In the present day, Assassin's Creed Valhalla's campaign, Layla Hassan discovers new insights into the ancient roots of the Templars, who founded the villainous Abstergo Industries, ultimately foiling yet another of their nefarious schemes. But what is modern-day Abstergo even up to this time?
Abstergo is the public face of the tyrannical Templars. Their tech and video game companies pull the wool over the world’s eyes while, from the shadows, their ancient conspiracy tightens its grip on civilization. Every single Assassin’s Creed game has cast Abstergo as its villain to some degree, but they have played a diminished role since Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. The series’ current protagonist, Layla Hassan, is a former Abstergo scientist who was motivated to the Assassins to get vengeance on the corporation for killing her friend (and possible lover) Deanna. Despite this, Abstergo’s Machiavellian machinations do not take center stage in the main historical or modern story of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Meanwhile, Abstergo’s predecessor plays a major role in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. In the historical reconstruction of the Animus, Layla learns about the ancient roots of the Templars through the eyes of the Viking warrior Eivor. In the 9th century C.E., Eivor s the Hidden Ones, a precursor to the Assassins organization. By Eivor’s day, the Hidden Ones have been locked in conflict with the Order of the Ancients for nearly two millennia. The Order of the Ancients was founded to bring order to the world through the use of powerful ancient artifacts - that, and some good old-fashioned totalitarianism. Their scheme in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is essentially to unite all of Christendom under the banner of order and defeat the Hidden Ones. This effort is led by the Anglo-Saxon king Aelfred who founds the “Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon,” which was the official name of the actual historical Templars. In this way, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla wraps up the Order of the Ancients stories of Layla’s trilogy and sets up the Templar stories of earlier titles.
Assassin's Creed: Where Did Abstergo Go?
However, the modern Templar organization, Abstergo, does not factor as significantly into Assassin’s Creed Valhalla present day story. While this absence seems odd given Abstergo’s ubiquity in the world of Assassin’s Creed, they have have recently been somewhat written out of the series’ plot, along with the franchise’s other archvillain - Juno.
First introduced in the original Assassin’s Creed, Juno is a powerful member of the Isu, a precursor race who created humans as slaves. The Isu’s destruction by a mysterious cataclysm shortly after the rebellion of humanity kicks off the mythology of Assassin’s Creed. Until very recently, the series’ plot largely dealt with preventing Juno’s resurrection, the next apocalypse, the triumph of the Templars, or all three. But with Juno's second (if not final) death in an Abstergo facility at the end of the official comic Assassin's Creed: Uprising, it makes sense that Abstergo’s threat would also be reduced. Subsequently, the corporation showed up in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey’s DLC, but Abstergo did not feature nearly as heavily in the main game as in previous titles.
It is likely that Abstergo has also been de-emphasized for the sake of accessibility. Ubisoft may have chosen to make Assassin’s Creed’s increasingly tangled plot a bit simpler for first time players to plug into by scaling up the threat of impending doom while simultaneously scaling down the importance of the “present day” story. Essentially, the saga can be condensed to: save the world from a coming apocalypse and ancient gods by killing the bad guys and getting lucky. Abstergo could certainly make a comeback in a big way in the next entry, or in DLC, as was the case with Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, but their marginalization helps make Assassin’s Creed Valhalla less convoluted.
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla does an irable job of setting up the Templar stories of the first Assassin’s Creed games while finishing the Order of the Ancients saga of Layla’s trilogy. That it does this without being totally incomprehensible to newcomers (at least, compared to the famously complicated franchise as a whole) is a praiseworthy accomplishment.
