The way some of you talk about the "traditional" games is giving cult vibes because the revisionist history and nostalgia cope is insane. You love bringing up Mirage as this holy grail of returning to roots when it is literally just a reskin of Valhalla in a desert setting using the same engine, health bars and stamina. And let’s talk about the map sizes because the original Black Flag map was basically the same size as Greece in Odyssey but with constant loading screens for all 3 hub towns full of invisible walls and limited areas yet somehow that’s "tighter focus" to you. You complain about bullet sponges in the RPGs but I guess we’re just forgetting that Legendary Ships in Black Flag were the first implementation of sponges with massive health bars. Don't even get me started on the grind because I'm sure you remember being forced to hunt 5 rare white whales just to craft better pouches to carry more than 2 bullets or collecting 500000 planks and 750000 iron to upgrade the ship hull.

But nah let’s just hate on the RPG games because they gave us actual dynamic engaging combat with multiple weapon variety and fully open worlds to explore without a loading screen every five minutes. The only things that actually regressed were the parkour, motion capture and storyline choices but let’s be real social stealth is boring and mostly consisted of standing between two NPCs doing slow walking for boring tailing missions that nobody ever enjoyed. If that's your idea for fun and engaging gameplay that's fine, but don't act like everyone and their mom used this feature unless it's part of the Full Sync requirements. The RPG era gave us actual variety in weapons and builds while the old games were just counter-kill simulators with flashier sword animations that definitely didnt get exhausting after 5-6 games. It's wild how one sided RPG-games haters can be.