I finally took the plunge and picked up a current generation console this weekend, opting for a PS4 bundled with Assassin's Creed Syndicate. I consider myself a fan of the series, but I'm also a relative late-comer to the games, and at this point I've not made it any further through the 'main' AC franchise than Revelations, which I played in early 2014. It's been around eighteen months since I last tackled one of these games, and I feel ready to jump back in, but I've heard mixed things about ACIII, and there's this nice shiny new one right in front of me, on my brand new console, that seems to be getting decent press...

My question is, can I comfortably leap into this without any knowledge of the series' overarching story since the end of Revelations? Are there any critical modern-timeline story beats I'd be missing out on by skipping over III, Black Flag, Unity and Rogue, that would hamper my enjoyment of Syndicate, or possibly compromise my ability to go back and fully enjoy those interim games? Or can I go into this and enjoy it as a stand-alone Assassin's Creed experience?

I mean, AC3 kinda wrapped it up, and they've really minimized the importance of the modern day story stuff. So you're not gonna really know how the Desmond thing resolved, but don't worry, who cares, it was kinda dumb. The Assassin's Creeds are all kinda standalone now.

@bisonhero: Thanks duder. I know that ACIII is the end of the Desmond arc, although I've somehow managed to avoid being spoiled on the particulars of how that all wraps up. I guess what I wanted to know was, does this game fall smack-bang in the middle of a new established modern-day story, and if so, would playing it be to the detriment of experiencing that? Glad to hear that won't be the case. It's good to know the games are more stand-alone experiences these days, too, as it kind of takes the pressure off playing through everything following ACIII in any kind of predetermined order.

@dankempster: I mean, there is still stuff where Juno, and pieces of Eden, and Precursors, and so on, appear or get mentioned in the present day. But I wouldn't say it's a new story arc on par with the Desmond arc. It's more that they're stringing along the conflict between the Assassins and Abstergo indefinitely, arbitrarily adding new wrinkles to that conflict as they go, because somewhere in the Assassin's Creed style guide there is a bullet point that says:

• "Every game should have some weird cyber espionage happening in present day, and maybe the player character finds the final resting place of some relic, or maybe they're just a faceless whoever reliving these memories for fun"

Fuck man, you need to play all those older games for the lore. Otherwise you won't understand why you're stabbing people.

@dankempster: I'd say AC3 is the last plot heavy AC entry if we consider the modern day stuff being the main overarching plot of all those games, and the Ezio/Altair business being relegated to side stories. That said I don't think AC3 is a great place to jump back in if you've been away for a long time and have a brand new console. While most of it will be very similar coming from Revelations, it's a game that is very systems heavy and in a way the last of it's kind before Black Flag started slowly but steadily doing away with much of what had become the traditional Assassins Creed formula up to that point.

Unity and Syndicate are both games that branched off in a completely different direction with the former being the shaky base upon which they built the latter. Unity especially had completely distanced itself from the modern day story of the precursor race with Syndicate taking baby steps to dip it's toe back in, but it's nowhere near as prolific as in the past titles. If anything those last two games have flipped the script, with the modern day stuff getting relegated to the background and the past becoming the main crux of each game. While before you would do the historical missions as a means to an end of unlocking further plot exposition in the modern day, searching for an artifact, scrubbing the memories for clues, now you are playing the historical missions for the sake of furthering their own self contained stories with most ties to the Juno/Abstergo plot being severed.

Ultimately you'd be better off watching the cutscenes from AC3 on YouTube and with that small plot refresher in mind diving straight into Syndicate. Almost nothing in terms of gameplay that was introduced in AC3 has made it's way into the current gen games so there is no benefit in playing it from that perspective, and it's an extremely slow burn with the world opening up after 2 hours of pure tutorials, maybe even longer than that.