Assassin's Creed / Artistic License History

Assassin's Creed gets credit for being slightly more accurate than usual, but bear in mind this is "slightly more accurate than usual" by video game standards, so there are still dollops of Artistic License.

On the whole, the series sits comfortably between Alternate Universe and Like Reality, Unless Noted. It uses the rhetoric of historical revisionism to justify the inclusion and insertion of fictional Assassins and Templars into a historical context, justifying their presence by stating that modern-day Templars have modified history to hide the truth by creating movies and video games to purposefully omit any details unfavorable to their cause or retool them to appeal to the viewer through their corporate entity Abstergo Industries. On the other hand, historical events and figures largely do act the way they did in a certain time and place and the backgrounds are generally accurate, with some of the details being Shown Their Work on the part of developers.

Assassin's Creed

The game gives a vision of The Crusades modified into a fight between The Knights Templar and The Hashshashin, neither of them being religious orders as we know them from history, but proto-secular humanist secret societies who fight over the use and abuse of Magitek artifacts left by Precursors. In reality, the Templars had the mundane duty of safeguarding the lives and possessions of travellers journeying to the Holy Land, while the Assassins mostly attacked local rulers and corrupt officials and never came into conflict with the Templars. The game does provide a more nuanced look at Richard the Lionheart than usual, however, notably having him speak in a French accent^note, and likewise does portray the Hashshashin as "the Asasiyun", demolishing the hashish-smoking Hollywood History.

The Teutonic Order are depicted in the game as a group of monastic Christian knights during the Third Crusades akin to the Knights Templar and Hospitalier. However, the Teutonic Knights were a small group of non-combatant Crusaders that took care of the sick and wounded in 1190-91, not to mention that they were not recognized as a military order until 1192. Additionally, the in-game name for the group is the Knights Teutonic rather than the Teutonic Knights.
There's a Turkish flag in Damascus. This is despite the fact that a.) Damascus was under control of the Ayyubid dynasty at the time whose flag or banner was completely different, b.) The Ottoman Empire (where the flag originates) wouldn't exist for another century, and c.) The modern Ottoman flag wouldn't exist for another 650 years.

Assassin's Creed II

This chapter generally gets the Renaissance background and history right, doing as much as possible to avoid anachronistic architecture, especially compared to later games. It also shows Leonardo da Vinci as a young handsome man (rather than the older man based on a drawing never attributed to Leonardo), Niccolò Machiavelli as a republican statesman and a more nuanced portrayal of Caterina Sforza. However, its depiction of the Medici and the Borgia families falls within conventional parameters of Historical Hero Upgrade/Historical Villain Upgrade common to Hollywood History, while, in reality, neither side was really that good or bad.

The murder of Giuliano de' Medici took place inside the Cathedral. In the game, it happens outside, both for the sake of playability and because the interior of the church is an Assassin's Tomb.
The historical Bartolomeo d'Alviano was a physically unassuming guy known by his wily strategies and political abilities, while his version from the games is a gigantic Boisterous Bruiser with a BFG, which, if anything, resembles more a Composite Character of Bartolomeo and his comrade Diego García de Paredes. The game also introduces an Arch-Enemy for him in the form of a French nobleman, Octavien de Valois, while in real life Bartolomeo's biggest enemy was another Italian, Prospero Colonna.
The iconic plague doctor uniforms seen in the game did not exist until 1582, decades later.

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood

The game starts introducing Baroque architecture into the Renaissance, features workable da Vinci machines, and presents a fantastic internal La Résistance against Cesare Borgia that, needless to say, goes against actual history.

Assassin's Creed: Revelations

The game anachronistically calls the fallen Eastern Roman Empire as "the Byzantines", though it gets most features of the Ottoman Empire correct, showing them as a multi-cultural society with a good look at the fratricidal politics of the Ottoman Empire's Decadent Court and the manoeuvring of the Janissary Praetorian Guard. Architecturally, it avoids anachronism, except for providing Hagia Sophia minarets far earlier than recorded.
The main antagonists are frequently referred to as Byzantines. However, the term "Byzantine" is a modern invention used to describe the society and culture of the Eastern Roman Empire and was never used by contemporaries. The Byzantines insisted until their last days that they were Romans, or Hellenes, or Greeks. Even during the War of Greek Independence centuries later, many Greeks still considered themselves to be Romans (Romaioi). Then again, this can be Hand Waved as another of the Animus's oversimplifications for the subject's sake, like the convenient subtitles.
While singing the tale of Cesare Borgia's death, Ezio makes a reference to gravity a hundred years before Newton's time.
The historical Shahkulu rebellion took place in the Taurus Mountains in southern Anatolia, not Cappadocia.

