10 Gaming Franchises That Suffer From Extreme Over-Complication

3. Assassin's Creed

Assassin's Creed is one of the most polarizing games in recent history. It's beautifully rendered, with flowing animations and a painstaking attention to detail when creating the atmosphere and majesty of its various historical settings. The cut-scenes are wonderfully acted and filled with non-verbal nuance from raised eyebrows to tapping fingers and scowled brows. There are very few games as visually impressive as Assassin's Creed. But it gets into trouble when it comes to the actual game part. Assassin's Creed is a complicated game because it's asking you to accept quite a lot conflicting animation when it comes to interacting and immersing yourself in the game's narrative and mechanics. Let's start with the over-arching narrative. The story of Desmond Miles is a confusing one - featuring secret societies, ancient quasi-alien beings, a rag-tag group of super geniuses and futuristic non-existent technology that allows you to jump into the memories of your ancestors so you can have fun historical adventures...erm, we mean, gain important information that will decide the fate of the universe. With Assassin's Creed IV it seemed like that particular series of events would be pushed to the back-burner and allow new and old players to start fresh, but no. Instead, while Desmond is no longer featured in the game there's a first person, unnamed character who interacts with the previous modern-day Assassins from previous games. This makes Assassin's Creed a phenomenally complicated franchise to dive into if you want to care about the entirety of the plot, and makes the actual main part of the game - the whole action-adventure-stealth thing, feel like a chore to the characters in the present day narrative, especially since in-game the historical events have already happened and would be common knowledge to the people running the animus. Assassin's Creed ALSO suffers from enough gameplay complications to be sent directly to the city morgue. From stealth mechanics that don't feature a stealth button, to strange tailing missions that require you to stay inside a certain radius of your target while not being spotted, to the strange way your character is supposed to be a hero (but is constantly required to kill and maim and brutally murder quite a lot of dudes in the name of 'freedom') Assassin's Creed constantly feels like its at war with the player. The side-content also feels strange and disconnected and overly robust for what the games are trying to accomplish. AC: Brotherhood featured mini-game where you'd be training other Assassins and sending them on missions, part three featured building up your massively grand 'homestead' whilst also somehow being portrayed as an underdog Native American, and while the text-based goods trading caravan mini-game from Assassin's Creed III is so boring and bizarre that you'll just stare at the screen and get horrible flashbacks to Zork. Having all this side content creates a strange experience where you're not sure what to do, and what's worth doing, and generates some confusion about where exactly all the Assassins' resources are coming from - it ruins the game's internal logic and leads the player to having complicated thoughts about plot-holes, how the world you're inhabiting works, and it's why the game just doesn't sit 100 percent right with most gamers.