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  Climbing on rooftops for the 11th time—but I had more fun than ever this time around. [credit:
  Samuel Axon ]

I’ve been a dedicated fan of the Assassin’s Creed video game franchise for 11 years. It hasn’t always been a happy relationship. While the early games captured my imagination and introduced me to whole new modes of gameplay, the series’ middle years were laden with misfires, feature bloat, and other serious problems.

I often look at fans raging against the companies that make their favorite franchises—Bethesda or Blizzard are the two most common targets I see—and shake my head in bewilderment. “If you hate their work so much, why don’t you just play something else and let everyone else enjoy their games? It’s not like there’s a shortage of great games to try,” I say.

But as I looked back on more than a decade of playing Assassin’s Creed games to write this article, I for the first time kind of understood loving something so much that its stumbles make you feel not just disappointed, but a little mad.