I can see the issue you take with diluting importance by assigning the player the most mundane of tasks, and agree with you to a point. Assassin's Creed was not a game in which you were made out to be incredibely important, influencial, or instrumental to the events taking place around you. They made sure to drive this point home every time you were told to collect evidence and Altair remarked, to varying degrees, on the tedium of the tasks he was assigned to.
The increasing importance of the character was not due to his stature as an assassin, nor his expoits, but because of the events he became caught up in which were, for once, truly bigger than him. Sure, he met Richard, and sure, he uncovered the mainical plot his master had been brewing for so long, but he was in no way made out to be an immensely important character. Instead, we were told that he was simply some one who got caught up in things bigger than themselves.
Phew, that covers the first half of your post, about belittling the characters achievements. I do agree more, however, with your assessment of games' immaturity. I feel that, far too often, games use their historical backdrops more as a reason to re-use and re-state plot points which have been used to the point of saturation. I felt assassin's creed did an admirable job of dropping the player into a tumultuous time in history and allowing them to feel part of the world. However, they distilled the conflict between Richard and Saladin to a simple battle for territory, and decided to forgoe further investigation into the racial and religious conflicts going on at the time. Additionally, as Dr_Feelgood so aptly mentioned, they made the Hashashin, a group that even Saladin himself feared, out to be a simple group of overly-acrobatic killers, rather than the religious zealots, trained from birth to move and kill without warning, that they were.
Gah, done. I THINK that loosely relates to what you were saying, amirite?
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