I treated myself to AC: Syndicate last week and though I am far from finishing it, I have already found myself speculating about where it might go next. For those who don’t know what Assassin’s Creed is, it’s a series of video games with a central premise of a secret war between semi-religious orders called Assassins and their mortal enemies The Templars.

Why are they fighting? Because each wants control of the technology of an ancient race of humanoids who were expelled from planet Earth several hundred thousand years ago – The Assassins to protect it and prevent others abusing it and The Templars to harness it.

These artefacts are called “Pieces of Eden” and there are also city ruins of this ancient civilisation all over the globe. We know all this because The Templars have been abducting Assassins for years and extracting the memories of their ancestors to locate important artefacts and ruins. The gameplay explores the genetic memories of people in the past. In the main series so far, we have explored Crusade-era Holy Land, Renaissance Italy, The American Revolution, The Seven Years War, The Age of Pirates, Revolution France and now with Syndicate, Victorian London.

For more information, please visit my storytelling articles: here, here and here.

I’ve been thinking about where I might like the series to go next. Here are my humble suggestions for Ubisoft though I don’t imagine for one minute they will take my views into consideration.

Ancient Greece – Peloponnesian War

I feel Syndicate has reached the limit of historical chronology and getting close to living memory. I would now like the series to take a huge leap back in time and would love especially to see Greece at war with itself. Visit Athens and Sparta and Corinth (rather than one big map), and reintroduce ship battles. See the great monuments and find the ancient technology beneath them. AC works best when it is innovating and opening up the game again to multiple locations may allow creative freedom to the writers and coders.

Russian Revolution

I said above that I think the series shouldn’t jump forward in time any further but part of me wants to see St. Petersburg in the grip of revolution. This might be too similar to Unity, and it probably will be, but it might be interesting. In the west, too few people are really familiar with Russian history, culture and architecture and this might just pique the interest. The major success of both Unity and Syndicate is clearly the spectacular visuals. They could really do the Russian city a great deal of justice.

Ancient Egypt

With such impressive temples, monuments and tombs, I am surprised they haven’t done it yet. From Pi-Ramese to Waset (modern Luxor), to Nubia in the south and the Med coast in the north, Ubisoft could create a game of such immense depth and breadth, giving the series back a scale not seen since ACII wowed players with the sheer immensity of improvements made since the first game. Most games in this series have had multiple locations. It was Brotherhood that changed that. It would also give some creative freedom to the writers and historians to imagine settlements that are no longer extant.

Maya / Aztec

Mayan civilisation was touched upon in Black Flag, but it would be good to see these cities alive rather than in ruins. The Maya seemed about as pure to the code as I’m sure the Assassin brotherhood would have been much earlier in its history and there is scope for great development in this area rather than the second fiddle it played in the pirate game. Let’s see some more pre-Columbian civilisations as they would have been. Even the Pueblo and Hohokum would be interesting –  two other civilisations that many people know little about.

Foundations

Let’s go right back to the beginning, to the start of the secret war – wherever or whenever that may be – I suspect a Mesopotamia setting would feel most fitting but part of me also wants to see what life was like after the human rebellion, to meet Adam and Eve and perhaps even see how the Assassins and Templars came about. Who founded the orders and why? How did the war start? What triggered the war? These are questions to which many fans would like the answers, I’m sure.

There are my humble suggestions, what are yours?