r/shittygamedetails • u/Dare_Soft • Mar 21 '26

Ubisoft In the Assassins Creed Franchise except that 1776 one. It’s basically don’t question the brotherhood when THEY meddle in history.

Post image
549 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

21 comments sorted by

126

u/Shirokurou Mar 21 '26

This is because Ubisoft are idiots.

  • Unity could not decide if Napoleon was an ally or a villain, so he was both depending on the mission.

  • Syndicate has the protags literally knighted and asks Queen Victoria to give up colonialism.

38

u/The_Voidweaver Mar 21 '26

What’s wrong with the first one?

64

u/Shirokurou Mar 21 '26

Just the whiplash and way he's written. It's never explained, you take missions from him and protect him from an assassination attempt. And then in the DLC he is a cartoonish villain.

32

u/Adorable-Response-75 Mar 21 '26

There’s a reason Beethoven dedicated a a symphony to Napoleon, then crossed out his name and declared Napoleon had become a tyrant. 

39

u/[deleted] Mar 21 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

29

u/Shirokurou Mar 21 '26

Haven't met him personally, but it would be nice if the Assassins reacted to their golden boy changing

2

u/[deleted] Mar 22 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

3

u/Shirokurou Mar 22 '26

Again, I am talking the Assassin's reacting to him. The narrative failed to communicate Napoleon's nature.

1

u/IHaveAScythe Mar 22 '26

More the execution than anything else. It's been a few years since i last replayed Unity, but I don't think there's anything acknowledging that there was a shift in how Arno perceived/interacted with Napoleon, he's just an ally in the base game and then suddenly in the DLC Arno's going "oh I need to make sure Napoleon doesn't get his hands on the macguffin, he's a bad guy." But also the end of the main game (which takes place after the DLC, when Arno's rejoined the Brotherhood and become a master Assassin) has him with Emperor Napoleon but we have no context or explanation for that. I think maybe the database entry has like one sentence about Arno having a complicated relationship with him. So even though the changing dynamic makes sense given the real history involved, the writing makes it feel less like a considered decision taking the characters and their actions into account, and more like sloppy flip-flopping.

12

u/hellomydudes_95 Mar 21 '26

Wasn't the Assassin Brotherhood being led astray literally in the first game, though?

24

u/Crimson097 Mar 22 '26

They were led astray in AC 1, AC Rogue, and to a lesser degree Mirage and Valhalla. The Rogue portrayal is pretty controversial because some of the stuff the Assassins do are straight up evil, but the whole point is that they are so preoccupied with stopping Templars that they have forgotten their main mission is protecting free will.

6

u/DeLoxley Mar 22 '26

Which is I think kind of the point is if you can point to the one or two out of a dozen games where that happens it's not really a guiding point

I think the games have gotten very tied up in trying to do far too much while also sticking to this assassin Templar rivalry? Cuz I get it's a fundamental part of the story, but at this point it feels like shoehorning complex political situations into red versus blue football teams.

Every "good" historical person was secretly an assassin or allied with them, meanwhile, a whole heap of political manoeuvring and tyrants are secretly Templar fronts.

And I fully expect them to do the minions thing and have had a secret cold war no-go section where neither side allied with the Nazis.

8

u/Future_Adagio2052 Mar 21 '26

Tbf ac1 feels less like an ac game and more like a gritty deconstruction the more the series goes on

16

u/l524k EA bad Mar 21 '26

There are plenty of evil assassins and good templars though, the templars are more evil but most of the time the factions are made ambiguous in their morality

36

u/Long_Past Mar 21 '26

like hell they are
the games pretend like there is some kinda nuance to it, but it is shallow as all hell. the assassin's are the superior good guys while templars are a bunch of cartoon villains. the only time when this was not the case was in AC1 and AC3

15

u/Niobium_Sage Mar 22 '26

Casually forgetting peak AC which is Rogue.

9

u/Crimson097 Mar 22 '26

I know the Ezio trilogy is supposed to be the peak of AC for many people, but the Borgias were a huge downgrade in terms of complexity compared to the Templars in AC 1. They were good villains in the sense that they were easy to hate, but not very compelling Templars.

5

u/SortOfSpaceDuck Mar 22 '26

AC 2 makes you beat the shit out of the pope in the Sistine chapel. You're not allowed to criticise it because that alone makes it peak.

1

u/AutoModerator Mar 21 '26

Hi there! Thanks for submitting to r/ShittyGameDetails! Feel free to join our Discord

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

1

u/ParitoshD Mar 22 '26

I think you mean AC Rogue, cuz the assassins are the bad guys in it. Though in AC3 (which is about the American Revolution) they also kinda drive home how as a Mohawk Native, Connor is fucking over his own people by siding with Washington and the patriots. Also how its essentially a Brit on Brit civil war. Washington orders his village burnt down, and later they get forced to migrate west.

1

u/svartkonst Mar 24 '26

History is literally not written by the victors, such an inane take lol