And I will make you host so that I don't forget to do that. OK, excellent. So I'm going to call to order the April 24th meeting of the African Heritage Reparation Assembly at 2.04 PM. This meeting is being recorded with the extension extension of chapter 20, the acts of 2021. This meeting will be conducted via remote means. Members of the public who wish to access the meeting may do so via Zoom or by telephone. No in-person attendance of members of the public will be permitted, but every effort will be made to ensure the public can adequately access the proceedings in real time via technological means. And let's make sure that everybody can be heard since I had an issue. And I'll start with you, Dr. Rhodes. I'm here. Great, it's great to see you. And back in Amherst, yes? Yes, I am. Welcome home. And Hala. Can you hear me? Yes, very good. Perfect, thank you. And Ms. Bridges. Yes, I can hear you. OK, great.  That's how you want it right now, I assume. Is that is that right? Yes, I'm on the phone. OK, perfect. All right, so I know that Yvonne is not able to join us. I'm just going to send a quick text to Dr. Shabazz and to Alexis, and then we'll get started. All right, great. Let's see. And I'm just going to check attendees. Oh, Dr. Shabazz is actually in the audience. So I guess now I can promote him and he should be moving over. Yes, I hear everyone. Welcome, Dr. Shabazz. Thank you. I'm glad you're here. OK, so just reviewing the agenda. It's been a couple weeks since we met and our survey has been live. And so I'm going to, of course, provide an update on that. Dr. Rhodes and I received an update from the Dunhu Institute this morning. And then we have a definite other item that we need to get to today, which is our Amherst Cultural Council grant. We have the opportunity to amend it so that we can utilize the $500 that was granted to us. And Pamela and I have been working together to think about some ideas for that. So we'll just want to review that with the committee. And then we also have some listening session, just a little discussion on listening sessions and some thoughts I have on that. And then I would like to touch on our final report as well. So any questions before we get to it? All right, great. I did want to share something really quickly with the group that I came across today. And I'm going to try to share screen here. I have been doing a lot of historical research on the town of Amherst. And I've been reading through dozens of annual town reports. And they're very, very, very interesting. I can send the link to everyone. You can search by date. And if you know something important was happening in a particular time period, you can search. And it's really been illuminating to me. But I wanted to share something I came across today. And let's see. Can everyone see my screen? OK, great. So in 1969, at the proposal of several citizen groups, the annual town meeting created a temporary, broadly representative 11 member Citizens Review Commission to study and make recommendations, which would more fully extend democratic government and equal opportunities to all inhabitants. And interestingly, it says that the commission's focus was on four major areas, education, housing, and real estate employment and governmental institutions. And its conclusion says, basically, Amherst is a typical Western Massachusetts town whose overwhelming white majority possesses substantial racist attitudes toward blacks, whose very environment and educational system permits the perpetuation of the economic and social disadvantages encountered by individuals of low income backgrounds, both white and black, whose college students encounter the universal prejudice in attempting to find housing or rentals, and whose secondary school population reflects the general polarization between the college community and the non-college community. I was able to search down over at the archives that you mass the full report. And I'm picking that up today at 4 o'clock. I think that it will be really interesting for us to take a look at that. This commission made recommendations based on these four areas. And it seems to me that they're just as relevant then as they are now. So I just wanted to share that and see if anyone had any thoughts or questions or comments about that. Yes, Dr. Schwarz. I think I'm accurate on this. But one of the members of this commission is none other than William Sandy Darity, Jr. Oh, wow. Recently, a few months ago, at the memorial ceremony for Professor Jules Chemetsky, William Darity Jr. was zoomed in to give remarks. And one of the things that came up in the discussion is that he was on that 1969 commission. I think Jules was as well. And Jules might have recommended or something. They wanted to have a youth, a young person participant. But when you get the document and you look at the members of the Citizen Review Commission, take a look if it doesn't say Sandy or William Darity Jr. Absolutely. And as soon as I have it, I don't know how they're going to let me have it. It may be pictures. It may be photo copies. I will send it to the assembly to look at. Thank you for that, Dr. Schwarz. And now that you say it, I remember you telling me about that a few months ago. So any other comments or questions on that right now? All right, great. So let's, Dr. Rhodes, do you want me to read out the report that came from Ellen this morning? Yes. OK. So let me just grab that. So we have a report from the Denahue Institute. And let's see. Tiffany emails. Strange. Here we go. All right. So as of today, early this morning, we have 363 responses to the survey. 41 of those respondents said they identify as black. And then in the other demographics for race, we have three that identified as American Indian or Alaskan native, five Asian, 37 black or African-American, 206 white, zero native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, 36 prefer not to say, and 23 identified some other race. So and the 41 who identify as black is representing about 11% of the total respondents. So I wanted to pause and see what folks' reactions are to those numbers. We're about two weeks in. And my sense is we will keep this open until Friday, May 5. So we have about two more weeks. Any comments or concerns or questions? Yes, Dr. Rose. It's kind of disappointing in relationship to the number of black people, African-Americans who have responded. Given the numbers that we know are here in Amherst. Is there, I know that there was something being discussed, Michelle, in relationship through a mail out to African-Americans via the census tract information. And that is something that I would really wholeheartedly suggest we do, especially since we have that. I would like to be able to look at these numbers with a more robust representation of black and African-Americans. Somewhere hitting around 20% rather than where we are right now. Yeah, I really appreciate that. And I agree. I would also like to see that number go up. I think when I talked to Carrie, she thought the number being that what our population of black residents is was a good number. But at the end of the day, we want to make sure that we hear from as many folks who identify as black as possible. So what we did is I requested a full resident list from our town clerk. And the Donahue Institute overlaid that onto the black census and then gave us essentially a list of all of the blocks where there are more than 10 people who have listed African-American on the census in that block. And so what we can do, and we have actually everything. So what we can do is a direct mailing. I did have a postcard created specifically for this. And so I'm wondering if others in the group would be willing to review the list and identify folks that they know may identify as black. Because then we can even be more targeted. The way that we have it right now is we would have to send it to everybody in that particular block. So if we have a way of going through and highlighting, if you know folks, then we can really target.  And then if you could just go through it and highlight who you know and send it just back to me and Pamela and Jennifer, and then we'll do a direct mailing out to those people by that. If we can get, if everybody can take a look at it in the next day or so, we can get that out by the end of the week. What do you think about that, Dr. Ritz? That's very helpful. OK. And we are also working with Hala and Ms. Bridges to get it into the newsletters at Goodwin and Hope Churches. So that's another new development. We have sent it to all of the groups that we have listed in Yes, Hala, please. Oh, you can finish your sentence, Madeline. Really? If you have an update on the churches, that would be great. Well, not an update, even though it is going in. It is in our newsletter that our clerk sends out for Goodwin. I was also wondering about, I can't remember if we had to be 18 because you're a voting citizen, but maybe through Poku, people call United at the high school, we could, you know, if we get the youth engaged in engaging their parents or caregivers, maybe. How do we get the word out in different ways that's not just email or a survey, I'm sorry. I'm wondering how we activate our youth a little. Sorry. No, no, I'm sorry. I just got really excited. That's a great idea. That's a really great idea. It did go out to the whole, in the newsletter, to all of the Amherst Regional School families. But I think directing it at Poku would be a really great idea. Does anyone have a contact? My experience has been you need to go through their faculty or administrative person. And that is, I think in general, yeah, she's very, you know, not only with Poku, but if just her own personal list, she could send it out with an endorsement. It would go a long way. Okay, great. Yeah, that's Sid actually, Sid Ferrara had recommended the same and he had made a connection between us. So I'll follow up on that and there we go. We'll try to make that happen. Awesome. Okay. Any other thoughts about, yes, Pamela? So it's just gonna say that I think Jen probably also has some connections at the high school and there are two high school students on the Human Rights Commission that we could share it with them as well. That's a great idea. I didn't know that there were two high school students on that commission. That's awesome. Okay. Great. Well, any other ideas or thoughts on that? I think that activating, as Hala said, the youth is actually so powerful and could really go a long way in engaging parents and caregivers as well. And if folks have other ideas, just send them our way. Does that date, Dr. Rhodes, does that date seem like a good date for us to keep the survey open through till May 5th, given our timeline? Yes. Not to do that would not be good for us. Yes, as long as we can keep it open, the longer we can keep it open, the better. Okay. Yeah, I agree. Okay. I'd agree as well with extending beyond May 5th. We can still go ahead and begin to build our report and analysis. And then I know that once we do say, pull this number with respect to UMD, they will, at that point, they'll be working on generating their analysis based upon the date we say close out. But, you