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Franchise / Assassin's Creed

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Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.

"We work in the dark, to serve the light. We are Assassins."
— The Assassin's Creed

Assassin's Creed is a Sci-Fi/Historical Fiction Conspiracy Thriller series of third-person stealth-based sandbox action games developed by Ubisoft. The series as a whole pivots on a secret war between two powerful conspiracies that became public during The Crusades: The Templar Order, who wish for mankind to be united in peace under their enlightened control and the Assassin Brotherhood, who believe that Humans Are Flawed and the desire to control other humans is the greatest flaw that humans possess. The succeeding games show that this conflict stretches over the whole of human history, across cultures and continents, and continued in the shadows under new names and labels in the centuries that followed — all the way up to the present day.

Each entry has two separate plots. The first is set in the 21st century, where the battle between the Assassins and Templars has become one largely about information control, media manipulation and occasional cloak-and-dagger black-ops skirmishes. However, this is only the Framing Device; the vast majority of the action is set in the historical plotlines of the mainline installments, which so far include the Third Crusade, the Italian Renaissance, the Italian Wars, the Ottoman Empire, the American Revolution, the Golden Age of Piracy, the Seven Years' War, the French Revolution, Victorian Britain, Ptolemaic Egypt, the Peloponnesian War, the Viking Age and Abbasid Baghdad. The expanded backstory found in the puzzle sections, spinoff games, novels, comics and other supplementary material shows the Assassins and the Templars participating in every conceivable world-historical event, with famous figures in history such as Socrates, Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, Richard the Lionheart, Jeanne d'Arc, Leonardo da Vinci, Niccolò Machiavelli, the Borgias, Tokugawa Ieyasu, Hattori Hanzō, Oda Nobunaga, Nikola Tesla, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Robespierre, Napoléon Bonaparte, Queen Victoria, Josef Stalin, and Adolf Hitler, among many others, being either Assassins, Templars, or non-aligned people supported or opposed by either faction. Indeed, what began as a fairly unusual Wide-Open Sandbox variation of stealth and pioneering Le Parkour traversal system became equally celebrated for its Shown Their Work "historical tourism" of famous cities and its monuments allowing players the experience of having Been There, Shaped History.

This historical fiction is balanced with strong science fiction Magic from Technology elements and the notion of Genetic Memory, whereby a person gains access to the ancestral memories stored in their DNA by reliving them as a VR simulation created by a device called the Animus. The Animus justifies Gameplay and Story Segregation by acting as a HUD, with video game style objectives and devices like a Completion Meter justified as "Synchronization" with a given ancestor's experiences. The events of the Framing Story in each game form the Driving Question of the plot of the historical section, with the Assassins and Templars, using the memories to retrieve information about the location of various pieces of Lost Technology left behind by a long extinct, technologically superior Precursor race known as the Isu who defined every religion and mythology.

The saga begins from the perspective of Desmond Miles, a New York bartender who flees from his legacy as an Assassin but gets entangled against his will to explore his Heroic Lineage, which consists of multiple lines of descent from famous Assassins from different corners of the globe. The multiplayer components of the games as well as later entries and the expanded lore show Another Side, Another Story and enlarge the conflict, featuring additional historical figures and the Templar point of view. As noted by its creators at Ubisoft, "history is our playground", and each entry features a great deal of Genre-Busting with its unique open world stealth adventure gameplay adapted to different historical backgrounds.

The franchise used to be released on an annual basis but in recent years, they've shifted towards making each installment bigger and more RPG-esque while offering post-game content. Due to these changes, they've begun to focus on biennial releases.

    open/close all folders 

    Main games 

    Spin-offs 
  • Assassin's Creed (2007) note 
  • Assassin's Creed: Altaïr's Chronicles (2008) note 
  • Assassin's Creed II (2009) note 
  • Assassin's Creed: Bloodlines (2009) note 
  • Assassin's Creed II: Discovery (2009) note 
  • Assassin's Creed II: Multiplayer (2010) note 
  • Assassin's Creed: Project Legacy (2010) note 
  • Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood (2010) note 
  • Assassin's Creed: Revelations (2011) note 
  • Assassin's Creed: Multiplayer Rearmed (2011) note 
  • Assassin's Creed III (2011) note 
  • Assassin's Creed: Pirates (2013) note 
  • Assassin's Creed: Memories (2014) note 
  • Assassin's Creed: Chronicles note 
    • Assassin's Creed Chronicles: China (2015)
    • Assassin's Creed Chronicles: India (2016)
    • Assassin's Creed Chronicles: Russia (2016)
  • Assassin's Creed: Identity (2016) note 
  • Assassin's Creed Unity: Arno's Chronicles (2017)
  • Assassin's Creed: Rebellion (2018) note 
  • Assassin's Creed: Freerunners (2021)
  • Assassin's Creed: Jade (2024) note 

Virtual Reality
  • Assassin's Creed: The VR Experience (2016)
  • Escape the Lost Pyramid (2018) - A VR Escape Room Game set in Assassin's Creed: Origins
  • Assassin's Creed: The Temple of Anubis (2018)
  • Beyond Medusa´s Gate (2019) - A VR Escape Room Game set in Assassin's Creed: Odyssey
  • Assassin's Creed: Nexus VR (2023) - A VR game for the Oculus platform that casts you as Ezio, Connor, and Kassandra.

    Audio Dramas 
  • Assassin's Creed: Gold (2020)
  • Assassin's Creed: Turbulence in the Ming Dynasty (2021)

    Comics 
  • Assassin's Creed (2007) - A 16-page graphic novel that was included in the limited edition of the first game.
  • Assassin's Creed (2007) - A short tie-in webcomic from Penny Arcade
  • Assassin's Creed (Les Deux Royaumes, Titan Comics):
    • Assassin's Creed 1: Desmond (2009)
    • Assassin's Creed 2: Aquilus (2010)
    • Assassin's Creed 3: Accipiter (2011)
    • Assassin's Creed 4: Hawk (2012)
    • Assassin's Creed 5: El Cakr (2013)
    • Assassin's Creed 6: Leila (2014)
  • Assassin's Creed: Subject Four
    • Assassin's Creed: The Fall (2010-2011)
    • Assassin's Creed: The Chain (2012)
  • Assassin's Creed: Brahman (2013)
  • Assassin's Creed (Titan Comics) (2015-2016)
  • Assassin's Creed: Templars (2016-2017) (Titan Comics)
  • Assassin's Creed: FCBD 2016 Edition (2016)
  • Assassin's Creed: Last Descendants – Locus (2016) (Titan Comics)
  • Assassin's Creed: Conspiracies (Les Deux Royaumes, Titan Comics)
    • Assassin's Creed: Conspiracies - Volume 1: Die Glocke (2016)
    • Assassin's Creed: Conspiracies - Volume 2: Project Rainbow (2017)
  • Assassin's Creed: Uprising (2017-2018) (Titan Comics)
  • Assassin's Creed: Reflections (2017) (Titan Comics) - Four-part miniseries
  • Assassin's Creed: Origins (2018) (Titan Comics) - Four-part miniseries
  • Assassin's Creed: Bloodstone (2019)
  • Assassin's Creed Valhalla: Song of Glory (2020)
  • Assassin's Creed: Valhalla (2021)
  • Assassin's Creed: Valhalla: Forgotten Myths (2022)

Manga

  • Assassin's Creed: Awakening (2013-2014)
  • Assassin's Creed: Blade of Shao Jun/Assassin's Creed: China (JP:2019-)
  • Assassin's Creed: Cinders (2021)

Manhua

    Live-Action 

    Animation 

    Literature 
  • Assassin's Creed: Renaissance (2009)
  • Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood (2010)
  • Assassin's Creed: The Secret Crusade (2011)
  • Assassin's Creed: Revelations (2011)
  • Assassin's Creed : Forsaken (2012)
  • Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag (2013)
  • Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag: Blackbeard - The Lost Journal (2014)
  • Assassin's Creed Unity: Abstergo Entertainment - Employee Handbook (2014)
  • Assassin's Creed: Unity (2014)
  • Assassin's Creed: Underworld (2015)
  • Assassin's Creed: Last Descendants trilogy:
    • Assassin's Creed: Last Descendants (2016)
    • Assassin's Creed: Last Descendants - Tomb of the Khan (2016)
    • Assassin's Creed: Last Descendants - Fate of the Gods (2017)
  • Assassin's Creed: Heresy (2016)
  • Assassin's Creed: The Official Movie Novelization (2016)
  • Assassin's Creed: Desert Oath (2017)
  • Assassin's Creed: Odyssey (2018)
  • Untitled Shao Jun trilogy:
    • Assassin's Creed: The Ming Storm (2019)
  • Assassin's Creed: Valhalla - Geirmund's Saga (2020)
  • Assassin's Creed: Fragments trilogy:
    • Assassin's Creed: Fragments - The Blade of Aizu (2021)
    • Assassin's Creed: Fragments - The Highlands' Children (2021)
    • Assassin's Creed: Fragments - The Witches from the Forests (2022)
  • Assassin's Creed: Mr. Men and Little Miss trilogy:
    • Mister Ezio (2021)
    • Little Miss Kassandra (2021)
    • Little Miss Eivor (2021)
  • Assassin's Creed: The Imperial Jade Seal series:
    • Assassin's Creed: Prophecy of the Emperor (2021)
    • Untitled Hongfu Assassin's Creed novel (TBA)
  • Untitled Assassin's Creed: Valhalla novel trilogy
  • Untitled Assassin's Creed Aconyte Books trilogy
    • Assassin's Creed Valhalla: Sword of the White Horse (2022)
  • Assassin's Creed: The Engine of History novel trilogy:

    Tabletop Games 
  • Assassin's Creed: Arena (2014)
  • Assassin's Creed: Monopoly (2014)
    • Monopoly: Assassin's Creed Syndicate (2015)
  • Assassin's Creed: Vendetta (2017)
  • Assassin's Creed: Top Trumps (2018)
  • Risk: Assassin's Creed (2018)
  • Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood of Venice (2021)
  • Assassin's Creed: Valhalla Orlog Dice Game (2021)

    Other 
  • Discover Your Legacy (Facebook App)
  • Assassin's Creed: Recollection (2011) (iOS App)
  • Assassin's Creed: Council (website)
  • Assassin's Creed: Immersive City Tour - L'Armoire de Fer (2021 Augmented Reality game playable in Paris)

This page applies for the series as a whole. Please add any examples from an individual game to their dedicated pages.

The series contains examples of:

