Assassin's Creed: Shadows is just around the corner, so come and see the last 17 years of the series' PC graphics at max 4K settings

It's been 17 years since Ubisoft's juggernaut series of Assassin's Creed games first appeared on the humble PC, and since then, a total of 13 'big' releases have graced our rigs (plus a whole host of off-shoots and other Assassin's Creed games). Each one has been developed using Ubisoft's in-house software rather than relying on the likes of Unreal Engine. Along with Snowdrop and Dunia, Anvil forms the cornerstone of Ubisoft's biggest games.

An awful lot has changed in the world of 3D graphics in the past two decades, and for a while, Ubisoft used Assassin's Creed as a model for just how good PC graphics could be. Of course, it's very unfair to compare a game from 2008 to anything in 2023, but I'm going to do it anyway. Or rather, just look back at what each major Assassin's Creed game looked like and describe the big features that the engine or game offered at that time.

So, without further ado, let's begin at the very start of the whole AC series. Oh, and before we get some 'er, actually...' comments, the indicated year next to each title is when it was available on PC, not when it first released. Lastly, all the in-game footage uses the maximum quality settings available, rendered at 4K, with the video encoded down to 1080p.

Assassin's Creed (2008)

To create the first Assassin's Creed game, Ubisoft Montreal developed its own engine, codenamed Scimitar, with the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 being the primary target platforms. The PC version didn't appear until five months after the console launch and could possibly lay claim to two world records: the longest ever tutorial sequence and the most unnecessarily complicated procedure for quitting the game.

It's fair to say that time has not been kind to the first AC game. The graphics aren't outstanding, even for 2008, though like so many of that era, the excessive bloom and a permanent green tinge to the looks don't help. On a modern PC, Assassin's Creed is a janky, buggy affair, but the core gameplay is very much on-point.

Assassin's Creed 2 (2010)

For the sequel, Assassin's Creed 2, Ubisoft upgraded Scimitar (renaming it as Anvil in the process), lifting the sense of realism in the graphics with better lighting and textures, a greater draw distance, and so on. Where the cities feel somewhat sparse and repetitive in the first AC game, Renaissance Italy looks considerably more 'lived in,' thanks to the more variable and detailed NPC crowds.

More importantly for PC gamers, Assassin's Creed 2 was a much more user-friendly affair when it launched, although it still didn't offer much in the way of graphical extras. Its console origins were still just as evident as before.

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood (2011)

Ubisoft tweaked Anvil further to continue Ezio's story in Brotherhood, though not to any major extent. Models, textures, and the cloth system are all a little more refined than in Assassin's Creed 2, though the cityscapes aren't any larger.

Assassin's Creed: Revelations (2011)

It's perhaps fitting that the final iteration of the original Anvil engine was used to finish Ezio's storyline in Revelations. Rather than adding new graphical features, Ubisoft Montreal focused on improving gameplay elements, and that's probably because the next major release in the AC series had already been in development for a number of years. Still, at least the Hookblade made it far quicker and a lot more fun to whizz about the map.

Assassin's Creed 3 (2012)

A new main character and a new engine—well, new as in heavily-updated. With the moniker of AnvilNext, Ubisoft's software changes introduced basic global illumination, weather systems, and seamless transitions between locations. Despite still being developed for the PS3 and Xbox 360, Assassin's Creed 3 sported significantly more world detail than any of its predecessors.

One can see this just by looking at the installation sizes on PC. The first AC game tips the scale at a little under 7 GB, with Brotherhood coming in at a little over 9 GB. Assassin's Creed 3, however, is almost 18 GB in size. But that was nothing compared to what was coming next.

Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag (2013)

Possibly the most popular of all the AC games, Black Flag was a showcase for AnvilNext's capabilities. Where seas and sailing only formed a small part of the gameplay in Assassin's Creed 3, it was a primary feature in Black Flag, and Ubisoft's developers went to town on modelling and rendering the water as realistically as possible.

Not that it was perfect when the PC version finally appeared, as ships, waves, and sometimes even the entire ocean would phase in and out of the world, like some kind of bizarre quantum effect. Of course, one avoids all that playing it these days, and you can just enjoy the excellent water effects.

That said, despite being developed with the next generation of consoles in mind (i.e. PS4, Xbox One), the lighting is still bloom-heavy, and face animations aren't a patch on the character body movements.

Assassin's Creed: Rogue (2014)

AnvilNext's last hurrah came in the form of Assassin's Creed: Rogue (2014)—rather than being a DLC expansion, like Freedom Cry (which could also be purchased as a standalone game), Rogue was a full game in its own right. However, it did little to advance the graphics or world of Assassin's Creed, but at least it gave Black Flag fans something else to dig their teeth into.

