If you’re anything like us, you’ve likely just finished everything there is to do in Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced and are wondering what to do with the rest of your life. The game was a stellar remake of, let’s be honest, the best Assassin’s Creed game, so it feels like we’ve reached the summit and have nowhere else to go. However, as rumors regarding Assassin’s Creed Codename Hexe begin to swirl, we find ourselves with a few reasons to be cheerful, but only if Ubisoft reads the room and delivers the goods.
When it comes to Assassin’s Creed, franchise fatigue really set in after Syndicate. Both it and Unity were fun games (once the bugs were exterminated), but that didn’t stop players from feeling mostly ambivalent towards them, especially Syndicate. After some time off, Assassin’s Creed came back, bigger and better than ever with Origins. And while those of us who’d played The Witcher 3 raised our eyebrows at the changes, it was hard to deny they weren’t for the better. Assassin’s Creed Origins is an excellent game, and the RPG elements were most welcome.
The trend would continue with Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, which even added naval combat back into the mix, making it the beloved child of both Origins and Black Flag. However, the formula started getting stale again by the time AC Valhalla arrived, and even the ever-popular Viking theme wasn’t enough for many players to push through the fatigue. Odyssey had been a massive game in its own right, but Valhalla dwarfed even that in terms of scope, to the point where it became overwhelming for players and a chore to finish.
2023’s Assassin’s Creed Mirage was a much shorter and punchier experience and also served as a love letter to the original Assassin’s Creed game. In many ways, this was Ubisoft testing the water to see if AC’s flirtation with being a vast RPG would continue, or if it should go back to being more of an adventure game with RPG elements. 2025’s Assassin’s Creed Shadows returned to the open-world RPG style, but things were far more curated and, mercifully, stripped back when compared to Valhalla and Odyssey.
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That brings us back to the present day and Assassin’s Creed Resynced, where a whole new generation of gamers has either discovered the joy of being a buccaneer on the high seas or been reminded of it. Black Flag was always and remains a vast game, and let’s not pretend it doesn’t feature plenty of RPG elements, but what’s important is that it gets the balance right. Then again, we’d argue that Origins and Shadows also did, and are comparable to Black Flag in terms of scale.
Codename Hexe is said to be “a dark, personal revenge and survival story” set during the height of the 16th-and 17th-century witch trials in the Holy Roman Empire. So it sounds like Ubisoft may be aiming for another game like Assassin’s Creed Mirage, something smaller in scope than the big RPG-era titles. But we’d caution Ubisoft about going too far in the other direction.
No game series is safe from franchise fatigue. If one title is too similar to the last, i.e., Unity and Syndicate, or Odyssey and Valhalla, then this risk becomes more pronounced. The trick is to mix it up; don’t overface players, but don’t shortchange them either. It’s a tough balance to strike, but after the success of Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced, the future of the franchise should be bright – no matter how dark and witchy the setting gets.
