Assassin’s Creed is 15 years old this week. I can scarcely believe it. I could swear on a stack of bibles that it’s a “new” series, in the same way that my kids will always be “little”, or that The Rock will always be “from the wrestling”. And what a 15 years it’s been: in that time, gaming has absolutely exploded, transitioning full from being a sort of silly hobby for weans and saddos to a mainstream phenomenon that (yes, alright, sorry, I’m going to say the thing) makes tonnes more money (ugh, let’s just get it over with) than any other entertainment medium (sigh, sorry). With Valhalla being set a few hundred years before the original game in the timeline, and next year’s Mirage spin-off being designed as a sort-of tribute to Altair’s groundbreaking adventure, it seems like the perfect time to revisit the crusades for a reminder just how fully-formed the series was when it arrived: it’s often said that the series didn’t properly get going until Ezio showed up in the sequel two years later, but as I’ve argued in the video above, AC2 successfully built on sturdy foundations which were set by the incredible creativity of the first game. If you’re lucky enough to have an Xbox Series X, you can enjoy the original 360 version running in glorious 4K at (an ever so slightly choppy) 60fps, as it was one of a privileged few to enjoy a double-whammy of benefits from the Xbox backwards compatibility program. If you have a PC, of course, you can get the Director’s Cut on Steam and run it at any resolution you like. Probably. Dunno. Depends. PCs are fiddly. Stop reading this, just watch the video, I spent a week on it.
