Assassin's Creed: 9 Biggest Franchise Mistakes Ubisoft Will Never Live Down

8. Making The Templars EXACTLY The Same As The Assassins

Speaking of that AC III opening twist, it ultimately did far more harm than good.

Let's backtrack, because in the first game, discovering the assassins and templars were still at war with one another in the present day was a fantastic revelation. Guys like your experimental overseer Warren Vidic having sinister motivations was a great way to encourage fans into picking apart precisely what happened over the years to create these diametrically opposed world views.

What does a modern day templar warrior look like? How do they fight? For everything the assassins can do, how have they evolved to deal the opposing blow at every turn?

Well... the answer came in AC III, as "By copying literally everything about the assassins". Part of that awesome-feeling twist was that the assassin-like Haytham Kenway is actually a templar, meaning the entire templar order actually mimic the same climbing, stabbing and general movements of our heroes.

Why? Who knows.

I can posit this was done to ostensibly delve into how any extremist left or right-leaning political ideology will always lead to ruin, but it had the knock-on effect of ruining any sense of conflict between the two sides. From here on in, the notions of templars and assassins pulling the strings behind the scenes were discarded, and the present day setting was left with nothing to explore.