know, there's still no, there's no reason necessarily to limit people from past that day, just want the analysis we'll look at from UMD, if any other comments come in. Excellent. Okay. So what all, I think that's really, yeah, that's a great thought to let Carrie and Ellen know that they can begin, you know, if they need to begin for their purposes to analyze, you know, to begin on May 5th to start to analyze to be in line with our timeline, then I think that's fine. And we can just continue to keep it open for additional responses. The other thing that everyone should know is we have a paper copy now. So it's available, Jennifer and Pamela have it. I know they received a request for a paper copy and we're gonna have that distributed in a couple of different areas. But if you know somebody who would like a paper copy, I have it in a PDF and we can print the packet for you and make it available so you can get it to whoever that person might be. Okay. So any other comments or questions right now on the survey? I have heard feedback from some folks who have taken it. They have felt that it was very well done and well articulated, clear and for what surveys can sometimes be, we've gotten really good feedback. So that's good. So I'm gonna open up a period of public comment, our first period of two public comment periods. And I will read our statement during the public comment period. The chair will recognize members of the public when called on, please identify yourself by stating your full name, pronouns and residential address. Residents are welcome to express their views for up to three minutes at the discretion of the chair. No speaker can see their time to another speaker. The AHA will not engage in a dialogue or comment on a matter raised during public comment, but we will be listening very carefully. And there will be a second public comment period before we finish. So this is the first, if you would like to make a public comment, please use the raise hand function and we will bring you into the room. Okay, I'm not seeing any. So I'm gonna close that public comment period. And let's go to the Amherst culture and cultural council grant amendment. So you may recall, we put in a long time ago at the very beginning of our work together, we put in an application to the Amherst cultural council. We asked for $5,000. The purpose of that money was going to be to create a documentary or to document the AHRA's work. And we received $500. The feedback we received was that we were very early on in our work. And so they encouraged us to come back at a later time when we were further along with our work. So Pamela and I were sort of, Pamela has been working with the chairs of the Amherst cultural council to help liaison with us in terms of what we need to do to amend our application so that we can use the $500 within the scope of what is allowable. So one of the ideas that we have, and this sort of ties into our final report topic. So I'm gonna kind of tie these together. One of the options is for us to use that money to transcribe our meetings. And that will give us a really good way to document all of our meetings and could be the beginnings. They will certainly be used for our final report but also could be the beginnings of the work that we'll need to do if we want to pursue a documentary at some point. So there is an excellent service, there are many, but I did try to transcribe one of our meetings and it was very, very clear. It was a really great formatted very, very well, not like something you'd pull off a YouTube. So I'm curious what folks think about that as a possibility for use of this $500. And if there are other ideas, we just have to submit this. Pamela, their meeting is May 2nd, did you say? I think it's a second, I think it's a second Tuesday evening in May. So it may be the 9th. The 9th, okay. I think it's on that. So any thoughts on that or should we, is everyone comfortable if we just move forward and amend the application for that purpose? Okay. Yes, I agree. Okay. Yeah. So I just wanna add that, so I did reach out to the two co-chairs to see if I could get a sense of whether that use would be acceptable to them. And I got, I'll just say maybe, perhaps like lukewarm feedback about whether it's something that they would be interested in supporting, so I don't know one way or the other whether they would approve it. The other thought was several months ago, I was approached by a couple who have experienced doing storytelling and gathering narratives, which might be another way to have that couple interview you all or interview the assembly about your experience as preparing another way to prepare for a documentary. So I just throw that other idea out there. I think it would be a good use to have the transcript but I don't know whether they will fully support that idea. Thank you, Pamela. Oh, go ahead, Dr. Schwarz. No, I was just gonna say, I guess we don't know until we follow up and submit along the lines of what we think we'd like to do and then they can let us know if it's consistent with what they're funding. Yeah, it's a really easy amendment process. It's very simple. And I might even be able to just put in both options to see, I did reach out to the folks that Pamela mentioned and I do hope to get together with them soon just to get an idea about their work and how they might be able to help us. Initially, they wrote back very enthusiastically and they sound like really creative folks and very committed to this kind of work. Dr. Rhodes, were you gonna add something? Yeah, just I think putting in another option would do us well, especially the storytelling. Okay, perfect. So just to be, just so I had a preliminary discussion with the town manager about transcribing our 60 plus meetings and I do think he would like for us to seek out some other possible sources of funding to do that if we really feel strongly about it. The other thing is we can determine which meetings would be important. Like for example, and I'm gonna move right into the sort of final report piece of our agenda today. So I have been in communication with Matia Kramer who was integral in the two reports that the Reparations for Amherst Group put together. She is an excellent writer. Her heart is fully in this work and she has a background in this particular kind of report writing and research. So I have invited her to our next meeting to speak with us about working with us on our final report. And one of the things that we've done so far is she has a service that she uses so she transcribed or is in the process of transcribing our retreat, for example. Because that's one where having that documented and transcribed it could be really helpful for us. So more to come on all of that and we'll see what shakes out with the Amherst Cultural Council but I will make sure that we get that in and I'll include both options. Let's see. So the other piece that I wanted to ask the committee about is we have a couple of months left. We're gonna be spending a lot of our time when we get the survey results and with a report that's due. But there are some listening sessions that I think we can still host with groups. One of them being with the Amherst Survival Center. I've reached out to the director this morning. Levin and I have talked previously about hosting a listening session during one of their community lunches. And I don't know if folks know but Jennifer Moyston is I think if not already but about to become the board president of the Amherst Survival Center. And I should say also that Jennifer was nominated by Rhett Mindy-Dum for a Black Excellence on the Hill Award. And I was honored to be there with her when she received the award in Boston and it was just a really, really special. I'd love to share more about it with the group when we're together in person but it was really quite amazing and she is so deserving. So it was great to see her recognized. So the other two listening sessions that I was hoping to add to that, one at Amherst College, which is already in the works. We just have to identify a date. And then one at UMass. And yes, Dr. Shabazz, I see your hand and I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on UMass, a listening session there. Well, I don't mean to interrupt. You can finish right now. No, no, no, please. No, I'm talking too much. Please talk. Yeah, well, I don't know. So I do know some of the students that are active at UMass and the other thing kind of competing for some of their attention right now is a tribute program, Memorial Program for the late Professor John Bracey who was kind of a founder of our department or at least going back to 1972. And that's taking place on Saturday, May 13th. So some of their energies right now are invested in that event, which is really student-driven and student-oriented. So the department, I wish to say, the Du Bois department is looking at a formal Memorial event in the fall or next academic year. We felt like we needed more time to do things right than to just do things immediately. So we are supporting this student-led effort, this student-driven effort, but the department will have a separate activity, an additional activity later in the next academic year. So at any rate, I don't know fully yet how much what they're bandwidth is going to be beyond the event on the 13th. There had been some talk about something on May 19th, but we'll see more on that. I had a little bit different item than the listening sessions piece though. So I'll wait if there's more for you to finish out on that. No, not really, Dr. Shabazz. I think I just wanted to see if there were thoughts on those three between now and the next month and a half, particular with Amherst College and UMass being that they're gonna head toward graduation real soon, so or till the end of the year. So I would like to try to get those in place, but that was about it for the listening session. So please go ahead. What was the third besides UMass and Amherst College? That was the Amherst Survival Center. Okay, survives. All right, so very good. So what I wanted to mention here and following up in future meetings for sure, but I internally would really recommend that we might all begin to look at other reports that have appeared, even if just a cursor glance at the California task force report, looking at Providence, looking at other municipalities that have come out with reports. And certainly I'm prepared to kind of send a query to Robin Rue with first repair for recommendations on her part for the kinds of things that are coming up in various municipal plans and municipal reports. Also Asheville, North Carolina comes to mind, which also was a county wide report. So that's one, at least that's one thing I've been looking at just sort of getting a sense of the form and function of some of these reports. And then secondly, I am putting together a few of my thoughts on sort of guiding some guiding ideas about the nature of our report. And some of them are things that I've been mentioning here in this group for the last, I don't know, two years or more. And that is, I'll mention a couple of those guiding points. But one, I think that our plan and what we're coming