    A-D 
  • Aborted Arc:
  • Abusive Precursors: Humans were pets, slaves, created not only to serve Those Who Came Before, but also to increase their power. Because enough people believing something can make it come true, it was possible for Those Who Came Before to strive for god-hood. Juno, with her penchant for calculations, and driven by a desire to avenge her beloved, murdered by humans, has become the Big Bad of the series, following the events at the end of III.
  • Actually Four Mooks: In the first four games, minimap dots may indicate a single soldier or a squad of up to eight soldiers.
  • Action Girl:
    • Lucy Stillman. Not so much in the first game, but she Took a Level in Badass between I and II where she's a kick-ass, high-heel wearing, falcon-punching Action Girl.
    • Rosa, Paola and Teodora also fall into this, the first being part of the Venetian Thieves Guild and more than capable of handling herself even with an arrow in her leg, the latter two being Assassins and performing Leaps of Faith at the end of Memory Block 11. Catarina Sforza also gets in on the trope during the Battle of Forlì expansion.
    • Aveline De Grandpré is a woman of French and African descent from colonial New Orleans and she is a master of stealth by using her slave and aristocrat disguises to blend in perfectly with the crowd.
    • Anne Bonny and Mary Read/"James Kidd", two badass pirate girls per Truth in Television.
    • Shao Jun, a protege of the legendary Ezio Auditore who would become the leader of the Chinese Brotherhood of Assassins.
    • Elise de la Serre is a Templar example since she is regarded as being a better swords(wo)man than Arno Dorian.
    • Evie Frye is the leader of the Rooks gang alongside her brother Jacob and she can kick ass just as much as him.
    • Aya/Amunet, the husband of Bayek and one of the founders of the Hidden Ones, the ancient precursors to the modern Assassin Brotherhood. She's also responsible for the assassination of Julius Caesar alongside his enemies in the Roman Senate and gave Cleopatra a poison to kill herself in the final days of Antony's Civil War.
    • Kassandra the Eagle Bearer is a Spartan misthios (mercenary) and the granddaughter of not just the legendary King Leonidas but she is even related to Pythagoras of all people and she would later go on to live a normal life thanks to taking possession of the Staff of Hermes from her real father until she hands it over to Layla Hassan when she dies.
    • Eivor Varinsdottir is a Scandinavian Viking shieldmaiden from Norway who is not only a badass warrior but she is the reincarnation of Odin, the chief deity of the Norse Isu pantheon.
  • Advanced Ancient Humans: The Isu are not homo sapiens but nevertheless they were an advanced humanoid race who were the creators of highly advanced, futuristic technology and especially humanity.
  • Adventure Archaeologist: In addition to being hitmen and occasional revolutionaries, Assassins spend a lot of time exploring and spelunking ancient architecture seeking lots of old artifacts and Lost Technology, often left behind by previous, long dead fellow Assassins. In Revelations, Ezio's main reason for coming to Constantinople was searching for Altaïr's library, with its keys hidden in various architectural monuments around the city. And in IV: Black Flag, Edward Kenway scours the Caribbean looking for a Precursor site known as the Observatory, mainly perceiving it as something that will make him a fortune. Odyssey has an entire plotline and DLC devoted to the search for Atlantis.
  • All Myths Are True:
    • Every real life mythological pantheon and religion in the franchise can trace their roots back to a long-extinct species known as the Isu, a.k.a The First Civilization and Those Who Came Before. Etruscan and Greco-Roman deities are seen throughout multiple installments of the franchise in the form of the Capitoline Triad not to mention the existence of mythological creatures from Classical Mythology and even the city of Atlantis in Odyssey as well as other gods and goddesses such as the Ancient Egyptians in Origins and the Norse in Valhalla.
    • The Old Testament of The Bible is also more or less true here in the Assassin's Creed universe with Adam and Eve actually being the first humans to not only rebel against the Isu but would lead La Résistance in the War of Unification and its successor conflict. Eden was also a real city created by the First Civilization where their most advanced technology was developed which is why the Pieces of Eden exist in the first place as opposed to just being the utopian garden seen in the Book of Genesis. Additionally, Cain murdering Abel would inspire a cult to follow in his footsteps and his insignia would be adopted by the Templar Order as their emblem.
    • Heck, even the Arthurian Legend rings true in the series with II and the novel Heresy revealing that King Arthur was a Templar, specifically a member of the Order of the Ancients who was betrayed by his loved ones and became disillusioned with the group's goals. Additionally, Arthur's sword Excalibur is a Piece of Eden located within Stonehenge that can be used by Eivor in Valhalla.
  • Alternate History:
    • In Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, audio files reveal that the First Civilization projected multiple alternate futures using their quantum prediction device. DLC content like The Tyranny of King Washington contains explorations of these alternate timelines, which are available through the programming of the Pieces of Eden and which contributed to Subject 16's insanity.
    • The Assassin's Creed: Odyssey DLC packs Legacy of the First Blade and The Fate Of Atlantis deviate even further from history by revealing that Darius and Pythagoras lived much longer than their real world counterparts.
  • Ambiguously Brown: Desmond has three distinct bloodlines of various ancestral origins, so his character model is intended to be ambiguous enough to have come from any of them.
  • Ancient Conspiracy: Most politicians or people of any prominence for the last three thousand years were Templars, Assassins, or aligned with/supported by one of the two groups. The Templars have rewritten history to conceal this, with near total success. It is the combined outcome of all of these conspiracies and plots that results in our modern society. Then the Abusive Precursors rear their heads as The Man Behind the Man. The Benevolent Precursors, too, but they're not as good at the math, so they're fighting a losing battle on that front.
  • Animal Motif: Birds on the whole for the Assassins. They associate it with flight, freedom of movement and speed, which to them typifies their fast Parkour movements across buildings and mastery of terrain. They also like collecting bird feathers in some eras as particular motifs:
    • Eagles are the most common. Altaïr's cloak has a beak-like hood and slits at the back that resemble tailfeathers, eagles are seen circling View Points, and all of the main story Assassins have a special ability called Eagle Vision. Altaïr, Aveline, Ezio, Haythamnote  and Arno all have names variously derived from the word for "eagle" in Arabic, Greek, French, and Old German.
    • Connor and Edward Kenway, as well as Jacob and Evie Frye don't have bird themed names but the two Kenways are respectively the captain of the Cool Ship — The Aquila, which is Spanish for the Eagle, and the Jackdaw — while the Frye Twins command a street gang called "The Rooks".
    • There's also Shay Patrick Cormac, the Assassin-turned-Templar of Rogue, whose first name Shay means Hawk and whose last name Cormac means Raven. His ship the Morrigan is named after an Irish mythological goddess who would often transform into a crow.
    • Bayek, whose name comes from a hieroglyph for "falcon", and has a pet eagle that assists him. At one point the eagle motif gets a direct nod when an oracle (or One Who Came Before speaking through her) keeps calling him "eagle".
    • The Eagle Bearer (Alexios or Kassandra) full stop. Not only do they have an animal-themed alias but they have a pet eagle known as Ikaros. Additionally their father Nikolaos is a legendary Spartan general whose nickname is "The Wolf of Sparta".
    • Both the Order of the Ancients from Origins and the Cult of Kosmos from Odyssey have a snake as their insignia.
    • Eivor is a member of the Raven Clan and their nickname is "Wolf-Kissed". Not to mention that they have a pet raven named Sýnin.
    • In general, the more traditionalist an Assassin protagonist is, the more likely they are to be associated with eagles, while the ones who flout the rules (Jacob), leave the Brotherhood (Shay), or Aren't In This For Your Revolution (Edward and Eivor) tend to be associated with crows and ravens.
  • Annoying Arrows: Arrows take off a small portion of the health bar of the player character, but are a One-Hit Kill for most enemies. Origins onward has a better balance for this offensive style; Odyssey in particular allows you to make arrows more powerful at the expense of melee damage.
  • The Anti-Nihilist: The Assassin Brotherhood, with their maxim of "Nothing is true; everything is permitted". Rather than being a doctrine or command to do what you want — as Edward Kenway willfully misinterprets it — it is more of an observation, that the truth must be divined by one's self, with guidance and forethought of the potential results.
    Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad: ...laws arise not from divinity, but reason. I understand now that our creed does not commend us to be free — it commends us to be wise.
    Ezio Auditore da Firenze: ...merely an observation of the nature of reality: To say that nothing is true is to realize that the foundations of society are fragile, and that we must be the shepherds of our own civilization. To say that everything is permitted is to understand that we are the architects of our actions, and that we must live with their consequences, whether glorious or tragic.
    Edward James Kenway: It might be that this idea is only the beginning of wisdom, and not its final form.
    Arno Victor Dorian: Not a grant of permission, the creed is a warning. Ideals too easily give way to dogma. Dogma becomes fanaticism.
  • Applied Phlebotinum: The various Pieces of Eden and other Isu/First Civilization technology serves this purpose, with different effects for each of them.
    • Back from the Dead: Some uses of the Shroud of Eden caused this. Additionally, the Ankh was capable of healing the sick, and temporarily resurrecting the dead. It also acted as a recording device, storing the mannerisms of a living person and being able to return those mannerisms to a corpse.
    • Cool Sword: The Swords of Eden seem to be used to give their wielder traits of The Leader and Super-Strength, effectively enforcing Authority Equals Asskicking.
    • Heal Thyself: The Shroud of Eden can heal major defects and injuries, but seems inconsistent in resulting in Back from the Dead.
    • Immune to Bullets: Shards of Eden are rings worn on a finger that are used as man-portable Deflector Shields to this end.
    • Mind-Control Device/People Puppets/Master of Illusion: The Apples and Staves of Eden seem to work this way, with just how they do this varying from user to user. In one case, a shard of a Staff was capable of causing a Healing Factor.
    • Portal to the Past: Crystal Balls act as a limited version of this, allowing people who use them to communicate directly with members of the First Civilization through visions.
    • Psychic Link:
      • The use of Crystal Skulls, with the user of one such skull being able to communicate instantaneously and telepathically with a user of another skull who is holding one as well from vast distances. As shown in Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, this works by the recipient's blood being put into the crystal in the skull's forehead, then that person's image being projected via hologram real-time in front of the wielder, complete with voice.
      • The Shroud also has one with the people who use it, and It Can Think.
    • Video Will: The Prophecy Disk and Memory Seals seem to have been a form of this, showing life from centuries past.
  • Arbitrary Mission Restriction: The series loves the optional objective variant. Since Sequence 2 of Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, every single main-series game and most of the side games have optional objectives for every mission. Some are actual restrictions (like "Don't get into open combat"), while others are merely extra tasks that must be completed during the mission (like "Get five Head Shots on enemies"). Other such conditions include "Assassinate your target with the hidden blade" (as opposed to any other weapon), "Don't touch the water" on missions that take place on or near bodies of water, "Perform three double assassinations," and so on. Completing them results in extra "synchronization" on the mission. Since the Framing Device for the game is that the player is reliving a historical figure's memories, these are loosely justified as being "the way the assassin actually did it". And of course, completing all of the optional objectives is a requirement for 100% Completion. Thankfully, the games from Origins onward have done away with this trope, once more giving players the freedom to accomplish their missions in any way they see fit.
  • Arc Number: 9.
    • Altaïr kills nine men for Al Mualim, Ezio assassinates Savonarola's nine lieutenants during the Bonfire of the Vanities and Brotherhood, Revelations and Syndicate have nine sequences. Jacques de Molay entrusts all the Templar knowledge with 9 men in order to rebuild the Order.
    • 72 in Brotherhood, which is divisible by 9.
    • The average number of main targets to be killed by the Assassins across all the games is also 9.
    • Of the members of the Order of Ancients in Origins, Bayek personally kills 9 in the main game.
    • The Inner Sanctum of the Templar Order always has nine members.
    • The Cult of Kosmos's "inner circle," so to speak, is composed of 9 members; the 7 Sages, Deimos, and the Ghost of Kosmos.
    • The number is emphasized in many ways throughout Valhalla, mostly through its multiple occurrences in Norse mythology.
  • Arc Words: "Nothing is true. Everything is permitted."
  • Aristocrats Are Evil:
    • There's an understated but consistent class angle between the Assassins and the Templars. The Templars tend to be plutocrats and a lot of them come from the high classes of societies through the ages, and in modern times titans of industries with the odd scholar here and there; in contrast the Assassins tend to include artisans, intellectuals, artists, scholars, soldiers, thieves, prostitutes, pirates, hackers, and other types of working class heroes and boast a multicultural set-up with the American Assassins during the 1776 Revolution, led by African-Americans and Native Americans.
    • The major subversion is the Auditore family, who are minor nobility in Florence, though regarded by some as New Money (benefiting from the patronage of Lorenzo de'Medici); their ancestor Domenico Auditore note  insists however that the primary loyalty of the family is to the people and not to "the deceivers". Ezio prizes himself as a Man of the City and believes that the duty of the privileged is to empower those who are less fortunate.
    • Aveline de Grandpré is another subversion, a woman born of privilegenote  but with a complex understanding of her identity that gives her the skills to move among different classes.
    • This is averted with Unity where the Templars co-opt democratic sentiment and class angst to radically erase the aristocracy and Church to ensure the triumph of the middle-class while the Assassins favour a moderate approach of Constitutional Monarchy in other words, a royalist position. The Assassins come from a position of privilege while the Templars are disaffected bureaucrats, underworld types and artisans while the Templars rebel against the older aristocratic Templars (with whom the Assassins had a brief truce).
  • Armor of Invincibility: Starting from Assassin's Creed II, the best armor in the game (as in, unbreakable and with the highest life points, not giving true invincibility) is generally locked behind a gate that requires a number of keys scattered across the gameworld in secret puzzles of some sort.
  • The Artifact:
    • The iconic white robes and hoods on the Assassin uniform, which have become synonymous with their image and are supposedly necessary for their brand of stealth. The only setting in the series where the uniform actually makes sense is the Third Crusade (from Assassin's Creed I); everybody wore long robes because of the desert heat, and the white color and hoods could be easily mistaken for the Muslim monks and clergymen. But it's laughable how the Assassins manage to go unnoticed in all the other settings. Renaissance Italy (Assassin's Creed II) is particularly egregious; not only do Ezio's large weapons, elaborate capes, and designer armor make him a walking circus attraction, but the bright white/red colors, long robes, and hood are the exact opposite of Renaissance era fashion (people favored big fancy hats, baggy coats and trousers, and dark "royal" colors like blood red, purple, and dark green). It's amazing Ezio, Connor (from Assassin's Creed III, Colonial American era), and Edward (Assassin's Creed IV, Golden Age of Piracy) manage to sneak past anyone in their get-ups. But, let's be honest; could you REALLY imagine the Assassins sneaking around, doing their thing without their uniform at this point? The outfits get more appropiate in Unity and Syndicate, and have been abandoned altogether in the modern times, so they might be one in-universe. It is still evoked by Desmond Miles' sweatshirt, which has a hoodie, and many modern Assassins tend to wear hoodies.
    • Zig-Zagged with the Hidden Blade. In the original game, it was so powerful it's mentioned in the gamebreaker page. It slowly lost its importance as new weapons (especially ranged ones) made their debuts. Between Assassin's Creed III and Rogue it was possibly the most useless weapon in the games, as stealth could be performed by other methods, and the majority of melee weapons are way more powerful. It got a bit more attention in Unity, Syndicate, and Origins but with the cost of being a stealth-only weapon. Odyssey didn’t have it at all until the DLC was released (its function fulfilled by the Spear of Leonidas), but the first DLC campaign, appropriately titled Legacy of the First Blade, focuses on the first Hidden Blade ever created.
  • Artificial Stupidity: While each game has its own unique quirks, there has been one consistent (and quite bizarre) AI flaw: in a case of an Anti-Frustration Feature Gone Horribly Right, all enemies are programmed to never hear you move past them if their back is turned, even if you're sprinting full-tilt. This was intended to make navigating the Wide-Open Sandbox less frustrating by minimizing unwanted enemy encounters, but the rule still carries over into restricted areas and self-contained maps, meaning that with a bit of trial-and-error and memorization of guard patrols, you can dash through areas that would normally require careful tactical stealth.
  • Artistic License: This is quite common in the franchise whether it's Rule of Cool, Rule of Drama, or Acceptable Breaks from Reality in regards to how it deals with real world history, though any discrepancies are mostly justified because the Templars are constantly rewriting the past via the Animus.
  • As Long as There Is Evil: Well, the Templars do not think themselves "Evil," but as long as there is human weakness, there will be those who wish to exploit weakness and take power.
  • Assassination Attempt: Every game allows the player to relive dozens of assassinations on historical figures as carried out by members of the fictional Assassin's Brotherhood (or its precursor groups). Targets range from Crusaders like Robert de Sable to American Revolutionaries like Charles Lee.
  • Assimilation Plot: The ultimate goal of the Knights Templar is to create a one-world order where free will is abolished and they get to rule over everyone.
  • Astonishingly Appropriate Appearance:
    • Desmond's hooded sweatshirt. Just picture it with the hood up... which it is in III.
    • Altaïr, Ezio and Desmond all have a virtually identical scar on their lips. Ezio acquires his in the tutorial for the second game.
  • As You Know: From II through to III, each new game opens with an As You Know narration of the events leading up to it. Particularly egregious at the beginning of Revelations, when Subject 16 is lecturing Desmond about the things he did in the past few games.
  • Audible Sharpness: The hidden blade has a very iconic "SCHWING!" sound that plays whenever you assassinate someone with it. By contrast, activating it when nobody is around just makes a slight clicking noise.
  • Aura Vision: "Eagle Vision," a genetic ability shared by all the playable Assassins, allowing them to see people as glowing lights that correspond with the assassin's relation to them. Brotherhood reveals it's a watered-down version of something Those Who Came Before possessed. In Black Flag, James Kidd implies ordinary people can access it with enough effort and training.
  • Awesome, but Impractical: Several of the ancient Assassin traditions, as Altair noted after becoming the Mentor:
    • Having an Assassin's ring finger removed was not only a dead giveaway, but, with minor alterations to the Hidden Blade, not even necessary.
    • Separation or emotional distancing between an Assassin and their parents, presumably to avoid familial issues and distractions, also did little in his eyes, arguing that such bonds could be beneficial.
    • As this video by Skallagrim points out, the Assassin's hoods, while cool-looking, are really detrimental to their field of view. This would make fighting multiple opponents incredibly difficult.
  • Badass Creed:
  • Badass Family:
    • Desmond's ancestors. By the time Desmond is born, the only remnant he has of his mighty ancestry is a penchant for white hoodies (this doesn't last, however), but Desmond's long varied lineage contains several badass families across generations, and Assassin's Creed IV has an internal Abstergo Entertainment e-mail that details just how far-flung his lineage is: through his father he's descended from both the Auditores and the Kenways, while through his mother he's descended from Altaïr and Maria Thorpe as well as seemingly Japanese, French, and Taiwanese bloodlines.
    • Altaïr was the son of an Assassin couple and married a Templar, Maria Thorpe, who was a good fighter herself and fathered two badass Assassin sons, one of whomnote  landed the killing blow on Genghis Khan himself.
    • In the second game, Ezio Auditore discovers that his father Giovanni and Uncle Mario were Assassins, a throwaway line in Assassin's Creed: Brotherhod implies that his brother Federico was one, too. His own sister Claudia becomes one in the same game, while Ezio himself is considered the greatest Mentor of the Order after Altaïr.
    • While Altaïr's family and the Auditores were cohesive and loving, the Kenways are a Big, Screwed-Up Family to say the least. Still, they are pretty badass with three generations of Player Character. Grandfather Edward is a feared pirate captain, his son Haytham is the Black Sheep, a Templar Grand Master, and the grandson Connor is a Native American Assassin who plays a major role in The American Revolution.
    • Odyssey to a certain extent features the lineage of Leonidas. Alexios and Kassandra are the legendary Spartan king's grandchildren, and much of the main plot revolves around their bloodline. It's even revealed later that their biological father is Pythagoras. Furthermore, Kassandra and her son Elpidios are the ancestors of Aya/Amunet from Origins alongside Darius, the inventor of the first Hidden Blade in human history.
  • Badass Longcoat: Connor's attire in Assassin's Creed III, and Duncan Walpole/Edward Kenway's Assassin robes in Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, since fashions have changed over the centuries.
  • Badass Long Robe: Most Assassins in Altaïr's and Ezio's eras wear this sort of attire.
  • Based on a Great Big Lie: The games posit that the history we know is incorrect, with all irregularities having been alterations or outright lies fabrications by either the Templars or Assassins to cover up what really happened. In later eras, the Templars' domination of information technology allowed them to literally rewrite history to suit their agenda and spread their propaganda.
  • Been There, Shaped History: All the freaking time. Listing every occasion where Assassins and/or Templars were involved in major historical events would probably fill up an entire page. In fact, it absolutely can.
  • Beethoven Was an Alien Spy: All over the place. "Good" historical figures were Assassins (or at least aided them). The one solid exception is Jack the Ripper who was an Assassin who went nuts until he was stopped by Evie Frye. "Bad" ones are Templars (though the writers will shake this formula up if they want to do really elaborate conspiracies). Then there are Sages,(really reincarnations of One Who Came Before who was trapped in a proto-Animus) amongst whom you can include pirate Black Bart, mysterious occultist the Count of Saint Germaine, and possibly David Bowie.
  • Benevolent Architecture:
    • Every structure that you need to climb has grab points conveniently located on it. Every rooftop path is loaded with platforms, protruding beams, and flagpoles. Every tall building has a haystack beneath it to perform a Leap of Faith into. The architecture is designed so precisely that it can only be traversed by someone with the free-running skills that the Assassins possess (never mind that a tall ladder would make most of the puzzle segments trivial). As with many other gameplay elements, this is implied to be an embellishment provided by the Animus to make "playing" the memories easier for the subject.
    • Assassin's Creed III introduces Benevolent Nature, with trees conveniently felled, stumped, bifurcated and sturdy enough for Connor to free-run on. Rocks on hills and cliffs can also be scaled without the climbing equipment, ropes and ladders needed to do so in real-life, thanks to Connor's firm grip and the presence of conveniently placed tiny grabbing points, fissures and inclines to scale.
  • Benevolent Precursors: Most of Those Who Came Before didn't wish humans ill; they merely saw them as lesser. In their desperate attempts to save themselves from a coming cosmic disaster, they were also trying to save humanity, and not merely incidentally. The Eagle Vision of all the playable characters is a result of human-TWCB interbreeding. Jupiter and Minerva, though not as skilled as Juno at the calculations necessary for predicting possible futures, were nevertheless working to try and save the world before they perished. They tried dozens of costly solutions. All failed.
  • Big Bad: The Templars and their predecessors in general, with Warren Vidic being their most prominently villainous member in the modern-day storyline for the first few main games. Following Vidic's death, Juhani Otso Berg becomes the most prominently seen Templar. Juno was also revealed as a chessmaster villain at the end of III, and from then on acts as the Greater-Scope Villain to both factions until she is killed off in the Uprising comic. Each game also has its own Big Bad:
