I loved the original and the Ezio titles, found the American Revolution one ran a little too much on rails (here you ride with Paul Revere, and here’s an unskippable ghost-train ride of a sequence where you have to shoot some goons; meh), and found the Victorian London one a bit dull. I haven’t yet played Black Flag, but may do so next, given that people rate it, though am not excited by any more recent ones.
Or, the private-equity shell company that bought the name of the original studio from the company that bought out the company that bought them and shut them down 17 years ago.
The economics of consoles made more sense when computer power was expensive, and the choice was an underpowered home computer with so-so graphics and sound or a dedicated game machine optimised for drawing sprites and scrolling the screen responsively, with the extra costs subsidised by the price of (uncopyable) software. When PCs caught up, the consoles started looking internally like x86 PCs with souped-up GPUs (and, of course, draconian amounts of DRM baked in). Now with devices like the Steam Deck (and similar form-factor devices running Windows in game-console mode), there’s no real reason to buy a dedicated game-playing machine.
They made some shitty tap-the-screen game with collectibles for the iPhone maybe 10 years ago, though the less said about it the better. My guess is that it was a fuck-you to Takahashi-san.
You can have reenactment of actual historical events with your character inserted as the hero, or you can have a vivid open world, but not both. AC 3 goes for the former and has the vibe of being embarrassed of being a lowly entertainment product and aspiring to be one of the worthy but dry educational “games” you’d get to play on the school computers.