Assassin's Creed: Victory - 10 Missing Unity Features That Must Return

6. Animus/Present Day Sections

For anyone who's been with the franchise since the beginning, the use of glitchy visuals and HUD elements that represent the fact you're inside a simulation are par for the course, but at the opening of Unity there wasn't a thing to indicate you were a new subject accessing an Animus machine. Instead it booted to a menu, and you had to reselect AC: Unity from a tiled grid of other Creed titles - something that to the uninitiated may have thought they'd entered some bizarre DLC back-catalogue. Also, what seemed like a genius idea of addressing the virtual reality aspect by talking to you directly in Black Flag quickly turned into the realisation that this was a move made out of pure desperation, as in Unity the idea of what's happening to the Assassins and Templars in modern day has been cast aside. Bringing back Desmond is impossible now, but you can't deny the idea of using your free-running skills around a city like New York is one mightily enticing prospect, regardless of who you're playing as. The idea of creating duel-timelines where something changed in the past directly effects that of the future looked to be the direction the franchise was heading in across all six previous games, and without any of this it's lost some much-needed identity.