    • Assassin's Creed has a Big Bad Ensemble between Rashid ad-Din Sinan AKA Al Mualim and Robert de Sablé.
    • Assassin's Creed II has "The Spaniard", Rodrigo Borgia/Pope Alexander VI.
    • Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood has Cesare Borgia.
    • Assassin's Creed: Revelations has Prince Ahmet.
    • Assassin's Creed III has Haytham Kenway with Charles Lee as The Heavy who pulls a Dragon Ascendant. The Greater Scope Villains of the game are Reginald Birch and Edward Braddock as revealed in the novel Forsaken.
    • Assassin's Creed III: Liberation has The Company Man otherwise known as Madeleine de L'Isle.
    • Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag has a Big Bad Ensemble between Laureano de Torres y Ayala and Bartholomew Roberts, with John in the modern segments. Some could say Aita is the true Big Bad, as Roberts and John are his reincarnations.
    • Assassin's Creed: Freedom Cry has Pierre, Marquis de Fayet.
    • Assassin's Creed Rogue has an interesting example of this trope. Considering you are playing as Shay Patrick Cormac, a Templar, and do battle with the Assassins, the primary antagonist of the game is Achilles Davenport, though he's portrayed as an Unwitting Instigator of Doom who has caused countless innocent deaths through a mix of recklessness and incompetence.
    • Assassin's Creed: Unity has François Thomas Germain.
    • Assassin's Creed Syndicate has Crawford Starrick.
    • Assassin's Creed Origins has a Big Bad Duumvirate example in the form of Flavius Metellus/The Lion and Lucius Septimius/The Jackal, the leaders of the Order of the Ancients in the Roman Republic and Ptolemaic Egypt. The Hidden Ones DLC on the other hand has Gaius Julius Rufio as the sole Big Bad.
    • Assassin's Creed: Odyssey has the Cult of Kosmos which is a Big Bad Ensemble with Deimos (canonically Alexios) as The Heavy for the Cult and Aspasia (the Ghost of Kosmos) as the Greater-Scope Villain and The Man Behind the Man of the Cult. The Legacy of the First Blade DLC has Amorges, the leader of the Order of the Ancients in the Persian Empire and the Greek city-states.
    • Assassin's Creed: Valhalla has yet another Big Bad Ensemble in the form of King Alfred The Great, who is the Grand Maegester of the English Order of the Ancients and is responsible for reforming the Order into the Templars after his exile had ended, thus making him a Greater-Scope Villain, and Basim Ibn Ishaq/Loki, who turns out to be Evil All Along and serves as the Final Boss. Basim also takes on the role of the Big Bad for the modern day segments of the story alongside Aletheia, another Greater-Scope Villain, since the two manipulated Layla Hassan (and by extension, the Eagle Bearer across over two millennia) into giving them the Staff of Hermes Trismegistus so that the former could be resurrected. Arguably, Odin himself is also a Greater-Scope Villain since he is the reincarnation of Eivor and is responsible for the death of Loki's son Fenrir, thus setting Basim's vendetta against Sigurd, and eventually Eivor, into motion. The Wrath of the Druids DLC has The Oak, otherwise known as Eogan mac Cartaigh, the abbot of Meath who wants to overthrow Christianity in Ireland and replace it with the Druidic faith of Classical Antiquity. The Siege of Paris has Charles the Fat, the last monarch of Francia and the grandson of Charlemagne, who intends to launch a Frankish invasion of England.
  • Big Good: The Assassins (including the Hidden Ones) and their allies for the entire franchise with Desmond Miles as the main protagonist in the modern day portions of the story in the first few games until his Heroic Sacrifice in III to not only give the Brotherhood a fighting chance against Juno and the Isu Triarch but he would avert a catastrophe that would have destroyed humanity in 2012. Supplementary material and other games have Gavin Banks and William Miles filling the role for Layla Hassan, Kiyoshi Takakura and other Assassins in Origins and Valhalla. Some of the games also have their own Big Goods:
    • Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad and Ezio Auditore, the focus characters in the first few games of the series, each become the head of their respective Assassin Brotherhoods after the events of the main games. We only get to hear about Altaïr's deeds through his journal, but Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood actually focuses on Ezio as a Master Assassin, recruiting and training new members. Assassin's Creed: Revelations goes even further by delving into separate but parallel storylines for Altair and Ezio.
    • In Assassin's Creed III, George Washington is the leader of the American Patriots and a personal ally to Connor Kenway. It's somewhat subverted since he was actually responsible for the raid on Connor's home village in upstate New York after the Seven Years' War and not Charles Lee as the latter previously presumed. That said, Washington is still very much a good guy and has no problems working with a half-British, half-Mohawk Native American Assassin despite his shortcomings. Played straight with Connor himself who becomes the Mentor of the American Assassins at the end of the game.
    • Honoré Gabriel Riqueti/Comte de Mirabeau from Assassin's Creed: Unity is the Mentor of the French Assassins during the French Revolution and he's one of the signers of the Declaration of Rights, the founding document of the first French Republic.
    • Assassin's Creed Syndicate has Jacob and Evie Frye who establish a British working class crime syndicate based in London for the purpose of undermining Templar dominance over the city and to liberate the children suffering under the bad conditions of Starrick's factories.
    • Bayek and Aya/Amunet in Assassin's Creed Origins become a mixture of this and Greater-Scope Paragon to the entire Assassin Brotherhood as the founders of the Hidden Ones, the original incarnation of the group before the Third Crusade.
  • Bilingual Bonus: Characters in non-English speaking settings will often use a phrase or expression from their native language.
  • Blending-In Stealth Gameplay: The series mixes up the classical avoid-all-contact stealth paradigm with elements of blending-in stealth, e.g. by allowing their protagonists to get past the guards undetected by mixing into a group of neutral NPCs (such as wandering scholars in the first game and courtesans in the second) or to hide in their plain sight by simply sitting down on a street bench with a couple NPCs. Latter games from Origins onward, however, give much more emphasis to environmental stealth instead. Valhalla to a certain extent is a return to form regarding social stealth, as Eivor can actually interact with environmental objects (like bread dough, drinks, etc.) within a crowd of people in order to blend in. Mirage brings the social stealth mechanics established in II back to the forefront.
  • Brain Uploading: Juno's plan gets her broadcasted into The Grey, her name for humanity's information network, and her ultimate goal is to "save" mankind by doing this to all of them. A line in Unity suggests it might also have happened to Clay and Desmond. Valhalla implies this to be confirmed in Desmond's case (with a character only identified as "The Reader" but is voiced by the same actor as Desmond), and Layla decides to join him in the hope of finding a timeline in which humanity and the Earth can be saved.
  • Broad Strokes: Some of the comic Accipiter, which occasionally gets a nod through some of the games. At one point in Rogue, Templars Otso Berg and Violet Da Costa discuss the MacGuffin from it, the Ankh, and whether it actually existed or not. Jury seems to be still out on that one.
  • Broken Pedestal: Occurs several times in various games, starting with the first. It is one of the franchise's Central Themes.
    • Altaïr was the first in the series to experience this, when his mentor and leader of the Order of Assassins becomes Drunk with Power and betrays the creed.
    • In Brotherhood, La Volpe comes to the conclusion that Machiavelli — at the time the Assassin Order's top figure in Italy — has betrayed the order to the Templars. Ezio stops this from becoming historical fact by discovering the truth of Machiavelli's actions and stopping La Volpe's attempt on his life at literally the last second.
    • Your mileage may vary, but the first act of AC3 seems to be invoking this with Haytham Kenway and the player. Haytham is initially portrayed as a cool-headed, honorable, and extremely capable Assassin — encouraging players to root for him and for the success of his project — only to reveal that he was a Templar all along. Surprisingly, Connor Kenway averts this by having no illusions about his father's allegiance and dangerousness from the get-go.
    • Connor Kenway feels this towards George Washington, when he finally discovers what Washington plans to do to his tribe. In fact, the entire American Revolution itself is this for Connor; He had spent the entire game praising the revolution, defending it against criticism and actively fighting for its success, only to be betrayed by it in the end.
    • Origins has Aya, Bayek's wife, who swears total allegiance to Cleopatra despite her husband's misgivings. After Cleopatra, along with Caesar, chooses to side with the Order of the Ancients and later dismiss the two of them, Aya is completely disillusioned. The game ends at the Ides of March with her inflicting the first stab in the assassination of Julius Caesar. Afterwards, she renames herself as Amunet, an Assassin who would much later become renowned within the Brotherhood for killing Cleopatra with a poisonous snake.
  • Bullying a Dragon: Most installments in the franchise have numerous examples of people deciding "hey, let's antagonize that person carrying enough weapons to kill a small army" and getting exactly what's coming to them. Which is usually a Hidden Blade to the face. The Templars are serial offenders with this trope, if they encounter an Assassin, they usually make it their goal to piss them off.
  • Central Theme:
    • The franchise has a central theme of the creed itself, using it as a filter to understand history and the lives of characters with different contexts and life experience defining and redefining its meaning and purpose.
    • Another central theme is the struggle of human history, with progress coming at a price; compromise, betrayal and failure a common outcome to even the most promising revolutions; and the extent Humans Are Flawed that they need control and the questionable wisdom of leaders to shape their lives rather than follow their own free will.
    • Loss as a theme runs heavily throughout the franchise. Loss of concrete things like loved ones, lives of children and friends, entire families or tribes, as well as more abstract things like innocence, naiveté, ideals, belief in one's elders as paragons of virtue, etc.
    • The cyclical and repetitive nature of history and time is also emphasized in many ways throughout the games. On a broad scale, this is highlighted by the never-ending conflict between Assassins and Templars spanning millennia with no foreseeable resolution in sight.
    • III and Unity had an underlying moral about the importance of compromise and cooperation. Over the course of the two games, the Templars and the Assassins form a shaky truce that collapses because of old grudges on both sides. Minerva notes that the the two orders could have saved the world if they didn't spend centuries fighting each other.
  • Chevalier vs. Rogue: The series has it as its central concept, featuring a secret conflict between the Assassins and the Templars. Though the rule truly applies mostly in the first game; by the time of the next games, the Templars have become mostly as shadowy as the Assassins over the years.
  • The Chosen One: Desmond is the ultimate Chosen One in a bloodline filled with them, all so The Ones Who Came Before can prevent The End of the World as We Know It.
    • Origins introduces Layla Hassan, an expert engineer who built her own Animus and hopes to get into Abstergo's good graces so she can gain the resources she needs for further development. Several messages from Those Who Came Before, speaking through Bayek's memories, hint that her Animus, unlike the known models which can only essentially view history as it happened, might potentially gain the ability to actually alter history, depending on the choices she has to make.
  • City of Adventure: Several examples, to the point that in some of them, the cities are essentially the main character. Special mentions to Florence and Venice (Assassin's Creed II), Rome (Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood), Istanbul (Assassin's Creed: Revelations) and of course, Paris (Assassin's Creed: Unity) as well as London (Assassin's Creed Syndicate).
  • Closing Credits: All games have long closing credits after the last cutscene. They are unskippable in case one wants to play again. Newer games from Syndicate onwards however simply inform the player that the main story has finished, and tell of other available missions to do post-ending, immediately going back to gameplay after the final scene.
  • Code of Honor:
    • The titular Assassin's Creed is a sort of anti-Code that still manages to be a Code: "The wisdom of our creed is revealed in these words: 'Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.'" Naturally, there isn't much debate over what fits with a Code like that, only how it should be applied. There was originally a whole slew of other rules (no poison, a number of ritual requirements like removing a finger to earn hidden blade privileges, absolute loyalty to superiors, etc.) but these were mostly abandoned over the centuries and each protagonist follows the warrior code appropriate to their culture. Evolving traditions aside, the Creed has three tenets that every Assassin must follow:
      "Stay your blade from the flesh of an innocent. Hide in plain sight, be one with the crowd. Never compromise the brotherhood."
    • The Templar Order has the Pledge which is even more of an anti-Code than the Assassin's Creed. The main tenets of Templar Pledge are best described by former Assassin Shay Patrick Cormac:
      "Uphold the principles of our order and all that for which we stand. Never share our secrets nor divulge in the true nature of our work. Do so until death, whatever the cost."
  • Color-Coded for Your Convenience:
    • In every game, each faction wears clearly distinctive colors so you can tell them apart at a glance. This applies to their minimap icons as well, when it's relevant.
    • Eagle Vision paints allies, enemies and targets accordingly to make it easier to tell NPC's apart from a distance.
  • Color Motif: White and red are the staple colors of the series, and of both the Assassins and the Templars. This is meant to highlight that, while both groups have noble intentions of peace, they have violent and bloody methods to achieve it. They're also a few traits unique to each group:
    • The Assassin white represents the white of a blank canvas, the ability to choose what it will become; in other words, total freedom. Their red invokes passion and their will to fight against tyranny.
    • Templar white is sterile and clean, unsullied by other colors. In the Templar's perfect world, the dirty work of murder and war will be unnecessary, ensuring humanity remains clean under their control. Their red is the stick to their white's carrot, an implicit threat of what exactly they are capable of if their peace is threatened.
  • Combat Pragmatist: All Assassins are masters at dirty fighting. When they say, "Everything is permitted," they mean everything is permitted. Initially subverted with the use of poison being looked down on by Altaïr in the first game, though he takes care of that in the codex pages of the second game.
  • Completion Meter: A staple in the series for "additional memories", such as collectible flags in the first installment, and eagle feathers in the second game.
  • Conspiracy Kitchen Sink: The entire premise of the franchise is about two secret societies manipulating historical events from behind the scenes to advance their own goals.
  • Contrasting Sequel Main Character: A particular feature of the series where the Numbered Entries (and non-numbered in the case of Unity) feature new Player Character that have drastically different personalities.
    • Assassin's Creed has Altaïr, an Implacable Man who is a career Assassin with no life outside the creed, seeking to atone for his mistakes and redeem his honor. Assassin's Creed II has Ezio Auditore, the Breakout Character of the Franchise, a charismatic playboy who enters the Order seeking revenge and later wisdom.
    • This is enforced even moreso in Assassin's Creed III and Assassins Creed IV where Connor's personality, a mixture of stoic resolve, vulnerability and Naïve Newcomer earnestness contrasts with that of Decoy Protagonist Haytham Kenway, who is worldly wise, jaded and walks with Bondlike swagger. Both of them are supremely different from the loutish Edward Kenway who is a foul-mouthed, amoral pirate.
    • Speaking of Kenway, in Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, he's a greedy fool who happens upon Assassin gear by sheer luck and, after using the gear for selfish purposes, joins them after some life-lessons. Assassin's Creed Rogue has a trained-from-childhood goody-two-shoes Assassin who thinks his fellows are being selfish (and forced him to inadvertently commit a massacre) and are handling things they shouldn't, so he joins their mortal enemies to forcefully teach them not to handle eldritch artifacts of such power. Edward also has a team of fellow pirates who enable his initially greedy ways for much of his story while Shay has a network of regulators from both sides who watch every last move he makes.
    • Bayek and The Eagle Bearer are also this. The Eagle Bearer (canonically Kassandra) is a mercenary who works for money, Bayek is a Medjay who works for free. The Eagle Bearer distances themselves from the Assassins and Templar's war for thousands of years, while Bayek is a major reason that conflict exists at all. Finally, The Eagle Bearer has their spouse killed by the Order of the Ancients and has their child taken away, while Bayek has their child killed by the Order (and from the same bloodline as the Eagle Bearer’s kid to boot) and his wife leaves him.
    • The Eagle Bearer is generally a solitary figure embarking on a personal journey. Eivor is well-established as an important member of the Raven Clan, and accordingly has to keep the clan's welfare in consideration when forging alliances and making enemies throughout England.
  • Contrasting Sequel Setting: The franchise uses this as part of its appeal - particularly to the part of its fanbase that is most interested in historical tourism:
    • Assassin's Creed took place in the Holy Lands during the Crusades, which are dominated by a particularly bleak atmosphere that seems to have an ever-present grey hue. The modern-day section is in a sterile lab in an unknown location that's overwhelmingly white. The cold colour palette and bleak setting combined with the almost total animosity Desmond and Altair face make for a rather claustrophobic, foreboding, and almost hopeless atmosphere.
    • Assassin's Creed II takes place in various north Italian cities during the Renaissance. The colour palette and atmosphere are now bright and warm, the cities are full of life and so are the people living in them, and the world design feels open completely unlike the overly crowded and claustrophobic feeling of the previous entry. The modern-day section is in a warehouse, which likewise now has a warm colour palette, large open spaces, and various people full of personality. The fact that Ezio and now Desmond are surrounded by allies only helps this.
    • Brotherhood, the direct sequel to the previous title, takes place in Renaissance Rome, while the modern-day section moves to the basement of the manor visited in the "past" section of the previous game. While for the most part the overall feeling hasn't changed, the comparatively more archaic setting - seeing as Rome has ancient ruins everywhere and the location of the modern setting isn't modern at all - gives a somewhat colder and more mysterious feeling.
    • Revelations takes place in the recently conquered and renamed Istanbul. Despite everything the city has gone through in the last several years - including said conquest and a recent destructive earthquake - Istanbul/Constantinople is full of life, with a very similar sensation to II - while the underlying tensions in the city and the mysterious ruins everywhere have that same mystery as Brotherhood, aided by the fact that Ezio is completely unfamiliar with this land. However, unlike the oddly similar old setting, the modern-day section sees its biggest change yet: it's a virtual reality space that consists of an island and some paleolithic-looking structures that are all clearly CGI In-Universe, and goes straight back to the frosty palette of the first game. The structures are gates that lead to surreal-looking and abstract representations of the settings of the previous games, maintaining basic shapes with the occasional realistic addition that makes it even more unsettling.
    • Assassin's Creed III takes place during the American Revolution. Unlike the busy cities of all the previous entries, the setting here is the entire east coast of the American continent and then some, where nature is still clearly the ruler of this world, the "cities" are barely established - even the largest one give a port-town kind of feeling, and you can go for literal hours in the game barely seeing any signs of civilization. The modern-day section is startlingly different. It takes place inside a cave with advanced Precursor tech, giving it a look like TRON - complete with Tron Lines - while simultaneously having the mystery and foreboding feeling the franchise associates with the ancient.
      • The DLC, The Tyranny of King Washington' takes the same physical location, and turns it into a horror setting. It's the dead of the winter, all the cities and other inhabitable locations are dead and ruined, there are corpses hanging everywhere and Everything Is Trying to Kill You. To top it all off, there is Mason symbolism everywhere, and THE most important elements of the franchise - aka the Assassins and the Templars are completely absent. It's dark, foreboding, and creepy as hell. Oh, and did we mention that there are random trinkets all over the place that look like they came straight out of the virtual reality mentioned in Revelations?
      • Liberation is presented as a side-story to III, and takes place in the French colonies in the same time period. This time the atmosphere is much brighter and the cities are somewhat better established, somewhat resembling the "Ezio" entries. Interestingly, the game tries to Lampshade the difference between Liberation and III by having the protagonist Aveline visit Connor, the protagonist of III. That part of the game takes place in the middle of winter, with the only signs of civilization being the occasional bridge or outpost, in near-complete isolation.
    • Black Flag takes place in the West Indies during The Golden Age of Piracy. It's a world where it's perpetually summer and dominated by pirate towns, jungles, and the occasional ancient ruin, and everything is clearly in disarray. The game hilariously Lampshades this trope when the Italian ambassador - who has the same voice actor as Ezio - goes on a long rant complaining about how different, uncivilized, and barbaric this place is compared to Italy. The modern section is in a fancy office building, which only looks happy and inviting - until you get to the deeper parts of the building and suddenly it's the first game and III all over again.
    • Rogue takes place during the French-Indian War. A good chunk of it is identical to III, taking place during that game's timeskip, but a very large part of the game is located in the Arctic circle, and is almost entirely naval, leaning heavily on the Mysterious Antarctica trope. The modern section is mostly unseen, but it once again happens in a fancy office building similar to the previous - this time in another country.
    • Unity takes place in Paris during the French Revolution, and the city goes from beautiful to absolute anarchy and chaos extremely fast. It's jarring to see a place that was at first so similar to the Italy of the previous entries go straight into the chaos and grey despair reminiscent of the first. The modern section is well... the player stand-in playing from the comfort of their own home. The player is also forced to see Paris in other time periods when running away from the massive glitches, and the differences are also highlighted, as one moment you are outside a medieval castle, and another trying to dodge Nazi patrols while climbing the Eiffel Tower.
    • Syndicate uses Victorian Britain London as its setting. While it's certainly busy and full of its own charm, any hints of nature present in the previous entries are completely absent and overtaken by the pollution and industrialization. The dystopian elements of the era are visible everywhere, with rampant crime, poverty and disease that were mostly absent in previous entries.
    • Origins uses Ancient Egypt during Cleopatra's reign. The setting is an open world with an architectural and cultural mashup of ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome, which stands out on its own accord from the other settings, with its huge monuments and endless desert. The modern section is in the gravesite of the protagonist, which is an ancient Egyptian burial site, which is a stark contrast from every previous modern-day setting which was in the middle of modern civilization.
    • Odyssey takes place in Greece during The Peloponnesian War. Unlike Origins, the landscape is dominated by greenery, seas, mountains, and islands, creating a stark visual contrast to all the previous games since nothing had this level of irregularity in the landscape. The massive monuments and the small, friendly, and open cities give off a sense of awe and comfort simultaneously. The modern-day section on the other hand takes place in a warehouse much like the one in II, though there are no warm colours here to make you feel comfy - instead, everything is dark and cold to give a distant feeling.
    • Valhalla is set in Dark Ages Europe, during the Viking invasions. As such, most of the major cities are archaic in their designs, especially in comparison to just about every other entry in the series, with ruins interspersed all throughout the country from ages that have passed by. The color pallete is somewhat bleaker than Odyssey's, with more of a focus on muted greens and browns with the occasional vibrant yellows. Asgard, on the other hand, is absolutely nothing like any other setting in the entire series. It is completely fantastical in its design, with massive creatures and impossible architecture and plant life all throughout its rather snowy landscapes. The modern day segment is set at the burial site of the historical protagonist, similar to Origins, but is next to a cozy cabin with all the modern amenities one would need rather than a dingy cave.
