I just designed the perfect Assassin's Creed game. You're welcome, Ubisoft.

Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag is a great game. In fact, it might be the best game in the series. But that doesn’t mean it’s perfect. You want to make a perfect Assassin’s Creed game, Ubisoft? Listen up, because I have all the answers. Here’s Assassin’s Creed V: Revolutions

(Before we start, a quick note: most of the images in this piece are by the very talented Xu Chaoyuan. You can and should check out his deviantart page here. These are from his Assassin’s Creed series, but he’s got a cool Warcraft one as well.)

Big Changes

First off, I’m making a few major changes to the series. The first is that I’ve done away with all of the modern-day conspiracy nonsense. I’m sorry, but it’s boring, immersion-breaking, distracting, and mostly nonsense. I don’t understand why Ubisoft spends so much time researching and recreating historical periods with painstaking realism, and then occasionally rips you out of these fantastically-realized worlds to make you sit behind a virtual desk for a while. So, that’s out. And I’ve gone light on the Assassins vs. Templars stuff, too, because it’s too restricting to try to shoehorn all of recorded history into the Assassins vs. Templars narrative.

The second major change is that in Assassin’s Creed V, players will take the role of two different characters, and they can switch back and forth between them Grand Theft Auto V-style during the game (although there would be some restrictions to this to ensure that they don’t get ahead of each other in terms of the main story). This not only helps keep players from getting bored by allowing them to switch to a different location and character at will, it allows players to see both sides of important historical conflicts.

Other than that, though, the game will look and play like Assassin’s Creed. In other words: you run around doing cool parkour stuff and stabbing important historical figures with hidden blades.

The story

The game opens in imperial China. The year: 1900. You take the role of a 15-year-old Chinese patriot (let’s call him Liu) and peasant from the outskirts of Beijing. You have seen and heard from your parents how the country is being torn apart by foreign aggression, and like your father, you join the Boxers. The tutorial mission might see you cutting the train lines to Tianjin to isolate Beijing, and then assassinating a Japanese diplomat (both things that actually happened in 1900) before heading into the city proper.

Then you switch to the other character, Zhang, an 18-year-old loyalist in the service of the Qing emperors. You see firsthand the Qing’s ambivalence about the Boxers, but when ordered to, you begin to collaborate with the Allied foreign forces in secret to assassinate Boxer leaders in Beijing. Through these early battles — which would see you jumping across rooftops and sneaking through temples and markets as fires and riots illuminate the Beijing night — you see clearly that China is being damaged by foreign powers, but also by its own ignorance and backwards-ness.

After the tutorial, the game jumps forward a bit to Shanghai circa 1926. Liu, having survived the Boxer Rebellion, has fallen in with the new Chinese Communist Party, and Zhang has become a hit-man of sorts for Nationalist Party leader Chiang Kai-shek. Amidst the splendor and squalor of 1920s Shanghai, Zhang and Liu skulk across rooftops and hide in alleyways, collecting information and performing assassinations to weaken the other side while outwardly maintaining some degree of friendliness. Liu and Zhang meet briefly at a ball in the French concession.

In 1927 when Chiang purges the Communists in Shanghai, most that survive flee. Liu remains but must keep his allegiance to the Communists a secret. He meets Zhang again and the two eventually begin to work together. These joint missions would have an interesting twist, though, because Liu’s goal would be to secretly undermine things without giving that away to Zhang. But over time, a true friendship develops between the two, and Liu becomes conflicted about his loyalties to the missions he’s being given by his Communist Party handlers and his loyalty to his friend.