Whoa whoa whoa, slow down. I think, disregarding the yearly release, this is a step in the right direction. Recently, I finished my second playthrough of AC2, which is, IMO, the best of the series. And I noticed two things. One, Ezio is a wicked-cool character, and two, that the gameplay and the combat from AC3 was ridiculously downgraded, and boring compared to AC2's, despite it being a later installment. You'd have thought they would've improved upon gameplay, but it's a huge downgrade at heart. They replaced Medicine, Doctors, and a proper Health bar with Recharging health. They replaced somewhat challenging, deep, combat where you had to time counter-kills and make full use of all your equipment, with a simple Batman-Style "Counter and Attack" easy-as-all-hell system. I won't get into how Connor wasn't that great, I'll just say that it seemed they were trying to make him "flawed" as a character, but slipped and made him too unlikable. It would have been awesome if they just made him a sort of antihero as opposed to "flawed". From what I've seen of AC4, which isn't much, it seems like they seem to have the right idea.