  • Cool Ship: Assassins are rather fond of this. The Aquila, Connor's flagship, is a custom-made brig built, his grandfather Edward was a pirate who piloted a repurposed Spanish brig which he built into a One Ship Armada while the modern day Assassins travel on a surveillance ship called Altaïr II, captained by Susan Drayton. Edward's first-mate Adéwalé would go on to captain his own ship after losing the Jackdaw, namely the Experto Crede, which would eventually be sunk by Shay Cormac's own brig, the Morrigan. In Odyssey, the Eagle Bearer gets their own ship with which to navigate between the many islands of Greece, the Adrestia.
  • Corporate Conspiracy: The Templar Order uses Abstergo Industries to achieve economic dominance over the enitre world and they are the main antagonists of the entire franchise.
  • Cosmic Horror Reveal: This is a perfectly normal game about an evil organisation forcing the PC to relive the genetic memories of his ancestors, tied in to an ancient-evil-conspiracy plot. Suddenly, Abusive Precursors arrive and the world's about to be destroyed by some sort of horrible thing. Then that's dealt with and we're instead fighting an evil undead god. And then more gods show up on the pretense of averting another catastrophe but with their own ulterior motives.
  • Counter-Attack: One of the highlights of the combat system is the elaborate and visually spectacular counters, to the point of having a different set of animations for each weapon type. In fact, counters are the only effective way to fight multiple opponents in Open Combat up until Brotherhood introduces kill streaks and combo kills, making it practical to go on the offensive for the first time in the series. The combat system has been completely revamped starting in Origins, however; direct counterattacks are very rare, and you are more encouraged to dodge, parry or block enemy attacks. The hidden blade is no longer of any use in open conflict in these games.
  • Cowardly Mooks: In certain games, the more low-ranked city guards will often retreat if the player character is good enough at showing off their badassery against them. Even some higher-ranked soldiers aren't immune to this, although again, it depends on the game.
  • Creator Cameo: A fictional version of Ubisoft exists in-universe and developed games based on the lives of Aveline de Grandpre and Edward Kenway with Abstergo.
  • Crow's Nest Cartography: A staple of the series. Typically, viewpoints are found in particularly high places and are used to reveal large swaths of the map. Different games offer different spins on it.
    • Brotherhood's Borgia towers had to be destroyed before Ezio could accomplish anything in its immediate area.
    • Naval forts in Black Flag served essentially as sea versions of this.
    • In Unity and Syndicate, synchronisation reveals various opportunities and details and the environment that you can use to execute your mission (such as "you can steal the keys from that nurse" or "you can rescue these guys to create a distraction").
    • In Origins, Odyssey and Valhalla, they serve also as fast-travel points to make traversing the massive open-worlds that much easier.
  • Cutscene Power to the Max: Averted, at least in terms of the pre-rendered CGI trailers. Despite not being gameplay footage, almost every action they show can actually be performed in the game itself.
  • Create Your Own Hero: Anytime the Templars initiate The Purge on the Assassins, and defeat key figures and seem to believe that Nothing Can Stop Us Now!, you can be sure that they'll piss off and dismiss some little nobody, and make them a Destined Bystander who will take several levels in badass and hunt and wipe them out, partly because they have a purpose but mostly because the Templars made it personal.
    • Altaïr is a career assassin and as such opposes the Templars on matters of principle rather than some personal vendetta. That said, Robert De Sable humiliating him for his brashness and leaving him alive started a grudge that drove Altaïr to find him in Arsuf. Even more, Al Mualim's sagely conversations with Altaïr and his giving him a second chance by wiping out nine Templars end up making Altaïr The Hero strong enough to stand up and defeat his newly revealed Evil All Along Mentor and make him into a successor who makes the Assassins into a stronger force. Smooth move.
    • Ezio Auditore was a playboy nobleman without a care in the world, until the Borgias decide to kill his father and brothers, with their mooks making rapey jokes about his mother and sister. After an apprenticeship with his Uncle Mario and several Stealth Mentors, he starts a lifelong career in littering Mediterranean Europe with Templar corpses, shutting them down, and in the process, initiating a Golden Age in Europe.
    • Haytham Kenway lampshades this in Assassin's Creed : Forsaken where Charles Lee's racist mockery of little Connor and his people and punching him out led the latter to a lifelong thirst for hunting Lee and his associates... leading to Connor upending decades of planning and destroying all their achievements. Haytham himself is an aversion. Reginald Birch had his father, Edward killed, his sister sold to Turkish slavers but he takes an interest in him, and manipulates and indoctrinates Haytham into a Templar who achieves for them what Ezio achieved for the Assassins; he's so successful that Haytham never abandons the cause even after learning the awful truth.
    • Edward, The Patriarch of the Kenway family, was a Lower-Class Lout who was a mere sailor aboard a ship who the Templars dismissed as a mere thug not worth their time and sent him away as a prisoner on their Treasure fleet. However, it's on that fleet that Edward meets his first mate Adewale, forms his first crew and repurposes their getaway brig into his flagship, the Jackdaw with him promoted to The Captain. He decides that the Observatory the Templars were talking about might be worth his time after all, and while the Assassins aren't entirely his cup of tea, he likes the fact that they are more forgiving and better company. If only the Templars weren't skinflints and had paid him properly.
    • Desmond Miles hated his Assassin upbringing and his father's stern disciplinary approach and ran away from home and lived as a drifter and bartender without a care in the world. Rather than extend a hand to a confused young man, the Templars kidnap him, with a Dr. Jerk assuring Desmond that he'll be killed once they have what they want with the result that Desmond realized that his father had a point about the Templars after all and made him a Prodigal Hero for the assassins once they rescue him; even before the reveal of his father, Desmond flat-out declared that "after what those Templar bastards put me through", he wants in on the Assassins. Lucy Stillman's assistance in particular played a more significant part in setting Desmond on the path back to his ancestors' cause, despite her turning out to be a Templar double agent. Interestingly, Juno's intervention made sure that she would not stand in his way, and her true allegiance is only revealed posthumously.
    • Shay Patrick Cormac is a Templar version: Once a loyal Assassin, after their search for Precursor artifacts led them to cause multiple earth-shattering earthquakes and the Brotherhood refused to listen to his warnings, he was forced to betray them in order to prevent them from having further cataclysmic screw-ups. After their failed attempt to kill him, he was rescued and swayed by benevolent if somewhat manipulative Templar. He would go on to render the Colonial Brotherhood to a single broken old man destined to rot away in his estate until the arrival of Connor. Incidentally, he also unknowingly started another version of this trope by killing Charles Dorian, Arno's father, although it would take several years and the death of another father figure before the latter could become a full-fledged Assassin.
    • The Animus shown in the 2016 film actually allows the subject to assimilate his ancestor's skills directly into his muscle memory with a rig in which the subject can physically simulate his ancestor's movements. An Abstergo security official even lampshades it: "We are feeding the beast." Sure enough, the imprisoned subjects initiate a prison break, allowing three of them to escape and set out to thwart the Templars' plans.
    • Origins shows the entire Brotherhood was one of these. Bayek and Aya were originally just a loving couple from the Siwa Oasis until the Order of the Ancients came looking for an Isu vault, with one particularly Ax-Crazy member of the group named Flavius Metellus taking the lead, resulting in the death of Bayek and Aya's son Khemu. During their Roaring Rampage of Revenge, the two make several allies, and when the Order manages to get Cleopatra and Caesar on their side, Bayek and Aya decide to form their own order to oppose them.
    • Layla Hassan was a longtime friend of Sophia Rikkin, daughter of Templar elder Alan Rikkin, who only wanted to put her engineering talents to use on the Animus. Despite many attempts to showcase her capabilities to Abstergo, they could not abide her aversion to authority as well as her penchant for risk-taking. At the end of Origins, William Miles offers her a chance to work with the Assassins. While she initially refuses to identify herself with them, the beginning of Odyssey shows her willfully cooperating, and later confirmed to be formally allied with the Assassins.
    • The Eagle Bearer was content to live a quiet, uneventful life in the Kephallonian Islands, until Elpenor came and had them hunt down the Wolf of Sparta, who happened to be their estranged father Nikolaos. Following this trail eventually allowed the Eagle Bearer to learn about the Cult of Kosmos and their attempt to subjugate the entire ancient Greek world, which set them on a path to take them all down.
    • Eivor's personal vendetta against a rival clan for murdering their parents inadvertently sowed the seeds for them to confront the Order of the Ancients silently taking over England, as their parents' killer happened to be a member of the same Order.
  • Crossover Cosmology: Every religious and mythological deity in existence are members of the same species be it Etruscan, Greco-Roman, Egyptian, Norse, Celtic, Hindu, or Christian.
  • Cycle of Revenge: Some version of the Assassins and the Templars have been fighting since the First Disaster in repeated conflicts over Pieces of Eden, and Desmond and William both think in Assassin's Creed III that the conflict will continue long after they die.
  • Dashed Plot Line: Most of the game takes place in "memory sequences", which are segments of memory in which significant events happened in the life of the main character. Individual sequences may take place over significant lengths of time and there are often lengthy jumps between sequences.
  • Deadly Sparring: Seen in The Secret Crusade. Altair and Abbas have a sparring match with live weapons shortly after the former tells the latter about his father committing suicide rather than leaving the order as Abbas was led to believe. Abbas refuses to believe Altair and tries to kill him right then and there, only stopping once Altair falsely admits to lying. As a result, both are forced to spend a month in Maysaf's dungeons, and Abbas is forced to spend an extra year in training due to his outburst. The event causes an enmity between them that lasts for Abbas' entire lifetime.
  • Deconstructor Fleet: The Assassin's Creed series as a whole is filled with several conceits that poke holes into traditional genre elements.
    • Unlike most conspiracy-based fiction, which posits a hitherto unknown secret as the real explanation, the game takes a Like Reality, Unless Noted approach that aligns 80% of the time with the actual historical record, with the facts altered for gameplay reasons. Indeed, the battle between the Assassins and the Templars as seen in the game largely shows how difficult or impossible "behind-the-scenes" control over history would actually be, with the Assassins and the Templars wavering in the level of control and influence they have on world affairs and never in a position to truly change things as they would like it.
    • By and large, the game tackles pop-culture perceptions of a given period, showing a more accurate vision of historical figures than most popular fiction. The first game for example shows Richard the Lionheart as a Noble Demon rather than the Big Good for England, a warrior for God who invades the Holy Land and regards his enemies as heathens but pragmatic enough to listen to the nominally Muslim Assassin, Altaïr.
    • The second game and its sequel likewise shows The Renaissance not only as an intellectual and artistic revolution but a time of great political turmoil and uncertainty, with city-states relying on mercenaries and backdoor assassinations to assert their hold over a region, with a special focus on the corruption of the Church. Niccolò Machiavelli likewise is shown as a Reasonable Authority Figure devoted to public welfare and service rather than the stereotype people hold over him. The game director Patrice Desilets was especially proud to show Leonardo da Vinci not by the popular image of a bearded old man, but the young handsome man that he was famous for being at the peak of his creativity.
    • Assassin's Creed III and Liberation likewise gives a Warts and All depiction of The American Revolution, showing what happened to people who didn't profit from the movement. Likewise, the fourth game Black Flag shows The Golden Age of Piracy as no Golden Age but a fruitless struggle for sailors and men of ambition oppressed by their country's navy to make a living that a restrictive society would not allow them, showing a fuller depiction of the reality of pirate life than adventure movies generally allow.
    • The third game in particular, both the present and modern story, deconstructs the Assassins vs. Templars conflict. The historical portion shows the Assassins and Templars briefly united by a common purpose as well as familial bonds while at the end of the contemporary storyline, Minerva tells the contemporary Assassins that they wasted the whole of history fighting the Templars instead of working to the common good.
    • The conceit of the game itself deconstructs Video Game Tropes itself: the Animus is specifically modified on the metaphor of gameplay with progression, items, quests geared to achieving "synchronization," an aspect defined as "organic design" by Patrice Desilets, the game director on the first two games. The fourth game, likewise, is set in a modern day game company that essentially seeks to do in the gameworld what Ubisoft is doing with the series: use ancestor memories to create pop-culture products.
  • Deliberate Values Dissonance: It's both played straight and averted in the series:
    • Assassin's Creed II: Not shown in the game itself, but the spin-off short movie Lineage features Lorenzo de Medici having a prisoner brutally tortured to reveal his information about an upcoming political assassination, but he is still a good guy, both in the movie and in the game. In Renaissance era Italy such brutal methods, along with backstabbings, poisonings and similar cloak-and-dagger maneuvering were the norm among nobles.
    • Assassin's Creed III
      • This game has much more ethnically diverse NPCs as well as taking place in colonial America. Connor is treated with quite a bit of prejudice, referred to as a "half-breed" (his father is English and his mother is Mohawk), and personally thinks that the Patriots should be fighting for the rights and freedoms of all the peoples who live in the Thirteen Colonies, as opposed to just the ethnic Europeans. He even has a brief conversation with Samuel Adams over Adams' owning a slave; Adams explains that she's legally a free woman (actually true, as both are historical characters) and that the Patriots just want to achieve general freedom first, after which they will work for the rights of non-whites. After the game's official end, in a cutscene set on Evacuation Day (when the British soldiers left the newly-formed United States) Connor witnesses the crowds cheering as the redcoats shove off, then sees a public slave auction happening right behind the crowd.
      • In the same game, Achilles deliberately gives Ratonhnhaké:ton a European name like Connor, so he doesn't stand out in cities. He also tells him to pass himself off as a Spaniard, since Connor's darker complexion would allow for that. Yes, he won't be treated as well as a WASP, but it's still better than being half-Mohawk and much better than being like Achilles (black).
      • William Johnson mentions to Haytham Kenway that his Irish Catholic background meant that his opportunities in life were limited and had to convert to Protestantism when he and his uncle left for America.
      • In one mission where Connor briefly teams up with his father Haytham tries to assert patriarchal authority over him. Connor (raised in a matrilineal culture) makes it clear he sees him as just some guy his mother spent the night with once.
    • Both Liberation and Freedom Cry deal with the subject of slavery especially with the respective protagonists Aveline and Adewale being the offspring of slaves and determined to bring down the institution.
    • Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag:
      • Black Flag likewise features racism against indigenous peoples and Blacks. One of the villains only disapproves of slavery because it's inefficient due to the risk of slave uprisings, not because of any moral qualms, and slurs like "dago" are heard when Spanish and English troops under the Templars hit a predominantly Mayan Assassin stronghold.
      • Edward Kenway himself, while surprisingly tolerant due to having shipped with a lot of different people, does once bring up to his Trinidadian ex-slave quartermaster Adewalé the possibility of returning to Africa. Adewalé's response amounts to, "Why would I go back to a place I've never been to?"
      • Even the aforementioned sense of pirates having more egalitarian views is put into a more historical context. Edward, as stated, has no qualms with Adewale serving as his Quartermaster. Blackbeard doesn't comment on it, nor does Anne Bonney or James Kidd. But Benjamin Hornigold's reaction to him is less than enlightened, wondering aloud why Edward lets Ade carry a pistol. And when Jack Rackham leads a mutiny and seizes control of the Jackdaw his first thought is to sell Ade. It's perhaps no surprise that the former three are the heroes, whilst the latter turn traitor. It's also explicitly stated when they first take the ship together that the reason Adewale takes the role and accepts Edward taking command is that he knows the crew wouldn't accept a black captain.
      • There's also a bit of white-on-white racism on display at one point early in the game when Edward is on the receiving end of an insult that includes a reference to him being English. He irritatedly retorts that he's Welsh, not English.
    • Assassin's Creed Syndicate: The vastly different social standards of Victorian Era Britain are brought up on several occasions. Maharaja Duleep Singh is faced with the challenge of reclaiming Punjab from British rule, and is treated condescendingly in London because of the prevailing attitudes of White Man's Burden and imperialism of the day. Pearl Attaway has been hounded by men her entire life for not giving up her business enterprise by entering a marriage, and one of the "Dreadful Crimes" side quests involves a woman who tried to use a fake psychic to trick her brother into giving up the family fortune since he received all of it as the male heir. In the World War I simulation, Lydia Frye pressures Winston Churchill into returning to Parliament to fight for women's suffrage, and Evie mentions in her penultimate notebook entry that although Starrick is dead and London has been freed from the Templars, female suffrage and education must be accomplished before all of London can truly be considered free.
    • Assassin's Creed: Odyssey:
      • While the rampant sexism of the time generally goes unmentioned, there is one quest in the Olympics where Alexios/Kassandra has to save a woman from being executed for the crime of... trying to watch the Games while being a woman. There were no Women's Olympics back then.
      • The game also makes it clear that Sparta was a brutal, caste-based society of aristocrats who disenfranchised the perioeci and terrorized the helots. Even sympathetic Spartan characters like Myrrine are either indifferent or supportive of the system, and Alexios/Kassandra can choose to aid the suppression of a slave revolt. Myrrine also chastizes Alexios/Kassandra for choosing to interrupt the agoge, the Spartan Training from Hell where Spartan boys would be put through a very strict regimen to become well-trained, disciplined warriors or else they would die from failing the test.
    • Assassin's Creed: Valhalla:
      • Varin sacrificing his life so that Kjotve doesn't murder his clan, rather than being seen as a noble if senseless sacrifice (because Kjotve just orders them massacred anyway), is seen by the Vikings as cowardly because he died on his knees rather than in combat.
      • The Glowcestrescire Arc deals with voluntary human sacrifice, in the form of Cynon choosing to sacrifice himself in a Wicker Man as the Harvest King in order to secure a good harvest.
      • The only punishment Eivor faces for killing two of Harald's men over an insult is having to pay 50 silver per man in compensation. Once Styrbjorn promises to cover it, Eivor is free to leave and set off for England.
  • Demythification: The Advanced Ancient Humans known as the First Civilization, Those Who Came Before, or the Isu are given as being the inspiration for many if not all gods from ancient mythologies, the first individual to explicitly appear being named Minerva as the player character, Ezio Auditore in this case, immediately identifies her as such a god but she denies any actual divinity.
  • Depending on the Writer: Much of the Lore across the AC-Franchise in both the modern-day, the historical era, both within the games and the Expanded Universe changes from writer-to-writer, leading to multiple Retcon and changes across the series:
    • The first Assassin's Creed game implied that it was taking place in an Alternate Universe substantially different from later series, with whole parts of Africa being depopulated and so on. The games following on from that significantly downplayed this, attempting to go in a more Like Reality, Unless Noted aspect. A good example is that, the first AC game had its main plot being stopping a Templar Satellite from going into outer space by which they would use a Piece of Eden, the Modern Day plot between Assassin's Creed II and III evolved to stopping a solar flare first predicted by the Mayan Calendar prophecy so as to mirror the contemporary craze over 2012 being the supposed end of the world.
    • The First Civilization were technologically advanced and quite powerful and capable but III had Juno insist that their technology had limits such as transferring consciousness digitally to a synthetic form, which was eventually retconned in Syndicate where Consus was revealed to have achieved that albeit kept the technology from Juno and Aita. The First Civilization were also incapable of halting the Toba Catastrophe while their many earthquake machines in Rogue suggest that they do have technology that can control the tectonic plates and landmass. Likewise in III, Juno insists that she failed to save Aita, but in Black Flag it's revealed that as a backup plan she managed to scatter him into an endlessly reincarnating being.
    • The Lore in the "The Truth" puzzles of Assassin's Creed II originally implied that Winston Churchill, George Washington, and other famous figures were Templars or Templar-puppets, then III and Syndicate changed and altered the allegiances of both characters for their on-screen appearances, and likewise Black Flag introduce a handwave that stated that Subject 16 couldn't differentiate the truth and false visions and probabilities from his visions, more or less making "the Lore" guidelines rather than rules.
    • The Templars are stated to be groups and individuals with worthy goals and ideals that got twisted and the conflict between the two, as presented in I was Grey-and-Gray Morality. However, the Ezio games made the Templars into cackling villains which III and Black Flag tried to balance and restore, and which Rogue and Unity tilted to the other way once again. This also gets contradicted internally, since Initiates (which was stated to be the canonical ending of Freedom Cry) said that Robespierre was an ally who aided the Haitian Assassins by abolishing slavery in the Caribbean, and that Napoleon was their enemy. But Unity the game presents a villainous (and Templar) Robespierre and a heroic (and Assassin ally) Napoleon instead.
  • Distant Sequel: A common occurrence, as the games are set all over recorded history.
  • Distracted by the Sexy: This is actually a game mechanic in the series: hiring a group of courtesans/Romanies to either act as a mobile hiding spot or distract a targeted group of guards is an effective way of completing most of the stealth sequences.
  • Doing In the Wizard: A major part of the franchise's backstory. Humans as we know them are actually a slave race created by the Isu, who ruled the world using incredibly advanced technology. Humans eventually rebelled against their creators, but a major solar event killed off the majority of the Isu and destroyed their technology, thus ending the rebellion. Over the course of human history, bits of Isu technology, called "Pieces of Eden," have been discovered and used by various scholars, inventors, and leaders, thus explaining various feats of mythology or inspiration. These items are explicitly not magical, but using a combination of super-science and manipulation of various neurotransmitters in the human brain. Often, a single Piece of Eden is connected to several famous people throughout history—for example, the same piece possessed by Napoleon Bonaparte was also later used by Harry Houdini. It's been hinted that every major religious figure throughout history came into contact with a Piece of Eden at some point.
  • Doomed by Canon: For all the success you have as an Assassin in the past, you know that eventually the Assassins will be driven underground and the Knights Templar will become an insanely powerful, globe-spanning corporation, Abstergo.
  • Dying Truce: Many storyline kills end like this, with the victim giving the Assassin important plotline information (or occasionally trying to plant seeds of doubt) with his dying breath as he lays in the Assassin's arms.
  • Dual Wielding: Several protagonists do this from II onwards. Many of the games outfit the player with dual hidden blades. Connor, Edward, and Shay all fight with dual weapons in different styles (Sword/Tomahawk with knife, full-length swords, and sword and shortsword, respectively).
  • Dump Stat: With regards to weapons up until Rogue and Black Flag, the Damage stat is useless since you'll be insta-killing most of your opponents anyway.

