Each episode of the Assassin’s Creed story relates a pivotal clash in the eonian struggle between two ancient factions: the Assassin Brotherhood, who seek to preserve humanity’s freedoms, and the Templar Order, who aspire to become society’s uncontested custodians.
A select number of senior Assassins and Templars throughout history have been privy to mankind’s most momentous and extraordinarily well-kept secret: that, until approximately 80,000 years ago, the world was ruled by the First Civilization, a technologically advanced race that was effectively wiped out in an extinction event known as the Catastrophe. Fewer still know or fully comprehend that the First Civilization fashioned humanity as a subservient worker caste, biologically engineered to be susceptible to control via specialist devices, or that the Catastrophe enabled mankind to bloodily supplant and ultimately extinguish its weakened masters.
Most humans retain the dormant but still receptive neural configuration that so readily subjected their ancestors to enslavement – and it is this fact, above all others, that has fuelled the conflict between Assassins and Templars throughout the intervening millennia. Though the Templars are not at all averse to more traditional forms of exerting influence and governance, from the direct to the cunningly oblique, they do not ultimately aspire to rule by means as prosaic as simply enforcing their political will on the masses. Instead, they have long sought to recover and exploit First Civilization technologies, particularly the control devices known as “Apples” or “Pieces of Eden”, to bewitch and beguile… or, more chillingly, to remove any capacity for dissent.
This leads neatly to a second secret preserved by Assassins and Templars alike. Contrary to any accounts on record, there have been countless instances where individuals (usually of Order affiliation, or under their direct sponsorship) have used First Civilization technology to bend others to their will, or have wielded an ostensibly supernatural degree of power. The particulars of such events have been concealed or excised from documented history to preserve delicate truths – up to and including the Assassin blade that permanently becalmed the ambition of the person holding the First Civilization artifact. Brotherhood luminaries (such as Altaïr Ibn-La’Ahad and Ezio Auditore) have then traditionally chosen to inter such powerful objects far from Templar grasp.
There has been a cyclical waxing and waning of respective Assassin and Templar primacy throughout their secret war, but the modern day Order has grown powerful and bold, hiding in plain sight behind the Abstergo Industries conglomerate that both bankrolls and advances their agenda through varied technological innovations.
Through Abstergo, and its ready access to the world’s scientific elite, the Templars have developed the remarkable Animus hardware. A core concept of the Assassin’s Creed series is the (for the avoidance of all doubt, in this context sadly fictional) capacity of human genes to store and record “genetic memories”. On each occasion that DNA is passed on, the sum of a progenitor’s experiences, up to moments before conception for men and before birth for women, is passed on to the resultant offspring. Every generation of humans is, it transpires, a biological archive of the experiences of all of their antecedents.
With the aid of the Animus hardware these genetic memories can be isolated and decoded, with advanced software converting the ancestral memory into a full virtual representation defined by an astonishing degree of authenticity. As the subject relives the memory, the Animus then captures and records a projection of their experience that is accessible to others in audiovisual form. It is through this device that the modern-day Templars have attempted to reconnoiter history (or, more accurately, the minds of those with a suitably relevant lineage, particularly captured Assassins) to locate and recover long-forgotten First Civilization devices.
Assassin’s Creed IV Black Flag revealed that a major evolution in Animus development now enables any user to directly experience genetic memories from an external source, removing the restriction that limited the experience to direct descendants and their forebears. Rather than jealously guard this momentous advance, the Templars have chosen to work towards a mass-market launch via Abstergo Entertainment, a relatively new subsidiary in charge of the worldwide release of a consumer system named “Helix”.
The modern-era chapters of the Black Flag story offered glimpses into the research and development of launch software for the consumer Helix streaming service. Though vastly inferior to their in-house tech, this system is designed to offer slices of history in a video game experience defined by quite stupefying, market-leading fidelity.
In actual fact, the Templars are ingeniously using Abstergo Entertainment’s resources to scour history for evidence of the First Civilization’s hidden legacy. The best of the extraneous material is repackaged as Helix software, entirely pruned of incriminating or inappropriate material, while the choicest excerpts from the world’s “secret history” are passed on to the Order hierarchy… and, on occasion, intercepted by Brotherhood spies and agents, who still strive in the shadows to thwart Templar ambitions.
The core ideological difference between Assassin and Templar is their regard for individual agency and free will. With due irony, both organizations have long been manipulated by a third party: the mysterious digital entity known as Juno.
Juno was, and by most meaningful measures still is, a First Civilization scientist and high-level functionary who achieved a form of transcendence – a digital immortality, of sorts – by uploading her consciousness into machines hidden in a subterranean vault close to New York. Her previous appearances
in the series suggest that she has an agenda, formulated over entire epochs, to restore her lost race.
In Black Flag it was revealed that she “seeded” the DNA of Aita, her husband, into the human genome in a post-Catastrophe experiment. The activation of the “planted” DNA is designed to recur with generational frequency. Aita, in short, is periodically reborn into the world, time and time again, with memories of his past life (at the very twilight of the First Civilization) overlapping with those of his host. It is implied in Black Flag that many of the hundreds of versions of Aita have sought to locate hidden First Civilization vaults and artifacts – and, in doing so, have come to the attention of the Templars and Assassins. Both factions know of the cyclical appearance of this man, whom they call “the Sage”: an individual possessed with remarkable knowledge of “the Precursor Race” or “Those Who Came Before”.
In the closing chapters of Black Flag, it was revealed that a Sage (known as John) had infiltrated Abstergo Entertainment. Prior to his death – an inexplicable act of “suicide by cop” where he brought his gun to bear on armed security guards after attacking a company researcher – he both leaked information to the Brotherhood, and appeared to be working to further Juno’s agenda via a new faction: the Instruments of the First Will.
This group adheres to the Manifesto, a written declaration that posits that mankind is but a tool created by the First Civilization, and must therefore willingly relinquish free will in favor of servitude to its ultimate progenitors. They are the expeditors of Juno’s designs, enabling her to accomplish her goals in the physical world.
And so, to summarize: as it stands, with Abstergo Entertainment’s Helix system now released and available to all consumers, we know that Assassins fight Templars to preserve humanity’s freedoms, while Juno seemingly manipulates both factions to mastermind the restoration of her race, and the re-enslavement of mankind.
Throughout the Walkthrough chapter that follows (and the Side Quests chapter thereafter), this guide will help you to reach the clues and revelations that advance the evolving Assassins Creed backstory – not to mention further tantalizing developments raised by details found in the margins of Arno Dorian’s story in Revolutionary France…