Not all fans appreciated the script decision, but the developers saw a potential threat to the future of the franchise and decided to act.
In Assassin's Creed 3, the developers made the decision to kill off Desmond Miles. The death of this protagonist caused some outrage in the fan community.
During a conversation with FRVR, creative director Alex Hutchinson shared his memories — between the numbered parts of Assassin's Creed 2 and 3, a couple more projects were released:
The problem with success is that it's addictive. And so Ubisoft... inserted two more games before we could finish [AC 3]. Between [parts 2 and 3] they released Brotherhood and Revelations. AC Brotherhood was originally conceived as DLC, and then it turned into a full-fledged game
The game lore with gods and alien creatures was becoming more complex and confusing, and began to distract from the main "historical" plot, which was important to most players.
In essence, Assassin's Creed 3 had to move away from the convoluted lore and preserve the core gameplay experience that was important to gamers — being an assassin in the past.
Alex explained that the developers didn't want the Assassin's Creed franchise to die like the RTS genre did; they feared that in the future (if they didn't part with Desmond and update the series) fans would point out inaccuracies in the lore and remember what they showed many years ago in the old games:
If you look at the death of franchises or even genres, it happens when they start trying their hardest to seem important or smart in a way that makes them look stupid. So, the RTS genre, before its kind of revival in the MOBA format, was chasing hardcore: the fans who loved [RTS] the most were screaming about super hardcore. So the games became more and more hardcore, which led to a greater loss of mass audience, and therefore a drop in sales. And then [RTS] just died. We didn't want the same thing to happen to AC; you know, when these ******* [dedicated fans] control everything and say: \"Oh, but in this game, 17 years ago, this and that happened\". [...] in essence, the advantage of Assassin's Creed or even Far Cry is that everyone always has a clear entry point [into the game's plot], and there's no feeling that you're missing out on anything
Desmond's death became a way to update the franchise and gave the opportunity to return to the past, to show the adventures of other assassins.