    E-H 
  • Early-Installment Weirdness: The "historical tourism" aspect of the series, enabled by the Database Entries and constant attention drawn to famous landmarks via Assassin's Tombs is not played out strongly in Assassin's Creed, with the only significant historical figure present being Richard the Lionheart and the Crusades being relegated to the background. It was with Assassin's Creed II, with almost the entire supporting cast comprised of actual historical figures, generally accurate time frame and recreations of historical events like the Pazzi Conspiracy and the Bonfire of the Vanities became as much a part of the core appeal of the series as the social stealth gameplay of the original.
  • Edutainment Game: Although obviously the storyline and characters are Historical Fiction, the games do provide real information about historical figures, settlements and societies. To cite one specific example, a significant amount of assassination targets across all the games really did die in the exact year and the exact city in which they are encountered in the game; only their causes of death are changed. Origins and Odyssey double down on this by adding Discovery Tours, which allow players to explore the game world at their leisure and learn actual historical information about certain places.
  • Enigmatic Institute: Abstergo Industries has a number of scientific projects to its name, most notably the Animus, and is the current front of the Templars from which they make and execute their plans to bring the entire world under their control.
  • An Entrepreneur Is You: Starting from II, the games generally feature a way to generate income, usually as a Money Sink. They almost always tend to be Game Breakers that will eventually give you more money than you can ever spend.
  • Equipment-Based Progression: The games generally follow this format, in that you get better weapons to do more damage, and better armor to get more health (the first has a "sync" bar that increases through the game as you did various sidequests).
  • Evil Counterpart: The Templar Order to the Assassin Brotherhood as a whole, See 'The Fettered' and 'Order Versus Chaos' below. Indeed the running theme of the game is to how the Assassins and the Templars react to emerging historical changes and events, with the series largely tracing it like a back-and-forth political debate. Some of the Assassin heroes, Connor especially, nurtures hopes for an Enemy Mine and to reconcile the two views. This comes closest in the series with Unity, with an almost literal marriage between the orders in Paris. Unfortunately, there's the problem of, as we discover in Black Flag, Sages.
  • Evil, Inc.: The Templars use Abstergo Industries as a corporate front for their modern-day operations and schemes from creating products to demonize the Assassins to using their paramilitary strike teams to eliminate any and all opposition.
  • Expanded Universe: Since the release of the first game in 2007, the franchise has seen a steady stream of novels, comics, spinoff games, online websites, films, board games, audio dramas, and even forthcoming Netflix shows to flesh out any details of the Assassin's Creed universe not seen or only implied in the mainline installments. As of 2021, the Assassin's Creed expanded universe has adopted a three-tiered system that classifies stories as "Classics" (direct adaptations of the mainline games), "Chronicles" (new stories featuring returning protagonists) or "Originals" (stories with an all-new cast and setting).
  • Exactly What It Says on the Tin: The entire franchise is unsurprisingly about the Assassin Brotherhood and their sacred creed with the exception of Odyssey.
  • Eye Scream: Some of the bladed weapon counter kills go for the eyes.
  • Fantasy Landmark Equivalent: The franchise uses some delicately-placed servings of Anachronism Stew to show famous landmarks in a sort of 'hybrid' state if they would lack features that would make them recognizable to modern audiences; for instance, in Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, St. Peter's Basilica in the Vaticano District bears its iconic dome underneath a series of scaffolds circa 1499, despite the fact that construction on the dome didn't start until 1506.
  • Fascist, but Inefficient: Whenever the Templars take full control of an area, they tend to run it into the ground due to their "keep the people weak" policy weakening entire nations. So much for their Utopia. And they never, ever learn from those mistakes. Or when they do learn, they commit new mistakes.
  • The Fettered: Both the Assassins and the Templars are a strange mix of both this and The Unfettered.
    • The Assassins strive for Freedom/Chaos, yet live by a strict moral code that defines all their actions. The Templars, in contrast, seek Order/Law, yet have absolutely no moral restrictions on their behavior and are free to use any and all means (up to and including mass murder) in pursuit of their goal. This leads to quite a few ironies, see Murder Is the Best Solution below. Ultimately, both the Assassins and Templars believe that "Nothing is true, everything is permitted". But to the Assassins the phrase is descriptive whereas to the Templars it's proscriptive (to understand this sentence better, note how Altaïr differentiates between the two as he progresses through Al-Mualim's missions in the first game).
    • Notably, Edward Kenway's willful misinterpretation of it in the face of Mary Read's straightforward explanation is part of why Edward stands out compared to the prior playable ancestors: for most of his game, he subscribes closer to the Templar interpretation despite not being on any particular side until later.
    • Shay Patrick Cormac's firsthand experience with the Creed is distorted by a tragic encounter with an Artifact of Eden, a mission sanctioned by his Assassin Mentor Achilles. He turns his back on the Brotherhood, declaring that "If everything is permitted... then no one is safe." His eventual allegiance with the Colonial Templars is rooted mainly out of spite for what the Brotherhood made him do, and not quite fully what the Order stood for.
  • Fire Stolen from the Gods: The franchise's backstory involves the Isu, Ancient Astronauts who acted as Abusive Precursors and subsequently acted as the inspiration for, at the very least, the Hellenic and Roman pantheons. Their "Pieces of Eden" were stolen by the first Assassins, none other than Adam and Eve themselves, and served as a launching point for civilization as a whole, with the Pieces cropping up in world history and mythology: for instances, swords wielded by Joan of Arc, Genghis Khan, and Obu Nobunaga are all Pieces of Eden.
  • Fling a Light into the Future: The grand design of The Ones Who Came Before, who found themselves dying from underpopulation after a great catastrophe, was to seed the Earth with their artifacts and use their knowledge of the future to manipulate events so that key people would have the necessary information to prevent the same catastrophe from happening again. Altaïr's story in Revelations is an explicitly demonstrated subplot of this larger design.
    Altaïr: They are... messages, of a sort.
    Niccolo Polo: Messages? For whom?
    Altaïr: I wish I knew.
  • Foregone Conclusion:
    • Both the Assassins and the Templars make it to the 21st century intact, and every ancestor character survives to have at least one child. The latter is subverted as of Origins onward, wherein the new Animus can trace genetic memories from any source of DNA, even if the actual user isn't a descendant; and so the character whose memories are being relived no longer needs to have a lineage that survived to the present day.
    • Just about every historical event will end in the same way as Real Life regardless of the machinations of the Assassin Brotherhood and the Templar Order.
  • Forever War: If the span of the playable games hasn't convinced you yet, then the backstory will: Assassins and Templars have been fighting each other ever since Cain and Abel, and have continued all the way into the "present". Surprisingly, both sides manage to keep a bearing on what they want, especially after their orders determined their purposes during the 3rd Crusade in 1190. While both sides have become obsessed with defeating the other, they both have specific reasons why they want this (ensure freedom for the Assassins, protect order for the Templars), and their worldviews are too different to allow peace between both sides. There were brief periods of weakness or truce through history, but the 2 orders have never had peace globally ever!
  • Framing Device: Desmond and the other subjects are looking into their Genetic Memory through a machine called the Animus, and access more of it if they complete missions as their ancestors would have. This justifies many of the Video Game Tropes present, such as 100% Completion Bonuses and "But Thou Must!" moments. This is actually Lampshaded in Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag with a series of internal Abstergo Entertainment memos where company employees who are turning Desmond's genetic memories into a video game guess wildly on possible future installments in the series. However, the project head clearly states that the cutoff point is the 1900s, when cars became common, because;
    Olivier Garneau: ...we don't want to go through the effort of coding extra Animus features just for the sake of digging up memories of people driving around in cars. There are other and more efficient ways to experience that...
  • From Hero to Mentor: This is basically Ezio Auditore's Character Arc throughout his trilogy and supplementary media. He starts out as a hero out to avenge his family and to foil a Templar plot but slowly grows into the role of the Mentor (which is an official title) of the Assassin orders across the Mediterranean. By the time of Assassin's Creed: Embers, his assassination days are clearly past, but he still mentors select students on occasion.
  • Garden of Eden: In the Assassin's Creed universe, it is an Isu city that contained a lot of advanced technology known as the Pieces of Eden. Much like the original biblical version, Eden is also the home of Adam and Eve who were the first humans to lead an uprising against their creators in the War of Unification and the subsequent Human-Isu War.
  • Game Mod: In universe, the Animus allows for a historical Player Character to wear outfits or use equipment from a different setting or era, with Altaïr's and Ezio's equipment being the most common. Some gear, such as the katana from Rogue, is explicitly stated to have been modded in.
  • Gameplay and Story Segregation: Justified and explained thanks to the above Framing Device. The Animus allows subjects to explore a virtual reality simulation based on their ancestor's memories, but it is not a perfect recreation. This is how the player is able to get away with doing some things the ancestor might not have done, why there is Video Game Time, why there is Benevolent Architecture everywhere, etc. (Amusingly, even the subtitles are covered by this trope, with Desmond pointing this out in one instance in II.) Basically, any time there's a bout of Fridge Logic at play, you can Hand Wave it as "it's not a perfect recreation, but it's close enough to maintain synchronization so just go with it." The Animus is also explicitly modeled after a video game console, and in later games a variant of it is marketed as such to the public, further justifying things like the HUD, mission objectives, and control scheme being as they are.
  • Game Plays Itself: The games have automated the act of jumping. Rather than pressing a jump button, you hold down a run button and then move the joystick to run at a ledge; the character will jump gaps automatically.
  • Generational Saga:
  • Genre-Busting: As a series, Assassin's Creed combines conspiracy fiction, science-fiction, historical fiction with some elements of fantasy and also features stealth and action gameplay.
  • Good Colors, Evil Colors: In Eagle Vision, allies are blue, enemies are red and targets are gold.
  • Gotta Kill 'Em All: The series basically embodies this trope, from the main plot of all the games revolving around assassinating a group of villains, to the optional sidequest of killing the 60 Templar Knights in the 1st game.
  • Gratuitous Foreign Language: It is very common to hear characters from non-English speaking countries and communities say a couple of words in their native languages even when they're speaking English.
  • Graying Morality/Grey-and-Gray Morality: The series zigzags this trope:
    • Assassin's Creed was fairly grey in that quite a few of the targets were sympathetic, the Player Character Altaïr was highly flawed himself. Then there's the fact that the Final Boss was ultimately, Al Mualim, the leader of the Assassins who had used him as a pawn to wipe away the other Templars so he can control the Apple for himself.
    • Assassin's Creed II and Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood was fairly clear in its Black-and-White Morality with Ezio and the Assassins, as well as their supporters, being good guys and the Templars being bad guys who are simply out for power. Assassin's Creed: Revelations however has a low-key conflict and more ambiguous villains, with Ezio doing dubious actions such as sparking a riot to complete a mission and later setting fire on Cappadoccia in an action that likely killed several people there.
    • Assassin's Creed III was the grayest in the series with the Assassin hero contemplating an alliance with the Templars that ultimately fails because Poor Communication Kills. Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag likewise shows the conflict from the perspective of a complete outsider.
    • The Colonial Assassins and Templars are fairly morally ambiguous in Assassin's Creed Rogue. From the perspective of the 18th Century Templars, the Asssassins are factitious, unstintingly use criminals, pirates and mercenaries as part of their set-up (though as shown in III, Haytham's associate Thomas Hickey would play a similar role for them), and their alliance with the French during the Seven Years' War does cause problems for people living in the British Colonies as well as the Native Americans allied with the English. Likewise, the main protagonist is a Assasasin-turned-Templar who feels betrayed by his comrades.
    • Assassin's Creed: Unity depicts the Assassin-Templar Conflict as not a struggle between good vs evil but instead a war of Well-Intentioned Extremists. The Assassin Council are a hotbed of indecisiveness too bogged down by rituals and hierarchy to adequately contend with the Revolutionary Templars. Mirabeau favored Arno's bold approach and solution of an alliance with Élise, but fellow Assassin Pierre Bellec instead kills him and wants Arno to take a more radical Kill 'Em All approach rather than advocate unity, believing this is how Altaïr, Ezio and Connor approached problems. The other elders of the Brotherhood seem relatively neutral on the matter, preferring to strip Arno of his title rather than give him a chance to change the status quo. The Templars as whole want to usher in a radical democracy to destroy the vestiges of feudalism, which is corrupt, decadent and leeching the people dry. For them, the excesses of the Revolution on the part of Agent Provocateur is intended to prevent future revolutions. Some of the Templars such as François Rouille, Louis Michel Le Pelettier and Maximilien Robespierre are sincere Revolutionaries while the likes of Germain is motivated by disinterested and unselfish dedication to progress at any cost. He doesn't want power, but control and sees the excesses he promotes as a means to make people fear further revolutions against the Templar Order they set up.
    • In Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, since there are no Assassins and Templars (at least in the base game), neither Athens and Sparta are wholly good or evil, and the players' choices aren't that cut and dried. Many choices that seem unambiguously "good" or "bad" can have quite the opposite consequences than what the player hoped.
    • The conflict between the Norse Vikings and the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in Assassin's Creed: Valhalla follows in the footsteps of III and Rogue when it comes down to who's more in the right and who's more in the wrong. No matter how honorable, reasonable, and inspiring the Vikings can be, the Anglo-Saxons are still completely within their right to defend their lands and people from foreign invaders. By the same token, while the Norse are seeking to conquer all of England, the various petty kings and rulers of the land are, while not as bad about conquest, still often hated by their own people to various degrees for other horrible actions, and so have no particular stake in whoever rules over them.
  • The Greatest Story Never Told:
    • Every story in the Animus is this, showing both the real forces which drove history with no one ever knowing their name and the lives of their allies and public figures distorted to elide it. The Assassins choose this by design of course. Desmond Miles in 2012, performed a Heroic Sacrifice to save the lives of every life on Earth. Not only is the public unaware of Desmond but they will never know how close they were to extinction.
    • An even more pertinent and emotional example is Clay Kaczmarek, Subject 16. No one had more Undying Loyalty to the Creed than Clay and yet even after his death, the Assassins, except Desmond (after having gotten a glimpse of his memories), seem to have forgotten him, treating him as a Cloud Cuckoo Lander with Desmond tersely reminding Rebecca that He Had a Name when she called him "subject 16".
  • Greater-Scope Paragon:
    • Adam and Eve, the first two humans responsible for the uprising against the Isu. Adam is also the ancestor of Clay Kaczmarek and Desmond Miles.
    • Khemu, the son of Bayek and Aya, whose death at the hands of the Order of the Ancients causes his parents to not only go on a quest for vengeance but form the Hidden Ones, the ancient precursor of the Assassin Brotherhood.
    • Kassandra may or may not have fulfilled this role to the Hidden Ones/Assassins since she took possession of the Staff of Hermes from her real father Pythagoras. She also mentions to Layla Hassan that she's seen "too many wars" and saw "too many people die" which means that she has been a participant in numerous historical events over the years.
    • Darius, Iltani and Wei Yu were proto-Assassins who fought against the Order of the Ancients making them the precursors to Bayek and Aya's Hidden Ones well before their chronological birth. The former led a resistance group in Ancient Persia and he was the inventor of the Hidden Blade which he used to kill Xerxes not to mention that he raised Kassandra's son Elpidios, the ancestor of Aya of Alexandria while the latter was a member of the very first Assassin-esque organization in Babylon (modern-day Iraq) and she was responsible for the death of Alexander the Great by using a poison she acquired from an alchemist. And the last one killed Qin Shi Huangdi with a spear which caused the collapse of the Qin dynasty in China.
    • The Mentor, the leader of the Assassins up until his death in 2000 during the Great Purge which led to the splintering of the organization.
  • Greater-Scope Villain:
    • Juno throughout the modern-day segments of the games and the comics seeks to create a New World Order by using a cult known as the Instruments of the First Will to release her. Her husband, Aita also serves this role since he's been reincarnated as Sages Bartholomew Roberts and François-Thomas Germain respectively.
    • Cain, with his insignia becoming the symbol of the cult named after him and eventually the Templars.
    • Pharoah Smenkhkare of Egypt's 18th dynasty was the founder of the Order of the Ancients, an organization initially founded to obtain Isu technology but eventually grew in membership and scope across Europe and the Middle East before it evolved into the modern-day Templar Order.
    • King Alfred the Great is the ruling monarch of Wessex and the English Grand Maegester of the Order of the Ancients who's responsible for reforming the organization into the modern Templar Order. A somewhat unusual example, since he disliked the group because of their pagan beliefs but nevertheless decided that they should be transformed into a religious holy order since he was a devout Christian.
    • Valhalla reveals another villainous Isu in the form of "Loki," who secretly snuck into Odin's genetic reincarnation project to survive their extinction, primarily driven by his desire to avenge his son's death at Odin's hands. Eivor is not fully aware that they are the reincarnation of Odin, but Basim eventually confronts and fights Eivor in keeping with him being a reincarnation of Loki. While Basim is defeated by Eivor, over a millennium later, he and Loki's wife Aletheia through the Staff of Eden manipulate Layla so he can be revived and continue his quest to find his children.
  • Group-Identifying Feature:
    • Most members of the Assassin Brotherhood can be identified by their hoods, longcoats and robes.
    • The proto-Templar Order of the Ancients in Origins have black robes and Egyptian facemasks.
    • The Cult of Kosmos from Odyssey are recognized by their Greek drama masks and black hooded robes.
    • The Hidden Ones in Valhalla have white-grey robes and red sashes.
  • The Guards Must Be Crazy: The often incredible stupidity of the guards is justified In-Universe by the Animus not rendering memories precisely as they occurred, but rather as a VR simulation that Desmond must attempt to "play" as close to the way it really happened as possible. The assumption is that the real Assassins were much better at being inconspicuous than the player appears to be. There are also a few aversions in the second game onward, when the guards will act with surprising alertness and care, in particular by searching likely hiding spots.
  • Hacker Collective: Erudito is opposed to Abstergo, and hack into the Animus files in Liberation to expose the falsehoods about Aveline and several of the multiplayer characters in III (including suggesting that one, Alsoomse/The Independent, never actually existed). They also send information to both players of Project Legacy and Desmond in Brotherhood by giving him passwords to the other Assassins' email accounts so that he can monitor their exchanges on his own terms. In the Black Flag multiplayer, it's revealed that several of their members participated in a cybercrime that deleted $10 million in life savings, devolving into petty larceny, and several of them ended up being arrested.
  • Half-Human Hybrid: The "Truth" segments and the backstory exposition across the various games reveal that Altaïr and Ezio's bloodlines are descended from "Adam and Eve", who were real people that were part of an experiment in cross-breeding humans with the Precursors. They proved to be immune to the Mind Control effects of the Pieces of Eden and stole the original Apple, giving rise to the myth of Eden. They led a revolt against their masters and eventually gave rise to the Assassins... and the Templars, through their son Cain.
  • Handwave: Any discrepancy between the information given in the Truth files in Assassin's Creed II and later instalments comes with the easy out that Clay had gone more than a little insane, either from the Bleeding Effect or not knowing which actual timeline he was looking at, and therefore the information is invalid.
  • The Hashshashin: A fictionalized version of the organization serves as the main protagonists for the entire franchise.
  • The Hero Dies: Desmond dies in Assassin's Creed III. The next few games feature anonymous player cyphers as one-off protagonists until Assassin's Creed Origins provides a new modern day protagonist in the form of Layla Hassan. Assassin's Creed: Valhalla ends with Layla's body plugged into the Yggdrasil and lethally irradiated (since she lost the Staff keeping her alive) while her mind joins with The Reader inside the machine.
  • Hero of Another Story: The series has a running theme dealing with the fact that history and life itself is filled with numerous characters with everyone, big and small, major and minor, having a part to play and a story to tell. Especially the post-Ezio story arc games which move away from the Desmond-centric story arc.
  • Heroic Lineage:
    • Desmond Miles has a family tree that spans multiple countries over ten thousand years. His ancestors include Adam and Eve of all people, a Syrian Hashashasin fighting in the Third Crusade (Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad), a Florentine nobleman from Renaissance-era Italy (Ezio Auditore da Firenze), a Mohawk tribesman in colonial America (Ratonhnhaké:ton/Connor Kenway) and a Swansea-born Welsh pirate captain (Edward Kenway). And that's just only a small sampling of his ancestry, he has distant relatives from Egypt, central Africa, Japan, France, Taiwan and other parts of the modern United States. The only exception is Haytham Kenway, who is a devout Templar instead of an Assassin.
    • In the Legacy of the First Blade DLC of Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, Aya/Amunet is revealed to be the descendant of the legendary Greek king Leonidas of Sparta, the famous philosopher Pythagoras, and the Persian proto-Assassin Darius through the Eagle Bearer's son Elpidos.
  • Highly-Visible Ninja:
    • Despite a profession that requires stealth and anonymity, the Assassins wear an extremely recognizable uniform. It is more excusable in the first game when the white robe and hood let them pass for Muslim scholars (which is even lampshaded when Sibrand is introduced).
    • It stands out even in a pre-modern period like the Renaissance, where the nobility wear robes and doublets, but aside from Monks, nobody wears hoods. Ezio's outfit in Brotherhood, its distinctive robes with the signature "beak" stands out starkly against other Renaissance Italian clothing, all the moreso since he prominently displays the symbol of the Assassin Brotherhood on his armor and like Connor, wears the symbol in metal atop red sash belts. The Assassin insignia belt buckle is almost as large as his head. No one ever suspects the guy wearing this outfit and bristling with weapons as the likely culprit of mass murder, even when he is standing right there watching them in a crowd, where nobody wears clothing remotely resembling Ezio's.
    • In the 18th Century, the Assassin outfits display changing fashion trends and looks more like Badass Longcoats. Connor in particular, barring his hood could pass as a wilderness lumberjack or frontiersman. His white longcoat also blends in well in the winter landscape. The Assassins however retain the prominent hoods, and their fondness for the same is actually lampshaded in Black Flag: when the Assassin defector Duncan was originally supposed to meet the Templars on the understanding that he'd wear the distinctive robes worn by his Order. Aveline de Grandpré is the most practically outfitted of the Assassins in this time period, sporting a black tricorne hat instead of a hood and who deliberately changes her outfits in her role as an Assassin, incorporating different gameplay elements by shifting from Assassin to Slave to Proper Lady.
    • In Unity, the French Assassins have mostly abandoned the hood and white robes except for ceremonial reasons. Arno is unique among the French Assassins for wearing a hood, since his mentor, Pierre Bellec, despite being an active field agent doesn't wear one either. He, like Aveline, is rare for having non-white default robes. He wears a blue suit, white vest and red cravat which aside from being the colors of the French flag also pass convincingly as period-appropriate clothes, with the hood being the most conspicuous element, Lampshaded by Napoleon himself.
    • Syndicate downplays this enough that aside from Henry Green, the traditional Assassin uniform has mostly died down as a fashion choice. Jacob and Evie Frye both wear darker robes, and usually accessorize in order to hide the look. The trade-off unfortunately is that even like this, their many belts and the like stand out like a sore thumb from more smooth Victorian fashion. Furthermore, Evie's outfit still has a hood which does make her seem a bit odd in Victorian Britain, and Jacob's top hat doesn't exactly help him blend in at all either.
    • Bayek's default outfit in Origins is more or less normal for the period (Ptolemaic-era Egypt). Optional outfits range from Ezio, Altair, and Aguilar's outfits (i.e. completely inappropriate for the time period and not even invented for another 10 centuries) to normal Egyptian wear, with almost everything in between. Completing an optional chain quest even gives Bayek a science fiction-inspired outfit that wouldn't look out of place in Star Wars.
    • Odyssey perhaps downplays this trope the most, taking place almost 400 years before the founding of the first Hidden Ones brotherhood. It's also the first game in the franchise to let players equip and mix and match individual armor pieces rather than equipping pre-made outfits. Alexios/Kassandra's "canonical" outfit (as seen on the game's cover art, trailers and other promotional pieces) resembles that of a typical Spartan hoplite wearing bronze armor. Some aspects of the traditional Assassin uniform still persist however, such as the red accents seen on Alexios/Kassandra's cape and pteruges and the large brass bracer worn on their left arm. Although the Hidden Ones and the Assassin insignia have not been established yet in Odyssey's time, many armor pieces instead prominently feature the Spartan lambda (Λ) and eagle motifs. Although Alexios/Kassandra are often shown wearing either a Spartan helmet or no headgear at all in most promotional material, hoods are a commonly found type of head armor in the game and one can even be obtained before the player leaves Kaphallonia Island.
    • Modern Assassins tend to wear either white hoodies or other types of regular clothing.
  • High-Speed Hijack: Starting with Brotherhood the games allow horse-jacking, either when you're leaping from above or from a horse of your own. Cart-jacking is done too, in a few sequences. There is an even an Achievement for it, Grand Theft Dressage.
  • Historical Domain Character: Every installment in the franchise has featured real-life historical figures in major supporting roles either as unwitting participants of the Assassin-Templar Conflict or members of the respective organizations.
  • Historical Hero Upgrade: The series' main draw is how the developers use the Rule of Cool to combine exquisite research with Historical Upgrades. If somebody in the past was awesome, they're in the series somewhere with his life examined in detail — with Hidden Depths because history was Written By The Templars, who would naturally seek to slander people who were opposed to them.
    • For starters, the Hashashashin themselves, who the first game accurately labeled as the Asasiyun (their true etymology). According to history, they were Hassan-I-Sabah's private army. They built a reputation at the time as his enemies were Asshole Victims whom they eliminated with a minimum of collateral damage. The first game also shows a respectful and realistic representation of King Richard I as a Blood Knight and Noble Demon, who occasionally can allow respect for the Worthy Opponent from a "heathen" faith.
    • Lorenzo de' Medici is portrayed as an idealized Big Good of the Florentine Renaissance, A Lighter Shade of Gray compared to the more ruthless Pazzi and Borgia family. As seen in the Bonfire of the Vanities DLC, his passing leaves weak descendants and Girolamo Savonarola to rise to power. Historically, the Medici held hegemony by the same combination of proto-mafia shakedowns and backroom power politics as the rest of the Italian families. His ruthless edge is acknowledged when he promises to destroy the Pazzi after they killed his brother, an action which Lucrezia Borgia tells Ezio extended to the innocent as well as the guilty. Likewise Caterina Sforza is shown as a ruthless and cold Proper Lady who, unlike Ezio, doesn't confuse business with pleasure but is also quite friendly and caring when least expected, perfectly described by Ezio as "A Rose of Tempered Steel".
    • The portrayal of Niccolo Machiavelli however is closer to his actual biography than to the Hollywood History version that most people know. In reality, he was an ardent supporter of republicanism, and many historians believe that his most famous work, The Prince, was a satire. Notably, Word of God is that the in-universe titular prince was not Cesare Borgia, but rather Ezio Auditore. Leonardo da Vinci gets an upgrade in heroism, despite only playing a supportive role to Ezio. Notable changes include that his inventions work, are completely functional and can be used at nearly any time. Plus he's the main character's best buddy. The game also accurately shows him in his youthful fame as a very handsome man, and also makes it clear that he is gay.
    • Assassin's Creed III averts this. It makes the personal failings and hypocrisies of the Founding Fathers a central part of its plot. With the likes of George Washington ordering the displacement of natives from the lands, citing the fact that many of them align with the British. They are also slaveowners who argue for liberty. The Native American hero Connor is constantly strained to justify his support for the Patriot cause and the fact that the Assassin-Templar conflict as such will have no effect on the wider reality. Rogue set in the Seven Years' War is another aversion since the Assassins support the French faction and the brief decline of the Assassin Brotherhood is tied to them putting their full weight on behalf of the losing side, who as Shay points out, are also their opponents in Haiti.
    • Black Flag looks at The Golden Age of Piracy with a pro-pirate perspective, showing them as poor sailors trying to resist Empires that compete to maintain the safety of the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea largely so that they can maintain routes for the slave trade. Likewise, the game shows us a Blackbeard who rarely killed and is A Father to His Men, a romantic depiction but one closer to historical record than earlier portrayals.
    • Unity subjects the Constitutional Monarchy of 1789 to a great deal of idealization, with Mirabeau shown as a Pragmatic Hero whose corruption and backroom dealing with the King is depicted as an attempt to control escalating tension. Mirabeau was intelligent and sincere, but he was also vain and personally ambitious and significantly misunderstood his influence with the Court. The Assassins mostly side with the moderate liberals, persecuted nobility and independent revolutionaries like Theroigne de Mericourt while the Templars co-opt the popular movement.
  • Historical Domain Superperson: The Sages, a type of Half-Human Hybrid who are essentially a reincarnation of the Isu, the Precursors of the setting, created by Lost Technology and genetic engineering (it's very complicated). While the Sages don't have any combat-related powers, they can use Precursor/Isu technology, which is generally locked and thus cannot be used by regular people. Some of these Sages are also real-life historical figures as well such as Jacques de Molay and Harald Fairhair.
  • Historical Villain Upgrade:
    • The Knights Templar in general were not a shadowy organization of psychotics and dictators bent on world domination. Indeed, even the depiction of The Purge of Jacques de Molay at the hands of King Philip IV le Bel in the prologue of Unity accords them very little sympathy.
    • The Borgias are the poster child for Big, Screwed-Up Family of the Renaissance and their portrayal in the Ezio games does not disappoint. While Rodrigo Borgia was certainly a murderous, conniving asshole, the game's research neglects his exceptional religious tolerance in favor of an entertaining Evil Overlord who regards Christianity as bunk and sees the papacy as an entirely political office.History  Likewise, Savonarola in the Bonfire of the Vanities DLC, although AC was hardly the first to come up with this portrayal, though the game acknowledges him as a Wild Card who is not connected to Assassins or Templars. History 
    • The Templars in Black Flag, III and the Villain Episode of Rogue largely avert this being more complex in motivation than the Borgias. That said, Charles Lee is a mostly In Name Only depiction that bears little visual resemblance to the real man, acts like a mustache-twirling villain for the most part and serves as a Satellite Character to the fictional Haytham Kenway.
    • George Washington danced with the trope a little bit. The Truth message in II painted him as a Templar. III disproved this with George being a major obstacle to the Templar plans and giving him a pretty fair portrayal, but one notable instance is that remains is George ordered the attack on Connor's village at a time when the real man had been retired from the military.
    • Unity subjects the entire French Revolution to this, showing the popular movement to be secretly stage-managed by the Templars who want to usher the rise of the Middle Class by destroying the nobility, while also showing the world that The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized via the Reign of Terror, so that people will fear revolutions in the future.
    • Origins depicts the marriage of Cleopatra and Julius Caesar as a means for the proto-Templars, the Order of Ancients, to maintain their stranglehold on the lower classes by manipulating both rulers and stoking their imperialist desires. In response, Bayek and Aya fashion themselves as the Hidden Ones to unravel their attempts at domination on behalf of the ordinary citizens of Egypt and Rome. After being the instigator of the infamous Ides of March by taking the first stab at Julius Caesar, Aya would later rename herself Amunet, who was identified way back in II as the one who killed Cleopatra with a poisonous snake.
    • In the backstory, we have Thomas Edison, a proven Jerkass who regularly stole ideas and performed grotesque "demonstrations" to smear his assistant-turned-rival Nikola Tesla. Turns out he was also a Templar who stole his rival's MacGuffin and gave it to Henry Ford, who in turn, gave it to Adolf Hitler for the express purpose of jumpstarting the Holocaust and World War II. Also, Hitler's conspirators? Winston Churchill, FDR and Josef Stalin. Making matters worse, at some point the Templar Order decided to use a Piece of Eden to cause insanity in Nikola Tesla thus removing him as a threat to both Thomas Edison as well as the general Templar order; though not before Tesla successfully destroyed a Piece of Eden in The Tunguska Event.
  • History Repeats: On a meta level, the franchise seems to be following an alternating design pattern:
    • The first generation of games (I, II, Brotherhood, and Revelations) were set almost exclusively in cities.
    • The second generation (III, Black Flag, and Rogue) not only included the surrounding wilderness but also introduced ships.
    • The third generation (Unity and Syndicate) dropped the ships and returned to the cities, only now larger and more detailed.
    • The fourth generation (Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla), in turn, opened things back up again and brought back the ships.
    • Mirage marks an explicit return to the original style of city-based, stealth-focused, parkour-heavy gameplay.
  • Humans Are Flawed: The tenet that both the Assassins and the Templars agree on. For both, there is no uncertainty that humanity and its way of thinking cannot be considered in any way perfect and society is in desperate need of some righting. However the Templars, being as they are, think this is meant to be accomplished by seizing power and using whatever means therein to mandate order and peace; while Assassins seek to uphold people's freedom and eliminate any attempt to subvert it.

