Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate - 8 Major Overhauls That Would Save The Franchise

8. Lose The Open-World

Y'know what was awesome about the first game? Planning your assassinations, and then executing on them. The world was built to allow for a series of set-piece kills, but to get into any of the more highly-guarded places, you had to do a string of smaller side missions to collect intel on guard patterns and entry opportunities. It was just enough like Hitman to draw a positive comparison, whilst Ubisoft's landmark animation system allowed for a huge amount of variation in how you took out your prey. I propose the game actually loses the open-world structure - after all, what do you really gain from having such a huge space open to you? - and instead reign in your play-spaces to a city square block or three, like the Hitman games. This way the players would appreciate the art design of the levels themselves (an under-appreciated area where Ubisoft are actually soaring), it'd let us explore every part of your target's routine, perfect an approach and ultimately deliver an assassination, rather than scrambling to shoot someone, sprinting through a crowd or just pulling off a cack-handed kill in the middle of a crowd. Contextually, at the end of the day these guys are meant to be the utmost professional killers in history, but I can't remember the last time I actually felt remotely proficient when it came to doing my in-world job - something giving you a smaller space to explore, learn and masterI would go a big way to remedying.