Assassin's Creed: Unity (2014)

While one can debate whether Black Flag is the 'best' Assassin's Creed game, there's unlikely to be any discussion of which one is the most controversial. It's Unity and by no small margin. What should have been a crowning glory for Ubisoft, thanks to an entirely rewritten engine (AnvilNext 2.0), Unity launched in an utter mess—riddled with bugs, glitches, and game-breaking issues. It's mostly fine now but still not perfect.

However, when it isn't misbehaving, Assassin's Creed: Unity can be stunning to behold, even by today's standards, although the short draw distance is quite distracting at times. The one thing that Unity really does right is a sense of scale, as the city of Paris is modelled at close to a 1:1 ratio.

We are talking about 18th Century Paris, of course, but even so, the vast number of NPCs in the crowds and the intricate detail of the city's iconic landmarks, such as the Notre Dame Cathedral, showed just how ambitious Ubisoft had been with upgrading Anvil.

Assassin's Creed: Syndicate (2015)

While not the final AC game for AnvilNext 2.0, Syndicate was certainly the last of the 'old-school' Assassin's Creeds until Mirage was released in 2023. At least it ran a lot better than Unity at launch, though it was still overly demanding on PCs, and while Victorian London looks very good, it doesn't quite have the same visual impact as Unity does.

Assassin's Creed: Origins (2017)

With Origins, Ubisoft did more than just take the story all the way back to its…well…origins. It changed the very nature of the game from being 'action-stealth' to 'action-roleplaying' and while that didn't go down well with every AC fan, one certainly can't deny that the sense of scale and scope shown in Origins just begs to be explored.

Set in Ptolemaic Egypt, the massively open world is like the history lesson you always wanted at school. AnvilNext 2.0 had been refined and tweaked to support the change in the game's focus, but at a bit of a cost: Assassin's Creed: Origins is perhaps the most PC hardware demanding of all the AC games, Valhalla included.

Pushing all of the graphics options to their highest value produces spectacular imagery but less-than-spectacular frame rates, even on a modern high-end rig.

Assassin's Creed: Odyssey (2018)

Ubisoft started the development of Odyssey a little after it had finished Syndicate and it's perhaps the largest AC game it's ever worked on. Not necessarily in terms of the number of developers or the installation size on PC, but just the sheer size of the game's world—in this instance, a significant portion of Greece, circa 4th Century.

Taking everything that worked well in Origins, Unity, and Black Flag, Assassin's Creed: Odyssey is as close to an Ancient Greek epic as one could possibly hope for. Not very 'assassin-like', mind. Despite its vastness, Odyssey runs better than Origins does and arguably looks better too, though there is only so much one can do to make sand look good.

Assassin's Creed: Valhalla (2020)

Odyssey clearly wasn't big enough for Ubisoft, and thanks to the continued development of its proprietary engine (now simply called Ubisoft Anvil), it was time for England and parts of Norway to be given the AC treatment. Arguably the best-looking game in the whole series, Assassin's Creed: Valhalla is a tour de force in traditional rendering techniques.

By now, the series was as un-assassin as one could imagine, and stealth took a back seat (several back seats back, to be honest) to in-your-face combat. For all its graphical splendour, though, Valhalla's England felt generic as a landscape and the majority of its regions could have easily been set in any part of the world. The game's bugs and glitches were at least a nice throwback to the glory days of Unity.

Assassin's Creed: Mirage (2023)

As popular as Valhalla was (and it sold very well), a considerable core of the Assassin's Creed crowd were unhappy with the fact that the game's name no longer meant anything, with regards to gameplay. Perhaps as a response or just to scale things down and make it easier to produce, Mirage was a return to the early days of the AC series. Full-on combat was to be avoided and stealth was back in.

Mirage didn't offer anything more than Valhalla did, when it comes to graphics and rendering tech, but given that the game was first developed to be a DLC expansion, rather than a standalone game, that's quite understandable.

Assassin's Creed: Shadows (2025)

With the release of the next chapter in the long-running Assassin's Creed series almost upon us, it's worth mentioning it here, even though one can't play it just yet. Ubisoft has given Anvil a thorough upgrade, with ray-traced global illumination (RTGI) being the most notable inclusion. GI first made an appearance with Unity, and it's been improved in every AC game since, though it's always been 'pre-baked' rather than fully real-time.

That's all changed for Shadows so expect some stunning-looking graphics. The words ray, trace, and performance rarely make for a good combination, but Ubisoft assures us that it'll be fine, even on PCs without ray-tracing GPUs. Whether that's the case or not, you'll know in due course, as I'll have a full performance analysis of Assassin's Creed: Shadows.