this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2024
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The first game has a weird gameplay loop where you get to a city that is very similar to the previous one, have to do a some filler missions (often with no story at all) to unlock the story mission, then do the story mission and move on.
2-Syndicate are much more continuously story-driven. They all have quite a few collectables, but they aren't important to experiencing the game.
The 2 family is mostly set inside cities, while 3 and after have more world around the cities. They also lose some focus on stealth over time, though it still exists in all of them.
Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla become much more RPG-lite, combat focused, and require you to do quite a bit to keep up with enemy level scaling.
Looping back to the root of your question, the 2 family is often seen as the peak of the core series, with 4 (Black Flag) being up with it but different.
The only downside of the 2 family is that there isn't much evolution between the three games to make moving to the next game feel like a jump to a new game, but progression is lost each time. It feels like one massive game with weird break points.
For what it's worth, I got into the series a bit late myself and didn't play AC1 until probably 2012 or 2013. I asked people at the time whether it was worth it to play AC1 or if I should just skip ahead, and everyone told me to skip ahead for a lot of the same reasons you said.
I'm not sure why I bothered asking because I decided to just play AC1 first anyways and still managed to enjoy it.
If you're new to the series, it's still fun just to run around and climb things and kill people. The story was actually interesting and the Animus was a really cool concept. The occasional shift to present day gameplay helped keep the historical stuff fresh. It doesn't have the overwhelming volume of useless collectibles strewn about everywhere like later games have.
I haven't played it since so maybe it's aged worse than I remember. It doesn't have dozens to hundreds of hours of gameplay and side quests in a huge open world. But for a dozen hours in a game focused on a linear main story it was pretty good. Like if you took down the walls of the hallways in Uncharted.
Thank you!