I loved the whole atmosphere of the first Assassins creed. This world you didn't know much about, and the crazy stuff that was written on the walls reffering to Chaos Theory, Maya and stuff; and the emails you read which had all sorts of stuff written in them. This game gave you a massive sense of anticipation of what the series could explore because of all that stuff that subject 16 wrote on the walls about the things he had seen.

I'm just a bit dissapointed at how the series continued from a story perspective.

Yes.

I hadn't thought about this before, and I actually agree!

I think, though, that Ezio is a more interesting character, but Altair isn't very stiff competition. Even if you prefer Altair, you can't deny that Ezio is more entertaining, at least.

Haven't gotten to Revelations yet, but I think I'd agree with this. It's a shame that amounts to almost nothing alongside the gameplay. Still, I beat it and I don't regret it. Someone was asking for people's favorite bad movies today, I didn't have a good answer, but I think AC1 is one of my favorite bad games. Right next to Earth Defense Force 2017 and Tenchu Z.

Disagree, I really enjoyed the story and pacing much better in AC2. I feel like that was my favorite story in the games, even the subject 16 stuff fascinated me. AC1 felt like a while lot of exposition between action scenes whereas AC2 felt more organic IMO. You got to know Altair, identify with him, and watch his rise from spoiled rich kid to master Assassin and I really got into it. Plus Rodrigo Borgia is a fantastic villain, I really liked how menacing he was. Still, that's just my take on the series.

Absolutely. The mystery and discovery aspect of the first game is the reason it ranks in my top games of this generation. It does a great job of reflecting the player onto Desmond, creating a very fleshed out world that's both familiar and new. And that ending was just completely bananas, really got me pumped for the rest of the series.
 
ACII was also amazing, but the trimming down of Desmond's story was a huge disappointment. Brotherhood continued the downward slope, but both those games had crazy enough endings to be great. Revelations was , with the only Desmond stuff being the fleshing out of his backstory, which could have been extrapolated from the first game.  It "resolved" the other two stories, which I felt were pretty closed already, but at the expense of ruining Subject 16, an amazing enigma of a character. 
 
I play Assassin's Creed games for the Desmond segments, the gameplay has gotten old pretty quickly; I was tired of it about half-way through Brotherhood. Unfortunately Ubisoft seems to be going in the opposite direction. I'll buy ACIII day one, but that'll probably be my last Assassin's Creed game. 
 
And on a side-note, ACIII should not be a Desmond only game, like Jeff insists. That would break the player reflection, by letting Desmond die and breaking the continuity of the game. He hasn't been able to die up until this point of the game, and Desynchronization is a great gameplay contrivance that allows for a smooth story flow.

I agree.  I find Ezio's story to be far more interesting than Altair's but what I am really interested in is Desmond's story, and the vast majority of that has taken place in the first game.  My biggest gripe about the series so far is that they've spent so little time on Desmond.  After the end of AC2 I couldn't wait to see where all that craziness was going to go and it pretty much went no where. 
 
I have the same worries about Darksiders 2.  The end of the first game was incredible and I'm dying to see what happens next, but it looks like we're not going to find out.

@Xtrememuffinman said:

And on a side-note, ACIII should not be a Desmond only game, like Jeff insists. That would break the player reflection, by letting Desmond die and breaking the continuity of the game. He hasn't been able to die up until this point of the game, and Desynchronization is a great gameplay contrivance that allows for a smooth story flow.

What if there's a future guy experiencing Desmond's memories? Yeah.

I think it's easy for the first one to feel the best, because it allows you to fill in the gaps with your own imagination. This sets up sequels for failure, because they're never what you wanted.

I think the 2nd is a more well written story with better characters. The first one is basic, Altair is one dimensional and it doesn't get into much of the stories "meat" so to speak.

I just wish they'd kept the AC fiction a bit more grounded.

AC1 was about the Templars finding a PoE to stick into their telecom satellite so they can have their New World Order. A little weird, I'll grant you, but if you can get past the whole mind control thing, you're there. Now things are just bananas, and I'm not sure if it's in a good way.

@Brendan: Much of what the first game suggests that Abstergo are involved in, is left completely untouched by the rest of the franchise. I agree that Altair was bland and I thought the subject 16 vid in ACII was great, but a good example of something that keeps you guessing is the Half Life series, HL 2 never strayed from the path the first one set of mystery, wonder and bewilderment. I don't think that sequels not living up to their predecessors story wise is an inevitability.

AC1 is still my favourite, just wish it had the gameplay changes of something more recent like Brotherhood. Never cared for Ezio really.

I think the AC series would have fared a lot better as a trilogy with a lot more time between releases, not the yearly releases they've been churning out.

I agree, I absolutely loved the oppressive atmosphere of the first game. Abstergo in the first game were much more interesting villains as opposed the generic "bad guys" they turned out to be in the sequels. They also played with some really interesting philosophical ideas in the first game, would you create a utopia at the cost of lies and people's freedom and knowledge or would rather spread the truth at the cost of said utopia? Despite being incredibly repetitive and having inferior gameplay from its sequels, I found AC1 to be the much more interesting story wise.

The success of Assassin's Creed 2 was the demise of the series' potential. Instead of going through various cities around the world with various assassins throughout history like they promised, the series turned into Ezio's Creed.

For me, the one thing the first game has that the sequels moved away from (dramatically, in my opinion) is the sheer grit. I remember that one scene in Assassin's Creed where Altair is hunting the Templar doctor who is basically imprisoning social outcasts/misfits for the purpose of medical experimentation--itself a rather barbaric notion--and the doctor orders the guards to break that dude's legs as an example of the punishment allocated for attempted escape. At that point I saw that and was totally blown away by the total nonchalance of the presentation of that violence. It wasn't stylized or choreographed. It was just brutal. Like the victim, Altair in the crowd is more or less helpless to interfere. The violence is sudden, the result is shown but not emphasized, and as soon as it arrived it was gone and you're left with this powerful mortification.

There was something, starting with Assassin's Creed II, that really softened the overall look of the game. It had slightly perceptible, yet totally noticeable cartoonish bent to the visual style. The game was still violent and whatever, but it never really presented it with the same tone the first stayed rigidly beholden to.

In my opinion the story peaked with AC2 and started to go downwards with Brotherhood.