Assassin's Creed 3 to feature "more Desmond than you've ever had before"

The mobile personality deadzone known as "Desmond" is a passable non-character for some, but for others his adventures set in the present represent the worst bits of every Assassin's Creed. His everyman role has been realised so blandly that he's simply a nobody, as though his personality desperately crawled out of his nostrils and fled into the animus to hang out with all those more interesting guys in the past.

"It's a big part of our story and I don't really want to give too many details away because I want people to experience what that is. But rest assured, you're going to see a lot of Desmond. More so than in any past game."

"We're spending more time on the present than we have in past games," he adds.

Oh, he's not all that bad. I'm being a bit mean. In recent Assassin's Creeds Desmond's done quite a lot of running about, and in Revelation he was trapped on a weird cyber island with that really passive aggressive Animus ghost. There's plenty that they could do with Desmond, and the present day bits, but it's going to have to be something big and new if it's going to beat chopping up Templars with a tomahawk in the midst of the American Revolution.

That's the trouble with the present day missions in Assassin's Creed. The Animus is a great conceit that lets the player dive into any period of history the designers see fit, wouldn't it be better if it just stayed a device, with no additional story attached to the chap wired into it? What do you think?

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Part of the UK team, Tom was with PC Gamer at the very beginning of the website's launch—first as a news writer, and then as online editor until his departure in 2020. His specialties are strategy games, action RPGs, hack ‘n slash games, digital card games… basically anything that he can fit on a hard drive. His final boss form is Deckard Cain.