forward with should really emphasize, link itself to and anticipate the development of reparations at the federal level, okay? And I see in some of the past reports different sort of orientations around this. So, for example, California calculated what is owed to each eligible individual and put that number out regardless of their own ability to even pay that number. But that was their approach. It was to try to assess the harm by individual, eligible California person. And that is certainly one way of doing it. I think in our case though, rather than that kind of theoretical, if you will, or rhetorical, or that sort of approach that then just comes out with like five million for each eligible person or one million for each eligible Amherst resident. But then that having no connection to the town of Amherst actually being able to do it is not then, in my view, the way to approach a program that a recommendation that is anticipatory of federal reparations where such a number could be grappled with. But rather to aim toward recommendations toward things we think our council can immediately act upon in its own power. But also the anticipatory part is also things that the council might lend its recommendation and endorsement to, but that are things that would be carried on at the federal or at the state level. So for example, Congressman McGovern, hearing from us, listening to us, coming to our listening sessions, he was emboldened to write a letter to President Joe Biden, calling upon him to take executive action on creating a federal commission to study and make and recommend proposals for reparations at the federal level. Now, I think while that was a nice outgrowth of our relationship with him and of our listening session involvement with him, how much more powerful would it be for the elected government of the town of Amherst to formally endorse and formally call upon our congressional leaders, not only McGovern but also Warren and Markey to make similar efforts for the support of the commission to study and recommend proposals as an executive action of President Biden. So to me, that's a concrete recommendation we can make to our council that I think should be right up in the preamble or right up in the early section of our report that the council then can take as an action item amongst the others that allow, but hopefully take it as one action item that it could immediately vote and I hope unanimously would vote to then follow on with recommendation based upon our work and our recommendation to follow on with formal letters to Senator Warren, Senator Markey and to Congressman McGovern, particularly thanking him for what he's already done but then further encouraging continued efforts to make this happen at the executive level. So things like that are where I'm starting to put my thoughts down that I will look to share and I certainly welcome the support, the editorial support and research and writing support of Matteo Kramer and whatever other support that can even be brought in because I envision a document with multiple sections, some that we can then begin to again enlist expertise and enlist support. If you recall our charge, part of our report ought to be speaking about how the kinds of equity initiatives or reparative justice initiatives, whatever we resolve on our final language but how some of these initiatives connect to existing institutions in our town such as in the business area, the bid and the chamber such as in things like Amherst Survival Center, Land Trust, housing, affordable housing efforts that are going on. We're supposed to be registering our thoughts in all of these areas. And I noted today, a counselor Anna Devon-Gottier was on WHMP and was speaking about one particular item she passionate about, affordable home ownership. And what the idea there is that when these opportunities are created in Amherst to just dole them out by a lottery system, well, how much more powerful it might be to have the council think about part of those opportunities or resources being a part of a reparative justice action rather than just by pulling a ping pong ball. So I'll stop with that, but just on the topic of final report, these are some of the things that I'm thinking about in beginning to do. Excellent, thank you very much, Dr. Shabazz. And I know that that Mattia will be following up to listen to our conversations and will be with us next week for our meeting. So we'll be able to share more. Does anyone else, would anyone else like to share any thoughts about the final report or anything really? We've basically covered everything on our agenda for today. There are a couple other items that I added to the agenda just to, we had, two weeks ago when we met spoke about the elementary school building project. I didn't get the sense from the committee then that there was anything this committee felt it should or wanted to do. If that has changed, please do let me know the vote. There's already actually voting happening by mail. Early voting is happening later this week. And welcome, Alexis. Can you hear us? Yes, I can. Can you hear me? Yes, very well. So that is on the agenda. If folks would like to revisit that, we can do that now. And then we also have on here the Darity Mullen League of Women Voters racial justice collaboration. And I don't have much of an update on that because the group that we're working with to plan that hasn't been able to get together. So hopefully we'll be able to get together soon. And I don't know if there are other updates like a BAM update or an HR 40 update that anyone would like to provide at this time. But if not, we can call our second period of public comment. Yes, Hala. I don't have a BAM update per se except to say we will be having our next meeting this Saturday, 1.30 to three, I believe. And yes, the information has been sent out. But if anybody is listening and didn't get it, so please contact us and we will make sure you get it. Thank you. Thank you so much, Hala. And if you need anything from me in terms of if you will be able to talk about the survey during that meeting, if you need anything from me, let me know. All right, so I am going to open up our second period of public comment. Again, please use the raise hand function and I will bring you into the room and you will have up to three minutes to express your views and you can express views about what we've spoken about today or anything that's within our purview here. And we will not be able to engage generally, although sometimes we'll be able to but we will be listening very closely. So I'm looking for hands. I'll just keep it open for another minute or so here. So I'm not seeing any hands. So I'm going to close our second public comment period and just check in with assembly members now to see if there are any final comments or announcements or discussion before. This was like our most efficient meeting yet. But there's still some time if folks would like to. Okay, so again, we'll be meeting next week. Same time, May 1st, two o'clock and Metia will be joining us for that meeting. I'd really like to spend a good portion of time with Metia to talk about our final report. We'll of course have another survey update. Alexis, you weren't here just so you know, we have as of this morning, 363 responses to the survey, 43 of the respondents identified as black. We spoke earlier about finding ways. We're gonna do a direct mailing using the black census and a resident list so that we can target. I'm gonna be sending out the resident list. So if you along with others are gonna, if you could go through and just highlight any folks you know, that would be great. And we have some other ways we talked about getting it out too as well. All right, any other comments, questions before I adjourn? And Pamela, you got to stay for the whole meeting. All right, well, thank you everyone. I'm gonna adjourn at 2 51 PM and we'll see you next week. Thanks a lot.


what's up everybody i'm the hook and i'm the blade and together we're you know welcome to the what blade if cast a show about all things assassins creed i'm your host lawson joined as always by your host tim timothy hey i'm not going to spend so long this time but i have another mobile game related victory to to share interesting have you ever played jetpack joyride now i don't i don't know what that is i'm of the opinion that jetpack joyride is the best mobile game ever created yes better even than tap tap revenge and it is really fun um but a couple years ago i had this glitch happen while i was playing and while my high score at the time was like around 10 000 meters on the run i had a glitch that made me unkillable for a while and i made it to 30 37 000 meters and i'd set a high score and i was excited because it was a really ridiculous high score but also immediately disappointed by the idea that i now had a high score i could never beat that i achieved not by my own skill but but through underhanded means and so every time i played the game for the last couple years it kind of bummed me out that i had this fraudulent high score right um but this past week i was able to pass it on my own really without the underhanded you know unkillable thing with no glitches whatsoever i made it to 39 000 meters that's and i feel pretty good about that that's pretty cool and handsome thank you tim thank you i knew you would appreciate that you're the only person i've told i'm really proud of you i i don't think anyone could have beaten your score and uh accept you thank you tim we got a couple notes at the top of the show for you today guys um some of you may or may not have noticed this we didn't really put it on all of our usual outlets where we promote the podcast but we just launched something of a spin-off show on our channel called the hookblade after hours and our first episode is about season two of the boys a tv show we both like and if you would like to know what we think about the boys uh you should give it a listen we have decided we like talking about things that aren't assassin's creeds sometimes so every once in a while you may see an after hours episode in your uh subscription box because i'm assuming as you're listening to this that you're subscribed because why wouldn't you be subscribed right yeah i just wanted to tell you as a friend or it's wanted to let you know or if you don't watch the boys and but you also don't care about spoilers and you just want to hear us talk about the boys also go listen to it for that reason i'll let you in on a little secret we were drinking some alcohol at the time yeah but honestly we we were still pretty much the same so i'm not sure that's a big selling point but the other thing that i suppose is worth mentioning right now and and i just want to like say this so that it's clear depending on where things are when this episode releases we are recording this at 2 30 p.m is central time on a wednesday and we have no idea at the moment who will be the next president of the united states so we can't really say anything about that because we don't know but probably i'm guessing we'll have a pretty good idea by the time this actually is uploaded so i'll just edit in a computer voice