Not long after Layla had completed the memories, longtime Abstergo/Templar baddie Osto Berg appears to try to get the staff for Abstergo. (We don’t have enough time to fully explain his whole thing. Short story: He is a long time Templar mercenary who works with them because they helped save his daughter’s life from a deadly disease.) Layla tries to explain how the staff, in the right hands, could help his daughter. Berg grows angry with Layla, and the two tussle, eventually leading to Layla stabbing Berg and leaving him to die. (Or maybe he didn’t die… we aren’t sure yet.) After beating Berg, Layla spends a moment with the body of Victoria, her friend, and then uses her dead friend’s headset to contact the rest of her team and explain what has happened and that she needs to be extracted.

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Image for article titled Let's Recap The Messy Modern-Day Storyline Of Assassin's Creed
Screenshot: Ubisoft / Kotaku

The Start of Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla

All that leads us to the beginning of Valhalla, where Layla’s old crew has ditched her after she killed Victoria. Now, Layla is working with Desmond’s crew of Assassins to figure out why the Earth is having massive magnetic field problems. Things are getting so bad that satellites are starting to fail, power grids are going down, and the Aurora Borealis is visible around the world, which is pretty, but also not natural.

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She still has the staff, but it is now safely locked away in a portable case. Layla and her team have received some odd communications that point towards a dead Viking as the possible solution to the Earth’s problems. So, using her custom Animus, she uses the dead warrior’s DNA and begins exploring the memories of another hero from the past, hoping to find a solution to save the future.


That’s a lot, and it’s really a skimming of what has happened in the last few games. I’ve included a ton of links for those who want to read up on more of the details. But this should be enough to get most players up to speed on the wild and strange modern-day narrative that Assassin’s Creed has been telling for over a decade.

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Or you can just ignore that stuff and focus on the standalone stories told in each game’s historical sections. That’s probably the easier way to play these games.

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(Updated 3/3/22 with new details)