Headscratchers / Assassin's Creed Origins

Caesar

• Julius Caesar turning out to be The Father of Understanding makes a great deal of sense as he (and his nephew) are the model for Hobbes Was Right throughout Western political thought.
  • Does that mean that the Assassins are responsible for the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, after all John Wilkes Booth compared Caesar to Lincoln, and saw himself as Brutus? Caesar inspired a whole lot of stuff across history other than Hobbes Was Right, such as the Calendar we still use today, and his sparing of enemies and argument for clemency (during the Catiline Conspiracy) also inspired diplomats and other statesmen in the centuries to come.
  • In-universe, Booth was a Templar assassin. Also, the game does suffer a bit of Hollywood History as they forget Brutus was an assassin attempting to preserve the class divisions of ancient Rome which Caesar was breaking down as part of his attempt to be a Universally Beloved Leader. However, there was no trope for Benevolent Tyrant so I went for Hobbes. In fact, Caesar's clemency is depicted negatively, which is one of the series WTF moments. Either way, Caesar is the perfect candidate for a Templar role model.
  • Not sure, because the series tends to be Depending on the Writer as far as Good Republic, Evil Empire goes. The Assassins allied with Napoleon, Queen Victoria, Lorenzo de'Medici, Suleiman the Magnificent. So i don't see how Caesar being "father of understanding" fits with the Templars Hobbes Was Right because it's so inconsistent as to be bereft of ideology.
  • The Assassins ally with autocrats and criminals as long as it helps them in their war against the Templars. This is a stated flaw of the Assassins which Lucrezia brought up to Ezio. Also, Shae commented the Assassins allying with one faction against another was stupid, especially when they were allied with the French in America and the English in the Caribbean. As for the Templars, they are SUPPOSED to be benevolent tyrants who assist the public good in the Plato Philosopher King sense. They just...don't...because they're very often greedy and corrupt.
  • Random aside but Arno turned against Napoleon and ended their friendship.
  • There's also an element of Hollywood History going on here as real life's frequent Black-and-Gray Morality often clashes with Ubisoft's tale of Assassins=Good and Templars=Bad.
  • With regards to Arno: No he didn't. The Co-Op Missions in Assassin's Creed: Unity show Arno saving Napoleon's life from a terrorist attack, and the Epilogue of the Vanilla Game has Arno revisiting the Temple Fortress a decade later. It's only the DLC made by a separate studio that goes that way, so this is Depending on the Writer. In terms of lore, Arno condones slavery, tyranny, oligarchy and lets the Haitian Brotherhood go unavenged.
    On a Doylist level, questions of this kind don't matter or mean anything tangible in terms of overall themes, in-game lore and out-game experience, because across the series and all its game Assassins are lackeys of tyrants, empires, kings and oligarchs far more often than they fight against them, and the war against the Templars aren't really about any actual ideology. I tend to lean Doylist and think Caesar is "Father of Understanding" because Ubisoft want to shoehorn all its origin-Call-Back eggs in one basket, and Caesar being father of understanding could mean anything fans wish to project on to the character. On a Watsonian level, it makes as much sense as other Cryptic Background Presence, "i.e. your sun...your son", "Calculations", "the Lady Eve" and so on.
  • The standard explanation for any historical inaccuracies is "the Templars rewrote history." Amunet mentions that Marc Antony turned Rome against Cassius and Brutus, forcing them to flee. Presumably in the AC universe Brutus was the one trying to implement the progressive policies, and when Caesar died Marc Antony gave him credit while painting Brutus as the villain (while also taking the opportunity to stamp out said progressive policies).
  • ...actually, maybe it would make more sense if it was historically accurate. Caesar was the enlightened dictator standing against the corrupt senators, which fits perfectly with the Templar's ideology. The Assassins have historically never paid as much attention to politics as they should, and Amunet specifically is pissed at Caesar for betraying her. Maybe Cassius and Brutus were corrupt, managed to convince Amunet that Caesar was a threat to the people, and got her help to kill him.

Cyrene ethnicity

• Why are the only non-Greek inhabitants of Cyrene and surroundings ethnic Egyptians? The area was never considered to belong to Egypt proper, and the natives of the region would be ancient Libyans, forerunners of the Berbers. Were the developers too lazy/stingy to model NPCs with Libyan phenotype and dress?
  • Short answer: probably yes. It's the same as how the enormous contemporary Jewish presence in Alexandria is completely ignored. Either the developers didn't have time to include other races, or (more likely) they simply decided that those were acceptable breaks and so elected not to devote any resources to it.

