WMG / Assassin's Creed Syndicate

Pre-release theories

One Side quest will involve jack the ripper.

• Confirmed. An entire DLC.

Alternatively, Jack The Ripper will be a major player in the story, Templar or assassin or wild card, anybody's guess.

• One problem with Jack the Ripper, is that the game is set in 1868 and the Ripper murders didn't occur until twenty years later in 1888. Syndicate would have to take the Assassin's Creed II approach and take place over many years in order to accomodate fitting in the Ripper murders. That said, Jack the Ripper is one of those iconic Victorian tropes, so it seems a shame to do a game in that era and leave him out. An alternative theory is that Jack won't appear in the main game, but will be relegated to a DLC adventure set after the events of Syndicate, with an older Jacob and Evie investigating the murders much like Freedom Cry and Dead Kings. We know that there will be a season pass, but what that will entail is currently up in the air.
• Alternatively, if Ubisoft decides to play a bit with history, they can show a quest about the origin of jack the ripper, and that it's actually a title, passed down from serial killer to serial killer. So, essentially, they're not dealing with THE jack the ripper, but maybe his predecessor.
• I think Ubisoft are taking a wait-and-watch approach here, they are setting the game in 1868 and if people like it and the characters, there will be a sequel dealing with the late Victorian period and the Jack the Ripper case.
  • Confirmed. Jack the Ripper DLC announced.
  • Also confirmed is that Jack was an Assassin who went well off the deep end!

Karl Marx will be in the game

One of the trailer shows a shot of the British Museum, where Karl Marx worked on Das Kapital. Part 1 was published in 1867 and the remaining parts were published later. The only question is if Karl Marx will be an Assassin or a Templar. UNITY made the Assassins to be anti-Revolutionary, and its possible that Marx will be a Templar since he saw the French Revolution as the birth of a new era. Also philosophically Marx was opposed to the lumpenproletariat, that is street gangs and thugs, he didn't think they were capable of being revolutionary while Jacob Frye thinks differently.

• It is likely that Marx would be painted as either an Assassin or sympathetic to them, since AC II-era background material shows a divide between Templar-driven capitalism against Assassin-supported Communism.
• Confirmed. Marx is in the game, and has several side missions like Darwin and Dickens. He is only an Assassin ally.

The Frye Twins

• Let's see you have two player characters who are twins, have similar abilities and playstyles, you don't have that kind of set-up unless you get a Mirror Boss somewhere down the line. Eventually the twins will turn and fight each other, and either A) Jacob Dies (since Ubisoft can avoid Stuffed in the Fridge complains), B) Evie dies (because they learned nothing from Elise's death), C) Both die. The fact that the game is set in a single year 1868 suggests that neither will outlive that time.
  • Or D: they both survive and stay together as a team. Also, promotional material has already shown that there will be RPG-style character improvements, so they will not neccessarily have similar abilities. Besides, just because they are similar does not automatically mean they MUST become enemies.
• Alternatively, they can go down the controversial Game of Thrones and Yosuga no Sora route and put in a real Crack Pairing and the fruit of this incestuous union will be Shaun Hastings ancestor. He will be too Squicked out to continue writing the database entries.
  • Jossed, Ubisoft has announced there will be no romantic relationships in the story.
    • Except there is one - at the end, Evie and Henry Green kiss. Even Jacob gets a kiss - at the hands of Maxwell Roth.
• Main part is Jossed. Jacob and Evie do fight and bicker, and have disagreements, but they don't turn against each other, rather they reconcile at the end.

One of the people you fight is Brock Lesnar

• One thing pointed out in clips of the game is that one of the underground fighters has a back tattoo that looks very suspiciously like Brock's. If that's the case, then Jacob's gonna be taking a trip to Suplex City.
  • Alternatively, enemies will be modeled on his fighting style, meaning that A LOT of the people you fight are Brock Lesnar.

The Kenway family will make an appearance

• Connor's descendants? Jennifer Scott's descendants? They may even have a major part in the story as the leaders of the local assassin chapter that Jacob will encounter.
• Jennifer Scott was a spinster when we last saw her. Connor's descendants never left America as per Black Flag Abstergo Files. Most likely we'll get an Easter Egg and visit the old Kenway Manor at Saint James' Place and pay our Requiescat in Pace to the grave of the Captain of the Jackdaw.
• We do visit Kenway Mansion, but no mention of Kenways or Connor's descendants.

Stonehenge will make an appearance

• It could be another temple of those who came before and a major plot point with another McGuffin the templars are after.
  • Jossed.

Excalibur is a Sword of Eden

• Excalibur is hidden somewhere in England and functions similar to Germain's Sword of Eden.
  • That's hardly a WMG, as that has already been revealed way back in AC II.
  • This speculation is actually one of the blurbs that can pop up during the loading screen.