saying something about the election if it changes before i schedule it we still don't know shit god bless america and that's what we'll have to settle for i hope that whomever you are and whomever you support and whatever you believe that regardless of how the election has turned out if it has turned out at all i still don't know if it will by the time you're listening to this hopefully we can give you some brief respite of entertainment and comfort for roughly an hour or so while we talk about assassins creed as we do here every week and it's very fitting that we are talking today about essentially alternate universes uh different possibilities about things that you know assassins creed has had the opportunity to do in the past has maybe chosen not to do um things that we know are are canceled projects or changed projects and essentially just imagining how assassins creed could possibly look very different today were it not for certain choices that the developers made along the way i think that could be a pretty fun thing to talk about what about you tim yeah i mean there's there's plenty of directions they could have went there's plenty of things that we know about that they were at least considering that they didn't go with um and there's also just plenty of of things that you and i like to speculate about like what if this happened so oh yeah definitely been looking forward to getting into this topic and we're gonna be covering things from all the way from like code names for games that changed before release we've got outright canceled projects i've assembled a good majority of these things into a fairly linear list and we could go through it from the beginning but i wanted to ask you tim and i'll answer this question too what do you think out of all the things you know have changed or or have been decided against in the history of the assassins creed franchise what do you think is like the point where if another choice had been made the franchise would look the most different hmm uh like what's the what's the butterfly fleck what's the butterfly fuck what's the butterfly effect changed that would have made the biggest difference hmm well that i know about okay can it be kind of like conjecture can i can i have some leads okay well i'm thinking for me uh you and i talk about a lot of the times where if like unity came out and it was super duper successful and everyone loved it yeah at the very least if it launched well um that would have meant very different things for series i also think that because of unity's reception and whatnot that i think they made some tweaks and some changes to syndicate and i think if syndicate would have been more reflective of maybe the jack the ripper dlc like it seemed like it was going to be from those screenshots that we would have seen a much different game and i think that game for a lot of reasons was kind of just like the crowd control fire extinguisher on unity so they could take a break and come back with origins yeah yeah that was literally going to be my answer if you didn't say it um i think that if unity had gotten like another six months in the oven or or even a full year delay and it just had launched with a clearer vision and fewer bugs we could have seen a very different assassin's creed landscape first of all you'd have to consider that like that would make rogue essentially a main release of that year and that could have had all different kinds of consequences being as similar as it was to black flag people might have actually gotten frustrated with that if rogue had come out as the main release but beyond that if unity launches well and it's positively received yeah it's very possible that like syndicate comes out with a darker tone and we maybe even get a third iterative rogue or revelation style game after that that's probably like one of the biggest what if scenarios that i've always thought about i feel like they would have delayed rogue had unity been delayed i couldn't have seen them the one title that year i think rogue doesn't piss people off if it's parallel to unity yeah because i think rogue works as like the kind of stepping stone between previous gen and the next gen and at that time there are so many different things that could have happened so let's kind of let's kind of i'm going to just go through i have a list of things yeah go for it and we can kind of play out like how different do things look if this is what happened and you have to start at the very beginning right with assassin's creed and what's the alternate possibility that everyone knows about with that game is that it almost wasn't assassin's creed it's that it was originally developed under the idea of being a direct spin off from prince of persia yeah or not even really spin off but kind of the main title it was going to be called prince of persia assassin yeah it was literally just going to be called prince of persia assassins have you seen the demo for that for that or like the concept demo like i don't know if it was a playable demo but it was like a totally it's it's really awesome to see that kind of stuff in and when you look at the early assassin's creed concept art and even just like not only prince the prince of persia iteration of the game but even the very early concepts for the first assassin's creed in general when it when it was going to become a franchise like things about the kingdom being able to be like you being able to hunt animals in the kingdom and like regenerate health and stuff so yeah it is really interesting if prince of persia assassin's to come out we would probably i i can't help but think we'd still probably be getting prince of persia games too right i don't know i think that it's a question of like how powerful was the prince of persia brand that you know if you took the game assassin's creed and you just labeled it a prince of persia game which is not really what was ever going to happen by the time it started to look like assassin's creed they started to call it assassin's creed you know they figured out i think a big a big part of it was the whole idea of the reliving genetic memory i feel like i've heard patrice desolée uh the the creator and producer on that game i've heard him say that he had that idea and liked it so much how that opened up the world and into all of these different time periods how that allowed for all of those game design explanations for things like the you know synchronization once he had that idea he was like i really want to do that right and it really wouldn't make sense yeah well that's the thing right is prince of persia assassins would have theoretically only been taken that would only have taken place within the historical context of it and there probably wouldn't have even been that much of an emphasis on like hey look at the time period it would probably a lot more like fantastical and stuff there probably wouldn't be historical figures and whatnot so you don't get to say oh prince of persia assassins here's the sequel in renaissance italy right but also you don't have the like hey here's nine historical figures that died that place in that year like you don't get to do that with prince of persia i don't think um i either played prince of persia so i don't want to be talking out of school but prince of persia seems a lot more fantastical than than historical realism and whatnot um that assassin's creed sports you have like sand that can manipulate time and stuff yeah i i i know so little about what sands of time does like i all i know is that when you die it reverts like time whatever do you know what i mean but i just always thought that the prince just goes pocket sand and he throws the sands of time into the enemy's eyes and he's like you just have been hit by the sands of time and they're like oh my eyes they have the sands of time in them the sands of eyes and it's just really interesting to me that like the relive in genetic memory stuff birthed the whole modern day science fiction concept it allowed you to jump through time periods like that so just that one concept alone and that's where i agree with patrice and i would say that you do too is like the animus relive in genetic memories and all of that like that is assassin's creed or else it's just an historical like theme park game whatever you like that is just ghost of sushi that is assassin's creed and so it's totally tracks that that's what patrice came up with and that's what differentiated it and that's what made it made it its own franchise the next yeah i think we can agree that like that would be a pretty drastic change i don't think there'd be any games like what we've gotten after that game that would have happened in the world where prince of persia not even a little no the next like big point of diversion brotherhood you know it seems like by most accounts brotherhood started life as just part of assassin's creed too it was not going to be its own game and then they had cut content from ac2 they had enough cut content in terms of the story in the gameplay they said let's just whip out a whole another full price title with all this stuff and that's why brotherhood feels very similar to ac2 and i mean there are even videos of kori may talking about assassin's creed too talking about how it ends in 1507 or whatever i don't remember the exact date so i might be wrong about that i want to say you said 1503 but i don't think i don't think ac2 even cracks 1500 right no i don't think so no it was definitely though consistent with where brotherhood ended so or yeah or started but yeah but you can go look and see that like they as as soon as when they were doing marketing material for the ac2 they they they like the ending where it ends in ac2 was is totally not where they intended it to and originally you know if you imagine a world where they were able to get those things done ac2 maybe becomes a much more interesting game could be too bloated maybe but really really big game with lots and lots of stuff uncharacteristically for the time for sure and then you may or may not get revelations at all i feel like revelations getting to be a main title had to be a decision that only got made if brotherhood sold well hundred percent considering the time that they had to make it so also as far as i'm aware that was appointed contention for patrice because he didn't want to do etzio again you know he yeah he didn't want to do more etzio he didn't want to be brotherhood he worked on brotherhood for like a blip and then they replaced him with someone else um i don't know to what degree brotherhood was actually finished i don't know to what degree patrice actually influenced things on that game i'm sure there are some people that could tell us but all but what i do know is he started on brotherhood in the whole drama started at some point throughout brotherhood so that was a point so like if you think also we could also think about what if patrice got what he wanted we would have theoretically gotten yeah minus two etzio games yeah and like patrice originally envisioned basically a trilogy i think the only source we have on this is like null and north and who knows what he was really privy to but i know he