Hesitation

• Why did Bayek hesitate to finish off Flavius? After the murder of his son, which he gloats about throughout the entire battle, and all the chaos he sowed throughout the region, you would think Bayek would do far worse to him than he did with the Ibis or filled with tranquil rage instead of crying that he can't do it.
  • Because the quest for revenge is everything that Bayek has left of his son, and once it's over, he'll finally have to say goodbye to him forever.

Discovery Mode and censorship

• So they covered up nipples on statues with these incongruous-looking sea shells, supposedly in order to secure a Teen rating. Yet the bits about Cleopatra include screenshots of several uncensored paintings depicting her and her handmaidens/servants topless. In both cases the nudity could be considered artistic rather than lurid, so why the inconsistent censorship?

Animus hematological link

• One of the documents mention that the new Animus system uses a hematological link rather than epidural, and that it reads the data in the red blood cells. Except red blood cells have no nuclei, and thus no DNA. What information is being read from them, exactly?

The ISU Vault under Siwa

• Early in the game it's established there's an ISU vault under the Siwa temple and the cult is quite desperate to find a way to open it(which even an Apple doesn't work as a key on). Much later in the game, the Cult opens it with the Staff and Bayek arrives not long afterwards. Inside he finds.....a holographic projection of the Earth as a globe. Aside from an obvious nod to the original Assassins Creed, what was the point of this? There's pretty much no follow up why this was so important to the Order, especially since most of the other ISU sites you find in the series are more or less intact, even a thousand years later.
  • The Order had no way of knowing what was inside the vault before opening it. They just wanted any potential boons inside.
    • It's mentioned later on that it was a map of Pieces of Eden - ala Assassins Creed and the map the Templars were after.
• On a similar note, how does Bayek almost instantly realize what he's seeing is a depiction of the Earth? He's certainly not dumb or stupid, but his knowledge of world geography is very likely limited to Egypt with some vague knowledge that Rome and Greece are to the North across the sea. That's a far cry from "I know exactly what I'm looking at".
  • The world map drawn by Eratosthenes would be pretty identifiable on the globe given its high accuracy, and the sphericity of the planet Earth was also pretty well-established at the time.

Bayek's Piece of Eden

• Near the end of Origins, Bayek retrieves the apple he had lost to Flavius when he kills him. He then takes it and....stuffs into a box in the Assassin Hideout in Alexandria. Do we know what happened to it afterwards? Presumably it's one of those Apples that is documented and/or shows up later in the series, unless we're just meant to assume it's still sitting in that box buried under Alexandria for the last 2000 years.
  • The Assassin's Creed Wiki states that Bayek's Apple is the same one owned by Al Mualim and then Altaïr, according to the wiki it ultimately states that the apple was destroyed after triggering the bleeding effect in Daniel Cross at Denver International Airport.

Death of Eudoros

• While the memory corridor conversations in this game are already… out there, compared to the other games, the rest still somewhat make sense; for example, Bayek’s vision of Khemu when he killed Flavius could have been caused by the Apple. However, when Eudoros was killed, he was stabbed under the chin and into the mouth, before his body was completely submerged in the bath, and Bayek didn’t have the Apple. At what point could he and Bayek have had a conversation?
  • That's just typical Assassin's Creed stylistic storytelling. Ever since the very first game, the main character has been stabbing people in the neck, followed by a 5-minute reasoned debate with the victim about philosophy and morality, when in reality they should be gurgling their last. Don't look too much into it.
  • This troper has always assumed that the memory corridor conversations are tied to Eagle Vision, it is my assumption that at least to a degree it is some sort of psychic sense, and somehow it allows the assassin to commune with their victims when they die, and that the conversations occur in an instant, with what we see being the Animus's interpretation of that discussion. While Bayek doesn't possess conventional eagle vision he clearly has some for of psychic ability, based on his ability to see through Senu, which allows him the same capacity to commune with his victims.
  • Arno's unusual version of the memory corridor conversations in Assassin's Creed Unity definitely take place in the mind rather than the real world, since they manifest as him having visions of his victim's memories rather than having a conversation with them as they die, and are definitely more than a mere stylistic device, since he repeatedly uses them to uncover his next target. It's all but confirmed that the above assumption is true and they're simply another manifestation of the First Civilization's "knowledge" sense, just like Eagle Vision.

Confiscate his clothes, but give him a bath towel

• I know the real reason, (Not wanting to show genitals + reusing an existing outfit rather than creating an entire new one for a single mission.) but why did the Scarab go to the effort of dressing Bayek in a bath towel after stripping him of his armour and weapons when he was planning on leaving him to die in the desert anyway?

Bayek's finger

• How did nobody, not even Aya, even seem to notice Bayek's amputated finger, especially when she showed him how to operate the hidden blade to not accidentally cut it off? And how exactly did Bayek shrug that injury off, being able to climb out of the bathhouse with that stump on his left hand?

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