And in III, Ubisoft is breaking even more barriers by presenting gamers with Connor, one of our medium's first Native American protagonists. Few series have the ability to make fans postulate over where and when the next installment will take place quite like AC. It deals with history in a way that few games ever had, and has the confidence in its own inherent storytelling to toy with those events. Ubisoft owes a debt of gratitude to those titles that created the stealth genre, while AC simultaneously stands as a pillar of open-world gaming that countless titles have attempted to replicate. In short, it was everything that a sequel should be, and so much more.

It was the first part in one of this generation's great character arcs, and it helped usher in a wealth of systems and mechanics that countless titles would adopt throughout the generation. But its follow-up did more than just build upon the original foundation - it created a world that was richer, deeper, and far more playable in every way imaginable. While an amazing concept that served as a litmus test for what the hardware was capable of, the repetition that existed in the core mission structure created a banal experience. I'll be the one to say it - the original Assassin's Creed was a bit of a mess. Would they be content with simply nicer looking versions of the games that they played throughout the early half of the decade, or would they desire some evolution in design that could only be accomplished using the power of Microsoft's 360 and Sony's PS3? Well, it turned out that in order to succeed in this growing arms race of a console war, games had to tow the line between both in order to gain the footing needed in order to establish itself as a legitimate franchise, which is exactly what Ubisoft's historical series has done. No one was quite sure just how powerful these small boxes were, and likewise, no one could really predict what consumers would want five years down the road. When the Assassin's Creed series launched in the autumn of 2007, developers were still getting their sea legs in regards to the new generation of hardware.

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