talked about the idea that essentially in patrice his mind you're gonna get a desmond game and etzio game or sorry uh an altair game and etzio game and then a desmond game no it's gonna be that well i think i think what no if i recall correctly no one was saying how you have altair desmond or sorry hold on no i'm doing it altair we've both done altair etzio and then like i think if there was a third assassin probably what he wanted to be connor originally the only thing i can tell you confidently is that no one nor specified a desmond game yes that i remember for sure because he said and then there was going to be a game that was all about desmond in the modern day and then the whole crowd was like oh my god can you believe he just said that that's what i wanted to see that's what i want is a desmond game oh my god well that's the thing is is he was specifying he like he was being very specific about how the original intention wasn't was so that desmond could hone all these skills these assassins and become the ultimate assassin in the modern day to kill all the templars i'm gonna i'm gonna literally look at the clip so no one has to correct us on what exactly the fuck no one north was saying okay all right all right i've got it it's it's way more than we were thinking so to be clear on the whole no one north thing he said the original plan as he heard it was there to be about six games and each game desmond would get more and more powerful by the end he'd be the ultimate assassin he's he's poorly communicating time travel thing because technically the animus is time traveling yeah there's a lot of weird fucking shit going on though in the modern day we're like there's been some stuff in the origins modern day that's kind of trying to imply that they're all that that even the modern day is in a simulation in origins you said yeah yeah and how did they how did they put that in between all of like the dude because it's not in the modern day it's stuff that you found in the past there are essentially these like six temples in the game and when you go into them uh you hear a message from a first sieve narrator voiceover thing and they're like incomprehensible henceable dude like i have no idea what they're saying but when i tried to read them recently in preparation for like you know playing vauhalla i was looking back at some of that stuff and there's definitely an implication in one of them that like the modern day like that the world itself is a simulation i wonder if that anyway like all i'm trying to say here is that sassin screed gets weird and like time travel i'm not sure it's this out of character for what they would have been doing as we might think yeah i i get what you're saying i just i guess i'm being more charitable that he's just poorly communicating it yeah i mean i i think that maybe less than being able to time travel it might be more the case that a final game would incorporate multiple settings and let you play in many of them at the same time or what have you but yeah i just i if patrice had his way i couldn't see him doing that we don't know we don't know it's it's a what if it's a what if it's a what if they did that we we it's common knowledge that revelations began life as a 3ds spinoff title called lost legacy we don't really need to talk about that too much but what if it was on 3ds i'm just glad that it isn't it wasn't you know me too it's also it's also interesting to me because the bigger what if for that that i i'm not sure if we've i'm sure we've mentioned it but i think the bigger what if of that is less about the game and more about it makes sense for darby to be writing on like a handheld spinoff game because of his past handheld spinoff games with ac but if revelations didn't happen as a full game would darby have written black flag would he have written dude i don't i didn't even think about that would he have written vahala now you know so who knows we don't know necessarily if darby i mean it's intuitive to imagine after writing chronicles and bloodlines and what have you that they said all right here's a new assassin screen handheld game let's get our go-to guy for that darby and then someone at eb stuff goes oh we're gonna upgrade that to a full on title hey darby you've done some writing for it already you want to just do a full game and then he's like hell yeah and then they do it and then then they're like wow darby you're really good at writing these full games let's get you to do a pirate one with ashraf ismail like that's very intuitive but it is kind of an assumption on our part it's very possible that he they'd already decided oh well you're going to write the next assassin's creed game and that they ended up you know like it's possible i think that's probably the most likely explanation yeah i think that's true i think if if it was a 3ds game maybe he still gets promoted because he'd done some good work but it's a less clear path to writing a game like black flag i feel like the timeline matches too that like they're impressed with what he did on revelations and they're like hey how about you fucking write this you know that this like iterative pirate game ever doing and it's interesting because like there's so much we don't know about ubisoft's inner workings and what the relationships are between the different studios because as we know revelations in black flag are different studios right revelation studio went on to unity also consider this lesson fucking the revelation squad both got kind of promotions out of that though because they they were like hey emancio how about you come work on unity you know after he after he finished up revelation so do i think yes that revelations it make is a kind of a clear path to unity but for them to take a chance on their next big next gen experience with the guide to revelations that that in and of itself is kind of a big thing to me totally totally um moving on to ac3 i wasn't able to find there's not really a whole lot of clear like alternate possibilities for ac3 other than like what if the development on that game wasn't a total clusterfuck and everything but we know it has some cooler kind of darker concept art we also have that whole target video i forgot about that there's a target gameplay video that shows a prototype version of car which isn't incredible it's an incredible video like the gameplay that they were targeting it looked really really cool and definitely has a darker atmosphere than the final game and definitely just is more technically impressive and i wonder if part of the problems they had making that game was that they set their sights too high because you can watch that target gameplay video right now and it's still impressive it still looks great yeah for sure whereas you know presumably if you watched that target video that we got those leaked screenshots from when syndicate was called assassin's creed victory it still looks like syndicate i mean aesthetically and gameplay wise the systems are different but it doesn't look radically different probably whereas the target video in ac3 looks like miles miles better than probably most assassin's creed games that exist not only does it provide like a different whole like gameplay vibe but i understand they're not trying to communicate much story and whatnot to that but like it really presents the potential main character in that game in a different light because he's quiet reserved and he maskers people and it really does seem like he is kind of like a force to be reckoned with in this area of the world i don't think he speaks once no you get spoken to but i don't think connor or whoever they were calling him at the time speaks at all but it is kind of interesting that the presence in that video to me isn't what like at all the presence of connor in ac3 yeah it's a great little target gameplay video and it's like yeah every time i watch it it makes me want to play assassin's creed 3 and then i remember that assassin's creed 3 isn't like that and is actually very bad yeah it's it definitely speaks to how like a lot of these games come out with demos and in marketing material that even in black flags case don't look like the game you know yeah and and completely realized and finished and working titles they release marketing material that doesn't stack up and the target video thing's different because it's not marketing it's purely internal uh reference as you know right i wish we could see that kind of stuff for all of the games except i know the reason we probably don't which is that they would probably make all of the games look like trash because these target gameplay videos are really interesting other than that moving on to ac4 one of my favorite things to talk about with assassin's creed is the codenames of the games because i feel like they're a window into what the developers actually want to represent and what they actually want the game to be called and some cases those codenames are better than the titles sometimes in some cases they're not ac4 was originally supposed to be titled assassin's creed golden age interesting and i think that's an instance where you can both see how like they're saying oh it's the golden age of piracy and we're really capturing that feel but also that the marketing department is going yeah but that doesn't tell anyone that it's pirates so we have to make it something more piratey and thus black flag which do you prefer do you prefer golden age or black flag i prefer black flag just because i like the ring of it but i do hate that it is called assassin's creed for black flag and not just assassin's creed black flag that's how most people that's how most people just refer to it anyway well a lot of people call ac4 you know right yeah people either shorthand it's a c4 or they just say black flag um i've never heard anyone combine them it did uh does remind me right now how me and some friends that might have been you we pointed out that like this is the year we're finally getting acv because there have now been two times we've speculated we are getting acv because we thought it was going to be assassin's creed five when unity was getting made and that would have been assassin's creed v technically because they did roman numerals right and then victory was the proposed title for syndicate so we've been having almost acv's this whole time and now we finally have it assassin's creed of unity yeah i i gotta say i i really don't mean to you just just you don't mean to jump ahead or anything but i i think i i much i much prefer victory over fucking 100 percent it just has a lot more to do with what the game's actually about and you can tell that with the title of syndicate they were trying to hit on the idea they were really trying to play up the gang's idea this is gangs of london baby oh it's a it's a crime syndicate yeah and i almost feel like that was an instance of them working backwards from the marketing like i think they said how do we make this game more fun or lighthearted or joyful or whatever and they said well instead of being all about how grimy and gross the you know victorian england was we make it about how there were some really cool gangs and gangs are fun