Assassin's Creed III

This game was praised for its broadly accurate chart of the American Revolution, background and causes. Some of the Artistic License shown, however, is that nearly everything about the game's depiction of the Boston Tea Party is wrong. The game depicts it as a riot in which a few dozen British soldiers get killed when it was in fact a non-violent incident; also, Robert Faulkner, the First Mate, makes references to Singapore, which had fallen into obscurity centuries before. The gameplay also moves ahead certain activities (such as Fort Liberation) earlier than the context would allow. It also features a Historical Villain Upgrade of Charles Lee, though it does put forth the shortcomings and hypocrisy of the Founding Fathers, in one extent going a bit too far by attributing the destruction of Connor's village to George Washington... in 1761, a whole three years after Washington retired from the military.

Robert Faulkner in Sequence 5 says that the Aquila is the best ship from the US to Singapore. Thing is, Singapore had fallen into obscurity centuries before and wouldn't be revived by British colonization for at least 40 more years.
Another more glaring example is Washington being behind the destruction of Connor's village in 1761, a whole three years after Washington retired from the military.
Nearly everything about the game's depiction of the Boston Tea Party is wrong. The game depicts it as a riot in which a few dozen British soldiers get slaughtered. In reality, the destruction of the tea was conducted in near silence, there were no British soldiers present (having been withdrawn to Castle Island after the Boston Massacre in 1770), and nobody was so much as injured. But then again, where's the fun in that?
Connor can start liberating forts for the colonial forces as early as Sequence 5, which takes place in 1770. This is 5 years before the war even began, and liberating forts involves hoisting the American flag up, 7 years before said flag was designed. The flag can also be seen flying at the Battle of Bunker Hill (1775).
As mentioned above, two other inaccuracies are specifically mentioned and Hand Waved in the Animus database as simplification for Desmond's sake: the dozens of different currencies used by American colonialists in the late 18th century are removed in favor of the British pound; and the American revolutionaries wear the classic blue coats to make them easier to identify, as opposed to the rag-tag unmatched uniforms they wore in real life.
Fort Wolcott wasn't actually called that until 1798. Doesn't stop the fort's commander from calling it that in 1773.^note
In the entry on the Continental Congress, Shaun says the Third Continental Congress formed in 1781 to create a government for the United States and dissolved in 1789 when the Constitution was ratified. The wording, as well as Shaun's joke about long meetings, all but states the Congress took an incredibly long time to draft the Constitution, when in actuality the Congress was serving as the governing body of America under the Articles of Confederation (hence its other name, mentioned in the database, as the Congress of Confederation). It's unimportant in the grand scheme of things, but stands out among the other better-researched entries.

Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag

Black Flag was likewise praised by historians for a more nuanced look at the pirate era, though the gameplay's violent approach to naval combat was far away from how pirates actually operated, and it still made some odd changes. In real life, Mary Read used and was raised under a male persona based on her late older brother, Mark Read. In Black Flag, her disguise is inexplicably changed to that of James Kidd, supposedly an illegitimate son of the historical William Kidd. This is lampshaded in the codex, where an entry on the Queen's Staircase

has the art director comment that it hadn't been constructed at the time the game took place^note. The producer tells him to put it in anyway.

