'Assassin's Creed' Isn't, And Can Never Be 'Call of Duty'

• Paul Tassi
  The hype train is moving for the next yearly Assassin’s Creed game. And by “moving” I mean inching along at a crawl, desperately hoping people hop on board.

Ubisoft has scheduled a grand reveal event for this Tuesday, which promises to unveil this fall’s Assassin’s Creed: Victory, which very well may be called Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate now, because maybe “Victory” implies some sort of hard ending. Which we know isn’t happening.
Rather, Assassin’s Creed will continue on until we beg it to stop, and the Call of Duty-esque annualization of the series is something that few can get behind, as Erik Kain wrote yesterday. But I wanted to explore a little bit about why COD’s yearly formula is so hard to repeat, and why Assassin’s Creed struggles with generating excitement for annual releases so consistently.
Call of Duty has its formula down cold. There’s a short campaign, about five to six hours, less if you’re flying through it. There’s multiplayer, where most avid fans will sink most of their time. And there’s the “third pillar” of Zombies or Spec Ops or whatever co-op type “challenge” mode the series has in place that year. Every year, the game is broken down into bite-size chunks. Nearly everyone can get through a five hour campaign, and the ease-of-play on normal difficulty modes ensures most people will see the end of it. And then after that, you, the player, have the option of playing as much multiplayer or co-op modes as you like. Play ten matches. Play a thousand. It’s up to you, as since they’re only 5-15 minute chunks, there’s really no limit.
This is in sharp contrast to Assassin’s Creed, a game that really only has one card to play year after year, a 20+ hour campaign that demands your attention for a very, very long stretch of time. The open world gets bigger each and every year, meaning there are not just more missions to complete, but more chests to open, stores to buy, armor and weapons to upgrade, towers to climb, feathers to collect, and so on and so on.
While Assassin’s Creed has the potential to live on forever because of a nearly infinite amount of time periods and locations throughout the world in which it could be set, the actual application of that concept does not lead to a fundamentally different experience year after year. Despite the new maps, the new characters, it’s always roughly the same. You’re tasked with killing a number of targets, all vaguely related to each other and serving some larger “the world is doomed” storyline. You will likely use your Assassin’s Blade to stealth kill 90% of the time, and then whichever sword suits you best once subterfuge fails. Some years counter-kills may be easy. Some years they may be hard. But across seven major console games now, the formula has not really changed.
Part of that is the desire not to mess with success. Part of that is the annualized schedule that doesn’t allow for too much innovation. Part of that may be that Ubisoft is just running out of ideas when it comes to their own series.

Call of Duty is a game that just fits like a glove when you put it on year after year. You slide in, play some games, mess around with the new gear, weapons and killstreaks, and stay around however long you see fit.
But when I think of starting a new Assassin’s Creed game, the only thing that comes to mind lately is exhaustion. Yes, it’s familiar territory as well, but in a way that requires you to go through the same process you’ve repeated six times already. Start with nothing, build up your income, skills and gear, clear out the map of the little icons infecting it at every turn. When you start Assassin’s Creed, you know you have 20+ hours of a campaign ahead of you, and the core gameplay isn’t that engaging to the point where that prospect always sounds fun.
I think most would agree that the best AC game in recent memory was Black Flag, which was barely an Assassin’s Creed game at all, and really a fully-fleshed out pirate simulator. It was the kind of departure that made you feel like to some extent, you were truly playing either an evolution of the series or a new game entirely. Despite similar elements, it was fresh, and an experience I was eager to dive into.
But Assassin’s Creed has struggled with replicating that kind of enthusiasm throughout its lifespan. After the fantastic evolution that was the jump from Assassin’s Creed 1 to 2, the series was content to stay there for two more unneeded installments, Brotherhood and Revelations, neither of which I could finish because they were repeating previously-tread ground to such a degree. (“Oh no, that house blew up with all my gear and money, better start again!”). The same thing happened with last year’s Assassin’s Creed: Unity, which debuted in such a stacked fall season, that 20 hours of AC gameplay locked back into a city seemed terribly dull after sailing the high seas in Black Flag, and many skipped it entirely. Now this year,  with Victory/Syndicate set in Victorian London, the same problem exists, unless there’s somehow going to be some absolutely crazy departure for the series announced Tuesday.
This just isn’t the kind of game you were meant to play year after year. It’s too repetitive, and too long, to replicate the kind of magic that Call of Duty has as an annual franchise. That series has its own problems, sure, but its formula at least lends itself to being annualized like a sports game. Assassin’s Creed doesn’t. It’s the type of game you play through, and then would want to wait two or three years for a new installment that moves things forward in a meaningful way. Slamming players with 25 hour campaigns and maps dotted with thousands of icons every year feels more tiring than exhilarating, and now Ubisoft is starting to creep into possibly doing the same thing with Far Cry as well.
I like spaghetti. It’s actually one of my favorite foods. But if I’m served spaghetti night after night, day after day and eat it until I feel like I’m going to burst, it will quickly go from one of my most desired meals to my least. That’s what’s happening to Assassin’s Creed, and Ubisoft’s desire for a yearly cash cow is outweighing the logical capabilities and enduring appeal of the series itself.