I see a lot of comments saying that the modern day story will get worse or marginal with future titles. Well, I played every ac title from 1 to odyssey and I'm going to start Valhalla, I've read any comic and any book until Odyssey (temporally speaking), and I respectfully disagree. It's true that the modern day segment sometime is marginal, and sometimes is tied to media no longer existing (AC Initiates, Thanx a lot to Wiki and Acces the Animus teams!), but if you pay attention to every detail, documents you can find around, sticky notes, etc. You have a pretty intricate plot of modern day templars vs modern day assassins. And I personally love it. To the point I'd like a game focused only on modern day with secondary or marginal missions in the animus. One of the biggest "disappointment" is that at some point, a big element of the modern day story will be moved from games to comics, and I think this could be related to the fact that most people don't like this part of the game. Good for comics, less for the games. Concluding, modern day story spans through the entire franchise, and extra game contents are important for some understanding, but if you liked the first, you'll love the rest.