Assassin's Creed

Assassin's Creed is an action-adventure video game series created by Ubisoft that consists of nine main games and a number of supporting materials. The games have appeared on the PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows, OS X, Nintendo DS, PlayStation Portable, PlayStation Vita, iOS, HP webOS,[1] Android, Nokia Symbian Windows Phone platforms, and Wii U

Premise

The Assassin's Creed games primarily revolve around the rivalry between two ancient secret societies: the Assassins and the Knights Templar, and their indirect relation to an ancient species pre-dating humanity, whose society, along with much of Earth's biosphere, was destroyed by a massive solar storm. The games' real-world chronological setting begins in the year 2012, and features Desmond Miles, a bartender who is a descendant of several lines of prominent Assassins; though raised as an Assassin, he left his nomadic family to seek out a more common lifestyle. He is initially kidnapped by the megacorporation Abstergo Industries, the modern-day face of the Knights Templar, who are aware of Desmond's ancestral lineage. Desmond is forced to use the "Animus", a device that allows him to experience his "ancestral memories". Abstergo is seeking to discover the location of several artifacts, or the "Pieces of Eden", that hold great power, to control mankind and alter its fate, bringing humanity into one single unified group. Desmond also encounters a small team of modern-day Assassins; agreeing to work with them, Desmond uses their version of the Animus (the Animus 2.0) to continue to experience the memories of his ancestors to discover the locations of additional Pieces of Eden so they can be recovered before Abstergo can do so. While experiencing these memories, some of their abilities are genetically leaked into Desmond, known as the Bleeding Effect, giving him some of the Assassin skills of his predecessors at the cost of living with multiple sets of memories and personalities in his mind.

Gameplay

While the game is presented through protagonist Desmond Miles, the bulk of the game is played as Desmond experiences the memories of his ancestors through an advanced device called the Animus. This provides a means of a diegetic interface, showing Desmond's ancestor's health, equipment, goals, and other features as part of the Animus interface. The Animus is based on the player controlling the assassin to maintain the synchronization between Desmond and his ancestor's memories. Performing actions that go against the Assassin's way or dying breaks the synchronization, effectively requiring the player to restart at a previous checkpoint. Furthermore, the player cannot explore outside areas that the assassin has not experienced yet. There are also abnormalities within the Animus from previous users of the device.

While playing as the Assassin characters, the games are generally presented as third-person in an open world, focusing on stealth and free-running. The games use a mission structure to follow the main story, generally assigning the player to complete an assassination of public figureheads or a covert mission. Alternatively, several side missions are available, such as mapping out the expansive cities from a high perch followed by performing a "leap of faith" into a haystack below, collecting treasures hidden across the cities, exploring ruins for relics, building a brotherhood of assassins to perform other tasks, or funding the rebuilding of a city through purchasing and upgrading of shops and other features. At times, the player is in direct control of Desmond, who by nature of the Animus use has learned Assassin techniques through the bleeding effect, as well as their genetic ability of Eagle Vision, which separates friend, foe and assassination targets by illuminating people in different colors. Through the Animus interface, the player can go back to retry any past mission already completed; for example, in Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, the player achieves better synchronization results by performing the mission in a specific manner such as by only killing the mission's target.