Thread by @AliceAvizandum

I’m pretty cold on the forthcoming Assassin’s Creed as well, because it sounds like one of those second-string smaller games that’s going to strip a bunch of stuff out - and yes, we all want shorter games made by people who work less, and the big releases *were* very bloated,

But you can’t train me to the tune of like 300 hours that an Assassin’s Creed game is a big sprawling stupid RPG now and then expect me not to be disappointed when you change your mind again

Also the risk of a perennial franchise problem: doing your best settings really dirty in terms of the time and budget. Liberation and Freedom Cry deserved more than second-order releases, the 1914 side bit in Syndicate was more interesting than the main game, etc etc etc etc

Finally going to Baghdad or Moscow or Beijing but it’s always in a comic or a side-scroller or something like this

And it’s all in service of a plot that has become completely nonsensical

I say ‘become,’ it was always stupid, but the first couple of games were able to preserve a lot of mystery by just not telling you everything all the time and it was genuinely pretty effective I thought. Felt like you were uncovering secrets!

Anyway this new one Mirage is an interim release before they do Infinite, another run at ‘what if we just use one game system as a platform and release new content on it,’ which IO tried with Hitman to mixed success

You could see the germ of this idea with Unity’s faux mission select screen, which typified the problem in that most of the ones you couldn’t select sounded more interesting than the one it forced you to