Assassin's Creed has this wonderful scifi conceit of traveling back into the genetic memories of your ancestors in order to uncover secrets, and largely wastes it. The more recent games have the modern world as largely an afterthought, and the series-level writing on this game is not good, mostly because it's meant to be an eternal franchise that never has any kind of conclusion, so can only spin its wheels and occasionally have a reveal that doesn't make sense and will surely have no further impact on the series. And the conceit is also at odds with the open world collectathon hyperactive distraction gameplay, failing to leverage the idea that this is what the ancestor character actually did, or that you're trying to be "in sync" with them.
Anyway, my dream Assassin's Creed game goes against every principle they must be working under to make such disappointing, buggy slopfests. And my desire for storytelling goes against the (weak) exploration the series has become so preoccupied with. And some of the things I want, like a proper modern day storyline that you spend actual time in, would probably not be budget-friendly because of the assets that you wouldn't be able to reuse.
But how cool would it be to switch between medieval Berlin, modern Berlin, and Cold War Berlin? To weave different interlocking stories together? To trace the past with the tool of the Animus? To have storylines that comment on each other both directly and through contrast? And one of the things that I don't recall the games ever doing is that you can have a conflict between past and present, where the person using the Animus hates the person they're trying sync with. You have to relive your grandfather's sins to get the information you need, and then his memories and personality start bleeding through, altering you. Think of the tension inherent in having to play out the memory of your ancestor killing someone you've come to like.
Absolutely no way Ubisoft ever does anything interesting with the franchise, sadly.
Budgetwise, I don't think you could do it, but I would love to have Nazi-occupied France as one third of the game, France-occupied Vietnam as another third, and then a modern day story to tie them both together. There are people who went almost directly from fighting for their homeland to asserting colonial control. The central thematic preoccupation of the Assassin's Creed games is control vs. freedom, and here you can have a great case study in what people actually believe, how nationalist ideals inform what a government does, and you can do this with the same characters.
I don't exactly know how this would tie into the whole Templar vs. Assassin conflict the games are so focused on, as these ideologies often seem to be all-consuming above and beyond any other identity. I guess in my perfect world, I would do something with that and examine how these identities aren't absolutist, or how this thinking about the world is shaped.
