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Given how tedious the American Revolution one was, essentially running on rails with your character inserted into key episodes, the Civil War episode would have sucked. Presumably you’d have been riding shotgun with Harriett Tubman and/or General Sherman in a succession of semi-interactive cut scenes, repeating until you shot/stabbed enough confederate NPCs to be rewarded with possibly a short break of open-world exploring as a treat.
One example: the early-80s arcade game Elevator Action, in which you play a secret agent who abseils to the top floor of an enemy building and has to grab secret files and make his way down to a getaway car on the ground floor. Well, that’s how it’s described. In reality, you’re a spree shooter rampaging through an office.
The economics of consoles made more sense when computer power was expensive, and the choice was an underpowered home computer with so-so graphics and sound or a dedicated game machine optimised for drawing sprites and scrolling the screen responsively, with the extra costs subsidised by the price of (uncopyable) software. When PCs caught up, the consoles started looking internally like x86 PCs with souped-up GPUs (and, of course, draconian amounts of DRM baked in). Now with devices like the Steam Deck (and similar form-factor devices running Windows in game-console mode), there’s no real reason to buy a dedicated game-playing machine.
You can have reenactment of actual historical events with your character inserted as the hero, or you can have a vivid open world, but not both. AC 3 goes for the former and has the vibe of being embarrassed of being a lowly entertainment product and aspiring to be one of the worthy but dry educational “games” you’d get to play on the school computers.
As Jamie Zawinski put it, it’s like a non-profit animal shelter setting up a sideline selling kitten meat to satisfy demands for hockey-stick growth. If somebody castigates them for it, they can point out that the demand for kitten deli slices didn’t going to go away, and if they didn’t sell them, someone else would step in and do it less humanely.
On one hand, it sucks that in the Trump era, maintaining shareholder value involves not offending Nazis. OTOH, though, given how tedious the American Revolution one was, essentially running on rails with your character inserted into key episodes, the Civil War episode would have sucked. Presumably you’d have been riding shotgun with Harriett Tubman and/or General Sherman in a succession of semi-interactive cut scenes, repeating until you shot/stabbed enough confederate NPCs to be rewarded with possibly a short break of open-world exploring as a treat.