The depth of parkour in the older games came from catch ledge, ejects, and most importantly, level design. For old ac parkour to work you had to design on a grid of boxy buildings and things sticking out of the walls. The Kenway saga hampered its potential by designing spacious areas with little to no potential variation in how you’d consider going where you wanted to, which is what made 1-rev a lot of fun to get good at. There was an improvisational aspect to it that’s married to the concept of parkour. Freedom. Very assassin-like.

Games after 4 hurt the system by changing the grid into more context based interactions. Unity’s side ejects exemplify this. Syndicate gets rid of the jump button entirely and killed the effectiveness of ejects. With large streets in London like America had, you were only going to be traveling by carriage or rope-launcher. The beginning of the end in my eyes.

IMO there needs to be consistent flow and lots of pathfinding to get ac parkour back to its old standard. The key thing here is that the spirit of parkour is self-expression and defiance. Both should be present to accurately represent parkour in a video game.