I kind of miss old Assassin’s Creed

*~~*memories*~~*

As I make my way through Assassin’s Creed Rogue Remastered, I can’t help but notice how Assassin’s Creed Origins has already rewired my brain. I keep trying to crouch like an extra sneaky assassin, but that button doesn’t exist. I find my fingers wandering to the shoulder buttons in combat, but this is the system where you just wait to counter-kill attackers.

It’s sort of staggering how Assassin’s Creed took a year off and changed so many fundamentals of the series. Playing the Origins DLC and Rogue Remastered in quick succession really highlights how different they are. I know this won’t be popular, but I kind of miss the old Assassin’s Creed.

My mom makes the best BLTs and that isn’t much to brag about because a BLT is a stupidly easy sandwich to make. But I’ll be damned if a BLT isn’t the first thing I want to eat every time I go back home. It’s a comfort food, and comfort foods don’t have to make sense to anyone else. If my mom made a BLT for a stranger, that person would probably say “yeah it’s fine, whatever.”

That’s the entirety of Assassin’s Creed for me, right up until Origins. Objectively speaking, yeah, Origins is a better game. Origins is a hip gastropub’s pork belly banh mi with duck fat fries that you wash down with a cask-aged floral IPA. So complex! So many notes and they complement each other so well!

Sometimes I don’t want that, though. Sometimes I just want two pieces of toast with bacon, lettuce, and tomato between them. That’s Assassin’s Creed Rogue for me right now. It’s familiar and it’s comforting and it’s simple. And it’s more palatable knowing that the series is probably never reverting to this exact style.