So I was checking Game of the year list on Wikipedia and noticed that Assassin’s Creed was never Game of the Year.
Not on any list around the world did it reach the top. The first one felt very fresh, but it just did not feel complete. But the 2nd one was just an amazing game and that one got beaten on some lists by Uncharted 2 which is understandable, but also by Batman: Arkham Asylum which is basically inspired by AC.
Maybe they should just ditch the whole Animus plot. I wished that Valhalla and Black Flag were just about being a Viking and a Pirate
Sounds like you’re talking about the Animus as sections where the player isn’t in the historical period rather than what I mean, which is that the historical experience takes place in an in-universe simulation.
I didn’t remember when the game character entered the animus to get the historical experience from Black Flag, Unity and Origins. So I believed the game started and ended with the historical character, in the AC world that means someone was connected to the animus all the time. But from the player’s perspective it is not different from any other game where one plays a historical character.
For me there’s a lot of video gamey ness to the AC series. I don’t find this breaks my immersion because the character I’m playing as is canonically in a simulation.
If the Animus wasn’t there as a framing device there’s a lot of stuff that I would find extremely hard to look past. I think it’s a great way to justify loads of stuff that would otherwise marr the experience.
The game character coming out of the Animus appears a lot up to AC3. There’s sections in AC 4 in the game dev’s offices, I’ve not played Unity, and there’s the stuff with Layla in Origins (incidentally, it’s only just occurred to me that I went to school with someone called Layla Hassan!).
There’s a lot more of it in the Desmond games, including part of AC3 where one gets to do assassin shit in modern times.