The "sea shanties" and tavern music are all actual folk music, with antiquated locutions and alternate lyrics which date to the early 18th Century, with some Anachronism Stew (Johnny Boker is from the 19th Century) thrown in for good measure. However, the tradition of singing sea shanties or folk music on a deck is only recorded in the 19th Century. Folklorists hold that sailors in the 17th and 18th century sang a generalized chanting hymn rather than full songs. Those records come from merchant and navy vessels, though, not pirates, so it's entirely possible that discipline was more lax.
Naval warfare in the Age of Sail was more a matter of maneuver and attrition than what we see here, with cannon volleys exchanged on a scale of minutes, not seconds. More to the point, the rather violent, take-the-fort style approach to plunder that's part of the gameplay is way off from the way pirates actually operated; most of them favored subtlety and Guile Hero tactics rather than going all One Ship Armada. Furthermore, historian Bryan Glass noted after seeing the game that most of the times Pirates never attacked or battled ships as the game asks you to do before you plunder it, since it defeated the purpose of salvaging and selling proper quality goods. He does however praise the game overall for its broader accuracy in showing the egalitarian nature of the Pirate life.
On a related note, no ship in its right mind would attack a fort directly the way the Jackdaw is shown doing, being tantamount to suicide. Naval Rams were not used at all during the period for combat, due to the inability to back the ship back out if the ram got stuck in the target.
The pirate ships here are all far grander than any they had in real life. Rather than pitched engagements between huge men of war, Blackbeard and Black Bart both met their ends, glorious as they were, in sloops against similarly armed sloops. Bart did, however, have a small fleet of four ships, making him somewhat grander than other pirates of his day. What made pirates fearsome wasn't that they piloted huge ships of war, but that they had more guns and, more importantely, far more men than any merchant they came across. Also, the law was nowhere near equipped to handle them, so the merchants had no choice but to submit meekly to their predation.

Assassin's Creed: Unity

In contrast to the other games above, Unity takes far more liberties with history than previous installments. One of the producers stated in Le Monde, a French newspaper, they didn't want this episode to be as focused on History than some others

although game director Alexander Amancio

had said that the game would be "unbiased" and "avoid reducing history" and does respect the facts of the events.

Arno gets sent into the Bastille after he's framed for the murder of Grand Master de la Serre at the Palais de Versailles. In reality, the Bastille was a prison for political prisoners, lunatics and general miscreants. For such a serious accusation as Arno's he would have been sent into one of the tougher prisons and certainly not among harmless and political prisoners.
The game repeats the famous apocryphal story that Louis XVI's death was Decided by One Vote. It comes down to an even split between clemency and execution with Templar puppet and patriot, Louis Michel Le Peletier casting the deciding vote. In actual fact, of the 721 available and eligible voters, 321 voted for imprisonment and/or banishment but a decent majority agreed on the execution. Of the 394 who voted for death, 34 voted for death with delaying conditions, while the majority wanted immediate summary execution. It also rehashes, for more understandable reasons, the apocryphal quote of "Jacques de Molay, vous êtes vengé!". Likewise the Templars make the trial a Frame-Up by having Marie Levesque artificially create starvation and pinning it on the Royal Family, neither of which were the reasons for his trial and execution in real-life, giving the general impression that Louis XVI was "innocent" when even the people who called for clemency admitted that he was guilty for conspiring with foreign powers and fomenting civil war against the Revolution. ^note
The Reign of Terror and the Revolution as a whole is presented without the political context of the 1792 Revolutionary Wars, namely the fact that the chaotic situation created by early defeats led to the September Massacres, a paranoid overreaction that political prisoners would betray soldiers on the front lines, whereas here its presented as a Templar plot to sow chaos. The Terror, far from being the work of a few individuals, had wide public support and political bipartisan agreement about its status as emergency laws to meet the challenges of civil war, invasion and deprivations. The game presents it as an excess of ideology or fanaticism and the work of Templars. Likewise, the game shows a bloodbath on the part of Robespierre's faction in the streets on the night of his downfall, when there was no violence at all that day from his side. Indeed, Robespierre was reluctant to order attacks on the National Convention and fatally delayed taking action.
The game's Brotherhood Missions and the Side Missions severely falsify the lives and personalities of the likes of Jean-Paul Marat, Saint-Just, the Jacobin Club and the Enragés. The Jacobins are depicted as a bunch of proto-Nazis who whip radical women like Théroigne de Méricourt for daring to ask for their rights, when in real life she was attacked by a radical faction of Revolutionary Women and was rescued by Marat. Likewise, Saint-Just and Jacques Roux are described to be psychopaths, with the overall negative depiction being informed by 19th Century royalist Malicious Slander rather than actual historical research.
A lot of the Paris Side Stories, Social Club Missions and the DLC exclusives "Chemical Revolution" and "American Prisoner" are filled with numerous basic errors in facts, including several anachronistic events and characters. Champollion, the famous Egyptologist, appears as an adult when he was born in 1790 (the Revolution having taken place between 1789 and 1799). Likewise Josephine describes herself as a divorcee when her husband was guillotined ^History and she was herself imprisoned during the Terror. Arno is tasked by Thomas Paine to rescue The Rights of Man from the Warden's custody, a book that was already widely published before he arrived in Paris (indeed the reason why he was invited in the first place), while the book Paine was working on was The Age of Reason, his Deist critique of Christianity.
The historian David Andress criticized the game's plot of a conspiracy theory instigating a Staged Populist Uprising as highly royalist and right-wing that maligns the strong popular current. He also noted that the game's portrayal of Paris, while admirable on the whole and accurate in terms of architecture, is generally inaccurate socially, in that it portrays whole sections as eternal Powder Keg Crowd, and it neglects the strong communal and active vigilance as reported in police reports of the time. He also noted that the game anachronistically features 19th Century storefront signs rather than external signage hanging on the sides facing out to walking pedestrians. He also admitted that the game's wide streets are more excusable as Acceptable Breaks from Reality, noting that the real Paris had very few open spaces (the streets of Paris became wider only under Napoleon III's Second Empire between 1853 and 1870, with prefect Georges Eugène Haussmann's huge renovations).

