How Historical is Assassin's Creed, Really? - Detail Diatribe

That comment about Odyssey getting the history wrong but the myths right really reminds of something my history professor once said. A classmate had asked him what popular film was the most historically accurate he'd ever seen. His reply was, "300 is the most accurate film to how the Spartans would have retold the battle of Thermopylae."

This reminds me this one tumblr post where someone was sharing a story that their humanities teacher had told him. The teacher went to europe with a bunch of his students. They where going to see a chruch or in Rome and had gotten lost. One of the students told them to follow him and they arrived at the church in 20 minutes. When the humanities teacher asked the student if he had been to Italy before, he said no and that he just played Assassins Creed Brotherhood. Sorry if this comment is too long, I just thought this story was funny.

Can we also talk about how embracing a "Cold War" aesthetic for the Peloponnesian War could have been perfect for an assassin doing covert shit, especially over an extended period? But no, they had to make it look like a full-blown war

The flavor text of the Cathedral in Havana in Black Flag actually includes a designer note from the in-universe Devs that says something like "now this Church absolutely does not exist at the time of Edward Kenway but it's so lovely we just had to include it" and this video really puts that into context as a great inside joke

Something I was hoping you would touch on during the discussion of Notre Dame -- Ubisoft actually helped out after the fire a few years ago, because they had done so many interior scans of the building for the game that they had a super accurate virtual model and France wanted to use it to help with the reconstruction, so it's a case where the historical authenticity sort of feeds back into the real world.

I appreciate the humility of the early churches in Jerusalem. It feels very much in line with what the core of Christianity (and religion in general) is about. It's not about flashiness or grander, it's about acknowledging your humble place before God. How good place of worship looks doesn't matter, what truly matters is your sincerity and intention.

51:40 One thing I did appreciate is that if you pull up the in-game database, the entry - written by an Abstergo employee developing a pirate-based Animus experience - openly SAYS the cathedral didn't exist yet, but people are paying to climb on landmarks so here it is. I suspect they had many discussions like that IRL when developing the game.

Valhalla would have been improved significantly if they'd set the campaign a hundred years later and swapped out Sigurd for RL historic figure Erik Bloodaxe; a pagan who had to flee Norway when his Christian brother seized the throne with the help of an English army, and after bouncing around islands for a few years, ended up being appointed King of Northumbria; a region that was a mixture of Norse and English culture and desperately trying to stay independent. In the end, Erik was murdered and Northumbria fell to the English, but his sons retook Norway and temporarily halted the conversion of the nation. An AC-style plot would easily fit into that (and on a funny note, one of the Kings of England from this era WAS randomly murdered by a strange man with a hidden blade who attacked him and someone else in the street!); the English and the Templars are backing the conversion of Norway and your protagonist ends up having to travel between both regions to deal with them. It'd also remove the pro-colonialism element and replace it with something more complex about dealing with overlapping claims long after a colonial period ended (plus it'd make more sense than the game trying to have its cake and eat it too by having you settle England AND raid it at the same time), and you could easily find some way to have one or two missions be set a century back with another character (maybe one of Eivor's ancestors who she's trying to emulate) to satisfy people who want the pop culture image of viking conquest.

May not be too historically accurate, but enough to get me and my 13 year old brain to get interested in history so thanks, Assassin's Creed

The only assassins I am familiar with are a worm, a droid, a female changing bounty hunter, and a male Mandalorian bounty hunter, specifically in that order. So I look forward to be educated in this video and expand my scope of assassin knowledge.

“We were being used in classrooms for some ungodly reason” I literally found your channel bc my classic lit teacher in high school showed us your video of Dante’s Inferno like 5 years ago 😭

I love the slowly fading in of “GOOD DOME” when they’re talking about the facade of St. Peter’s. It’s very much Blue and I agree.

I've always been fond of the idea that, since Abstergo was building these virtual worlds out, at least in part, for mass consumption through media, that any historical discrepancy can be chalked up to Abstergo conforming their worlds to the popular idea what these places looked like, or what they're familiar as. In that way, Abstergo almost becomes a meta-commentary on the devs behind the franchise.

At this point I'm starting to just headcanon that the Animus tech is just completely breaking down. The first few games had mostly the correct setting with a few buildings that the assassin's great grandparents or great grandchildren would've seen. By AC Valhalla time it's just straight up like 10 different generations of assassins' memories mushed together into a hodgepodge of "England". Someone might need to go replace the motherboard bc I think it's melting.

An interesting possibility with these "historical inaccuracies" with some of the building designs could possibly be explained by the nature of the Assassin's Creed games themselves. The Animus, the device the main characters use to relive the history of their ancestors has been shown to behave strangely on occasion. Swear words and sometimes full phrases are spoken in the ancestors languages rather than English, cracks in reality, and the Animus technicians have no idea why. The Animus also creates a "Bleeding Effect" where the past lives bleed into the current one. It's possible that this also works in reverse, though in a much smaller way. Its possible that the reason these buildings look like they've been fast forwarded is because the people in the Animus remember the buildings as they are now, and that's effecting how they look inside the Animus.

Big fan of how Blue decided to write "Big cathedral" in the AC IV slide because "La Catedral de la Virgen María de la Concepción Inmaculada de La Habana" was too long

The one thing I wish AC had was some in game explanation for anachronisms like "Oh the animus occasionally renders more modern buildings to better adjust the user to the simulation by giving them their expectations"

The first time I went to Rome, I visited the Castel Sant’Angelo and instinctively knew my way around it from playing AC Brotherhood. I feel like that’s really a testament to the dedication put into these games

Fun fact: until the start of this video I would have bet literally my entire life savings on Red and Blue being actual siblings irl because of how their dynamic works

As a swedish person who learned about viking history in school and who knew a bit about the earlier assasins creeds i was somewhat intrigued by the potential of a large AAA game portraying the culture. As you can expect i was very dissapointed when i watched the trailer and the whole "Warrior-ization" of the vikings with the tattoos and such (especially the wrist blade in the trailer thing like wtf).