When Assassin’s Creed Shadows launched last month, I wrote that the game’s Animus Hub felt rather threadbare, but that this was not unexpected. The Hub’s main feature, its battle pass-like “Projects”, are specifically designed to unlock over time and reveal their rewards – a smattering of cosmetic items, in-game resources and new narrative content – at a slow pace, in order to keep you playing over the weeks to come.
A month on, and thanks to early access to the game for Eurogamer’s Assassin’s Creed Shadows review, I’ve now completed the game’s first Project, The Legacy. Doing so was straightforward, and only required about 10 minutes of playtime each week to speed through some simple Animus quests (mostly “go here, kill this guy”). My reward? A shiny new in-game armour set and some fresh Assassin’s Creed lore.
So – what’s the story? Well, over the course of various text logs you’ll discover a new front in the age-old Assassin-Templar conflict, set sometime in the relatively near future, and meet someone who feels suspiciously like they could become the series’ new Desmond – its modern day protagonist. The location is Marrakech, at a time when it is nearly uninhabitable due to rising global temperatures, and the focus is on a small band of Assassins who take in a new member, and strike out at their long-time enemies.
In general, this is a storyline that acts as a soft reboot of Assassin’s Creed’s modern day narrative – one that re-introduces the series’ two main rival factions, emphasises the scrappy underground nature of the Assassins, and includes only a few clues to when it’s actually set.
My guess is this new narrative, with brief mentions of advanced-sounding AI and hints at a more advanced climate crisis, is likely at least 50 years in the future. This would comfortably move the story past the generation of modern day Assassins seen in previous games (such as William Miles, Shaun Hastings and Rebecca Crane, who last popped up in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla). The shift also means this new era can skip past any consequences from Valhalla’s ending. For now at least, there’s no more detail on any of that here.
To Marrakech, then, where there’s a heat curfew and widespread death whenever there’s a particularly hot day and power fails. A young man named Joel Eastman is visiting the city to find out more about what his late father had been doing.
Eastman is British, originally from Gloucester, and admits that he disappointed his dad by not wanting to do more to help the world while growing up. In an early diary entry, we hear how he tries to make contact with a former associate of his father at a local market, but is easily spotted and tailed by mysterious figures that sound a lot like Abstergo goons.
A later text log, from the viewpoint of someone named Hamza Belkacem, reveals that Eastman was caught in a firefight and injured one of the goons enough they were now in hospital – so Eastman is not as incapable as he first appears. A call log of a phone conversation between Eastman and Tatyana Dane, a former colleague of his father, describes the pair planning to meet and quickly escape from the city. Dane doesn’t believe the call has been bugged, but the transcript suggests otherwise.
Dane is initially suspicious of Eastman and critical of how conspicuous he’s been, but Eastman says he has the dying words of his father he needs to share. We don’t find out what these are, but they’re enough that Eastman winds up with Dane’s local Assassin group, and we discover that Joel’s dad Geoff Eastman died alongside others in his operative cell while infiltrating an Abstergo compound.
As often seems to be the case in Assassin’s Creed, things are currently not going well for the Assassins at large. “We’re scattered, stripped to the bone,” Dane says to a fellow recruit. “Without new blood, they’ll whittle us down to nothing.”
A transcript of a larger meeting attended by Eastman shows the group – around half a dozen members in size – planning a mission to hit back at the Templars by extracting a high value target travelling in a convoy. Joel Eastman is ultimately portrayed as capable, and when he demands to be involved in the operation, the local Assassin leader Poul Agard agrees.
A diary entry from Eastman written on the road offers more background to his dislike of Abstergo, and why his dad saw the company as such a threat. By the latter half of this century, Abstergo has used Animus software to alter humanity’s understanding of history, by presenting and popularising individual perspectives of the past as fact. Eastman’s father had worked as an archeologist, seeking artefacts that could demonstrate the truth.
The Legacy’s final text log is a report written by a rather Templar-sounding individual named Director Ospanov, which details the outcome of the Assassins’ extraction attempt from Abstergo’s point of view. An important scientist, Dr Muller, was indeed taken by the Assassins, and seemingly chosen because he was an integral part of something called “Project Mnemosyne”. Abstergo says Muller’s work had ensured the company was on the verge of taking a revolutionary step forward. What could this be? Our only clue, perhaps, is that in Greek mythology, Mnemosyne is the goddess of memory.
Next week, I’ll begin unlocking the second of Shadows’ two Projects, titled Awakening – and it seems certain that the game will add more over the coming months as Shadows’ post-launch roadmap is revealed and released. These text-based logs are a long way from the playable modern day in previous games, but for fans of the series’ ongoing storytelling, these do at least provide a few nuggets of new canon – and hopefully will act as fresh basis for something more substantial in the future. So, Joel Eastman, when will we get to play as you?