Assassin's Creed Syndicate

Possibly to atone for Unity, Syndicate's artistic license comes with a healthy dose of Refuge in Audacity, such as exaggerating the extent of Victorian London's criminal underworld to create, essentially, Grand Theft Auto: Industrial Revolution. The game also transplants aesthetics from other "Gangland" works onto the Victorian setting (ranging from the almost-contemporaneous Gangs of New York to '60s Swinging London).

In general the class-war angle of the game is slightly anachronistic since the 1867 Reform Bill which preceded Syndicate expanded the suffrage to a decent enough level to dial down revolutionary tensions. While Victorian London definitely had street gangs and some genuinely nasty criminals, the depiction of gangs controlling entire boroughs of London is a complete invention of the game. London was fairly settled by this time, if still bearing stark divisions between rich and poor areas. The game largely borrows the general aesthetic and motifs from the roughly contemporaneous Gangs of New York-era^note for Rule of Cool.
Ironically enough, the main campaign of Syndicate doesn't feature prostitutes, formerly a ubiquitous and much criticized feature of earlier AC games despite the fact that prostitution was a prominent feature of Victorian society. Many of England's social reformers campaigned to help "fallen women" and early feminism campaigned against absurd and exploitative laws faced by women, and unlike the other tensions which happened in other decades of Victorian London but moved to the 1860s, this was very much contemporary to the year and place of the game's setting. (They do appear in the Jack the Ripper DLC, naturally, since he was known to target them specifically.)
The game also sidelines the social class distinctions of Victorian London, with Jacob and Evie Frye interacting easily with a range of figures across Victorian society. There are situations such as Evie Frye commanding a contingent at the Tower of London, that is a huge stretch for women in this time and place. Likewise, while Evie Frye is sophisticated enough to pass in high society, Jacob Frye interacting with the Disraelis despite being visibly and audibly a street thug is unlikely given Victorian society's class divisions, as well as Disraeli's own snobbishness.
With the exception of the final post-game Queen Victoria memory cutscene, the game doesn't address the role and function of The British Empire within England, generally focusing on local issues. Empire historian Bob Whitaker notes that with the exception of Henry Green and Duleep Singh, most of the NPCs are white, when London at this point was a Melting Pot and the dock areas featured immigrants from India, Ireland, Eastern Europe and several other nations, giving a portrayal of Victorian society that is not quite as multi-cultural as it really was in this time and place, especially since the main political issues of the late 1860s concerned the expansion of the Empire, The Irish Question and the role of the monarchy, and that ordinary English people had more fears about Fenians than they did street gangs.
The Alhambra was a real-life music hall in London at this time and it did get burnt in a fire but that happened in 1881, not in 1868. The place was rebuilt and continued to exist until 1936, when it was permanently demolished.
The fact that both Blighters and Rooks have nearly 50/50 men and women ratio in their ranks is hardly accurate for the gangs of the era (although, with them being the Templars' and the Assassins' proxy gangs respectively, this may be intentional).

