Top 10 Biggest Assassin's Creed Plot Holes
Top 10 “Assassin’s Creed” Plot Holes
Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we’re counting down our picks for the Top 10 “Assassin’s Creed” Plot Holes.
For this list, we’re scouring the extensive lore of the “Assassin’s Creed” franchise to find the many inconsistencies and contradictions.
Which of these plot holes bugged you? Did we miss any? Sound off in the comments!
#10: Mount Taygetos
“Assassin’s Creed Odyssey” (2018)
As human-Isu hybrids descended from the great Spartan King Leonidas, Kassandra and Alexios are more powerful than the average person. But this doesn’t quite explain how they survived being thrown off the top of Mount Taygetos as children. In real life, Mount Taygetus is over 7,800 feet tall; this is over six times taller than the Empire State Building. It’s completely impossible that Leonidas himself would survive this, let alone a small child and an infant. In fact, the very reason they were at the top of the mountain was so that Nikolaos would throw his supposedly cursed child from the peak and kill them. He does just that, and they miraculously survive. The official “Assassin’s Creed” twitter account simply blamed video game logic for the feat.
#9: British Accents
“Assassin’s Creed Unity” (2014)
While the original “Assassin’s Creed” portrayed its Middle Eastern characters with American accents, later games changed this so characters speak English but with a very clear accent from their native country. Even Altaïr was reworked with the correct accent for his “Revelations” flashbacks. However, despite Ubisoft being a French company, and “Unity” being developed by French-Canadians with a cast of many French-Canadian voice actors, none of the characters had French accents: instead, they were all British. The game’s creative director, Alex Amancio, explained that the Animus is translating, and the immersion would be broken if they were to have French accents. Nevertheless, players have said it’s more immersive to play the game with entirely French audio, and the trend of having actors speak English with an accent has continued in all subsequent titles.
#8: Natural Assassins
These are games about a secret Brotherhood of Assassins, who go through robust and brutal training to make them expert fighters and free-runners. So why is it that so many of our main characters have already mastered these skills prior to donning the white robe? Kenway, while not being an assassin for most of the game, would at least be able to fight and climb thanks to his time on the high seas. But Ezio and his brothers are already experts at parkour when the game starts, with very little training required for Ezio to make the leap from scrappy teenager to master assassin – aside from that one late-game jump upgrade.
#7: Eagle Vision
It’s now an established cliché in most open-world games that your character will have an ability to highlight important objects, people, and maybe track animals if that’s a mechanic. “Assassin’s Creed’s” version of this is Eagle Vision, the superpower that handily turns all your enemies red. But the explanation for what Eagle Vision actually is is inconsistent. It’s initially explained as just being a helping hand from the Animus, but eventually morphs into being an ability handed down through generations of assassins, which Desmond manages to access thanks to the “Bleeding Effect.” Is it an innate power of the human-Isu hybrids? Is it just the Animus giving you a HUD? Can Bayek and Kassandra telepathically communicate with their birds? We may never know for sure.
#6: Lucy
“Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood” (2010)
Who could forget the insane cliff-hanger “Brotherhood” left us on, where Desmond is manipulated into stabbing Kristen Bell? Lucy was originally Vidic’s assistant who reveals herself to be an Assassin double-agent in the second game, but then she’s revealed to be a triple agent who was working for the Templars all along. Or, was she? We’re supposed to assume that she was a traitor based on what happened, but the explanation that she was a Templar comes not in a main game, but in a DLC for “Revelations.” On top of that, it was buried in a collectible you could have easily missed even if you did play “Lost Archive.” Players deserved better than this, and it’s not surprising many want to believe Lucy was loyal to the last.
#5: Connor in “Rogue”
“Assassin’s Creed Rogue” (2014)
In a lot of ways, “Assassin’s Creed Rogue” was made to tie-in more closely to “Unity” than the previous games it shared a setting with. We discover Shay Cormac is the man who killed Arno’s father Charles Dorian, after all. But it’s Charles who puts a spanner in the continuity, by saying that Connor has been undoing all of Shay’s work for the Templars in the American Colonies. However, Charles Dorian dies in 1776, only part of the way through the events of “Assassin’s Creed III.” In fact, Connor was most likely locked up in Bridewell Prison at this point in time, and still had years left to help the American Revolutionaries and get rid of Templar influence in the colonies.
#4: The Movie’s Apple of Eden
“Assassin’s Creed” (2016)
Video game movies are almost always terrible, and even the good ones like “Sonic the Hedgehog” or 2018’s “Tomb Raider” are still far below the standards set for movies that aren’t based on games. So it was no surprise when the “Assassin’s Creed” movie turned out to be a complete flop, even if it was led by Michael Fassbender. It turns out that it’s not just difficult to cram a dozen games’ worth of lore into ninety minutes, it’s impossible, which leads to numerous contradictions with the established “AC” canon. The most egregious issue is that there’s now only one Apple of Eden, as opposed to the hundreds of Isu artifacts we know exist in the game world.
#3: Adam & Eve
In the beginning, it seemed like the modern-day storyline would actually go somewhere. While there was some semblance of continuity from the first game to the end of the “Ezio Trilogy,” that was quietly abandoned, and with it the interesting Adam and Eve originating myth. We were led to believe that Adam and Eve were the original assassins who rebelled against tyranny and presumably founded the Brotherhood. However, by the end of “Origins,” we know that’s not true. Human-Isu hybrids are still important – kind of – and powerful, but Bayek and Aya were the true first assassins. Adam and Eve haven’t been mentioned in the lore for years.
#2: The Father of Understanding
What do the Templars believe in? Though their “Odyssey” precursors the Cult of Kosmos seem to believe in some kind of divine being, hints that there’s a religious element to the Templar Order – aside from the real-life Knights Templars being staunch Catholics – existed before this. Namely through their invocation of the “Father of Understanding,” initially believed to be some kind of Templar deity. However, in “Origins” we’re given a clear answer: the “Father of Understanding” was, in fact, Julius Caesar, despite the fact he was being manipulated by the Order of the Ancients. So they were worshipping their own stooge for thousands of years.
#1: The Templars’ Plan
“Assassin’s Creed” (2007)
Most of the time, the Templar Order is simply evil for the sake of being evil, seeking ultimate power and control in contrast to the Assassins’ dedication to free will. And even at the beginning, their motivations were barebones, to say the least. Their entire plan in the first few games is to find the Apple of Eden through Altaïr’s memories and then put it on a satellite to mind control the entire world. They do this to end all wars and “awaken in humans what should have been ours from the moment of our creation,” according to in-game files from “Revelations.” But this storyline is a casualty of the franchise’s many villains. There are simply so many villains in so many different eras that the Templars’ overall motivation is practically non-existent.