The Evolution of Assassin's Creed

"*Nothing is True. Everything is Permitted.*"
―The Creed

## The Gist

History as we know it, spanning all the way back to Ancient Greece, has been shaped by a Brotherhood of hooded figures who specialize in murder. They have waged a centuries long war with a conspiracy group over a collection of conspiracy items of terrifying power left behind by those who lived on this planet before us. Today, their memories are relived through an impossible machine called the Animus, which is utilized by both the Assassins and their enemies to recover the items in the hopes of ending the seemingly never ending war...

## Evolution

### Cutscenes

In the first installment, the cutscenes were consistently interactive, in that that characters were still free to move the character around, as well as being able to determine the camera angle when the opportunity presents itself. All the games afterwards have stuck to more traditional looking cutscenes that fall more in line with the media grammar of film and television.

### HUD

This section might seem irrelevant because you can actually turn off the HUD throughout the game for a more cinematic experience, but it's worth diving into for the way that the HUD relays the story. With that being said, Assassin's Creed has had one of the most inconsistent HUD evolutions in Video Games. The HUDs only actually exist in the Animus' simulations and once a player leaves the Animus and enters the "real world" the HUD will be completely gone. The First game started fairly simplistic, aesthetically consistent, but also compact. The HUD worked given the context of the in game story, as it represented how in sync someone is with the simulation.

The Sequels added more flair and more clutter that persisted until Assassin's Creed III, which introduced a new compact HUD. Assassin's Creed IV subsequently removed the new HUD and basically utilize a more updated version of Assassin's Creed I's HUD. This continued through Unity up until Syndicate, which brought back Assassin's Creed III's HUD in a more updated form. Then Assassin's Creed Origins said screw it and brought in a brand new HUD that has carried over to Odyssey.

However, in the context of the story, this inconsistency happens to make complete and total sense. All this ties back to the Animus, the impossible memory simulation machine. At the beginning of Assassin's Creed II, it is stated that the Animus in the first game was using v1.28 software and that the new Animus would use a more recent software, v2.0. By the time III rolls around, the Animus has been updated again to v3.0, which explains the brand new HUD. However, once IV rolls around, the characters are forced to use an Animus operating on a variation of v1.28 and this Animus use continues throughout Unity. By the point Syndicate rolled around, it was back to using a variation of v3.0 and once Origins came into play, Animus HR-8 was being used.

With that explained, it goes to show that even what appears as an inconsistency in HUD evolution can be used to weave an underlying story throughout a series of games without outright stating it.

## Nature

### Choice

The series offered side missions in every game, giving players the choice of whether or not to proceed with the main story right away. Not to mention there are optional objectives during the main story missions, giving the player some choice in how they proceed. However, Assassin's Creed Odyssey brought in multiple endings and dialogue trees, making the presence of player choice much more pronounced.

## Relevant To

* Anything You Can Do...
* Your Choices Matter