Assassin's Creed Origins

For the most part, the game was praised for its accuracy, but there are a lot of little things it gets wrong. The biggest mistakes mostly revolve around Cleopatra and her relationship with Caesar, which was far more controversial in real life than it's portrayed in the game.

You play a Medjay during the reign of Cleopatra. The Medjay had seemingly disappeared centuries before Alexander's conquest of Egypt, let alone Cleopatra's reign which is the very end of the Ptolemaic era, though this is justified in the game by virtue of Bayek being The Last of His Kind and the fact that we don't know whether the Medjay were reformed or abolished after the 20th Dynasty.
Many of the Greek/Ptolemaic Egyptian soldiers are seen wearing Corinthian helmets, even though they were largely replaced by the Thracian and Chalcidian helmets centuries prior.
Similarly, the Roman soldiers depicted in the game come across as cartoony and "Hollywood Roman". Not only do they have archers in bright red robes (at this time the only archers in the Roman armed forces would be non-citizen auxiliaries), they also have a greater variety of equipment than is historical (some run around with long spears, others are giants with large clubs).
Bayek uses a khopesh more than 1,000 years after they were replaced with straight swords among the Egyptians. He also uses a Roman spatha, which wouldn't see widespread use for at least a century after the birth of Christ; legionaries were using the gladius during the Late Republic period.
The game has Cleopatra speaking with an English accent to emphasize her Greek origins as Accent Adaptation. Similar to Assassin's Creed: Unity and Napoleon's lack of Corsican-tinged French, this ends up neglecting a crucial aspect of a historical figure, namely that one of the few very well-known facts about Cleopatra was that she was the only known member of her family to speak Egyptian fluently and communicate in it, appealing more to the people than her brother Ptolemy XIII (who only spoke Greek), so she should ideally sound the same to players as Bayek and Aya.
Their half-sister Arsinoe IV (captured by Caesar and put under house arrest at the temple of Artemis in Ephesus until murdered by order of Mark Anthony some years later) and their younger brother Ptolemy XIV (installed as co-ruler with Cleopatra after XIII's death, died not long after Caesar's assassination in 44 BCE) are not mentioned at all. Ptolemy XV Caesarion (offspring of Cleopatra and Caesar) has a brief appearance at the end of the game, but looks much older than the slightly less than three years old he would be at the time.
The finale of the game is set in Rome during the Ides of March, and Caesar's assassination. The meeting convened is explicitly about Caesar asking the Senate to confirm him as King and tyrant. In actual fact, Caesar at the time of his assassination was en route to Parthia to avenge Marcus Licinius Crassus and the Senate meeting was in his eyes, a minor call-to-order of no importance whatsoever. Likewise, the assassination is shown to be quite clean and smooth, when in actual fact multiple senators tripped and injured themselves as they ganged up on Caesar, and Caesar himself used a stylus to vainly try and defend himself. The actual assassination was a far more tawdry and pathetic affair than what you see here.
Both Alexandria and Rome were cities in the Ancient World that had large populations, a million people each and as such both of them should have NPCs on the level of Paris in Assassin's Creed: Unity, but the game greatly limits the number of foot-traffic in both on the scale of the first two medieval-Renaissance games. One of the reasons both cities fascinated historians and authors is that after the fall of The Roman Empire, it would take more than a millennium for cities of that size and scale to rise again. The Roman Forum we see in the finale is empty of crowds and shown as a militarized zone that Aya moves through but it should be packed full of people and NPCs since Caesar's assassination was an immediate public event.
Cleopatra is shown to have attempted to court an alliance with Pompey first, and then turn to Caesar. There is no record of her attempt to court Pompey's favor at all. The game also dramatizes her famous meeting with Caesar (being rolled into a carpet) by Apollodorus the Sicilian, as Plutarch described, but Plutarch describes that happening privately while in the game it happens in the presence of her own brother. She also immediately offers a marriage proposal to Caesar, when in reality, their relationship was controversial because Caesar was already married, and it would be hard to convince the Republic to accept Cleopatra, a foreigner, as a wife over a Roman woman of patrician stock (as Caesar's wife was at that time), and Cleopatra at the time of Caesar's death was anxious about getting her child with Caesar, Caesarion, Roman citizenship, which even Caesar, after becoming dictator perpetuo, found it hard to do and too controversial to support, and in any case, his will listed his nephew Octavian, the future Augustus, as his heir.
Tutankhamun's ghost (or whatever it's supposed to be) is shown to be a large, physically imposing bruiser who can and will kill even a fully levelled up Bayek. As opposed to the real life Tut, who was only eighteen when he died, and was lame and sickly to boot.
The Great Synagogue in Alexandria has a Star of David above its door centuries before it was used as a religious symbol by Judaism.^noteBeforehand, it was the menorah.