    I-P 
  • I Fought the Law and the Law Won:
    • Averted. You can kill all the guards in a specific encounter and others in different areas won't notice.
    • In a larger, more metaphorical sense, this is why the Templars keep thriving no matter how many of them are killed by the Assassins - You Cannot Kill An Idea.
      • The Assassins train for years so they can battle society's flaws, but even when they succeed in changing society for the better, society is rarely grateful, as the Templars are always there to offer simpler - albeit amoral - alternatives to the Assassins’ Creed of wisdom and freedom. However, the Creed itself uplifts those who follow it to great heights if they are willing to work hard for it - Nothing is True (Think for Yourself), Everything is Permitted (Freedom is Life) - making it impossible to destroy.
        Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad: ...how does one wage war against a concept? It is the perfect weapon. It lacks a physical form yet can alter the world around us in numerous, often violent ways. You cannot kill a creed. Even if you kill all of its adherents, destroy all of its writings – these are a reprieve at best. Some one, some day, will rediscover it. Reinvent it. I believe that even we, the Assassins, have simply re-discovered an Order that predates the Old Man himself...
        Connor Kenway: Were we not meant to live in peace, then? Is that it? Are we born to argue? To fight? So many voices - each demanding something else.
      • The Templars use society's flaws to dominate it, which they find simple and profitable. And they will always exist because Humans Are Flawed; As Long As There Are people who prefer to obey rather than think, there will be Templars to reward their obedience with wealth, power and influence; while the Assassins are literally born of lifetimes of discipline and self-study, the Templars are even more resilient than the Assassins because they're not even an idea - they're the absence of one. On the other hand, this also means that they will never succeed fully, since obedience, as Warren Vidic laments, "doesn't always take."
        Haytham Kenway: Even when your kind appears to triumph, still, we rise again. And, do you know why? It is because the Order is born of a realization. We require no creed! No indoctrination by desperate old men. All we need is that the world be as it is. And this is why the Templars will never be destroyed!
  • I Need No Ladders: While you technically can and do use ladders, very often in the series simply running up the wall next to a ladder is faster than climbing it.
  • Iconic Item: The Hidden Blade. It's used by nearly every protagonist in the game as their primary weapon.
  • Iconic Outfit: The standard Assassin outfit is a long robe/coat with a red sash and a beaked hood. No matter the time period, almost every Assassin will wear some variant of these robes. While it isn't strictly required by the Brotherhood, every Assassin has worn this outfit for centuries with the exception of Aveline who instead opts to use three different disguises to blend in with the crowd and doesn't have a hood, unlike the others.
    • The Eagle Bearer is a non-Assassin example in Assassin's Creed: Odyssey. The character is easily identifiable by their Spartan helmet, red cape, grey armor, fustanella, golden gauntlets and greaves.
  • The Illuminati: The Templar Order are basically the group with a different name, a millennia old conspiracy that works behind the scenes to influence historical events.
  • Inexplicable Treasure Chests: Shows up in a lot of the games. Treasure chests are scattered all over the game world, some in guarded or forgotten areas and some in plain sight. None of them will be opened before you get there and in some cases, the chests might be centuries/millennia old(even in the ancient games) yet contain modern(for the time period) money and "fresh" food. It gets more absurd starting in Origins where chests can be found underwater with their contents perfectly intact and usable. Odyssey even lets you find cosmetic upgrades (including paintjobs, sails, figureheads and even crew reskins) for your ship in said underwater chests. Valhalla has lots of treasure chests at the bottom of empty wells and locked houses with fragile roofs.
  • Informed Attribute: The games always maintain that the Animus is essentially like the Pensieve of Harry Potter i.e. it shows the real past, and Assassin's Creed states that any Artistic License – History that we see is a case of conventional history being Written by the Winners. The problem is that much of what the Animus shows is more or less Hollywood History and rarely goes beyond The Theme Park Version and Pop-Cultural Osmosis. For instance, historical Templars and Templar-allies are such figures as Caesar, Cleopatra, Rodrigo Borgia, Charles Lee, Robespierre. For the Templars to have rewritten history and given their views a Historical Hero Upgrade, these figures should ideally enjoy a heroic reputation in the universe of the AC series when in fact all of them are disreputable figures, some of whom are victims of a Historical Villain Upgrade, and the games portrayal of their lives can be in many respects even more stereotypical and unfair than other historical fiction dealing with said individuals. This also makes one question how successful and effective Templars really are at rewriting history, and by extension how effective Abstergo really is.
  • Inverse Dialogue/Death Rule: The major assassination targets are capable of giving entire soliloquies, followed up by an explanation of important plot points, after you've stabbed them in the throat. It's implied that there is some kind of telepathy, or memory alteration going on.
  • Invisible Writing: Many instances exist of characters using Eagle Vision in order to see hidden messages. The first game infamously ended with Desmond discovering this ability and finding Subject 16's writings all over the lab where he was kept inside Abstergo. The "Jack the Ripper" DLC of Syndicate uses it for horror, with the messages being left by Jack to taunt Evie Frye.
  • It's All About Me: Many characters who defect to the Templars (including the Crusader, the Sentinel, Lucy Stillman and Shay Patrick Cormac) do so not so much because they believe in the Templars' cause or methods, but to avenge some perceived betrayal against themselves, their family, or their tribe/clan. Additionally, almost all of themnote  harbor an abundance of arrogance. Most think themselves special, above all others, and unique in history. This is probably why they have Suicidal Overconfidence when facing the humanoid murder machines known as Assassins. "Sure, you killed hundreds of guards, knights, nobles, high-placed holy men and emperors... but I'm better than all those other guys!" Every one of them also thinks the world (or the nations they immediately occupy) would be better off with himself in charge. As such, Lucy Stillman stands out for averting this trope; particularly since her true allegiance was only revealed after she was killed by an Apple-controlled Desmond. The Apple of Eden in particular seems to amplify this personality trait in the Templars who have wielded it across millennia.
  • The Joys of Torturing Mooks: A sizable chunk of each game can be spent exploring all of the ways to maim and incapacitate guards. Valhalla takes this to another level where you can dismember or even outright decapitate enemies when you land the killing blow.
  • Julius Beethoven da Vinci: As of Black Flag, the Sages. Through Born-Again Immortality, one individual has been recurring throughout history, in such guises as the Wandering Jew; Jacques de Molay, last historical grandmaster of the Templars; Black Bart the pirate; the Count of St. Germain; and possibly David Bowie. No, really.
  • Kill the Parent, Raise the Child: Reginald Birch arranges for the murder of Edward Kenway, taking in his son, Haytham, and raising him as a Templar, while selling his daughter, Jennifer, into slavery. Haytham eventually learns what happened to his father, and kills Birch, although he remains a Templar.
  • Knight Templar: Unsurprisingly, the eponymous Templars are shining examples of such thinking. The Assassins tend to dabble in this philosophy at times as well but for the most part they exist as A Lighter Shade of Gray, not seeing free will and independent thought as evil but far from perfect or just.
  • La Résistance: The Assassins are basically freedom fighters who work in the shadows to oppose Templar tyranny.
  • Le Parkour:
    • Nearly everyone in the games who is either an Assassin or a target of an Assassin has amazing free-running skills, even people you wouldn't expect to like overweight (and heavily dressed) Church officials. Assassin's Creed III takes it a step further by moving from urban settings to colonial and forested environments; thus the moniker "tree-running".
    • This series became the Trope Codifier for video games. Many games previously had some sort of building-scaling, but AC was the first game to have the character actually reach out to various handholds and footholds on what would otherwise be something completely impassable, even for Batman. Follow the Leader kicked in; inFAMOUS and The Saboteur are two of the bigger ones.
  • Leap of Faith: The trademark skill of the Assassins (along with the Hidden Blade), consisting of a swan dive down into conveniently-placed haystacks; all recruits are required to perform this as part of their initiation as full Assassins.
  • Left Hanging: In terms of the wider story-arcs however, the following count:
    • The first game mentioned a Templar Satellite Launch which the Modern story of AC said was of great importance but the second game said that the real problem was the Solar Flare and in the third game, Abstergo called off the Satelitte launch after all, with the Templars stepping back from their grand plan for world domination in favor of mundane Abstergo Entertainment propaganda games.
    • Brotherhood's Subject 16 missions mentioned that Desmond has to find Eve, with vague messages concerning "your son". The importance of Eve keeps being referred to, with Aveline's prophecy disk and the Dead Kings DLC mentioning "the lady Eve" but has generally been a loose end and Black Flag retcons Subject 16's rambling coming from Post-Historical Trauma. Syndicate reveals that the comment about Desmond's son was accurate.
    • In terms of historical story, the later lives and careers of Connor, Aveline and Shay have generally been unmentioned despite the fact that two games take place in the same time of their later careers. Connor's story so far has continued only in supplementary comics.
  • Legacy Character: The basic premise of the games is that Desmond is a convergence of the bloodlines of Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad on his mother's side, and Ezio Auditore da Firenze and Connor/Ratohnhaké:ton (and two prior generations of male Kenways) on his father's side.
  • Leitmotif: Not including the first game, the main melody of "Ezio's Family" introduced in II has become a staple of many of the succeeding games' soundtracks in varying degrees. One of its most poignant uses is during the ending of Origins, where the melody plays when Bayek and Aya declare themselves the Hidden Ones, creating what would eventually become the Assassin Brotherhood. This also features heavily in the main theme of Odyssey.
  • Like Reality, Unless Noted: Most of the time, it's a straight-up Historical Fiction... right up until strange, almost-alien artifacts appear. The fact that the games focus 95% of the time on the historical period helps to drive home just how wrong these artifacts are for intruding into human history.
  • Long-Dead Badass: Every Assassin whose life is relived through the Animus is this from a modern-day perspective, and every Assassin from a sufficiently distant previous era is this for the Animus player character (like Altaïr, who's been dead for well over two centuries by Ezio's time). Surprisingly subverted in Odyssey with Kassandra obtaining immortality through the Staff of Hermes Trismegistus, and staying alive for more than two millennia simply to pass the Staff on to Layla. Another subversion occurs in Valhalla when Layla chooses to stay connected to the Yggdrassil, allowing Basim to escape, take hold of the Staff and be revived after over a millennium.
  • Long-Runners: As of Valhalla the series has been running for more than 14 years.
  • Lost in a Crowd: A common way for Assassins to essentially hide in plain sight by surrounding themselves with different sort of mobile camo ranging from praying monks to a a flock of courtesans.
  • Lost Technology: The Pieces of Eden were sophisticated Precursor inventions that can control people through manipulation of neurotransmitters within the brain. The Templars wish to use the Pieces to achieve total dominance over the Earth.
  • MacGuffin Super-Person: On very rare occasions, there are human Pieces of Eden. Altaír encountered one such person called Adha. During the Salem Witch Trials, the local Assassins discovered a human host of Consus whom the Templars were after.
  • MacGuffin: The Isu civilization created powerful artifacts known as the Pieces of Eden which have been fought over by the Assasins and the Templars for centuries. Later, humans who are revealed to be reincarnations of Isu beings become central to the conflict.
  • The Main Characters Do Everything: Justified in a few cases.
    • In the first game, Altaïr was busted down to the lowest rank, meaning he has to do the grunt work of preparing the ground and investigating his targets. Since he still has his Master Assassin skills, he's also the one to do the killings.
    • In the second game, Ezio is unaware of the larger Assassin network for most of the game and so operates largely on his own with whatever allies he has personally recruited (who all happen to be part of said network).
    • In III, Connor is the sole active member of the Brotherhood. Naturally, almost everything the Brotherhood accomplishes is due to him. The trope is also present in the Fake-Out Opening with the presumed Assassins doing everything personally. After it's revealed they are Templars, they gain large numbers of Mooks to do their bidding.
    • In Unity, Arno chooses to strike out on his own often, a tendency that aggravates the Assassin Council. This, among other things, causes them to expel him from the Brotherhood, leaving him without a support network for the rest of the game.
    • Syndicate has the Frye twins singlehandedly tackle the London Templars head-on while the only actual representative of the local Brotherhood, Henry Green, simply goes along for the ride.
    • In Origins, there are no other Assassins yet, just two bereaved parents on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
    • In Valhalla, the Raven Clan's submission to King Harald of Norway forces Sigurd, Eivor and other sympathetic clan members to try and carve out their own space in England. And the Hidden Ones have had no presence in England for centuries, so Basim and Hytham decide to join Eivor on their quest to make alliances and pacify England by guiding them to uproot the Order's attempts to control the Anglo-Saxon territories from behind the scenes.
  • The Man Behind the Man: Juno, who is responsible for everything that happened in the games so that it would benefit herself at the end.
  • Meaningful Name:
    • "Altaïr" is Arabic for "the flying one" or "the flying eagle." Altaïr is also the name of the brightest star in the constellation Aquila, which is Latin for "Eagle". In full: Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad is "Flying Eagle", "Son of None".
    • "Miles" means "soldier" in Latin.
    • The Italian name "Ezio" derives from the Greek word aetos, which means "eagle".
    • 'Animus' is Latin for "soul", and in Modern English usage it can refer to a grudge or purpose (hence the slightly more common word "animosity").
      • 'Animus' is also one of two parts of the unconscious mind according to Carl Jung, the other one being 'anima'. Several important female characters share names with the four development stages of the anima: Eve, Helen (of Troynote ), Maria (Thorpe, Auditore), Sofia (Sartor, Rikkin).
    • Malik Al-Sayf is Arabic for "King of Swords".
    • "Connor" means "Wolf Kin" or "Lover of Wolves" which reflects on his more predatory Assassin style, while his Native American name Ratonhnhaké:ton is commonly described in English as meaning "life that is scratched", which is pretty apt.
    • Grandfather Edward James Kenway shares his first two names with English kings. He also names his ship the Jackdaw and his son Haytham (Arabic for young eagle) because of the resonance of Aesop's fable of The Eagle and the Jackdaw symbolizing his overreaching aspiration to be more than a Welsh peasant, a "man of quality".
    • Abstergo means "to wipe off/clean away" in Latin, indicative of what they're doing to human history.
  • Megacorp: Abstergo.
  • Mineral MacGuffin: From Brahman onwards, the Templars are shown looking for the Koh-I-Noor Diamond, which is a Piece of Eden capable of boosting the powers of other POEs. By the modern day, they've no idea where it's gotten to. It eventually turns out it was buried in Spain, during the rise of Franco, and remained there ever since.
  • Mobstacle Course: Fortunately, you can shove them away. In the second game, Ezio can create these with well-aimed money tosses. It's a pretty convenient way of blocking pursuing guards for a few seconds while you're running away. In Revelations, Ezio can use a Pyrite Bomb to scatter fake coins at a distance, distracting guards and civilians alike.
  • Morale Mechanic: Brutally kill a few guards and some or all of the rest may flee. Strangely, this behavior vanished from Assassin's Creed III onwards. In general, successive civilian kills in a short span of time will have the game warn you that Assassins don't kill innocents, and ignoring said warning enough times will eventually lead to desynchronization. Odyssey does not have this limitation, and civilians in that game are not always as defenseless as you may think. Valhalla reverts to punishing the player for murdering civilians.
  • Motive Decay:
    • Ironically, this happens to the Assassins: Initially a society devoted to achieving peace through individual freedom and personal responsibilitynote , over time they found themselves increasingly dedicated just to opposing the Templars, with their lofty ideals all but forgotten. They are called on this during Assassin's Creed III, both by the Templars and, at the end, by Those Who Came Before.
    • Happened to Templars as well, during the rule of the Borgia; Robert de Sable was a Well-Intentioned Extremist, and Haytham Kenway would be even more well intentioned and less extremist, but Rodrigo Borgia is using the Templar agenda of "control" to achieve his dreams of unlimited wealth and personal power, while he is enjoying incest, pedophilia, or incestuous pedophilia... and his son Cesare is no better. Although his "Great Minds of History" portrait depicts him as a "man of faith and passion [who] suffered under a smear campaign under the hands of his enemy, Ezio Auditore" who instead should be remembered "for his progressive outlook and focus on family values", privately the 21st-century Templars consider him an Old Shame who, with the Order "Blinded by greed and personal ambition" and forgetting its purpose, led the Order into "dark times for us", and even admitted that "greater men pushed on, becoming what we should have aspired to be: true pioneers of scientific research. It was because of them that the era came to be called the Renaissance."
      • A side-mission in Origins reveals that the Templars have undergone Motive Decay from the start - the earliest known version of the Order, the Order of Ancients, was founded to investigate the Isu in Ancient Egypt. At some point, acquiring Isu artifacts became secondary to oppressing people in the name of "order".
  • Motive Rant: Most of the primary mission targets, upon being taken down, deliver a lengthy monologue about why they did what they did and why you're a terrible, misguided person for opposing them. Unity did away with this, instead showing bits and pieces of the target's life elaborating why the victim warranted execution, as well as hints to what they were planning before they were struck down. However, Syndicate and Origins return to the usual white-room conversations with the Assassin and their dying victim. And then Odyssey completely removes this once again; save for a short line characterizing them once you unmask a Cultist in the menu, most of them can be killed without any further explanation. Valhalla gives all Order assassinations a cutscene, including the Zealots who are basically just enforcers that aren't directly involved in the shadowy politics they are notorious for.
  • Multi-Melee Master: All the Assassin characters are equally adept at any weapon they pick up, whether it be a knife, sword, axe, mace, etc.
  • Multinational Team:
    • The Assassins, both in the past and present. While the 1191 Assassins seem fairly close to the historical Muslim sect since the depicted Assassins have been identified as the Levantine branch thereof, the Assassin Tombs that can be visited in Assassin's Creed II house the remains of Mongol, Chinese, Roman, Egyptian, Persian, and Babylonian Assassins. Assassin's Creed III' and Assassin's Creed III Liberation add Native American, British, French, and African to the mix. The Templars can also be seen as an evil version of this.
    • On start-up, the player is assured that the game was created by one of these, so that they won't presume that the game is biased in favor of or against one particular faith or race. In response to dramatic shifts in the political/cultural climate of the West during the mid-2010's, the pre-game disclaimer was modified starting in Syndicate to identify the games' creators as encompassing "various beliefs, sexual orientations, and gender identities."
  • Multiple Demographic Appeal: The games as a whole are Genre-Busting with Stealth, Action Adventure, Sandbox, Puzzle and RPG elements. The stories and historical settings likewise appeal to a wide range of audiences and has gained the series a lot of fans from demographics that usually don't play games but come in for the architecture and historical recreations.
  • Murder Is the Best Solution:
    • Somewhat ironically, it's the Templars who seem to immediately default to this when faced with any problem, whereas the Assassins (whose name implies their intent to murder people) appear at times to be willing to at least pursue alternative solutions, including diplomacy or guile. For example, Altaïr and Al Mualim have a couple of conversations in which it's suggested they only resort to assassination against people who are simply too stubborn or fanatical to be talked out of their harmful course of action.
    • As demonstrated by shown by Connor in ACIII and in some of Project Legacy memories though, Assassins of later centuries weren't above a "kill first, question later" tendency either, on the basis of the belief that their targets were Always Chaotic Evil, and unwilling to concede that the Jerkass Has a Point. Also, as shown with Connor again and even Ezio, they sometimes seemed to ignore or dismiss any collateral damage of their actions, such as Ezio setting Cappadocia in a panic by blowing up the arsenal, killing hundreds by fire and smoke inhalation, and later letting a tyrant on the throne of Constantinople because the alternative, his brother, is a Templar. As both Haytham Kenway and Rebecca Crane bemoan, their war with the Templars ended up taking priority over their previous progressive and peace-making mindset from Altaïr's time.
  • Myth Arc:
    • The Assassin-Templar Conflict is the framing arc for the whole story. The main games are merely glimpses into the war between the Assassins and Templars, but the greater arc is about a 3-way battle between the aforementioned groups and Those Who Came Before, aka the Isu. Especially Juno, the Predecessor Villain for the series.
    • In the background of the above conflict is the overall progression of human history, especially from the European and Middle-Eastern perspective. Approximately 2,480 years are covered from the earliest point in Odyssey to the modern setting in the latest entires, and in that time technology advances, wars are waged, and new beliefs and religions spread. Civilizations rise and fall, with several becoming ruins that are featured in a game set later on, such as the Roman Empire in Valhalla. Playing through the games in historical order rather than release order especially highlights this.
  • Nephilim: Referenced as a name for the Precursors:
    "We saw the Nephilim there. We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them." Imagine trying to explain all this to a two-year-old. To a grasshopper. When they said the will of the gods was unknowable, they meant it - literally."
  • New Powers as the Plot Demands:
    • The Eagle Vision changes from game to game to provide new abilities as and when required by gameplay and plot. Altaïr's eagle vision was basic and limited, Ezio's is more robust, serving as secondary thermal vision with a blink of an eyelid and in Revelations he gets Eagle Sense, where he can reconstruct events from the past (track Altaïr's shade at Masyaf) and record trajectories of people he's tailing compared with ghostly images of them moving. Connor's Eagle Vision is more basic, while Edward Kenway can track people walking through walls. In Unity, Arno's Eagle Vision can give him insights into the memories of his targets as they are dying while Shay's Eagle Sense develops a Spider-Sense that warns him of an approaching Assassination attempt.
    • The Pieces of Eden were originally restricted to Apples, which are absurdly powerful objects capable of mind control, to creating illusions. Their powers vary from creating illusions, inducing mind control and then later becomes an Instant-Win Condition which reigns down death all around the protagonist. II reveals there were also swords and staves scattered across history. The fact that the First Civilization have scattered Lost Technology across humanity becomes less and less impressive when one sees the frequency and variety of objects and vaults with power spread across landscapes. The only games that do not revolve around gaining new technology as a central focus of Assassins - Vs- Templars is III and Freedom Cry where the actual issues - Revolution and Slave Liberation - take precedence.
  • Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: A stated appeal of the series is its ability for cultural mix-and-match on pure Rule of Cool situating it within a solid historical grounding more or less. An Egyptian Medjay, a Syrian Hashashasin, an Italian nobleman from Florence, a half-white/half-Mohawk Native American warrior, a Louisiana Creole noblewoman, a Welsh pirate, a French-Austrian aristocrat and Victorian Era British gangster twins have all counted themselves among the ranks of the Assassins at various periods in human history. The same goes for the Templars too.
  • No Delays for the Wicked: Expected as a key element of conspiracy fiction, but Assassin's Creed is one of the few series that has a perfect excuse for playing it perfectly straight; the Templars foil the Assassins at every turn and ultimately not only rule the world but re-write history to support their rule. However, in Assassin's Creed III, Haytham Kenway of the Revolutionary War era American Templars explains that they are simply realistic and opportunistic - they don't need to be perfectly competent to achieve their goals, they just need to accommodate and nurture the flaws in human nature instead of attempting to correct them as the Assassins do. As long as there are cruel, greedy humans, there will be Templars to reward their obedience with wealth, power and influence.
    Haytham Kenway: Even when your kind appears to triumph... Still we rise again. And do you know why? It is because the Order is born of a realization. We require no creed. No indoctrination by desperate old men. All we need is that the world be as it is. And this is why the Templars will never be destroyed!
  • No Historical Figures Were Harmed: While the franchise enjoys using actual HistoricalDomainCharacters most of the time, on the occasion that it cannot find history interesting enough, it creates fictional characters directly patterned on historical figures.
    • Assassin's Creed III uses Decomposite Character to divide the historical Charles Lee into a character that is mostly In Name Only in both looks and background, while Haytham Kenway, the true Big Bad shares more in common with the real Lee, namely his romance with a Mohawk chieftain's daughter resulting in the birth of a son (the Player Character Connor).note 
    • Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag is Historical Fiction of real-life pirates in the Caribbean, but the main Player Character Edward Kenway is based on Edward Low, with similarities mirroring the pirate (his troubled marriage, affection for his daughter and first name). An explicit Allohistorical Allusion has Kenway promising to cut Governor Torres' lips and stuff it down his throat, something the real life Low actually did carry out.
    • Assassin's Creed: Unity has two unusual examples:
      • The Big Bad Francois-Thomas Germain shares a name and surface background with a highly obscure historical silversmith, but his overall character and persona, a leader of an Illuminati-esque cabal that causes the French Revolution and secretly being a reincarnation of an immortal is derived from the legend of Comte de Saint Germain, who often appeared periodically in many 19th Century stories by Alexandre Dumas and Aleksandr Pushkin as a Humanoid Abomination Evil Sorceror The Man Behind the Man manipulator much like his counterpart in the game.
      • Likewise the Templar La Touche has a greater biographical and visual resemblance to Maximilien Robespierre than the game's own portrayal of Robespierre. He starts out as an honest bureaucrat who slowly resorts to violence, wears a pair of spectacles (much like the real man) and finally quotes a famous speech of Robespierre saying that Terror "is nothing but justice, prompt, severe and inflexible."
  • Non-Lethal K.O.:
    • The player characters never actually die; Desmond gets "desynchronized" from their memories, so the Animus re-initializes them.
    • Assassins can deliver supposedly non-lethal finishing moves when fighting unarmed. Considering you still hear necks snap and see spines bend way too far to be healthy, the "non-lethal" part might just be on paper.
    • Odyssey actually allows you to knock out enemies with chokeholds or Paralyzing Arrows. Incapacitated enemies can then be recruited as Lieutenants for your ship.
  • "Not So Different" Remark: A recurring theme in all the games is that the Templar will point out to the Assassin that their goals and methods are actually quite similar.
  • Nothing Up My Sleeve: The signature weapon of the Assassins is their Hidden Blade, an extendable knife used to silently kill enemies. Some games even have protagonists wield two of them to kill two enemies next to each other as well as various upgrades to it such as adding the ability to fire projectiles or inject poison.
  • Notice This: The Animus causes all useful and/or quest-related objects to glow and emit Matrix Raining Code, and they frequently emit an audio cue when you're nearby as well. Eagle Vision/Sense is the ultimate version, allowing you to identify and distinguish all important objects by colour. It's implied that Those Who Came Before had this as a inborn sense, which means they built their advanced civilization by simply Solving The Soup Cans.
  • Old Save Bonus: The later games add outfits from previous games if the player has played them, tracked through U-Play/Ubisoft Club.
  • Older Than They Think: In-universe. The Templars and Assassins are way older than either of those Middle-Ages names suggest. There has always been some group trying to take over the world and some other shadowy group trying to stop them by any means, going at least back to ancient Rome and ancient Egypt. Even if one side gets completely wiped out, someone somewhere will come up with the same idea to start it up again (resistance movement or dominate-the-world). Altair even muses on the fact in his Codex, speculating whether both groups are just ideas that both groups had rediscovered.
  • Omniscient Morality License:
    • Having failed at it the first time around, Those Who Came Before grant this upon themselves in service of stopping humanity from being wiped out in 2012. The long struggle between the Assassins and Templars, all the wars and suffering, is part of their plan. Ezio very nearly hangs a lampshade on it in Revelations.
      Ezio: Maybe you will be the one to make all this... suffering worth something in the end.
    • Then it turns out in III that not all of it was their plan. Minerva contemptuously states that mankind squandered her peoples' gifts and warnings in their petty feuds. At the very least, she never planned on the Assassin-Templar feud. Of course, this is also when we learn that Those Who Came Before were not themselves united, and that Juno had her own plan, which required forcing Desmond to make the choice he faced there. Without the feud, the problem would have been solved, and Juno wouldn't have been freed from her prison...
  • Once per Episode:
    • For the Ezio trilogy: Ezio starts each one of his games by getting injured and having to find healing. Ezio climbs a tower with a close friend/family member/fellow Assassin near the start of every game. Ezio beats up Duccio de Luca once in every game. (You don't have to in Revelations, but you get an achievement for doing it anyway.)
    • Every game has an opening sequence in which the protagonist performs a Leap of Faith.
  • One Stat to Rule Them All: Regarding weapons till Black Flag and Rogue, Deflect/Combo refers to the number of times you need to hit your opponent before initiating a OHKO. Except III, the higher the number, the less hits you need to connect.
  • Optional Stealth:
    • The series is like this most of the time. There are some missions that desynchronize you for being detected, but by and large it's just as doable to fight all the guards as it is to sneak past them or stealth-kill them.
    • There's also the first Assassin's Creed game, and the second one, for the most part. Later ones have tended to avert this by punishing being caught with instant game overs.
  • The Order: Both the Assassins and the Templars are secret organizations that have existed since the ancient era of history and work behind the shadows to achieve world peace...though they have their arguments over how to accomplish it.
  • Order Versus Chaos: The conflict between the Assassins and the Templars is a somewhat nuanced version of this: The Assassins' ultimate goal is to safeguard human freedom, even if that means performing the occasionally necessary evil (assassinating people dangerous to human freedom), and also means allowing humanity to make their own mistakes. At the same time, they live by a strict code (the titular Assassins Creed) which, among other things, prohibits the killing of innocents and encourages them to seek inner peace. In contrast, the Templars want to end human suffering by bringing an end to free will and creating a society of perfect order. At the same time, their belief that there is no afterlife (although that may have been Retcon) and thus no higher law means that they are free to do whatever they want in pursuit of this goal, up to and including the slaughter or enslavement of millions if it will save millions more in the long term. The Templars' complete lack of any moral rules beyond their singular Utopia Justifies the Means goal seems to explain why the organization is overwhelmingly made up of monsters.
  • Our Ancestors Are Superheroes: While Desmond Miles knows he grew up in an assassin compound, he is shocked to discover the truth about his ancestors. Both Altair and Ezio, for example, have the Eagle Vision ability, which allows them to distinguish friend from foe and even see things that are hidden. Due to the "bleeding effect" of the Animus, he gains that ability as well. The Assassins were also master engineers, as they had technology centuries ahead of the rest of humanity. Not to mention the whole First Civilization plotline, which is pure Advanced Ancient Humans.
  • Our Founder: Both Templars and Assassins are stated to be Older than You Think but the modern orders and the period succeeding The Crusades regard two figures as the key makers for their respective order's nature afterwards:
    • For the Assassins, its Altaïr ibn La'Ahad, who already in the Ezio games is regarded as the Big Good, his Codex being a major source for inspiration and guidance for the Italian Renaissance. Altaïr developed cells in different countries, brought Niccolo and Maffeo Polo into the fold and even allowed the traditional, historically known front of the Assassins crumble before the Mongols so that they can move into the Shadows to better match the Templars cloak and dagger ideological power.
    • For the Templars, it's the real-life Jacques de Molay, the last known Grand Master who was burned by King Philip le Bel. According to the lore, he committed a Heroic Sacrifice and scattered the Templars knowledge and directed the Templars to become the underground secret society of conspiracy theory lore. In Unity the new Templar Grandmaster rediscovers his teachings and sets out to revive his vision during the The French Revolution.
  • Our Humans Are Different: Long story short, the Precursors created humanity for the purpose of providing a source of slave labor to build their cities and create advanced technology known as the Pieces of Eden. That is until Adam and Eve decided to escape the Isu city of Eden and led an uprising against their creators which was abruptly ended by the Toba Catastrophe. Whereas the Isu was driven to near extinction after the disaster, humanity was able to rise from the ashes of civilization and survive long enough to become the dominant species on Earth.
  • Pacifist Run: Going fully pacifist is not an option, but you don't need to slaughter everyone either. Assassin's Creed 3 added melee as a viable option in stealth, and this persisted until Rogue. Unity changed the weapon system, with blunt weapons being non-lethal, and stealth knockouts, while still possible, take much longer, making the hidden blade the better option. Syndicate keeps knockout stealth, but all combat is now lethal.
  • Patricide: The series features two very dark examples of this, featuring a villainous and anti-heroic Big, Screwed-Up Family:
    • Rodrigo Borgia the Big Bad of Assassin's Creed II decides that his Visionary Villain son is getting a bit much so he resolves to murder him with poisoned apples; Cesare is warned in time by his sister before eating too much, and then Cesare then stuffs the rest of the apples down his father's throat.
    • Haytham Kenway and his son Connor are on opposite side of the Templar and Assassin conflict, with Haytham being Archnemesis Dad. Both of them hope that they can form a bond and set aside their differences, but alas Poor Communication Kills and in the end Haytham tries to choke his son to death only for Connor to stab him in self-defense; Connor is haunted by this action.
    • The first assassination the Eagle Bearer is tasked with involves their estranged father Nikolaos, known as the Wolf of Sparta. You are given the option to spare him, however. And then later in the story, it's revealed that their biological father is Pythagoras, who's over a century old but is kept alive by an Isu artifact. Once the Eagle Bearer gains possession of said artifact (either peacefully or by force), Pythagoras ages rapidly and dies.
  • Peace Conference: Apparently attempted in the past between the two orders, but without success. At one point Desmond asks his father if the Assassins and Templars ever tried to actually sit down and make peace, and William says yes, but muses that there was just too much mistrust built up over centuries of conflict and the ideologies were just too opposed for peace to ever work.
    William Miles: If there is to be peace, it wouldn't be a truce so much as a submission.
  • Photo Mode: The one in Assassin's Creed: Odyssey and Assassin's Creed: Valhalla has a free moving camera with excessive filter options.
  • Plague Doctor: Assassin's Creed II and Brotherhood have NPC doctors in this costume (which is appropriate for Medici-era Italy). Not all doctors of the era were dressed like that, but it makes it easier to spot them.
  • Politically Correct History: Similar to Deliberate Values Dissonance (see above), the series somehow manages to both avert and play this straight, sometimes in the same game:
    • While Assassin's Creed was considered daring in its time for having an Arab protagonist and portraying a revisionist view of The Hashshashin, many noted that it ended up making The Crusades a backdrop to a secular dispute between two secret societies, when this was a major conflict driven by religion. Most Assassins likewise tend to be Secular Hero with the brotherhood featuring "liberated nuns" like Sister Theodora in Assassin's Creed II or harmless and theologically suspect priests like the one on Connor's homestead in Assassin's Creed III.
    • Patrice Desilets mentioned that in Assassin's Creed II he wanted to make Leonardo da Vinci's homosexuality explicit and mention the fact that the real-life Leonardo faced charges for sodomy in Florence, but the producers insisted they remove it. While Leonardo's homosexuality is hinted at in the vanilla game of both II and Brotherhood, only the optional DLC for Brotherhood featured a direct acknowledgment.
    • Despite the fact that the games are set in events central or related to Jewish history — the Crusades, the Renaissance, the French Revolution — none of the major games feature Jewish NPCs or supporting characters in any of the playable main and side missions, with barely any mention to the institutional and systemic anti-Semitism operating in this timenote . There's also the fact that the games demonize figures like Pope Alexander VI and Maximilien Robespierre who were rare major political figures who contributed positively to Jewish rights while having the Assassins ally with the fiercely anti-Semitic King Philip IV to persecute Jacques de Molay. Likewise, the depiction of Rome in Assassin's Creed Brotherhood does not have the famous Jewish quarter, filled with refugees from Spain and France, patronized by the Borgias' support. It took until Assassin's Creed Syndicate for the series to feature major Jewish NPCs — Karl Marx and Benjamin Disraeli.note 
    • The games set in the New World however avert this: Assassin's Creed III, Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, Liberation, Freedom Cry deal with colonialism, native displacement, slavery, and racism. Syndicate however returns with the lack of emphasis on colonialism, the greater melting pot of Victorian London, imperial politics, and the fact that Jacob and Evie Frye flout a series of class and gender norms while facing no social reproach. Also in Syndicate, prostitution is not even hinted at in the base game until the Jack the Ripper DLC.
    • Assassin's Creed Origins is set in Ptolemaic-Era Egypt during the reign of Cleopatra VII. A lot of the plot is set in Siwa oasis but makes no mention of that region's historically renowned and documented traditions of same-sex relations and homosexual marriages dating to the ancient world. Similar to the erasure of Jewish history in early games, the Hellenistic Judean community of Alexandria is missing. The presence of slavery in the Ptolemaic era is neglected and not referred to, and the game's portrayal of politics in the Roman Republic falls squarely in the Good Republic, Evil Empire dichotomy.
    • Assassin's Creed: Odyssey does this in spades.
      • When you play as Kassandra, the game more or less ignores the strictly enforced gender roles of Ancient Greece, especially Athens; by modern standards these would be considered nothing less than misogynistic. A woman was seen as more or less property of her “oikos” (family unit), and wouldn’t have been able to make any decisions for herself. Notably, there's also no difference between interacting with men in Athenian controlled regions vs Spartan controlled regions, even though the two city-state cultures differed significantly in their treatment of women. Sparta came the closest to modern standards of gender equality, with women being able to own land, receive an education, and run businesses. However, Spartan society placed the heaviest importance on women bearing strong offspring, and aren't known to have ever sent them into battle. Similarly, both Alexios and Kassandra would have been maligned in Athens as foreigners, and would've had their movement and social standing heavily restricted.
      • The game is pretty cavalier about women soldiers in general. Half the bounty hunters are females, and while neither of the Spartan or Athenian armies employ women, women are frequent among bandits and pirates. Keep in mind that to the Ancient Greek, the idea of women soldiers (who they may have seen in Scythian societies to the Eurasian east) was so fantastical and unbelievable that it literally became the stuff of myth in the Amazons.
      • The practice of pederasty, common among Greeks of the time, goes obviously unmentioned.
      • The Greek practices regarding prostitution are included in the game, but the game glosses them over by using the ancient Greek terms and never defining them for the audience. It will often use the term "hetaera(e)" for various female character of high societal standing - in particular for Aspasia (Who was one in real life), but the game never goes into detail explaining that the term means to avoid offending audiences (Or raising that ESRB rating). note The closest the game gets is noting that Corinth is known for its prostitution, and mentioning how there are a lot of Hetaerae running the town, letting the player add 2 and 2 together.
    • Assassin's Creed: Valhalla primarily takes place in 9th century England and the protagonist is the leader of a Viking clan from Norway colonizing the area yet it glosses over the more unpalatable aspects of raiding (like killing civilians and taking thralls) and Norse religion (blood sacrifices), presumably to avoid having the player character seem like too much of a Villain Protagonist.
  • The Power of Love: The Assassins come around to believing that love is the great unifying force that binds man to society and each other. Altaïr rejected Al Mualim's austerity believing that Assassins keeping families will only make them strive that much harder to fight for a better world for them. Ezio later guides Shao Jun on the same way:
    Ezio Auditore: Love binds our order together. Love of people, of cultures, of the world. Fight to preserve that which inspires hope, and you will win back your people.
    • The beginnings of what would become the Assassin Brotherhood were instigated by husband-and-wife Bayek and Aya. Although mostly driven by grief over the murder of their son, they're mostly depicted throughout Origins as still devoted to one another, and their inauguration of the Hidden Ones is motivated by a genuine desire to uphold the freedoms of ordinary people and defend against any attempt to subvert them. Even though they formally separate at the end of the game, they still show signs of lingering affection for each other, and are still buried together after their deaths.
  • Precursor Heroes:
    • The Hidden Ones are the original incarnation of the Assassin Brotherhood formed in 47 BCE to oppose the Order of the Ancients' encroaching influence upon the Roman Republic and Ptolemaic Egypt. The group soon rapidly expanded into Rome and Greece after Aya/Amunet assassinated Julius Caesar alongside Brutus and Cassius. After Cleopatra killed herself with a poison handed over to her by Amunet, the Hidden Ones expanded throughout the known world from Britain to China where they would establish more "bureaus" in major cities and settlements to bring in new recruits for the cause.
    • Darius, Iltani and Wei Yu were Precursor Heroes to other Precursor Heroes responsible for accomplishing significant feats by killing significant world leaders which made revered figures in the Brotherhood.
    • Adam and Eve take this up to eleven as they were the first humans to lead an uprising against the Isu and change the course of history.
  • Precursors: Those Who Came Before — an ancient and powerful race gifted with a sixth sense that let them sense a great deal more about their environment and the people in it, including motivations, the past, and the future, than mere humans could ever hope to see. Depending on where you look, they may come in at least two varieties, as we see through the course of the games. See Abusive Precursors and Benevolent Precursors above.
  • Predecessor Villain:
    • The Order of the Ancients are the precursors to the Templar Order seeking to achieve political and economic domination to create a unified world government. Much like the Hidden Ones, the Order was founded in Ancient Egypt by Pharoah Smenkhkare for the purpose of securing Isu technology from a hidden vault located within the Nile but its goals and membership quickly evolved throughout centuries which allowed them to establish prominent connections with aristocrats and other members of the social elite.
    • Cain murdered his brother Abel just to get a Piece of Eden and he inspired a cult to follow in his footsteps whose insignia would later be used by the Templars as their emblem.
    • To a lesser extent, the Cult of Kosmos are also ancient precursors to the Templars.
  • Prequel: Naturally, a long-lasting franchise like Assassin's Creed would have games set chronologically before the first installment:
  • Previous Player-Character Cameo: Several times:
    • The first is in Assassin's Creed II where via bleeding effect we play as Altaïr in a brief sequence. In Revelations this is taken further with brief missions as Altaïr being a major selling point. In fact, the main goal of the game is for the present-day Player Character to find the main memory of his ancestral Player Character viewing that of the first Player Character.
    • Exaggerated in Assassin's Creed Rogue, which at one point sees Shay teaming up with a former Player Character (Haytham Kenway) for a Boss Fight against another former Player Character (Adéwalé), making it the first time in the series that three player-characters have ever shared the same fight.
    • Played with, during the epilogue of Rogue, Shay is in Paris during the events of the prologue of Unity and he briefly walks past the young Arno before killing his father Charles Dorian. Since Rogue and Unity came out the same year and the same time, its not clear that either game qualifies as "previous", and this is more of a case of the same scene from two different points of view.
    • Aya/Amunet briefly appears in the Legacy of the First Blade DLC of Assassin's Creed: Odyssey where it's revealed that she is the descendant of the Eagle Bearer's son Elpidios.
    • In Assassin's Creed: Valhalla, Bayek has a voice cameo in a sidequest involving ancient writings of the Hidden Ones. Ezio has a very brief cameo (done by a different voice actor) in a vision.
  • Professional Killer: They are called Assassins for a reason. All the games, however, explore the morality of being a person who literally kills for a living — in Altaïr's case, the question is whether his blind allegiance to his Creed makes him not that different from his enemies; while in Ezio's case, the question is just how much death is justified in the service of vengeance; Connor wants freedom, but those around him are too busy fighting to notice the chaos around them. Notably, the characters come to very different conclusions.
    Sofia: This is not your battle.
    Ezio: But where does one end, and the next begin?
  • Protagonist Title: Overlapping with Team Title, The name refers to the titular Assassin Brotherhood and its creed which the protagonists strictly adhere to as part of their code of conduct.
  • Public Domain Artifact: Most of the Pieces of Eden.
    • The Chalice in the first game is based on the Holy Grail but it doesn't actually exist.
    • Black Flag: The Observatory is powered by Crystal Skulls.
    • Unity: The Sword of Eden is every famous sword from mythology.
    • Syndicate: The Shroud of Eden is a syllable and a half away from the Shroud of Turin.
    • The Koh-I-Noor is in Brahmin.
  • Puzzle Pan: Used extensively in the various platforming sequences, especially in the vaults/tombs/crypts that are puzzle-based rather than stealth-based. A minor version is used whenever the game wants to call attention to a particular jump you're supposed to make, frequently resulting in annoying the player as it screws up the directional controls, which function relative to the camera's perspective.

