Assassin's Creed went stale after Black Flag, with the two games following it being buggy/dull and competent/forgettable respectively, so it's no surprise that Ubisoft decided to give the team an extra year to get the franchise back on track.
The result is AC: Oranges.
I've played a couple of hours and, wow, it seems like they've pulled it off.
The gameplay's not exactly original but they've at last done away with the dated high profile/low profile stuff from previous games. Traversal and combat now feel like a mashup of Witcher 3 and, wait for it, Dark Souls. Yes, Dark Souls.
The usual Ubisoft map vomit is still there but moving from '?' to '?' is a lot less painful with the addition of your trusty eagle, Senu. He's basically a drone, like those in the popular Ubisoft game,
Ubisoft Presents Tom Clancy's Wildlands.
Also: Mo-capped camel.
Not content with paying homage to Witcher 3 and Dark Souls, Oranges nods enthusiastically towards Destiny. Loot is liberally dotted around the world and on enemy corpses, with it being colour coded to signify rarity. We've even got Destiny's cumbersome cursor-on-a-gamepad driven menu system
This isn't to say that the game doesn't have its own identity. There are still haystacks to dive into, towers to climb (which now contain fast travel points rather than opening up the map) and fools to murda but your path between the AC mainstays is a lot slicker and a lot more 2017.
There's also hunting and crafting like in that Far Cry game.
I'm impressed. An open world Assassin's Creed seems like a very nice thing.