Assassin's Creed: Odyssey

Ancient Greece is far away enough, with very few written sources, that Odyssey takes more license than usual (for instance, the character of Aspasia, an actual historical figure, has nothing known about her other than being Perikles' mistress and being smart). The inaccuracies are justified in-universe by the DNA sample used for the Animus being too corrupted over time to produce a cohesive simulation, so Layla and Victoria supplemented the data with information from historical information of varying quality, primarily the works of Herodotos.

Absolutely no one fights in the formations that Greeks were famous for (though that is largely due to the limitations of the engine), quite a few mythical ruins can be found and explored even though we still haven't found them in the modern day, and gender is largely a non-issue.
The Battle of Thermopylae in the prologue is more or less a rehash of 300, without any of the 700 Thespians and 400 Thebans who also stood against Persia. According to Herodotus in the game, Leonidas sent the latter soldiers away when he saw they were afraid of the coming battle, as he only wanted soldiers with the appropriate amount of resolve. The actual Herodotus in his Histories reports that Leonidas commanded some of his allies to beat a retreat while choosing to hold off the Persians for strategic reasons, while the Thespians and Thebans volunteered to serve and fight alongside the Spartans. Likewise, the cut-scene before the battle shows the Spartans in their phalanx, albeit with much shorter spears than was typical, and held at the waist instead of at their shoulders so they could stab over their locked shields. When you can take control of Leonidas, they appear to have completely abandoned the phalanx formation that they were famous for never abandoning. Ironic since this formation, coupled with the battle taking place in a narrow gorge, was indeed the primary reason 300 Spartans killed 10,000 Persians; some historians speculate that without the treachery, the Greeks would have made a successful defense of the gorge.
Historically, King Leonidas had a son named Pleistarchus with his wife Queen Gorgo and no other children besides him.
Practically nothing survived from Sparta. The few ruins that survive tell little about the social life and all written records about the Spartans were written by non-Spartan Greek historians (mostly Athenians, notably Xenophon, but also Hellenic Greeks)^note. Much of what is known of Sparta's culture comes from Plutarch, who wrote about it in the 1st century AD... almost 5 centuries after the Sparta seen in the game. The game's depiction of Lakonia as such is entirely based on current conjecture. Additionally, the battle sequences are entirely different from the Spartans' use of phalanxes and formation.
The art direction provides a more colorful portrayal of Greece than other works, but there is a mix of history and mythology, though it might be justified given that even in the ancient times, many believed that the myths were real events or based on reality. For instance, stuff like Odysseus' Palace being a well known ruin on Ithaca is not recorded but it's likely that a location believed to have been such did exist then, since many cities would advertise or fabricate such connections if they had ruins nearby. The giant statues seen in the game are not only ahistorical but also physically impossible; the tensile strength of stone is not enough to prevent such large constructs, like the statue of Zeus in the starting area of the game, from falling under their own weight.
The armor, weapon, and costume designs also take creative license, with some soldiers' panoplies being nothing more than a loincloth, helmet, and shoulder pads. Granted, this is largely done to emphasize the fantastical and mythological elements intertwined with the main historical narrative; in artwork of Ancient Greek mythology, wacky suits of armor and weapons were all over the place.
