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Assassin’s Creed: how to play the series in chronological order
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Francisco Dominguez
This chronology serves as your Rosetta Stone to keep track of the series’ shadowy cults and relics in the historical timeline. Be warned, though: It is spoiler heavy.
The Precursor race
First, some background: The Isu were the progenitor race, making the human race to serve as slaves. Adam and Eve escaped, triggering a rebellion which ended approximately in 75,000 BCE with an apocalyptic solar flare.
The Isu may be long gone, but their Pieces of Eden and DNA remain, scattered across the globe in vaults and Isu descendents like Assassin’s Creed protagonists.
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, 431-422 BCE
As Athens and Sparta fight the Peloponnesian War, the secretive Cult of Kosmos plots to manipulate a united Greece under a philosopher king's rule with a future-predicting Isu device. A Spartan mercenary named Kassandra stands in their way. It’s personal: The Cult brainwashed her brother Alexios into a ruthless champion whose fury led the cult away from once-peaceful goals.
Kassandra may destroy the device and the cultists, but they’ve established a sinister template for successors to follow.
Assassin’s Creed Origins, 49-43 BCE
Departing the Mediterranean for Egypt, we meet Bayek and his heartbreaking quest for revenge. His son was killed by the Order of Ancients, a more-successful contemporary of the Cult of Kosmos. They mistakenly thought Bayek could open a vault with an Apple of Eden, a powerful tool the Isu used to control humans.
Bayek and his wife Aya face The Order’s intimidating cabal of Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, and Ptolemy, but Flavius turns out to be the real threat, stealing the Apple and brainwashing the city of Cyrene. Once Cyrene is freed, the couple's work is not over. They start the Hidden Ones to combat the Order’s malign influence.
Assassin's Creed Mirage, 861 CE
We come to Baghdad in the Islamic Golden Age. Orphaned Basim was forced into life as a street thief before helping the Hidden Ones beat the Order of the Ancients to an Isu temple buried beneath Alamut. Here he finds a surprising discovery: He’s a reincarnated Isu. He vows revenge against those who imprisoned him, leading him to colder climes.
Assassin's Creed Valhalla, 872-878 CE
Eivor is a Viking looking to settle in Ravensthorpe, which begins as a small camp in East England. Their survival means forging allies with their neighbors, a Norwegian detour into Viking mythology, a run-in with Basim, and eradicating the Order.
Lastly, they must contend with the Saxon King Alfred the Great, a despotic ruler under the Order’s thumb. Alfred’s Christian ideals always conflicted with Isu pantheon worship, so he commits to remaking the organization into what becomes the Order of the Knights Templar.
Assassin's Creed, 1191 CE
Where it all began, at least for those without a time-hopping Animus. The first game! The Hidden Ones have become the Assassin Brotherhood. Altaïr steals an Apple of Eden in the Holy Land only for it to fall into Templar hands, who wish to use it to create world peace by brainwashing humanity. Altaïr and the Assassin Brotherhood prevent them and hide the Apple, preserving humanity’s free will.
Assassin's Creed 2, 1476-1499 CE
Ezio is a noble in Renaissance Italy whose father and brothers are slain by Templars. His quest against the Borgia family in command takes him to an Isu vault beneath the Vatican and the Apple needed to open it.
Years later, the Brotherhood comes for the vault. There's a showdown with Templar Grand Master Rodrigo Borgia, now the Pope, a series highlight. Within the vault, the hologram of an Isu explains the purpose behind them: protection against eradication by solar flares.
Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, 1499-1507 CE
Sparing the Pope was a huge mistake for Ezio, now leader of the Templars. Rodrigo attacks Ezio’s estate, takes the Apple and puts the Brotherhood firmly on the back foot. Under Ezio’s command (with help from his sister), they conduct a years-long campaign to destabilize the Borgias, reclaim the Apple from St. Peter’s Basilica, and hide it safely after using it to track down the last Borgia threat in Spain.
Assassin's Creed: Revelations, 1511–1512 CE
The last of the Ezio trilogy departs Italy for another marvel of the ancient world: Constantinople. Altaïr built a library storing Isu wisdom and an Apple of Eden. The Byzantine Templars seek to kick out the Ottomans and reform the Byzantine Empire of old, but another sect of Templars resumes their efforts to create peace by inescapable mind control.
Once their plans are thwarted and the library’s door thrown wide open, we learn of the Grand Temple, an important site holding the key to preventing humanity’s annihilation by solar flares.
Assassin's Creed Chronicles: China, 1526-1532
In Ming Dynasty China, Shao Jun has returned from her travels in Europe after Ezio revealed the Eight Tigers are Templars, ruling China behind puppet emperors. He also gives her the Precursor box artifact, a tool to decipher Isu script.
