Since finishing Assassin's Creed 3, I've wanted to get my thoughts on the series down. And let me be clear, I am now finished with it. I have zero interest in 4 and will be moving on to greener pastures. I really liked AC1, loved AC2, and LOOOOVED AC:Brotherhood. Then I skipped Revelations, and borrowed a copy of 3. I think it's safe to say my interest has been winding down the last few years.

The first nail in that coffin was the annualization of the series. The leap from 1 to 2 was nothing short of spectacular. They basically fixed everything that was wrong with the structure and some of the gameplay issues of the first one. Suddenly you're not repeating the same quest templates and you get to follow a full coherent story. And Ezio is super awesome. But for me, it was all about Desmond. At the end of 1, he gets Assassin's vision and is ready to bust out from Obstergo. Then in 2, he starts working with other Assassins and has one of the greatest ending twists ever. I was on a super high on the series. But when Brotherhood came out a year later, I was scared.

While I probably preordered 2, I waited for reviews on Brotherhood. And there they were, it was being praised across the board. Great, I'll just jump right in. And man was it awesome. The world was great, buying stuff everywhere and fixing it up was fun. Recruiting the Assassins and sending them on missions was exciting. The series had hit its peak for me. ANd I felt that Ezio's story was finished. I was ready to move on.

Cue Revelations. I no longer cared. It didn't help that the reviews came out lukewarm. I had no desire to run around another city and collect feathers. Old Ezio held no interest for me, and hearing there was barely any Desmond made this an easy pass for me. But it's ok, the A-team was still working on a full fledged sequel. AC3 they would call it. So it had to be amazing, right?

I'm going to go into minor spoiler territory for AC3, so heads up. I was planning on picking it up, but a buddy of mine had just finished it and was going to let me borrow it. Sounds good to me, if I liked it, I would just buy myself a copy. It was a game that would let you get excited and have fun for about 3-4 missions at a time before throwing another mission at you that just sucked all the fun away. The character you start as is pretty cool. He can Assassin dudes really well and the twist that comes at the end of that bit is awesome. But for me, that was actually when I just started getting into the game. Then to take all the abilities away from you and start over again as Connor was just deflating. So, four hours later when you're back up to speed, the game gets pretty cool again. Until you hit a mission where you can't be spotted, or one where you're tailing a guy and you get stuck on a bench. Or when you get locked in combat and accidentally jump off a cliff. It all just made it too easy to put down. Couple that with the dumb Desmond story, and I was getting to the limit of my patience.

And that pattern just recycles over the whole game. A few good missions, something awful, put it down. Another good mission, dumb Desmond stuff, put it down. It doesn't help that Connor's story reaching what I considered to be a logical conclusion with the wrap up of the story with his father, and then continued to kill another dude. When I finally got to the end of the game, I watched the ending, immediately said "That's dumb," and ejected it from my PS3. This was a series that was one of my first purchases after getting a 360, and here I was tossing it in a pile to get it back to my friend as fast as possible.

I'm willing to concede that I also no longer want what it was giving me in terms of a world. The idea of a open world with a crap-ton of side stuff to do doesn't excite me. In fact, I actively avoided any side missions. I just don't care. The world itself is not interesting enough to draw me in. And that may be true of any open world game. The idea of doing that again in the next GTA is not something I want to do. It may just be that my tastes are changing and I'd prefer a nice linear story over some big open world buffet of things to do. But either way, me and AC are finished, and it's kind of nice to not worry about what happens next. I just don't care.