The game portrays the Pythia at Delphi as someone who can be freely consulted at any time; one only needs to stand in line. In reality, she was only available on a single day per month, and only for nine months per year because Apollo wasn't at Delphi during the winter months. There were also many sacred rites involved, such as throwing cold water on a goat to see if it shivered — if it didn't, it was a sign Apollo wasn't available and people had to wait another month. Oracle readings weren't free — quite the contrary, in fact — and the Pythia herself was supposedly seated on a tripod during readings.
The Athenian ostracism seen in one mission takes dramatic liberties and gets several details incorrect. For starters, the number of "ostraka" (broken pieces of shells used for voting) tallied for one person had to exceed 6,000 in order for the ostracism to take place; if no one received 6,000 or more votes, then no ostracism took place that year. The building in which the vote seems to take place doesn't even seem to contain fifty. It would also be exceedingly hard to fake, since the votes were tallied via each citizen participant etching their vote on their ostraka, meaning that the fake ostraka had to be individually etched with the proper fake vote.
One mission involves the player taking the place of a pankratiast at the Olympic Games, and all the competitors are shown wearing loincloths. In reality, athletes at all of the Panhellenic Games competed entirely nude.
- Furthermore, women were banned from competing under the penalty of death, meaning that, if playing as Kassandra, participation should not have been possible. This is actually noted by one of the loading screen hints, and even mentions the Heraean Games (essentially the female version of the Olympics), but the actual game proper does not make any mention of this at all, even when playing as Kassandra. Somewhat downplayed considering that there were exceptions that took place, most notably that of the Spartan princess Cynisca's participation.
- The pankration bouts also take place in a designated "ring" (a marked circle on the ground), but this was not the case for any of the actual ancient combat events besides wrestling (which took place in a shallow pit dug into the stadium track).
Speaking of women in Ancient Greece, you will find various female NPCs fraternizing or fighting alongside men as soldiers and mercenaries. This ignores the fact that Greek city-states upheld strict gender roles for both sexes meaning that women had no political rights nor were they allowed to serve in the military even in the more egalitarian cities such as Sparta.
Historically, Sokrates served as a hoplite in the war, even saving Alkibiades during the Battle of Potidaea. Both went unmentioned in the game. Sokrates, as per Xenophon, was also a kind of pimp for young tricks but this isn't addressed since the game exclusively presents us Plato's version of Sokrates.
The open world has features such as ships with Spartan colors and constantly fluctuating back-and-forth skirmishes between Athenian and Spartan forces. In actual fact, the Spartans had no navy and only got one late in the Peloponnesian War courtesy of the Persians. The Athenians denied battle to the Spartans throughout the war and avoided battle whenever possible.
The game heavily compresses the timeline of the "Archidamian" era of the war from nearly a decade down to a couple of years maybe. While this could otherwise be handwaved as time passing off screen, a moment near the end of the Family Arc confirms that the timeline doesn't match that of history: Brasidas receives a severe wound from Deimos during the Battle of Pylos. During the following Mission, set during the Battle of Amphipolis, Brasidas is still nursing this injury with visible blood and bandages. Historically, these two battles took place 3 years apart with an entire major battle in between.
Literacy in the Greek world was extremely limited to likely less than 10% of the population, and was a skill almost exclusively held by very wealthy men. Obviously, the likes of Herodotos and most of the player's Athenian friends would have been (and were) literate. However, characters such as Barnabus, Kyra, and even the Eagle Bearer themselves almost certainly would not.

Assassin's Creed: Valhalla

After the grace given to Odyssey, the portrayals of history in Valhalla were a little rougher by comparison.

