Readers tear into the flawed morality of the Assassin’s Creed
A Creed To Kill By
In a spiritual sequel to his Assassin’s Creed Syndicate review, Patrick Lee checked out the game’s first major expansion, which has its stars crossing paths with Jack The Ripper. What he found was a piece of downloadable content that unintentionally exposed the questionable morality that bubbles beneath the series’ surface and, while occasionally bursting to the forefront, is usually ignored. Down in the comments, Beema took issue with the Assassins’ virtues, as well as the series’ disregard for historical accuracy:
The morality of Assassin’s Creed games has always been a huge load of shit, especially when you learn how much they’ve falsified world history. Part of my growing distaste for the series was directly tied to how they always portrayed these mass-murdering vigilantes as righteous and just, despite never actually bothering to illustrate the benefits of their actions. Plus, you have a massive budget and a giant team working on perfecting centuries-old architecture—and you couldn’t spend a little bit of time fact checking stuff in a history book?
But AncientShenanigan points out that the series often explains away the creative license it often takes with silly things like “historical facts”:
To be fair, the historical falsification is usually a Templar tactic (or is portrayed as such). As to the greater morality, I think the only games to really get into that was AC2, which included Codexes from Altair (star of the original game) where he reflected on why the Creed alone didn’t seem to change anything or make anything better for the people the Brotherhood tries to save. All Altair manages to conclude is that, while education and tolerance is well and good, evil people ought to die, which he admits is no conclusion at all.
What strikes me more than anything—and I say this as an AC fan—is just how staggeringly incompetent the Assassins must be to constantly be on the verge of losing the war against the Templars for 900 straight years. You guys need to start doing something different, because apparently tactics haven’t changed since Altair decided that the Assassin’s had to go underground in the year 1200.
And Bakken Hood appreciated the way one of the series’ most beloved entries incorporated historical inaccuracies into its setting:
I enjoyed Black Flag’s take on its historical inaccuracies. The in-game journal, with its entries on the churches you can climb and people you can stab and whales you can also stab, presented the game’s “historical” content (a simulation within a simulation, as you’ll recall) as an imperfect simulacrum, designed by Abstergo’s people for coolness rather than realism. It freely admitted that some of the buildings were crumbling/not yet built as of the game’s alleged timeframe, that the real-life counterpart of sex object Anne Bonny would have been much younger than her in-game representation, etc. It also features an argument between Abstergo employees about incorporating the non-face-stabbing parts of history, in which someone replies (and this is a direct quote), “STICK TO SHIT THAT SELLS.” So yeah, none of this means that Creed isn’t bullshit. It is, however, sometimes self-aware bullshit.
Smilner points out that Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag also incorporated a look at the morality Patrick wrote about: