10 Convoluted Video Game Lores Even The Creators Don't Understand

1. Assassin's Creed

And finally, we have Assassin's Creed, a series which launched under the guise that it was an historical stealth-action game, only for the 2007 original to reveal a shocking and unexpected sci-fi twist.

The series' exploration of "genetic memory" has allowed it to visit disparate time periods all while maintaining a central narrative throughline, even if doing so also presented a considerable continuity challenge to franchise co-creator Patrice Désilets.

Désilets, who served as director on the first and second games, also consulted on the next mainline game Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, though departed Ubisoft before the game was shipped.

As the major creative force behind the franchise, he took all of his ideas with him, and the consensus among fans is that the main series took a major nosedive after the completion of the Ezio trilogy (comprising ACII, Brotherhood, and Revelations).

As it turns out, Désilets had mapped out a wider roadmap for the series' present-day Abstergo storyline, and without him, Ubisoft had little concrete idea of how to follow it up.

Voice actor Nolan North confirmed that the original plan was for series protagonist Desmond Miles (voiced by North) to learn from all the historic assassins and then use those skills to take the fight to Abstergo in the present.

That obviously didn't end up happening, and with Désilets' departure, the role of Desmond was quickly de-emphasised as a revolving door of new creative leads were brought in to offer their own decidedly worse spin on the series.

Without a clear "Godfather" to create a single unified vision across the games, Assassin's Creed had lost its "special sauce," and despite the acclaim the more recent games have received, many core fans remain disappointed at the original storyline being discarded so aggressively.

That's not to forget the sloppy treatment of various key lore concepts, namely "those who came before" - aka the Isu, who were responsible for creating the human race. The result for those still sticking with the series, narratively speaking, is a tangled, undisciplined mess.