When Ubisoft first announced Assassin’s Creed Infinity, it felt like an ambitious vision for the series’ live-service future. But over the past console generation, it has pretty much amounted to nothing. It hasn’t been a means to tell shorter, more human stories across a range of different historical periods, nor has it changed how each game looks or plays.

To be perfectly honest, the underrated trio of Assassin’s Creed Chronicles titles did a better job of exploring a different side of the coin than Infinity ever managed to, moving action to a new plain of existence and exploring smaller time periods that mainline games are yet to try and explore. When Mirage came around, there was a naive hope that the series was shifting back to its roots to embrace a more intimate setting and stealth-focused gameplay, although the reality was instead a bitter reminder of how far the series has come and how archaic its earliest entries truly are. With Shadows though, it’s taking another shot at Infinity.

The Animus Hub Is The Home For All Things Assassin’s Creed

If my hands-on preview was any indication, Assassin’s Creed Shadows will pull back on the modern day escapades of Layla Hassan and focus entirely on the historical shenanigans. In the prologue I played, the game begins with you accessing a new computer program known as The Animus Hub, a collection of historical archives operated by Abstergo Industries that is sold to consumers so they can experience epic adventures of their own, while also diving deep into the memories of important figures to uncover the mysteries of the Assassin Order and The Templar.

At first, it seems kosher, but the presence of corrupting visuals on the screen and a robotic voice guiding us from a distance indicates that something nefarious is taking place. Every twenty hours or so, I bet we’ll be pulled back into this interface and fed the next arc of tech babble before returning to the shoes of Yasuke and Naoe. Ubisoft must have learned from years of experience that most players have little interest in the modern-day segments now that Desmond Miles is long dead, and burying that part of the game in convolution for little reason is only going to turn people off. Turning it into a computer menu you can interact with, that also serves an in-universe purpose, is a compromise that offers the next best thing.

This Is The Live-Service Vision Of Assassin’s Creed We’ve Been Expecting

The Animus Hub itself grants you access to four distinct features in the form of Memories, Projects, Exchange, and Vault. Memories is where you will find all the latest games and can jump right into them so long as they’re installed on your console or PC. At least, that’s the assumption I made when scrolling past every modern title from Origins to Shadows. If you click the icon of each game, there are widgets for purchasing the title in its entirety and downloadable content, alongside new updates and reminders of your exact progress. It is not what Infinity was initially pitched as, instead presenting itself as a dedicated launcher.

The idea of a battle pass in Assassin’s Creed feels unnecessary, especially when the premium skins we’re used to seeing in the digital store are already garish and unsightly.

Projects is where the live-service component comes in, with Ubisoft set to release missions known as Anomalies that reward the player with unique rewards once completed. It’s not clear what form these quests will take, but they will be feeding into a battle pass of sorts that will also allow you to craft weapons and armour in the Exchange that’ll immediately become available in the game itself. It doesn’t look like these missions or passes will be available as part of older titles, and it’s not clear if Ubisoft plans to support them. My worry is that these missions we will be asked to complete in order to progress, each battle pass and gain rewards will be nothing but open world filler, which the base game has plenty of anyway.

Memories is where the modern day narrative will call home moving forward, and will now be doled out as part of The Animus Hub instead of being a constant presence in each game. It seems like the menu will unlock over time with new updates and as you progress through the hub’s other components, taking the form of text files, audio logs, and perhaps even videos or comics.

This is Assassin’s Creed Infinity, or at least the only form Ubisoft managed to make work in conjunction with the series’ modern identity. It is held up by open world games already too big for their own good, and now they are being further funnelled into the saturated world of live-service to make us grind for cosmetics.

I understand and appreciate the intention of making The Animus Hub a home for Assassin’s Creed and the means for telling a modern-day story that isn’t awkwardly shoved into games, but when the end goal is clearly to make us grind through battle passes forever, it won’t take long for it to become a tiresome chore.