King Arthur is a member of those who came before

The prologue is set in St. Helena at the time of Napoleon's death

• Assassins retrieve Napoleon's apple and sail back to England where it is kept by the order.
  • No historical prologue like Unity, the Helix portion begins straight away with Jacob and Evie's memories.

Possible historical Templars/ Assassins:

• Benjamin Disraeli, Isambard Brunel, Florence Nightingale, William Booth. First two could be Templars, latter are Assassins. The Salvation Army could be a front for the Assassins.
  • Confirmed for Disraeli and Nightingale, but not for Brunel.
• I think Brunel can be a candidate for Templar Grand Master. While he died in 1859, he could have lived longer in this timeline the same way Germain lived longer than his historical death.
  • Or, he could have died "on-schedule", as it were, and someone mention him having been a great Grand Master for the Templars.
  • Templar Grand Master in Syndicate is Crawford Starrick, an original character.

The sage in this timeline will be

• Alfred Lord Tennyson.
• Robert Louis Stevenson (author of Jeckyll and Hyde).
  • Jossed. No sages, except for the Master Spy killed by Lydia in the World War I simulation.

Jacob and Evie will be involved in the Abergele Disaster

• Trailer footage has already shown a pretty nasty train accident, and that one was the worst ever at the time. And 1868, when the disaster happened, is the only time that the game's been confirmed to take place in, so far.
  • Jossed.

You will end up meeting Edward Bulwer Lytton.

• He was seriously interested in the occult and highly regarded by the English Rosicrucian Society due to his writings. Definitely a candidate for someone with more knowledge than most about the truth of the world, whether he's an Assassin, a Templar, or someone who lucked into the knowledge without being a member of either group.
  • He could also be that era's Sage.
  • Jossed.

Jacob is a Decoy Protagonist for Evie.

• Even though the majority of the game will be played as Jacob, Evie will end up being the real protagonist of the game. Jacob will be killed or incapacitated at the start of the finale and Evie will be the playable character for the rest of the game. Story-wise she'll go from being just the strategist and planner for the Rooks to their full-on leader after Jacob is taken out of commission.
  • Jossed. It's a split between Jacob and Evie.

The final confrontation will be in Big Ben

• you will chase the grand master in a climbfest till you reach the gears where it all ends. And maybe a bit of cliche hanging for deaf life on Ben's hands.
  • Jossed.
  • However, the last of Queen Victoria Memories, all of which take place after the main story, does end with one of the twins disarming a Templar bomb hidden in the Big Ben tower.

Jacob is Jack the Ripper

He already bears some similarity to the typical portrayal of the famous murderer, and since no one knows who Jack the Ripper really was, it's entirely possible that he could be the serial killer himself. Syndicate will probably be part of a new subseries within Assassin's Creed, probably comprising just two main games, with Jacob being the Villain Protagonist of the first game and Evie a more heroic figure in the second, forced to kill her own brother when he goes rogue and starts murdering innocent people as well as Templars.

• I think it's going to turn out that the Templars are the reason why Jacob is called Jack the Ripper. He is assassinating Templar agents and they're making it look like a serial killer.
  • Jack the Ripper murdered defenseless prostitutes in a slum district. I don't think Templars are stupid enough to game the system by using powerless people as agents and I don't think Ubisoft, as heartless as it can be, is so inhuman as to slander poor defenseless women and make AC into a slasher-title with you as the slasher.
  • I mean the women were not poor and defenseless, they were Templar Agents that Jacob killed. Then they use their powers to make it look like they were poor defenseless women to slander Jacob. That or the Templars made Jacob think they were Templar Agents just for their own agenda similar to Arno from Unity.
  • Jack the Ripper DLC is confirmed but we don't know anything yet.
• Jossed. The Lydia Frye/World War I section confirms that she was born in 1893, five years after the Ripper murders, and that Jacob and Evie were still alive then and had a role in raising her. So Jacob is not Jack the Ripper. If he was, it would be unlikely he's still alive but even less likely that Evie or Jacob's son would allow him near Lydia or anyone else.
  • Confirmed when the DLC begins that Jacob and Jack are separate characters. Jack was an Assassin trained by Jacob until he turned rogue.

There will be side missions similar to the Frontiersman Tales in Assassin's Creed III

These will be based in part on Victorian literature, namely Sherlock Holmes stories, and naturally will be called "Mysteries".

• Possibly confirmed with the announcement of the PS4 exclusive "The Dreadful Crimes" missions.
• Confirmed overall.

There will be Sherlock Holmes-style mysteries.

