For all the grief we give Ubisoft Entertainment SA for the many missteps it has made over the last year or two, we still love a good Assassin’s Creed game and desperately hope that Assassin’s Creed Syndicate can redeem the series.

But after eight (soon to be nine) mainline games and over a dozen side games, the series is in serious danger of becoming stale, if it hasn’t already.

Games like 2013’s Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag proved that the studio can still add exciting new gameplay elements to the franchise, but there are a few Assassin’s Creed staples that have clung to the series since the early days that add little in the way of fun, and they could easily be removed without hurting the franchise.

Viewpoints

Viewpoints in the Assassin’s Creed games serve two main purposes: one, showing off the hard work Ubisoft did to recreate a historical city, and two, busy work. Early on, the games had only a handful of viewpoints for each city, and they often allowed you to climb iconic locations like the the Colosseum in Rome or the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul.

Later games seemed to add more and more viewpoints, however, and from Assassin’s Creed III and on, many of the extra viewpoints were just random trees.

Ah yes, the iconic tree of…what’s this island called again?

While viewpoints have gained a few new functions over the years, such as unlocking fast travel points and revealing collectibles on the map, they are still primarily designed to pad out the game time, and they could easily be reduced or removed entirely without harming the actual gameplay.

Unfortunately, Ubisoft seems unlikely to abandon viewpoints anytime soon, and it has even started adding them to its other games, such as the radio towers it uses in Far Cry 3 and Far Cry 4.

Pointless collectibles

Assassin’s Creed and collectibles go together like stray dogs and fleas, and while collectibles are not bad on their own, Ubisoft tends to be a little too fond of scattering a hundred or so useless items across the map that do little more than fill out a percentage on the game progress page.

The studio itself has even admitted that some of these items exist solely for the purpose of occupying the time of completionists.

“Mostly for the most hardcore completists among you, the Animus Fragments are just a fun bonus to track down,” Ubisoft said in a description of the Animus Fragment collectibles from Black Flag. “All 200 must be obtained in order to complete all of the Abstergo Challenges, which allows you to unlock the Deceased Crew Cheat.”

The cheat you get from collecting all 200 fragments, many of which are scattered across a few dozen tiny islands, is a cosmetic change to your ship’s crew that makes them look like zombies. Hardly worth the hours and hours of effort, especially considering the fact that activating the cheat disables the game’s saving ability, meaning none of the ships you sink or treasures you find with your zombie crew matter.

Eavesdropping Missions

Eavesdropping missions have been around in one form or another since the very first Assassin’s Creed game, which is a little surprising considering the fact that they have never been fun.

In the first game, eavesdropping simply involved sitting on a bench while some nearby characters talked. Ubisoft quickly realized that players are not big fans of sitting around and doing nothing, so eavesdropping evolved to eventually include some stealth gameplay, forcing players to sneak along inside a moving circle in range of the speaking characters until the entire conversation is complete.

Falling behind the circle for too long or being spotted by enemies results in an automatic failure, which can be a bit frustrating when the failure was caused by some of the clunky free run mechanics present in a few of the more recent Assassin’s Creed games.

And while the more recent eavesdropping mechanics add more in the way of actual gameplay than the earlier games, they still essentially boil down to waiting around for another character to tell you where to go next.

Assassin’s Creed Syndicate image courtesy of Ubisoft Entertainment SA