yeah and it's just very strange that's exactly my problem with like the switch up because those screenshots communicate perfect like the perfect like victorian atmosphere and then and then it's like oh well what about my rooks you know like not even a year later even like the just the aesthetics syndicate is a very colorful game and it doesn't very colorful look like what you'd expect victorian fucking england to be you know what i mean it well and you know they were all like well actually it's sunny every day in england you don't know like they're like trying to like they're trying to like backpedal and be like actually it it does it rains like once a year in london you uneducated you uneducated fucks and it's like i don't know i i think it's pretty dreary sometimes over there i mean i don't know i'm an uncultured swine but it definitely seemed like in those in those teaser images for ac victory or the you know the target gameplay images like i was stoked on the idea that we were going to get a darker assassin's creed game and yes of course no no because also those leaks happened right around like right before dead kings came out dead kings gave us all a taste of what darker assassin's creed can be and boy was it enticing and it was like i remember playing dead kings and thinking man this is what the whole next game is going to be like this so dope yeah i know i was wrong they played me i still think the victory screenshots not being the actual game or have been my biggest one of my bigger disappointments with the series because when i first saw those screenshots i was fucking stoked because yeah and like it just had like the art style got completely shifted and i can't help but think that's because of unity they were like wait a second people don't seem like unity because of its dark story and it's it's like or it's dark aesthetic you know oh guillotines and beheadings oh that's too dark now we gotta go with gangs of new york and twins and henry or they go or they go black flag did really well and that was a fun swashbuckling pirate adventure can we do a fun swashbuckling pirate adventure in victorian london now that's a good point and it's a shame because victorian london was really high on the list of settings i would have loved to see so i literally remember exactly where i was when i saw the leak us in the backseat of my parents minivan we were driving home from dinner and i was looking at the fucking leak on kotaku like hyperventilating you know it's finally happening for sure i i mean and just even like the swinging thing and the like carriage fighting and stuff it all looked just so like the robes too dude the swinging is my biggest like oh i wish kind of thing was because swinging being able to attach a rope point and then swing across a train station is a much more exciting idea than a shitty zipline mechanic for sure because one one kind of enhances navigation and one lobotomizes it if i could have been literally spider-man swinging through london that whole time like you have no idea how sick that would have been and there are plenty of instances in rogue that have things that could have been implemented into syndicate like the swinging that's what i thought i mean rogue has those ropes black flag has ropes i thought they were just they'd found a way to do that there's so many opportunities that you could have closed the gap between the the buildings and the streets and saw it installed carriages and i have to look at those screenshots again but it also kind of seems like these screenshots may have been pre rope launcher because the streets and those screenshots look smaller or am i yeah i could be wrong let me look at them real quick i mean the one on the carriage the streets look much more narrow let me look at one from like above up in the streets the streets do look wide in the one where he's like at a sink point and you see all the smoke but they don't look as wide as they are actually in the game could be totally wrong um still you and i have talked at length about how many ways they could have closed that gap or made it feel more natural or made it not need the rope launcher as much but yeah victory i'm i think one better title and if they would have kept that same aesthetic uh could have been really interesting game here's a game that did not in my opinion have a better codename than its actual title sassans creed comet yeah later known as the sassans creed rogue i just don't know what the hell comet meant in that context i like i like comet more and i i recall knowing why they called it comet and i don't remember it wouldn't have made sense no i i don't i don't know if it makes sense either but i i prefer comet over rogue i mean we i think we knew that it was that it was seven years war at that point right yeah because the reports were claiming that it would take place around 1758 i swear i never knew why it was called comet i don't think at any point they were going to call the game comet yeah i'm not seeing a fucking reason why what is interesting though is it says it says here game blogs report claims that comet will take place in and around 1758 that it will star a sailor named shea who betrays the captain of his ship and that it's set on the atlantic ocean game comet game blog says will continue the nautical theme established in last year's assassin's creed for black flag interesting it's like half right yeah like betrays betrays the captain of his ship like they figured out that he betrayed someone and they filled in some other details but i also saw some articles googling just now that were like assassin's creed comet might let you play as a templar and you know right they were right i don't know it's interesting but i think and here is where i'm gonna throw out my most speculative idea but i feel like they had to have been talking about following up black flag with a wild west game i feel like that had to be on the table at some point because it just makes sense given that you would have then played as presumably connor's son or grandson i think and you know could have been in like gold rush california areas where there were actual cities to run around in and i've always felt like they could have essentially iterated on the naval mechanic with carriage based desert gameplay where like you could kind of have a faster paced version of that ship combat that has you turning to the sides of your vehicle and triggering you know gunfire shots it could have been really cool that's complete conjecture i don't think we have any sources saying that at any point they're developing a wild west game they definitely though i feel like hinted at it in that email that's like one of the first emails you open in assassin's creed for is talking about potential settings and it's right at the top is this really cool like cowboy assassin artwork and probably the reason they put that in is because they knew they weren't making that game but i would love to live in the what if alternate reality where we got that instead of rogue and then unity got delayed and then everything else that we want to see happen also happened yeah i think it's safe to say that the idea was floated around yeah but yeah i mean there's nothing that confirms that they were ever going to work on it but there is i think plenty that you could translate over from especially black flag mechanics to a wild west game like having four revolvers on you at a time yeah and i think with carriage stuff it could be interesting if they maybe could lean into instead of pirates lean more into like wild west gangs and you have like perhaps how i think carriage combat would work most most appropriately is that you have some some buddies with you on a carriage and they're kind of helping you steer or whatever like while you're attacking the next carriage like carriages the only thing is like even a stagecoach isn't that big so i don't i don't know like how well you could translate like big old ship combat to carriages i do think that that's the best way they could they could translate it over yeah i would have preferred that to something like what syndicate did with carriages right for sure for sure and and i could see where it's just cars i could see too like they bring back like like more ramming stuff like from revelations yeah and also uh you know we talked about this you could have trains yeah like yeah yeah train robberies yeah like instead of having legendary ships you have like legendary trains that you have to rob and i think that the the story hook that would have been really interesting for that game is i think that that would be a story where maybe the Templars would actually win because i feel like the wild west is really in a lot of ways a story about the establishment of law and who's going to be out there trying to establish law and order it's going to be the Templars you know what i mean and ultimately they'll be victorious and that could have factored in i'm not an expert on the history at all i've just i know that like that's the prevailing theme in westerns is the relationship between between criminality the glantism and organized law and it's super interesting to me the idea of getting to juxtapose the assassin temple or conflict onto that i feel like that it's too late i don't think that the modern way these games get made and their priorities would lend itself to a wild west setting uh you know i would hate to see what the origins odyssey gameplay version of wild west looks like right because that would be there'd just be no parkour anywhere yeah i mean rogue rogue makes me feel like they could have done like a american wild west architecture and then it find you know done it well yeah because rogue does it light years better than three does okay so two things actually my hang up with the wild west game even like i would love it i think it would put a nice cap on the like you know kenway trilogy because you see three different kenways and very distinct different time periods but from what i have like this little you know reddit searches here and there it seems like wild like the pirate history stuff is maybe dramatized but not too unrealistic or or false way in black flag like but with the wild west i feel like i've read places that it's kind of one of the more dramatized and exaggerated times in history yeah i don't know how well because ac does history very well i don't know how how well they could translate that if it really isn't the whole big like cowboys and and draws out in the middle of the road i think when you think about how dramatized it's been i'm sure there's a happy medium just like with pirates i mean yes obviously in black flag pirates did exist and they did plunder shit yes and just like in the wild west there were criminals and they did steal shit and it was called the wild west for a reason it's probably not quite like showdowns at high noon yeah no yeah i'm not suggesting that like nothing ever wild westy happened it just like it does seem to me that like it's not as exciting as people think i think it would be really interesting too just to see like a connor connor's grandson perspective like at the an american indian perspective not only in the american