She’s imprisoned and the box is taken from her. Her destiny, after fending off a Mongol invasion designed to support the Tigers’ leader, is not to reclaim it, but to rebuild the Brotherhood in China.
Assassin's Creed Shadows, 1579 CE
The feudal Japan outing introduces Yasuke the African samurai and Naoe the ninja, on opposing sides of Oda Nobunaga’s infamous reign. Yasuke is his faithful samurai; Naoe is hellbent on slaying him. Circumstances unite them, and the pair build the Kakushiba ikki, the Japanese chapter of the Brotherhood.
After dispatching the brutal Shinbakufu faction who destroyed Naoe’s home, their attention turns to the Templar Jesuit slavers, who were responsible for Yasuke’s childhood plight.
Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag, 1715-1722 CE
Edward Kenway is a Caribbean pirate in the Golden Age of Piracy who murders a Templar and audaciously impersonates them in Havana. This leads him into the British and Spanish navies’ plot to use fighting piracy as a front to hunt for the Observatory, an Isu snooping device they intend to use for blackmail.
After failing to establish a pirate utopia, Edward and his allies join the hunt for personal gain—but a pirate’s allies turn out not to be trustworthy. After slaying the Templar leader, he decides greed isn’t worth the price and seals the Observatory.
Assassin's Creed Rogue, 1752-1760 CE
Shay Patrick Cormac is bad news for Portugal. He triggers the Great Lisbon Earthquake—one of European history’s worst natural disasters—by tampering with Isu artifacts. Ridden by guilt, he turns against the Brotherhood and joins the Templars.
Templar Grand Master Haytham Kenway (son of Edward, presumably spinning in Davy Jones’ locker) commands Shay to track down the Precursor box. That quest ends in France 16 years later, with a hint that maybe a revolution could prove useful.
Assassin's Creed III, 1754-1783 CE
Templar Haytham Kenway moves to America to build the order’s influence. He falls in love with the Mohawk woman Kaniehti:io, who shows him the way to the long-awaited Grand Temple. Its entrance, however, is impassable.
Skip to 1760. Kaniehti:io dies in a Templar attack, their son Ratonhnhaké:ton takes the name Connor and routs British Templars in the American Revolutionary War. He gains the key to the temple and hides it away, a problem for another age.
Assassin's Creed: Liberation, 1765-1777 CE
Aveline de Grandpré, while liberating slaves, uncovers a Templar plot to take command of Louisiana in its transition from French to Spanish control. The Temple contains the Prophecy Disk, with groundbreaking information about human history, but a bloody showdown in St. Louis Cathedral awaits before those secrets can be told.
Assassin’s Creed Unity, 1789-1794
Framed for murdering his adoptive father, the Grand Master of the French Templars, Arno Dorian is locked away in the Bastille before the French Revolution gives him and an Assassin a way to escape and discover the Templars who committed the crime.
Their leader, François-Thomas Germain, engineered the Terror to produce a Templar dictator. Arno and step-sibling Élise track him down and foil François-Thomas’s plans, paving the way for Napoleon’s rule.
Assassin's Creed Chronicles: India, 1841 CE
During the Anglo-Sikh War, Templar forces in the East India Company hunt for Precursor sites. The Koh-i-Noor diamond (now set in the Queen Mother's Crown) can unlock site locations, but is stolen by Assassin Arbaaz Mir. The Assassins lose the box, but the priceless diamond is bequeathed to a British Assassin—the father of Syndicate’s London duo.
Assassin's Creed Syndicate, 1868 CE
The Shroud of Eden is an Isu cloth with healing powers sought by Templars to resurrect an Isu. In Victorian England, Jacob and Evie, twins from London’s criminal underbelly, find the key to the Shroud in St. Paul’s Cathedral. The Shroud itself is located in Buckingham Palace, a royal ball providing an opportunity to gatecrash the monarchy in style.
Assassin's Creed Chronicles: Russia, 1918
Fresh off the October Revolution of 1917, Assassin Nikolai Orelov agrees to recover the Precursor box from the deposed Romanov family. The Templars get there first, but Anastasia, Tsar Nicholas II’s daughter, escapes with the box.
Nikolai takes her to the Brotherhood for refuge but, since she's a vestige of the recently overthrown monarchy, the Brotherhood imprison her in the Kremlin. Nikolai helps her escape, leaving the Precursor box with the Templars.
This concludes our lengthy rundown of the Assassin's Creed chronology. You can check out any and all of these great games on Epic Games Store today!