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It's time to have the Animus out of Assassin'south Creed

Information technology'southward the vegetables of the Assassin'southward Creed universe

By Updated Oct iii, 2018, three:41pm EDT

Ubisoft Quebec/Ubisoft via Polygon

The question of whether the Animus yet belongs in the Assassinator's Creed serial comes up with the release of each new game, but Assassin's Creed Odyssey makes me even more sure that Ubisoft should take a simple, but obvious, step: Remove the Counterinsurgency from hereafter games completely and pretend information technology never existed.

People play Assassinator'due south Creed games to travel through time and kill a agglomeration of people; the framing device that explains how and why characters in our ain fourth dimension are themselves taking that journey has never felt and so primitive and vestigial.

The lore reason to forget the Animus

I don't want to relitigate the past of the series or guess about the future, but the lore of the franchise itself is a mess, as you'd expect from any popular civilisation holding that stretches across 20 games and 11 years. The easiest way to clean it all up would be to simply cut the line that holds all the games together, and that line is the Animus.

Assassinator'southward Creed is virtually two stories, each of which are moved slightly by each release. There is the boxing between the Assassins and the Templars through history, and that battle can only be relived through the Counterinsurgency, a piece of engineering that is used to permit people re-experience memories that were locked in their Dna. If you wanted to find something from the past, you had to locate an antecedent of the person who knew where it was, and put them in the Animus and so they could experience those memories and share the information with you. Information technology kinda made sense!

In the current games, nevertheless, anyone tin visit any memory, and the reasons for why people are searching the past for these artifacts or knowledge has grown so unnecessarily complicated that yous'll probable have more than fun ignoring that aspect of the series completely.

What happens, and in what society, is set in stone. It'due south literally history.

Which means, conceptually speaking, we're all in the Counterinsurgency when we're playing the game. Everything that happens is the right thing, because the history has already been written. We know we're not in the by, nosotros're in a simulation of the past, and we don't demand that explained a 2d mode past pointing out that we're actually playing another grapheme playing another character living through something that already happened.

Ask yourself this: Were yous ever bothered past the fact you literally weren't Kratos when you played God of War? Would the game accept been stronger if someone was in that location to explain you lot're actually a third person playing Kratos, and that'south how this is all happening? Or are y'all simply aware that video games exist and you're cool with God of War being a video game?

And so if the framing device isn't necessary to explain that people throughout history are trying to impale other people and another grouping is trying to kill them — and the philosophies of both the Assassins and Templars are pretty interesting on their own — yous have to inquire what the modern day segments are bringing to the game narratively.

The reply can exist constitute when you effort to effigy out what the hell is going on in the mod day segments, because it deals with the end of the globe and the First Civilization and the path of legendary items throughout history. It's the simply part of the story that'due south really happening in existent time, except the mod day story is so bogged down in the ridiculous and complicated lore at this betoken that it's impossible for anyone outside of the hardcore fans to follow.

That's a problem when games like Odyssey do and so much to set up what's going on in the historical part of the story, maybe to its detriment, while but assuming yous've already played all the previous Assassinator'due south Creed games so you don't need anything in the present-day laid out for you lot. The historical stories remain well above average, game after game, while players are slowly growing farther and farther away from caring nearly the modern mean solar day stories.

And do you want to know why Ubisoft doesn't merely release a 5-minute video of the modern mean solar day story upwards to this point and so we can all catch up? Considering doing so would evidence what a useless mess information technology has become. The best you tin can practise these days are Wiki articles that, I hope, aren't a joke, and are actually meant to help. They only seem similar nonsense when y'all expect at them through the lens of effective storytelling.

The main selling point of the Counterinsurgency oftentimes seems to be that its story so complicated that you have to study it to even pretend to understand information technology, and that means that, without the Counterinsurgency, all of that meta-narrative is meaningless. The Assassin'southward Creed story, some fence, is the story of the Animus. The Animus is important to united states considering the Animus is important to Assassinator's Creed; which is circular logic based around the Thermian argument more than any actual reason for the Animus to continue to be a thing.

Cutting all the horrendous lore loose would badger the same 10 people who claim to love Desmond Miles in the comments of every story almost how the Animus is bad — even though he died roughly 87 games ago — but it would get in much easier for new players to spring into future games and relish them for what they are: ridiculously detailed worlds in which yous tin impale people throughout time.

That'due south enough of a selling bespeak! The lore is a weight, not a feature.

The gameplay reason for getting rid of the Animus

The bigger reason, and arguably the amend reason, for ditching the Counterinsurgency and the modernistic story stories is that the mod day stories aren't fun.

If y'all want to exist introduced to Alexios or Kassandra, the ii characters you tin play every bit in ancient Hellenic republic, you lot need to play Assassin'due south Creed Odyssey. Fair enough! That's the game Ubisoft wants you to buy and play this week. It's a proficient game! If you want to exist introduced to Layla Hassan, the star of the mod day portion of the story, you need to buy and play Assassin's Creed Origins, a game that came out last year. Or you can read a Wiki article, I judge.

I didn't play much of Origins, so the modern day portion of Odyssey showed me a character I didn't know, and when the start chunk of the game was over and Hassan left the Animus I was stuck wandering around a small room, beingness told to look at my e-mail. So I sat down at a calculator and brought up a few dozen emails, all of which seemed to depict more of the modernistic twenty-four hours story, starring a character whose story has never been told to me, so I just got upwards and went back to the Animus in order to kill more people throughout history in the beauty of ancient Hellenic republic.

Friend, I read enough email about people I don't care nigh in existent life. That shit can get right the frick on out of my video games. Then here'due south the bigger question: When did you play a modern 24-hour interval segment in an Assassin's Creed game that was actually fun?

When your choice is between being a badass historical killer with a variety of lethal means with which to dispatch your enemies through history'due south about cute countrysides or checking your email, why include it at all? Is it surprising that I hopped right back into the Counterinsurgency the moment the game kicked me out of the fun stuff to try to get me to read my emails?

The Animus will never go better until it's destroyed

These modern day characters won't be fun until they let us play agile Assassins or Templars in the secondary story, and they won't be interesting until Ubisoft can notice some mode of simplifying and re-introducing the lore.

Which is a challenge because while the historical aspects of the games can tell a complete story with a commencement, middle and end, the modern twenty-four hour period sections can't ever come to a consummate finish because that would mean the series would cease. So Ubisoft feels trapped betwixt ending the series or laying on fifty-fifty more silly, modern day plot lines and characters.

The technology itself has already been rebooted in the game's world so that anyone tin can utilize information technology, which makes the modern characters themselves interchangeable. The stakes are even lower at present than when the serial began. The just expert selection is the third option, the one Ubisoft doesn't desire to admit exists: Go rid of the Animus, and never bring it upwards once again.

It'south the right thing to do.

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Source: https://www.polygon.com/2018/10/2/17926100/assassins-creed-odyssey-animus

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