• The murder mysteries in Unity are already very Sherlock Holmes-like, and Syndicate would already have been in production by then, so it is possible they already practiced with the mechanics in Unity.
  • Confirmed: The Gold Edition of the game comes with an outfit addressed as The Baker Street so it's a dead ringer these missions will happen.
  • Double confirmed as PS4 versions have exclusive Penny Dreadful-style detective missions titled "The Dreadful Crimes".
  • Continuing the Sherlock Holmes references, the younger of the two "quest givers" for the Dreadful Crimes is a young (seemingly pubescent age) Arthur Conan-Doyle. So another case of Been There, Shaped History in that "Artie's" presence at the crime scenes and the Fryes essentially pulling the deductions out of thin air (as non-Assassins/Templars have no comprehension of Eagle Vision) give him all the inspiration he needs for his later literary career.

This game will bear similarities to Assassin's Creed: Revelations

In that you'll incorporate ideas of district control, defending areas with other members, and generally have a bit more of a Grand Theft Auto vibe to it with the raising hell for the working class, gaining territory, while also playing through story missions as well.

• Not really a theory but yeah it's like Revelations.

There is no Evie...

• Much like Mark of the Ninja, notice how in all the trailers we never really see Evie talk to anybody who isn't Jacob or exchange dialogues with anyone without Jacob in the same scene. Likewise the game artwork puts Evie on the right side, like she's marginal or not part of Jacob's crew, nobody really interacting with her. Then the Twin Assassins trailers shows that Jacob has brown eyes and Evie has Green/Blue eyes. Those eye colors together are the mark of the sage. The reason is that Evie is a figment of Jacob's imagination and that Jacob is actually the Sage and the Sage-genes have driven him so crazy that he's separated his mind into twins. In the game when we shift between Jacob and Evie, it's entirely in the mind of Jacob, who as a result of coping with the Sage part of his personality created an entire separate personality inside him. Jacob will eventually have a Tomato in the Mirror moment and Go Mad from the Revelation and become Jack the Ripper.
  • Jossed. The gameplay footage shows other character, Alexander Graham Bell, Dickens, Henry Green (with whom she has Ship Tease) and many others interacting and acknowledging her presence. She and Jacob are two different figures for sure.

Jacob and Evie aren't working class.

Prior to the game's release, Jacob's (and to a lesser extent Evie's) voicework has been criticized for a I Am Very British quality, when it's assumed, the characters are working class. And yet, the Fryes' background hasn't really actually been stated. Given their accents, the fact both twins seem rather well educated, and the fact their family has been involved in the Ancient Conspiracy for a while, perhaps they're really middle class, and are simply rousing the working class out of a social concern.

• Confirmed. They are born and raised Assassins and their father gave them a middle class upbringing.

The Rope Launcher will be given a modern upgrade

• Whether it's the Assassins, Templars or even another player going through the memories of Jacob and Evie, one of those factions is gonna get quite the delicious piece of lost technology to use.

Jack the Ripper will turn out to be multiple people, or at least have accomplices.

He appears to be working on his own, but that doesn't count out others joining in on the "fun", directly or indirectly.

• Confirmed that Jack has accomplices and an operative network of activity throughout London. He even took control of Jacob's gang, the Rooks, to turn them on the Assassins.

Post-Release Theories

Rebecca will survive having been shot after the end of Syndicate.

What better way to get people invested in the modern story for the next game than finding out if she lives or dies.

The Precursor in the Shroud that the Templars got...

The logs you get show Alvaro Gramatica and Violet communicating with Consus through the Shroud until it's destroyed during the Assassin's raid on Project Phoenix.

George Westhouse is a reference to George Westinghouse

The only real similarity they have is the name and that they live in the same time era, but maybe this is their way of a Shout-Out to a historical figure they had no real way to put in the game.

• Similarly, Alfred Fleming is almost certainly a Shout-Out to Ian Fleming, the author of the original James Bond stories who was himself an intelligence agent.

Jacob will get a DLC focusing on him

To balance things out. Might I suggest heading West to get Billy the Kid? They've got to do the Wild West at some point.

• There's The Last Maharaja mission-pack coming up but I doubt he'll get a Story DLC. Maybe a full sequel for sure.

The Frye family changes it's name some time in the 20th Century...

Whether due to Templar scrutiny, or just in order to become a little less conspicuous after Evie and Jacob's exploits. Naturally, they change it to Croft. Proving acrobatic Brainy Brunettes are just part of their Heroic Lineage.

Any information in Tomb Raider games contradicting this (i.e. the Croft family being around before WW1) can be explained away as fabrications, especially because Domenico Auditore once pulled off the exact same trick.

Jacob is bisexual.

Or whatever the term would be in the 19th century. But while he does seem to be mostly a ladies’ man, there is quite a bit too much flirting going on with Sgt. Abbeline and to a lesser extent Henry for him to be completely straight.