revolution but also in the wild west where things were equally as shitty for native americans you know so yeah could be could be really definitely could have been really really fucking cool dude i agree and my other favorite alternate history alternate possibility it is pretty heavily rumored for instance that uh there was at one point in development maybe also with ubisoft sephia a game that would have been set to come out in 2016 that would have been built on the same framework as uh unity and syndicate were and that's a really interesting possibility to explore because if you're like me and i think most fans there's a recognition even if those games were not perfect by any means and both were very very flawed in their own ways that was still a better next gen approximation of what an assassin's creed experience could be than a lot of what they've done since with origins odyssey and now valhalla and like that's not an assessment of quality mind you like that's just an assessment of like well the games have historically been about city urban settings with lots of parkour they're not right now but in those two games at least we know they were and another game of that in that vein could have been really great because it could have been an opportunity to kind of iron out the kinks of that gameplay formula in the same way that revelations ironed out the kinks and the same way that rogue ironed out the kinks that game could have and my two favorite ideas for settings the two settings i most want to see would have been the settings that would have made the most sense to follow up on syndicate with number one being russian revolution 1917 that would have made perfect sense because then you'd have a revolution trilogy you had the french revolution the industrial revolution and the russian revolution beautiful beautiful beautiful super neat right and that would have made me i would have been i would have been very i would have had i've been very excited uh i'd have been i've been downright turgid about that in the second one uh the second one i want to see like 1920s city in america chicago maybe new york city maybe i want to have like that game which also would have been a very logical follow-up from syndicate yeah i i do think i do think in terms of just like like you said the revolution trilogy that's where russian evolution may may have like won the race or like yeah like a warring 20s game but the warring 20s being about like crime syndicates and whatnot and organized crime similarly to syndicate so they both would have worked i probably would have been the easier asset flip between the two probably easier to turn syndicate london into 20s new york than it would be to turn syndicate london into mosco yeah and you also like there's plenty of things where you can just turn carriages into into cars yeah you can just have that and that would be interesting to say the least and you would have you would have like more automatic weapons and both it's probably time we've got a little bit more to say about the the origins odyssey the the mythological trilogy if you will some alternate possibilities for that because like origins for instance is fascinating in the number of ways it could have been different first of all would have been called empire absolutely a better title better title hundred percent no no doubt no disagreement origins is a shitty title it's as generic as they come and it says nothing about the game actually well do you know what the codename was for odyssey he was a chojan i'll tell you in a moment and then you'll change your mind okay um it didn't make any sense um for origins though the the big thing is originally it was gonna be written by darby so it's gonna be the darby and ashraf right after black flag and darby came up with a lot of concepts that made it into the final game i'm pretty sure he created the characters of bayek and aya but he never wanted to do the avenging a dead son story he had no nothing to do with kimu i i i i i think darby named them i don't think he came up with them i mean maybe ashraf said here the archetypes i want to work with i have a medjai the medjai has a wife and then and then darby looks at a history book and goes oh we'll call them bayek and aya you know right like i i do think it tracks that ashraf would have already have come i've come up with at least the main character anyway sorry um but he left because he wants to work on what we now know was a canceled ubisoft space project uh he which would have been so cool but i feel like i've heard him say or imply somewhere or i've heard this from other people question mark i can't i don't remember but i've just heard that like darby didn't really enjoy essentially that with origins that they had this framework for what the gameplay was going to be and darby was struggling to see how it could really work for an assassin's creed narrative and he just on twitter expressed some frustration with the whole decision that origins made of saying well here were the hidden ones in the order of ancients seemingly contradicting the lore that had already been established that you know the assassin's brotherhood could have existed long before then it created all these really weird like narrative hiccups that they've had to now retcon or explain away and say oh well there's an assassin symbol on those statues because they were like assassins but they weren't really assassins they were hidden ones yeah it's a it's all a little crazy and it doesn't make a whole lot of sense yeah it the the biggest thing is is is the is the modern genie tomb some of those assassins pre-date origins and they are referenced as assassins yeah and plenty of in plenty of other ways they reference them as assassins and templars like the whole thing was that the assassin the templars in some form or fashion existed like since the dawn of time and i just don't see that like oh ancient ebdip is is when they officially recalled the assassins and templars like no they could have predated that only the first time we got a hint of that was that there was a database letter in syndicate where they're saying like oh and before they were assassins and templars they were called something else i wonder what those groups were called it doesn't help that the hidden ones is a terrible name for for a group it's still on the nose right ah the hidden ones who are hidden like the order of the ancients actually doesn't sound that's cool but i don't understand why it's called the order of the ancients like who are the ancients the order but they're all are they ancients is everyone in an ancient hi it's me it's all our no it's all our no next generation ancients all ancients um yeah it's i yeah i guess i'm not like all i'm all i'm really upset about is that like they basically had to go through the the hoops of like oh well all these assassins that pre-date origins they're actually hidden one yeah like it's and there's no you don't earn anything by doing that like it doesn't make the story better to just to to go with that i think it's very clear that at one point it was a game it was called assassin's creed empire it was set in ancient egypt there would have been assassins in it and there would have been templars in it and then someone in marketing said you know look ancient egypt we're not sure it's actually gonna sell but what if this was an origin story and then they just tacked on a bunch of origin story bullshit at the very end or don't even get me started about the ring finger possibly it had nothing to do with maybe they just wanted to make a game that was going to be like not have any assassins or templars in it and it was going to do its own thing and then they said well you have to turn it into an origin story for it to make sense there's obviously it's not like anyone who knew at all what they were doing had anything to do with that decision if they knew as they should have known that the game immediately after it was going to be set 400 years before and i don't know who makes these calls but there's no way whoever did they were they were not they were they were bad calls they were not good calls that you made it would have been interesting if it was just assassin's creed empire assassin's templars ancient egypt done and then they could have done whatever the fuck they wanted to after that but it started the precedent of like ooh it's proto assassins and proto templars which shouldn't mean that much if if the hidden if the hidden ones don't represent anything different from the assassins and they evolve into the assassins then why is then why make the distinction if they're all that's a great point why did they make the distinction let us know in the comments if you know why they made the distinction but you don't because no one really does hey so tim do you remember a little while back i told you that there was a codename for assassins creed odyssey and that when you heard it you would like the final name better yeah i i i feel like this there might be a part of me that knows it already but yeah go for it it was gonna be i think dynasty yeah okay which really fucking hurt me deeply because imagine hearing the next ac game is titled dynasty and thinking where are they going in Asia is it going to be china is it going to be japan and then imagine at the end of that we get that game fuck jesus christ what a disappointment um and that's a super bummer and we have to hit on something that's a very important what if possibility um that i should have mentioned earlier right one thing we know changed from syndicate uh was that evie's screen time basically got cut in half and we also know that with assassins creed odyssey that originally the developers wanted a single female protagonist uh but ubisoft surge hascoat would not let that happen and with origins i was supposed to become main protagonist halfway through that's a great point i fucking forgot about you're completely right yeah bayek was gonna die halfway through the game and i was going to be the protagonist which would have been great that would have been so cool you have no white like just amazing it would have been it would have been like haytham and connor all over i love protagonist switcheroo's i love when it happens so so you so you must love force awakens then the force awakens now well i just the whole marketing campaign marketed a fin as like the as like the jedi character and then i still think it's brilliant the posters the trailers everything is like fin fin fin and then it turns out turns out to be ray and so kylo you are shocked just as kylo and fin are that ray is actually the chosen one anyway so yeah and then they sidelined fin for the next two movies because disney is racist they're let they're more racist than they are sexist which is good yeah it's not just like america anyway um yeah so like that's a big thing for origins odyssey should have just been kassandra and honestly i would have just loved i mean obviously kassandra i think is the better protagonist between the two as far as the performance goes alexio sucks straight up i'm just gonna say right now oh my god i'm alexios this isn't forced at all dude the actor for alexios is fucking beautiful