
The first five main games follow Desmond Miles, a descendant of several important Assassins throughout history, who uses a machine called the Animus to relive his ancestors' memories and find powerful artifacts called "Pieces of Eden", while also attempting to prevent a catastrophic event said to wipe out humanity by the end of 2012. There are three overarching story arcs in the series. A new story and occasional new time period are introduced in each entry, and gameplay elements evolve from the previous one. Apart from single-player missions, some games also provide competitive and cooperative multiplayer gameplay. Players have freedom to explore the historical settings as they finish main and side quests.

Main games of Assassin's Creed are set in an open world and presented from the third-person perspective where the protagonists take down targets using their combat and stealth skills with the exploitation of the environment. The series's eponymous first title was released in 2007, and it has featured twelve main games in total, the most recent being 2020's Valhalla. The series took inspiration from the novel Alamut by the Slovenian writer Vladimir Bartol, based on the historical Hashashin sect of the medieval Middle East, while building upon concepts from the Prince of Persia series. In the majority of the games, players control a historical Assassin, while also playing as an Assassin Initiate or someone caught in the Assassin-Templar conflict in the present-day framing story.

The series features historical fiction, science fiction and fictional characters intertwined with real-world historical events and figures. Created by Patrice Désilets, Jade Raymond, and Corey May, the Assassin's Creed series depicts a fictional millennia-old struggle between the Assassins, who fight for peace and free will, and the Templars, who desire peace through order and control.

Assassin's Creed is an open-world action-adventure stealth video game franchise published by Ubisoft and developed mainly by its studio Ubisoft Montreal using the game engine Anvil and its more advanced derivatives.
