Assassin’s Creed Historical Inaccuracies From AC 1 to Origins

Last week, we covered one intrepid Redditor’s efforts to play through and analyze every single one of the core Assassin’s Creed games so that they could chronicle the numerous ways in which each game deviated from actual historical records. Now, Redditor VestigiaLlama4 has completed their task, and they’ve gone ahead and created a handy index which allows for easy perusal of all their threads.

It turns out Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag was one of the less egregious examples of historical inaccuracy.

The index (which VestigiaLlama4 was kind enough to share on both the Assassin’s Creed and Bad History subreddits) contains a catalogue of links for each of the separate threads that they created for the core Assassin’s Creed games. Within each thread, readers can see for themselves just how many creative liberties Ubisoft took when developing every major Assassin’s Creed game from the 2007 original up to the most recent release, 2017’s Origins. Overall, VestigiaLlama4’s main goal isn’t necessarily to condemn Ubisoft or be overly critical of the games (they are still fun to play after all), but rather to show that the major historical events and figures portrayed in the game shouldn’t be taken at face value.

In their index thread, VestigiaLlama4 also lists a few common themes that are prevalent throughout the entire Assassin’s Creed series. For example, themes of diversity tend to be much more thoroughly explored in the ‘New World’ era games (Black Flag, Rogue, AC3), though several of the games also tend to draw more inspiration from popular culture rather than historical fact (hence why, for example, Black Flag is often labeled as a “Pirates of the Caribbean” game).

Hopefully, VestigiaLlama4 will turn that same critical eye on Assassin’s Creed Odyssey when it launches next month, since they’ll likely have a lot to say about how the game both portrays the Ancient Greek way of life and also uses clever narrative loops to work in elements of Greek Mythology. Assassin’s Creed Odyssey will arrive on October 5 for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC, but if you want to prepare for its arrival ahead of time, this clever new Amazon Echo Alexa skill can help you do just that.