oh yeah michael antinacos or whatever yeah michael alexios he's a great looking dude kassandra is beautiful in real life too melisandre mahut yeah she she she got real by wil ferrell in uh did you hear me did you what i just said i said she got fucked by owen wilson which is not the not the actor i meant wil ferrell i meant what you were saying owen the owen wilson is more vince von's counterpart than wil ferrell and wil ferrell are not really in the same sphere well wait wait oh yeah wil ferrell and owen wilson we're not in wedding crashes look she got railed by wil ferrell in a netflix movie that is a fact we all know about it we've moved past it i i mis-said her name earlier it's melisandre mahut i believe i'm sure i'm butchering the pronunciation but i said the wrong first name anyway sorry if it had just been kassandra then we wouldn't be looking at these weird gender choice uh justifications either we would yeah you almost wonder like how late in the game did valhalla's whole idea come up with which we still don't really know the true nature of uh we still have not yet had to eat our words and deeds um on that but when we do yeah it's like is there any way that that would have happened had odyssey not been forced into a uh a double gender situation anyway lots of what ifs and then one uh finally example of where the code name was much much better yeah here we go assassin's creed kingdoms it just makes perfect sense uh i thought you were going to mention the ancient roam game well there is some speculation that they would have done a roam game last year but i'm not sure i think that definitely if it existed which i wouldn't be surprised if it did it would have been way too similar to origins of odyssey it would have been really a for sure for sure burnout and then can you imagine getting valhalla the year after that and just being like expecting something dramatically different and getting the same shit well i think i think originally what we were assuming was that like valhalla wasn't even in on the table like the roam game was coming and then we would close off the truth the like technically the ancient trilogy that way now valhalla has now turned it more into the myth like the mythology trilogy because it's not ancient but it seemed like for a while that we were thinking that ancient roam is going to come and then that would cap off like the ancient trilogy and then we would get whatever else black flag comes out in 2013 so 2013 slash 14 is when origin starts development 2015 is when odyssey starts development so 2016 could have been where uh where a roam game started development and then they get maybe a year into that process and then origins comes out and those developers free up and then after that year they're like you know what this roam game isn't really going to shake out because it's just too similar to these other two so let's give the iterative title to the origins guys and then come up with something that i feel like what we're going to end up seeing is that valhalla is more of like a 0.5 iteration like odyssey is pretty much origins it's origins 1.1 right so this would be origins like 1.5 or 1.7 or whatever you know what i mean like it's it's not as iterative but it's still pretty iterative that makes sense to me it's a it's a halfway point between what origins looks like and what a fully next generation assassin's creed will look like it's the rogue yeah we definitely know that like the next assassin's creed game is gonna is going to be using a lot more of the next gen technology it's out now it won't be on like ps4 xbox one i think personally um so that will be the not iterative like it's it's going to be something completely different it might still utilize the rpg stuff i don't know i probably if i if i were a betting man i'd say yes yeah we're not going to have a fourth title in this kind of like running off of the origins well game philosophy yeah i don't think so either and i think if i think earlier on it was easier to think um you know uh our buddy noah has talked about this a lot thinking that the you can kind of sort these games more into duologies than trilogies which is fair because after revelations if rogue is counted as a spin-off you've only had duologies three and four unity and syndicate origins and odyssey that then it makes sense for the idea to be that valhalla has a second game that would be somewhere like as i think noah suggested the black plague right in england or somewhere france um and valhalla is certainly a part of but that's the thing is that valhalla is too similar to origins and odyssey probably more than we would have thought beforehand uh when those kinds of predictions got made it's not syndicate to origins different that's the exactly that's the thing like origins doesn't fit in the unity syndicate trilogy obviously and you know you have origins odyssey valhalla definitely fits with odyssey definitely exactly you know yeah so so the idea that we'll get another game like this next year that would be cross gen and i don't think that's gonna happen personally but there are a lot of what if we were really only able to scratch the surface of them here here's a fun question los and i i don't know i don't know if you think it's to be appropriate like to end on but i it's kind of a what if like we've we've talked about it uh do you think that it's possible that the next game is another soft reboot type deal like unity yeah no i think so i think definitely i think it also opens up considering the post launch shit we got for valhalla i don't think we're getting an assassin's creed game in 2021 i think a 2022 release is is more likely especially if this is going to be the big next gen title fully agree i think valhalla post launch content will will keep everyone satisfied for a little while those who are satisfied by valhalla obviously and then i think i'm going to say right now you and i have talked about this i think if it is going to be like a soft reboot that's more classically aligned maybe like maybe a much bigger compromise i think they're gonna fucking and especially if they go eastern i think that they're just gonna call it assassin's creed and we're gonna we're gonna see what the fuck happens with that but i don't think the brand has been poisoned to the extent that it's necessary to blow up the subtitle thing i don't know i don't know i don't know i think that time will come but they're saving that for when things get really fucked although this would be a more likely time for them to do it than any other time that's that i do think we'll set we'll get a subtitle because they're very big on having the subtitles convey what the actual setting is like odyssey immediately says greek because the odyssey is fucking famous greek literature valhalla they chose over kingdoms as i was maybe going to say earlier because they thought as a marketing department that that kingdoms doesn't tell you it's vikings but valhalla does and i'm sure that that was a compromise because i think valhalla still ties into some of the themes of the game whereas they could have been like assassin's creed ragnarok and it would have made no sense i guarantee you marketing department wanted to do that pillage they wanted to do that i swear yeah totally valhalla definitely conveys vikings but also just like the the yearning for valhalla and yeah within the game so i can just picture darby in a room with some poor marketing director he's like you have to meet me halfway here please we can't call it ragnarok it won't make a goddamn sense i i i definitely see where you're coming from obviously i think just calling it assassin's creed would be like that'd be big like re like actual reboot time yeah um and and and for cat if we're more casual people assassin's creed is not dying people people are really enjoying this this version yeah this phase of assassin's creed the brand is in a much better place than it was back then and that's also why i think that 2022 is when we're gonna get the next gen game because if this was the ubisoft of 2014 if it was unity all over again they'd be saying we have to get one out this year because we have to be yearly releases but i think now they're gonna say no let's take our time let's kill all the bugs and let's put it out when it really deserves it because it'll be one of the first i think fully next gen games that's really been in development for a long time i can't think of anything else other than what Bethesda's cooking up that we know is gonna come out in the next couple of years that'll have nearly a decade of development under its belt that's why i think they they could maybe just call assassin's creed for that reason it's possible i think it's it's gonna represent a big change yeah let us know in the comments first off what you think about some of these alternate possibilities we've discussed which ones you would have loved to see like what your favorite potential idea was is that the roam game a russian revolution game a wild west game all these very easily could have existed in an alternate universe would you rather be in an alternate universe where a different presidential candidate won the election and also leave a like subscribe to us if you've made it this far you've probably already done that but we would appreciate you doing it anyway hey um you know unsubscribe and then resubscribe just so that we get the notification that'd be fine yeah make sure you fucking sound off in the comments yeah let us know in the comments i think they should i think they should talk to us in the comments or tweet at us if you're listening you're not on youtube youtube youtube if you're if you're not on youtube you should just tweet at us bro tweet at us at hook blade okay listen i've been the hook and i've and i've been the blade and i've been the what and i've been there oh that's that's yeah that's cute you're really clever tim that's cute thanks we will see you next week hey by the way guys here's what we're kind of doing you might want to know you might be curious what we're going to do about vahala it's coming out on tuesday the 10th tuesday the 10th we're recording on wednesday so that we can upload on thursday so tim you'll have a couple days in the game but yeah so i'll have i'll definitely be able to get my first impressions on everything come the 11th of november yeah we're gonna do a first impressions episode that thursday at our normal time and it'll be spoiler free we'll just be talking about the things that we think you can listen while you play then a week later hopefully we'll have gotten through the main story we can get into a little bit more of a actual review context and i'd imagine that in the future we'll be bringing some people on to talk about the game and talk about certain things surrounding the game and and all that good stuff and really just dive in to uh assassin's creed vahala here on the hook blade podcast it is what we've been waiting for this whole time when we started making this show i'm a little surprised we've made it this far to be honest thanks for listening i've been the hook i've been the blade good night good night


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