Several of the details in the World Premiere trailer owe more to modern pop culture depictions than to actual historical evidence, such as the Vikings having Pict-ish warpaint, wearing leather armor with furs, and having metal-rimmed shields with arm-buckles. Additionally, the Anglo-Saxons' elite soldier with a Roman-style helmet wields an anachronistic two-handed sword that would be more fitting in the 15th century. In the Assassin's Creed: Valhalla Official Trailer #2, one of the enemies has a windlass crossbow on his back — a weapon not invented until the 15th century.
Upgrading Eivor's equipment level requires nickel, titanium, and tungsten. The peoples of that era were barely able to smelt and forge iron. While nickel and titanium have melting points in roughly the same bracket as iron, working tungsten with its 3400°C melting point would've been impossible back then.
Flails are an obtainable weapon despite not being attested to in this period, and their existence in general being a subject of controversy.
Instead of following real world-consensus on Vinland being in eastern Canada, Valhalla's map depicts New England and upstate New York, and the area features natives that speak Mohawk instead of any Algonquian languages. The game offers a justification: Eivor specifically visits the "real" Saint Brendan's Island. There is also the real-world argument that the term "vinland" may not refer to a specific location, but any area along the North American east coast that can support the eponymous grapevines. In that light, it's somewhat reasonable for one viking clan to settle one "vinland" in the 870s and Leif Erikson to discover a completely different "vinland" in 1000.
Stave churches can be found in Norse-controlled areas, even in Asgard, for presumably aesthetic reasons despite the fact that the game takes place 200 years before Norway was Christianized.
Despite their commonality in the game, the earliest known proper Dane axes (as opposed to nonspecific two-handed axes used in battle) are attested to from the 10th Century as opposed to the 9th when the game takes place.
The world event "Ledecestreshire Sauce" is one for what would be the creation of Worcestershire sauce by a good thousand years before it became known, though the man putting it in the basement because it wasn't quite right does line up because it has to properly age before it's palatable.
The Picts are depicted as fur-wearing or topless. Despite still being a distinct ethnic group at this time, their dress would probably have been broadly similar to the Anglo-Saxons.
The Viking longships in the game have the heads of dragons and the like in the front. As any scholar well-versed in the history of the Viking Age can tell you, dragon heads are far too small to fit on a ship.
While it was likely done for the sake of Rule of Cool, no Viking ship would ever consider attacking heavily armed fortresses. Vikings were raiders and pillagers, but they did not care about fortresses. Vikings usually attacked minor settlements and especially monasteries because they were lightly defended (though they would also attack and raid cities across Europe).
9th Century flyting involved a lot of alliteration, kennings, and a particular meter, but no rhyming. According to This example contains a TRIVIA entry. It should be moved to the TRIVIA tab.Word of God rhyming was chosen as the method of determining a correct verse because it was deemed more intuitive for the average modern player to follow, even if it wasn't very accurate to the time period.
The Glowecestrescire Arc follows a group of pagan holdouts, but by this time paganism at this scale would've already been eradicated for centuries. Additionally, human sacrifice by Celtic pagans is only attested in biased Greek/Roman sources and may not have even been practiced.
The Raven Clan are depicted using their longship to move from Norway to England. In real life, the longship would not have been used for such a voyage due to the lack of room to carry cargo, and would have instead only been used for local raiding. For such a journey, a knarr would be used instead. The longships in the game are also much smaller than the ones in real life, at least on average, being based more on the karvi than on the larger snekkja or skeid more commonly used in warfare.
Prehistoric material is all over the place throughout the game. Bronze Age round barrows are treated as if they're Neolithic chamber tombs. Seahenge is fairly accurate but called Seahenge by a Viking over a thousand years before the name exists. Arbor Low uses the commonly speculated etymology of Eorthburg Hlaw but otherwise bears no resemblance to the actual monument. This while the game does little to distinguish these things from 'Celtic' materials, and goes all in on conflating them in Wrath of the Druids. Doon Fort - an Iron Age ringfort - is turned into a Stonehenge-esque array of trilithons, seemingly because of the fact a Druid - one outright ascribed as 'he of the Stone Circles' - has to be found and assassinated there. Despite their association in popular culture, Druids were not responsible for the building of Stonehenge or other monuments like it, as such precede even the broadest definitions of proto-Celtic by a thousand years.
There is no Goddess called Danu found in Irish mythology; her existence was hypothesized by scholars as an explanation for the name Tuatha Dé Danann, and the true meaning of the word Danann is still ultimately unknown.
The existence of Druids in Ireland is something of a contested topic in modern historical scholarship; there is no contemporary evidence for their presence and their first mention in the historical record comes almost 400 years after Ireland was Christianised as the word druí, generally meaning 'mage' or 'wizard', having no apparent association with the Celtic priestly caste of popular imagination.

Artistic License History / Assassin's Creed