allowing players to push the action part to new heights. However, while shining in battle, Yasuke has some severe limitations: aside from his hate for Templars, he’s not an Assassin and has little to do with the Creed. Yasuke’s movement in the world is very limited. He can’t parkour like every AC character before him, which prevents him from reaching rooftops and high ground in the world, requiring players to switch to Naoe instead. On top of that, Yasuke can’t even perform the signature leap of faith, instead simply falling from high points like a sack of potatoes while swearing in the process — something players haven’t seen in the series before.
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