There are 14 mainline Assassin’s Creed games, and where you should start depends entirely on who you ask. Purists will say at the very beginning, or at least with the Ezio trilogy; others might suggest Black Flag as a jumping-on point for the most action-packed affair; and newcomers may urge you to try Origins to get familiar with the RPG elements. With so much history, no era of Assassin’s Creed feels the same, so there’s no ‘right’ answer, just a bunch of confusingly different answers.
Thankfully, after nearly 20 years, Shadows has a pretty good solution — the Animus Hub. It’s basically the Call of Duty launcher, but for Assassin’s Creed, in that you can play the games from a centralised menu without having to look through your library. It makes jumping between eras far easier, but it’s also a perfect extension of the games themselves, making it as though you really are sifting through different memories in an Abstergo VR suite.
Nobody Cares About The Modern Day Story Anymore
What makes the Animus Hub work is that it clearly lists when each game takes place on a vertical timeline, with both the date and a descriptor of the period cutting straight to the jugular of what people care about — the historical setting.
While the series functions somewhat like an anthology, with standalone historical stories, there is a continuous thread from start to finish through the modern-day, as we see the impact of exploring these old memories in the contemporary underground war between Templars and Assassins. But this plotline has been flailing around aimlessly since Desmond Miles died and hasn’t led anywhere of note since 2012 — franchise boss Marc-Alexis Coté even admitted as much.
Ubisoft has since tried to find a new ‘Desmond’, with Layla Hassan leading the charge across three games, but without enough conspiratorial intrigue and far too much focus on the mythology, it quickly fell flat. The Animus Hub understands that failing, and splitting the games by their historical era immediately tells newcomers that it doesn’t matter what order you play the series in because the crux of the story takes place in the past: you can ignore the modern guff altogether. All you need to do is pick a period in history that you find fascinating, whether that’s the Peloponnesian War or the Viking invasion of England, and go from there.
Granted, it’s not perfect. Right now, only the RPG games are included (Origins, Odyssey, Valhalla, Mirage, and Shadows), meaning that the majority of the series is not being represented. It’s especially disjointed given that most look at Mirage as a smaller pseduo-spin-off, bigger than Chronicles and Liberation, but smaller than the ‘true’ Assassin’s Creed games.
However, Ubisoft stresses that “The Hub will continue to evolve” with new features and additional content in the coming months and years, and there is a rumoured Black Flag remake supposedly underway, so I imagine we’ll see some, if not all of the old games added down the line. But even with so many games missing, the Animus Hub is the most intuitive way to break into a series with as much baggage as Assassin’s Creed.
You don’t need to listen to ten different fans argue over which game is the best starting point, because you don’t need a starting point. Pick a period in history and you’re set. It’s never been easier.
