Assassins Creed was one of my Favourite franchises but I stopped buying them after Assassins Creed 3. My problem with them is not that it’s repetitive or stale, it’s that they try to innovate and it just detracts from the core gameplay. The games have always put a lot of emphasis on the Story and the Characters (which is probably why they keep shoving the present day shit into every game, despite the fact I’ve never met anyone that likes that aspect of the games). Which is different in itself, a lot of games don’t give a shit about that aspect which is fine when you want something to just fuck around in but it offers a nice change of pace when a game does put some time and effort into making likeable characters and an enjoyable story. The problem with 3 there in was that the main character’s only personality trait was being an unlikeable asshole, and they might as well not bothered with the story at all given how forgettable it was. In terms of gameplay they added new mechanics which only made it more annoying, changed the controls around but didn’t improve the way it handled in anyway and had huge maps with absolutely nothing in them. And one of the worst parts was the whole Ship mechanic, people complain that the gameplay of the Assassins Creed games is repetitive but it is at least fun. The shit with the Ship was even more repetitive with none of the fun. If they’d invested less time in new mechanics and more into the story and characters it could of been an enjoyable game. I didn’t bother with Black Flag until it was free with Xbox Gold, and I got about half way through the story before I just gave up. It was about 70% more shitty boat mechanics and 30% playing as an actual Assassin (except you’re still not an Assassin at the half-way mark, something else that was shitty about AC3). I bought Syndicate because it looked like they did away with a lot of the shit they’d pulled in the last 3 iterations and returned to what made AC popular; a good story and characters, an interesting and immersive setting and just fun killing-lots-of-people-in-brutal-ways type gameplay. And it does a lot of that, but it also has some of the flaws of the previous games still. The whole Horse and Carriage stuff is just garbage, they managed to make something that handles worse than the Boats, with even more annoying controls and then they shoe-horn it into every other mission. And for some reason they put every action you do in the game onto the B button. The amount of times I do the wrong thing while hitting the right button because of some asinine requirement to stand in just the right spot is terrible game design. I’m hoping with a longer development cycle, and having it set in a time period where there isn’t so many things they can try and shove in to make it different, they’ll finally make an AC game comparable to that of the first few.