    Q-W 
  • Ragnarök Proofing: Invoked; the First Civilization designed the Pieces of Eden and the Vaults that house them specifically to withstand the ravages of the 75,000 years that have passed since the First Catastrophe.
  • Red Is Heroic: Almost every member of the Assassin Brotherhood wears a red sash or a robe with tints of the color.
  • Refuge in Audacity:
    • When Thieves steal from people, they openly run up to them and do the deed visibly. No one protests. But when Ezio does it sneakily, the victim can somehow recognize him and try to fight back.
    • The Assassins as a whole rest entirely on this. They believe in strict operational secrecy and a binding commitment to not compromise their order, their location, and their ways, yet they also believe in over-the-top public assassinations of officials as a way of sending across a message.
    • If the optional objectives allow for it, or if you don't care about them and play, however you can disregard stealth entirely and run straight to the target and assassinate him in full view of everyone. Even the target sees you coming, he just doesn't know what you're doing until you do it. This is mentioned in Unity during the Sivert assassination mission, where it's suggested that Arno "sacrifice himself to the cause" by doing exactly this as it sends a powerful message. He declines. You can still do it with no issues and even get the optional objectives done.
  • Replay Mode: The Animus provides a justified example as the story you play in the games is being relived by the descendant of the historical character. Thanks to this, the Animus will allow the player to replay any of the sequences in the game by accessing the synchronization info tab in the pause menu; this is helpful both to replay the missions and to complete any synchronization that was left pending due to the failure of some objective. This is Averted in Assassin's Creed II in which you can only replay one specific mission with the DLC. The feature is abandoned from Origins onward, replaced with a New Game Plus feature.
  • Research, Inc.: Abstergo does research and helps fund a secret society, though Word of God is that the overwhelming majority of their and their subsidiaries' membership are unaware of said secret society and are entirely sincere in having no secret agenda in their work; said secret society is simply appropriating the bounties of and "guiding" the direction of said work.
    • This trope is actually a plot point in the 2016 movie; Sophia genuinely believed that her work with the Animus was for eradicating violence, while her father Alan Rikkin wanted the Piece of Eden for the sole purpose of annihilating the Assassins.
  • Revision: An acknowledged one. The "Truth" Subject Sixteen showed in II depicted George Washington holding an Apple and alongside several Templars who used Pieces of Eden to control the world. When III showed that Washington was an enemy of the Templars, Shawn argues that this doesn't contradict the Truth as all that showed as explicit fact was that Washington owned an Apple at some point. From a meta perspective, this does come off as a bit of a hamfisted justification for how this isn't really a Retcon, though.
  • Romanticism Versus Enlightenment: It's kind of hard to decipher where the Assassins and the Templars align on this spectrum. Both of them are pro-science but the Templars believe that knowledge is the province of the enlightened and worthy few individuals who can understand, assimilate and harness it for power and the greater good and actively hold back technology until they feel its ripe for progress and manipulation. The Assassins on the other hand believe that knowledge ought to be free and serve humanity as a whole and people should be given complete access to education and universal ideas.
  • Rule of Cool: The entire premise of the franchise runs on this trope by turning human history into a war between two secret societies, with one of them being made of hooded ninja-like individuals who assassinate their enemies with retractable blades, are Multi-Melee Master, practice Le Parkour and meet tons of Historical Domain Characters.
  • Roaring Rampage of Revenge: The franchise loves using this trope.
    • In Assassin's Creed II, Ezio Auditore starts out with the family business of killing people in revenge for the death of his father and two brothers. Then it extends to that family's bosses, and their bosses, right up and into the Ancient Conspiracy central to the game, for over thirty years. It is subverted, however by the last quarter of the game, Ezio is shown to be getting tired of his constant desire for revenge, which dovetails neatly into his plan to set up the Assassin Brotherhood to oppose the Templar Order systematically rather than in a reactionary way in Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood and Assassin's Creed: Revelations.
    • In Brotherhood, Ezio finally stops and spares the one who caused it all. Sparing Borgia turns out to be a bad idea after all, when Rodrigo's psychotic son comes looking for payback, against dad's advice. He does this again in Revelations when he finds out about Yusuf's death and Sofia's kidnapping.
    • Connor Kenway from Assassin's Creed III also performs one against Charles Lee for burning his village and killing his mother. Only to find out that Charles Lee is innocent of the burndown. The one who really did it was no other than Connor's idol, George Washington.
    • Assassin's Creed: Unity is this for both Arno Dorian and Elise de la Sarre as they track down who was responsible for her father's murder.
    • Assassin's Creed Origins is about Bayek of Siwa and his wife Aya/Amunet hunting down the members of the Order of the Ancients who were directly involved in the death of their son Khemu. At the end of the game, finding that their revenge does not make them feel satisfied and not really at peace with the death of their son, Bayek and Aya/Amunet set up the foundations of the Assassin Brotherhood in Egypt and Italy to hunt down everyone else in the Order of the Ancients, which in essence makes the whole Assassin Brotherhood one long revenge scheme against the Templars for the death of Khemu.
    • Assassin's Creed: Odyssey: The third act of the DLC Legacy of the First Blade is the Eagle Bearer going Mama Bear/Papa Wolf on the Order of the Ancients for killing their love and abducting their baby Elpidios.
    • Assassin's Creed: Valhalla has Eivor taking around 20 years since Kjotve murdered their parents to finally enact their revenge with the help of the Hidden Ones, since he also happened to be a member of the Order of the Ancients. For good measure, after Kjotve is defeated, Eivor sails all the way to Vinland (modern-day North America) to track down his son Gorm and eliminate the clan for good. And then there's Loki, an Isu who has been feuding with Odin for the death of his son. The Animus Anomalies retrace his memories of him plotting his revenge amidst the Isu's impending apocalypse, and once the memory is fully reconstructed, it reveals he secretly snuck into the Sage Project after Odin and the others, swearing to hunt him down across their reincarnations. And so Basim eventually fights Eivor seeking revenge for his son's death, with Basim as the reincarnation of Loki and having those memories, and Eivor as Odin but mostly oblivious as to why they're fighting.
  • Running Gag: A surprising amount of Assassins throughout the series have a habit of putting someone through great pain for the sake of information, and upon finally getting the information, politely say "Thank you!", and leave them be. A few examples...
    • Connor does this in Assassin's Creed III by pushing someone's wrist in such a way that it would snap in half.
    • Aveline does this in the Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag add on missions by beating someone senseless, then threatening them with a hidden blade before they give up the info.
    • Arno, in Assassin's Creed: Unity, does an... Interesting variant of this. He does the usual "Beat the shit out of someone" routine, then threatens them, then says thanks... Then knocks their teeth out.
  • Scenery Porn: Panning over beautiful vistas of old-world cities and countrysides is a series mainstay.
  • Screw the Rules, They're Not Real!: Played with. The Creed reads in part "Nothing is true; everything is permitted". Altaïr in Assassin's Creed initially thinks this means there aren't any rules, which he uses to justify murdering a bystander in the Action Prologue. Altaïr is severely punished for this, because in actual fact the Assassins simply take the Anti-Nihilist position that there is no such thing as "natural law": the only rules that exist are the ones that humans impose on themselves, many of which are requirements for civilization to be possible. Ezio Auditore explains this in more detail to Sofia Sartor in Assassin's Creed II:
    Sofia: ["Nothing is true; everything is permitted"] is rather cynical.
    Ezio: It would be if it were doctrine. But it is merely an observation on the nature of reality. To say that nothing is true is to realize that the foundations of society are fragile and that we must be the shepherds of our own civilization. To say that everything is permitted is to understand that we are the architects of our actions and that we must live with our consequences, whether glorious or tragic.
  • Secret History/Secret War:
    • The Assassin-Templar War in general with both organizations having participated in nearly every event in human history and making sure that the public doesn't find out that they still exist or know the true extent of their operations.
    • The entire Isu civilization especially since they were the creators of humanity which in turn would rebel against them in the War of Unification and its successor conflict.
  • Secular Hero: Some of the protagonists throughout the series have been atheistic or agnostic in their beliefs.
    • Altair seemed to alternate between believing that God Is Evil or that He didn’t exist at all. He also doubted that there was an afterlife.
    • Arno’s closing narration in his game makes it clear that he doesn’t believe in a God/supreme being who looks out for people.
    • We never gain much insight into the spiritual beliefs of Jacob and Evie other than that Evie believes in ghosts while Jacob doesn’t.
  • Self-Deprecation: As of Liberation and Black Flag, Abstergo has started selling genetic memories as highly advanced videogames, playable on home Animus entertainment systems. Black Flag uses this development to make fun of the videogame industry and the series itself, as well as imagining what a lazy tie-in Hollywood movie might look like.
  • Sequel Number Snarl: Assassin's Creed II was followed by Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood and Assassin's Creed: Revelations... then Assassin's Creed III. Granted, Brotherhood and Revelations are more like mission pack sequels. Then came Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, which is a prequel to Assassin's Creed III. Numbers were dropped altogether afterwards.
  • "Shaggy Dog" Story:
    • Since the series sticks close to history and history often lacks neat dramatic structures, the series as a whole uses a variety of plots like this.
    • The end of Assassin's Creed III controversially turned the entire Myth Arc from the first game and the Ezio Trilogy into this. The quest by the Ancestors to pass on a message to Desmond to avert a Disaster was all a ploy by Juno to return to life. Desmond's absorption of his ancestor's memories and abilities were ultimately of no greater purpose than to sacrifice his life for Juno's return. In addition, the intellectual quest of Altaïr to garner as much knowledge as possible, as well as Ezio's spiritual search for his place in life and Connor's yearning for justice is likewise manipulated by Juno to historically relay said message to Desmond.
  • Shared Universe:
    • Possibly shares a universe with Watch_Dogs in the form of e-mails in Black Flag revealing Abstergo Industries' interest in the ctOS technology created by the Blume Corporation; and Watch_Dogs in turn has Aiden Pearce assassinating Olivier Garneau on behalf of the Assassins. Watch Dogs: Legion also has Darcy, a member of the British Assassins, as a playable DLC character. Though Ubisoft has continued to deny that both franchises are set in the same continuity, the games still make overt references to each other.
    • The DLC expansion pack of Far Cry 3 has a letter by Masahiro which discusses the Pieces of Eden and Thomas Edison's experiments seemingly confirming that the series is part of the Assassin's Creed world. Additionally, the logo of Abstergo can be found in a bunker.
  • Shout-Out:
    • Remember back when this series was inspired by Alamut?
    • The games love to reference Mario, especially the Ezio series.
      • In Assassin's Creed II, Uncle Mario introduces himself to Ezio with It's-a-me, Mario!.
      • The achievement for completing Sequence 4 of Brotherhood is called Principessa in Another Castello.
      • The Assassins' sigil is very reminiscent of that of the Freemasons, another very selective semi-secret society, coated in myth, with many influent characters from all over the world's history being members.
  • Shown Their Work: Throughout the series, Ubisoft shows a remarkable amount of detail into the various historical settings, from the people and their mode of dress and language to the architecture. Even the more fantastical settings, such as Ancient Egypt and Greece ensure that the mythology that is central to people's beliefs in their time is depicted fairly accurately. Sometimes they use broad strokes to distort history, but this is more often a case of Rule of Cool, Rule of Drama, or some of the exigencies of the video game medium than any deliberate error (for example, almost all doctors in Renaissance Italy dressed up as Plague doctors because that getup is both extremely freaky-cool looking, and produces an easily identifiable figure/silhouette so the player can find medicine-and-healing-dispensers quickly and easily, despite their beak masks dating back to the 17th century, about two centuries later).
  • Sigil Spam: Both the Assassins and Templars put their respective logos on seemingly everything, but the titular Assassins really take it up to eleven. Their capital "A" symbol is visible somewhere on virtually everything they use; it's on flags above their HQs, it's engraved into their weapons, it's stitched into their clothing, it's cut into their clothing (they are fond of split capes that are cut so as to form a clear representation of the Assassin "A", with the distinctive inward curve at the bottom edges to make it very clearly not a coincidence) and in some cases it's even worked into their architecture. Origins even reveals that the symbol itself predates the Assassin name by centuries. To a lesser degree, the Templars and Abstergo do this with their respective logos, but it's mostly restricted to their flags, weapons, and metal accessories (like buckles). You'd think the two halves of a secret Ancient Conspiracy older than civilization itself would be more circumspect with advertising their allegiances.
    • Zig-zagged by the Templars in modern day. They don't use the cross symbol that much in modern day, they're Villain with Good Publicity hiding behind Abstergo Industries, which indeed uses its logo a lot.
  • Signature Device: The Assassins will almost always be seen wielding their Hidden Blades, a weapon used since the very inception of the Order. Every non-Assassin who wields one was either gifted the tool, forcibly obtained it from an Assassin (Whether through stealing or as a battle trophy), or happens to be a turncoat from the Order.
  • Simple, yet Awesome: Counter Attacking. In almost any game, holding the block button and pressing the attack button as an enemy is about to attack will result in your character blocking it and either scoring a One-Hit Kill, knocking your opponent on the ground in the first game — almost ensuring a kill anyway against non-boss enemies — or doing some damage to your opponent in all other games. It's also fairly easy with any weapon except the hidden blade, which guaranteed a counter kill on anything but the Final Boss, making it Difficult, but Awesome instead, or your fists (which doesn't do anything in the first game, but will attempt to disarm your attacker in other games). From Origins onward, however, this is no longer doable, as the combat system has been completely revamped. Dodges, parries and blocks are given much more emphasis (and rarely damage the enemy by themselves), and you have to go on the offensive to win a fight.
  • Solar Flare Disaster: The First Civilization was all but wiped out when a solar flare hit Earth and caused it to become geologically unstable. The driving goal for the Assassins up until after III has been to stop this from happening a second time. On that front, the Assassins succeed. Valhalla then reveals this was only temporarily delayed, forcing the Assassins to retrace Eivor's memories in hopes of finding a solution.
  • Stealth Expert: All Assassins are expected to be this, though with Gameplay and Story Segregation (not including Full Synchronization), its perfectly possible to charge headfirst. It also varies as per Player Character and changes in succeeding generations and generally, as the story progresses, the missions and player actions get less and less stealthy.
    • Altaïr is the stealthiest as per storyline and Synchronization objectives. Though even there it varies with some of his targets - Talal, Jubair, Abul Nuqood (though Jubair can actually be assassinated in stealth if done carefully) - having a chase mission and others such as Majd Addin being a Conspicuously Public Assassination which Malik calls him out on. He also straight up defeats the Templar Grandmaster in a Trial by Combat in the sight of King Richard the Lionheart which is hardly the quiet approach.
    • Ezio zigzags this trope, sometimes being stealthy and quiet and sometimes indulging in brazen public assassinations as in the case of Uberto Alberti, Francesco de'Pazzi, Marco Barbarigo (at the end of Carnivale Celebrations) and finally Rodrigo Borgia/Pope Alexander VI, an attempted Air Assassination in the middle of High Mass at a crowded Sistine Chapel, which is the opposite of subtle. More to the point the targets know who he is, by name and sight, but he still manages to get his man. He's much more stealthy in the middle of Brotherhood successfully eroding Cesare Borgia's power base under his very nose.
    • Connor is fairly stealthy as per Synchronization objectives but he also zigzags, first assassinating Jonathan Pitcairn in the middle of an open battlefield, successfully blending in with the chaos to get close and escape. All his other Assassinations are significantly less so, with Thomas Hickey leading to a chase in a crowded street only for both of them to end up in jail and then much later killing Hickey in broad daylight, before George Washington and a large crowd, his other targets are not stealthy at all.
    • Edward Kenway is highly sneaky and efficient as a stealth expert, actions which make him a brilliant pirate Captain and decent Assassin novice towards the end of the game.
    • Evie Frye is capable of becoming so still she becomes almost invisible to other people's perceptions, as opposed to her brother Jacob, who is usually anything but stealthy.
    • With the right abilities, the Eagle Bearer can be skilled enough to be virtually invisible while staying still, and even to hide enemy targets in the same fashion.
    • Basim teaches Eivor to be aware of their environment and act in accordance with the people around them to blend in while infiltrating and seeking out a target.
    • Some of the more notable Templars as well can be very underhanded. Haytham and ex-Assassin Shay are especially this due to both having prolonged exposure to Assassin techniques. This makes them all the more deadlier, than the typical members of their order.
  • Story Within a Story:
    • Desmond and other protagonists alternate between being the Player Character and a First-Person Peripheral Narrator to historical Assassins.
    • The framing device of the Animus means that, despite making up the vast majority of each game, the historical sequences are technically this to the wider storyline.
    • The mysterious messages from Those Who Came Before found by Layla Hassan through Bayek's memories may potentially have massive implications for the games' modern-day plot: their very reality may itself be yet another simulation no different than the Animus.
    • In Valhalla, Eivor has visions of Asgard and Jotunheim induced through potions concocted by the seer Valka. As the story progresses, it's revealed that they are more than likely glimpses of Isu memories.
  • Super Drowning Skills: In the first game, Altaïr desynchronizes if he falls into any body of water higher than his knees. This is lampshaded in the second game as a glitch in the Animus 1.0, and the main characters in II and all subsequent games are very capable swimmers no matter how much armor they wear. Other characters, including your Assassin Recruits, remain unable to swim until Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag.
  • Super Swimming Skills: Starting with the second game, all playable characters can swim perfectly and for any length of time without tiring, no matter how much armor they are wearing, except that they can't hold their breath forever underwater. Assassin's Creed III adds a limited immunity to hypothermia and/or frostbite; the player gets desynchronized if they stay in the icy water for too long.
  • Super-Senses: Eagle Vision allows the user to see things that used to be present, that are present but normally not visible, traces of the past that simply shouldn't be visible, hints of the future, things that are hidden but important, and to know the motivations of others... it is a gift from Those Who Came Before. It is stronger in the Assassins, as the intended followers of Minerva's plan, but Black Flag shows that it's something which can be trained in many people, and can naturally and powerfully develop even in people outside the order (like Edward Kenway). Origins, Odyssey and Valhalla feature more literal takes on Eagle Vision; the games' protagonists have a pet eagle (or in Eivor's case, a pet raven), and they are able to see whatever the bird sees. And that's on top of them having their own versions of the original Eagle Vision.
  • Talking Is a Free Action: Each and every primary assassination target gets to have a Just Between You and Me conversation with the player character, regardless of the circumstances under which they were killed. Said conversation takes place in the Animus' White Void Room, implying that the VR reconstruction of the event did not precisely match the actual memory.
  • Tempting Apple: The Apples of Eden are one of the more common types of Precursor artifacts; they were used originally as Mind Control devices and are highly sought by the Templars for that reason. Unrelated to the trope, the third game has the exact quote as the title of the achievement for finishing Memory Sequence 3; the more appropriate trope there would be Player Punch.
  • Thematic Sequel Logo Change: Each entry in the series, ever since III, has altered the traditional Assassin sigil to reflect the game's time period and themes.
    • III's logo is red and blue with some stars added to the design, evoking the design of the American flag. Makes sense, as this game takes place during the American Revolution.
    • Black Flag's logo has a skull in its center, as it is set during the Golden Age of Piracy.
    • Rogue's sigil is shattered like glass, symbolizing the protagonist Shay's shattered faith in the Brotherhood and his turning against them.
    • Unity has a logo that has been cleaved in two, meant to represent the division that plagues both the Assassins and the Templars throughout the game, but also to evoke the imagery of the guillotine, the infamous execution method used during the French Revolution the game is set in.
    • Syndicate's logo is more angular and metallic, with bolts soldered into its design to evoke the Industrial Revolution.
    • Origins has a logo featuring the Eye of Horus, representing its setting of Ptolemaic Egypt.
    • Odyssey's logo is easily the most unique in the series, as it forgoes the traditional sigil altogether since the Assassins do not exist at the time of its historical portion. Instead, it features two pillars in an "A" shape with a Spartan helmet in the center, fitting for a game set during the Peloponnesian War.
    • Valhalla returned to the traditional sigil, this time with it being made up of two battle axes Befitting of a Viking during the Dark Age of Europe.
    • Mirage has a logo that noticeably returns to the roots of the series, with a more ornate design that evokes the original game's. It is also made up of Arabic words that translate to "Hidden One", which accentuate its setting of Baghdad during the Islamic Golden Age.
  • The Theme Park Version: Assassin's Creed while praised for being (at least in earlier games) revisionist and subversive of tropes and Hollywood History still more or less presents simplified versions of actual historical periods, nations, and cultures.
    • Assassin's Creed and Assassin's Creed II the other games more or less dials down the role of religion in the actual medieval era, insisting that such religious sects as The Hashshashin and The Knights Templar were Hiding Behind Religion and really secular humanists. While this compromise makes commercial sense and fits with the overall meta-narrative, it ends up giving a distorted view of the period and history. Likewise, none of the European set games deal with anti-Semitism in the open world despite it being a major part of the setting of the time.
    • The later games rarely tackle the importance of class and social background. The blending mechanic allows a Native American like Connor to hide in a group of Colonial Bostonians, a Cockney thug like Jacob Frye to talk on even terms with the British Prime Minister, an Irishman who was raised catholic and with a thick accent like Shay Cormac to blend easily in a time when said identity (unless he converted to Protestantism) would mark him out as a second class citizen. Even the Florentine exile and disgraced nobleman Ezio Auditore easily interacts with a range of class groups in a time where costume, rank, title, and appearance were crucial social signifiers. The only real aversions are Aveline and Adewale whose blending mechanic is complicated because of their race and gender which presents its own can of worms.
    • The games also codified Le Parkour in games as a climbing and traversal mechanic that simplifies both the human body and the surfaces and architecture of various cities to facilitate said gameplay. Other mechanics such as the naval gameplay of Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag is more or less a simplified and condensed simulation of naval combat with ships easily navigated the wind and the waves.
  • The Three Faces of Adam: Ezio's trilogy closely follows this, with ACII, Brotherhood, and Revelations respectively showing the Hunter, the Lord, and the Prophet phases of his life.
  • These Are Things Man Was Not Meant to Know: The Templars cover up knowledge of Those Who Came Before, and the origin of man, for this reason, figuring if people did know, there'd be mass shock and outrage (that, and to make sure no-one else finds out about them).
  • Tightrope Walking: All the playable Assassins (and Desmond) can run on certain incredibly thin ropes, wires, wood planks, and the like.
  • Time Skip: This happens with each new installment taking place in a new historical period and setting.
  • Title Sequence: Starting from Assassin's Creed II, each entry has featured a brief title sequence at a particularly significant composition just when the main music theme hits over the credits.
    • Assassin's Creed II has Ezio and Federico Auditore resting on top of a Church Tower, noting that theirs is a "good life." And "May it never change, and never change us" just as the titles ominiously fills the screen on the right.
    • Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood has a Meaningful Echo to II where Ezio and Mario climb up a Church Tower and Ezio debates on whether or not he should throw the Apple or not. Both Uncle and Nephew take a leap of faith as the titles flutter over the Roman Skyline.
    • Assassin's Creed III has Haytham Kenway climb up to the Crow's Nest of a ship as he climbs over the fog covering the view of land in Boston Harbour. He gets his first glimpse of America and the New World, as the titles fill the screen.
    • Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag has the title show up just as Stede Bonnet and Edward Kenway enter Havana.
    • Assassin's Creed Rogue has the title appear as Shay and Liam first sail the Morrigan.
    • Assassin's Creed: Unity has Arno do a Leap Of Faith off of the Bastille. As he falls, the camera pans out to show Paris and then the title appears.
    • Assassin's Creed Syndicate has Jacob and Evie Frye heading to London on a train.
    • Assassin's Creed Origins has the title not appear until after Bayek has assassinated his first target, and left Siwa for Alexandria. As he leaves the Qattara Depression and gets a view of Alexandria, the title finally appears.
    • Assassin's Creed: Odyssey shows the title as the Eagle Bearer sets sail for Megaris to seek out The Wolf of Sparta, a.k.a. their father.
    • Assassin's Creed: Valhalla has Eivor and the Raven Clan sail to England while the title appears above their ship.
  • Translation Convention: This is in effect for any historical segments shown that do not take place in the Animus (such as the short films Lineage and Embers.)
  • Translator Microbes: The Animus automatically translates any foreign dialogue that takes place in it for the sake of the user (and the player). It doesn't do it perfectly, though, which gets a bit of Lampshade Hanging. In Valhalla, the language of the Mohawk in Vinland is left untranslated, as well as Brigid's heavily-accented Welsh.
  • Two-Part Trilogy:
    • Averted. While each game ends on a Cliffhanger or Sequel Hook of some sort, the stories being told in each game is distinct. In fact you could consider Assassins Creed II as itself being split into three parts including Brotherhood and Revelations, linked together as Ezio's story. Supporting this is that once the series moves on to a new main protagonist it goes back to numbering the sequels.
    • Likewise Assassin's Creed III and Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag cover in anachronic order, three generations of the Kenway family but both parts are tied to a different plot and context.
    • Origins, Odyssey and Valhalla form a trilogy of games covering historical periods predating the protagonists calling themselves Assassins, traced in the modern-day by Animus engineer Layla Hassan.
  • Uneven Hybrid: Before dying out, The Ones Who Came Before hybridized some humans with their own DNA in an attempt to give them sufficient wisdom to understand the First Civilization's agenda. This worked only partially, and the bloodline of "Adam and Eve" has waxed and waned throughout the millennia. Those with a particularly strong reinforcement of the proper genes develop traits characteristic of the Assassin protagonists, such as Eagle Vision. note  Those with one very specific recombination turn into the Sage, the genetic reincarnation of Juno's husband Aita. Valhalla reveals multiple Sages actually exist as reincarnations of Norse gods like Odin, Tyr, Thor, Freyja, Loki and several others.
  • Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Averted. Bystanders will generally remark things along the lines of "WTF?!" when the protagonist climbs the walls of buildings, drops from above, and especially fights and kills people. They'll also gather around, say, a poisoned guard.
    • Ocassionally played straight. NPCs will sometimes ignore fights and people getting killed in their general vicinity to continue whatever they were doing. More notably, occasionally some rather interesting things will be going on in the background during conversations that those in conversation will take no notice of.
  • Uplifted Animal: All humankind is the uplifted animal, Those Who Came Before having uplifted homonids into homo sapiens (and a few others, including Neanderthals) to work as servants.
  • Utopia Justifies the Means: The mindset of the Templars. The Assassins for their part don't believe in Utopia at all, chiding the Templars for their clinging to easy solutions.
  • Villains Act, Heroes React: In most games, it's the Templars who come up with a plot that the Assassins then stamp out. This is a fact that they don't fail to point out every time. In most cases, it seems that the Assassins only play a key role in history by accident, while the Templar are actually trying to bring about a change, which they are then not able to control. About the only times the Assassins were truly proactive was during Ezio's era, when they brought the Renaissance to Rome and even that was driven by opposition to the Borgia. The Templars cite this trope as proof they have the moral high ground on the Assassins; they are constantly trying to improve the world and the Assassins are just pettily getting in their way without any real solutions to the world's problems because they just don't want the Templars to win. On the flip side, the Assassins are convinced that nothing the Templars could ever conceive within the bounds of their Order is even worth looking at as a solution, believing that the people's freedom to make a difference in their own individual ways is more important than the Order's incessant attempts to subvert this and bring the people under their control and direction. So the trope is indeed played straight, but the more important issue as far as their ideological conflict is concerned is what the Templars are acting against and what the Assassins are reacting for.
  • Villain Has a Point: It's fairly common for the Templars to have at least some truth to their cause or be attempting to fix some legitimate problem with society. Assassin reactions to this range from agreeing but finding the Templar's actions to be going too far, as in the case of Garnier De Naplouse note , to rejecting the idea outright, as in the case of William Johnson note .
  • Weapon Specialization:
    • In the first game, a lot of attention is given to Altaïr swords which are continually upgraded throughout the plot, but the promotion and the focus of the storyline is that of his special hidden blade for which he sacrificed a finger.
    • The Ezio stories gives attention to the upgrades of the Blade that turn it into a Swiss-Army Weapon (Hidden Gun, Poison Darts, Hookblade, etc.)
    • Connor has a lot of focus on the Tomahawk, though dual wielding in general is his thing. Desmond himself prefers two small knives in combat, using Connor's fighting style.
    • Edward Kenway wields Dual Cutlasses arced at a low angle to form the Assassin A.
    • Arno also tends to be seen with a rapier or his Phantom Blade, while Shay has his unique Templar prototype rifle.
    • Jacob and Evie Frye wield a kukri and a cane-sword respectively.
    • Bayek is rarely depicted without a bow-and-arrow.
    • The Eagle Bearer has a spear (or a sword) in one hand and the shortened Spear of Leonidas in the other.
    • Eivor is often shown with an axe in each hand.
  • What the Hell, Hero?: The Assassins have committed their share of moral hypocrisy and for this other characters hold their feet to fire.
    • Vali cel Tradat left the Assassins for the Templars because the Assassins allied with the Ottoman Empire and supported its conquest of Eastern Europe, including his homeland of Wallachia.
    • Altaïr points out a contradiction in his Codex: they kill whoever opposes them while declaring to support the freedom of humanity (which presumably would include being free to make wrong choices).
  • When All You Have Is a Hammer…: The Assassins' trademark action is assassinating people, even when conflicts could be solved in a peaceful manner. Most of the times, assassinations are justified, but it sometimes backfires: in Revelations, Ezio killed a mostly innocent general and in Rogue, Shay kills three Templars during his time with the Assassins, one of which was dying anyway and another was effectively useless; this later contributes to his defection to the Templars. One of the proto-Assassins, Aya in Origins, literally calls themselves "poets of the kill."
  • White Void Room:
    • The Animus loading screen. The original Animus screen featured lots of hexagonal lines and bits of code scattered in the background, while Rebecca's Animus 2.0 had a simpler but cleaner white void with grid lines dividing up the empty space. The Animus 3.0 loading screen is a chaotic void of cloudy triangles.
    • In general the Templar and the Assassins have different Animus interfaces. The Assassins favor simple white contours (with the Black Room in Assassin's Creed: Revelations) inverting the colours for black because Desmond is in a coma. The Templars on the other hand like blues and greens as shown in Assassin's Creed and Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag.
    • As of Assassin's Creed Syndicate, the Helix loading screen is white again - despite still being part of the Templar technology. However, with the amount of hacking the Assassins have done into the Helix, this could be their doing.
    • Origins depicts the loading screen as black once more, evidently due to the hardware of Layla's portable Animus.
    • Odyssey does away with this altogether, instead showing the Artifact pyramid of the Cult of Kosmos. As you rack up Cultist kills in the game, their bloodied masks will accumulate around the floor near the Artifact. Also, Layla's transition in and out of the Animus has its own unique loading screen as well.
    • Valhalla returns to the classic loading screen, this time set against a night sky with the aurora borealis shining above the player.
  • Wrestler in All of Us: The playable characters are capable of pulling off wrestling moves as unarmed finishers such as suplexes, DDTs and dropkicks.
  • You Are Number 6: Abstergo brands its line of Animus users as Subject 'X', of which there were seventeen. Of these, we know the true names of Subject 2 (Warren Vidic), 4 (Daniel Cross), 16 (Clay Kaczmarek) and 17 (Desmond Miles). Throughout the games, there are scattered mentions of Subjects 1 (a male descendant of Aveline de Grandpré;) 12 (who had some connection to the Philadelphia Project) and 15 (a woman whose pregnancy messed with the Animus because it couldn't tell the difference between her and the baby).

Alternative Title(s): Assassins Creed

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