Assassin’s Creed is media franchise, that started as a videogame series, created by Patrice Désilets, Jade Raymond, and Corey May. It has spawned multiple videogames and a movie. The series depicts a fictional millennia-old struggle between the Assassins, who fight for peace with free will, and the Templars, who desire peace through order and control. The series features historical fiction, science fiction and characters, intertwined with real-world historical events and figures. For the majority of time players control an Assassin in the past history, while they also play as Desmond Miles or an Assassin Initiate in the present day, who hunt down their Templar targets. The franchise centers on a video game franchise published by Ubisoft and developed mainly by its studio Ubisoft Montreal. The genre of the main games in the series is an open-world action-adventure stealth using the game engine Anvil and its more advanced derivatives. The series took inspiration from the novel Alamut by the Slovenian writer Vladimir Bartol, while building upon concepts from the Prince of Persia series.
The series’s eponymous first title was released in 2007, and it has featured eleven main games in total, the most recent being 2018’s Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, while a new game Assassin’s Creed Valhalla has been announced. Main games of Assassin’s Creed are set in an open world and presented from the third-person perspective where the protagonists take down targets using their combat and stealth skills with the exploitation of the environment. Players have freedom to explore the historical settings as they finish main and side quests. Apart from single-player missions, some games also provide competitive and cooperative multiplayer gameplay. A new story and occasional new time period are introduced in each entry, and gameplay elements evolve from the previous one. There are three-story arcs in the series. For the first five main games, the framing story is set in 2012 and features series protagonist Desmond Miles who uses a machine called the Animus and relives the memories of his ancestors. In games up until and including Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, Abstergo employees and Assassin initiates recorded genetic memories using the Helix software, helping the Templars and Assassins find new Pieces of Eden in the modern world. The latest two games, Assassin’s Creed Origins and Assassin’s Creed Odyssey follow ex-Abstergo employee Layla Hassan as she is recruited into the Assassin Order.