One of the dangers of having long-running gaming franchises is that if they aren’t set up in a way that allows developers or publishers to grow them in meaningful ways, they’re going to slowly fall apart. We’ve seen that with many series over recent years, including ones featuring legendary characters like Master Chief. In the case of Ubisoft, its long-running franchise, Assassin’s Creed, was the thing that went from launching them to the forefront of modern gaming in certain respects to being the thing that they were cranking out without much thought of care of quality, almost ruining the franchise they made.
Everything came to a head when they created Assassin’s Creed Origins, starring then-23-year-old Abubakar Salim, who played Bayek in the game and helped reveal the true origins of the Brotherhood of Assassins. Looking back, it’s easy to see why the game was so successful and how it influenced the titles that came after it. However, for Salim, as he noted in a tweet, the timing of the project, mixed with the bombing of the live-action movie, led to him thinking that he was about to be the final nail in this franchise’s coffin:
For the record, he wasn’t wrong about the movie. It did its best to make people care about the convoluted and time-defying storyline, but it didn’t feel truly like the game franchise. It was one of many Hollywood attempts to “capture the gaming youth’s attention” by doing renditions of their favorite gaming series. It didn’t work, obviously. Thankfully, the game did work, and it helped resurrect the series. Plus, Bayek remains one of the best characters in the series in fans’ minds, so that’s also a plus.
The irony here is two-fold. First, while Salim is fine looking back at his performance as Bayek and see the positives in it now, he’s also one who has commented fairly about the state of video games. He noted in another tweet that companies are focusing on making money versus making games that people want. That’s why they keep trying to make live-service titles instead of meaningful single-player experiences, like the one he partook in.
That’s where we get to the second irony because Ubisoft has done that many times over in just this last year. They’ve rushed out titles that weren’t ready for launch or were as average as possible, and then they were mad when people didn’t buy them. They even delayed its biggest title of 2024 because the team pleaded with the higher-ups to give them more time to adjust and polish it. That says a lot.
