Well, I'm surprised it took this long. Judging by some of the reactions I've seen online, most people aren't either. They are mostly pissed off that they are cancelling so soon after Legions. Basically Turbine took their most loyal fans' money and ran. That's not cool and is certainly not the way you keep your fans happy.

I still blame 3 people for the entire AC2 debacle:

Jesse, for just throwing shit into the game because it sounded cool and never actually testing things, making it doubly hard for the Live team to figure out how the hell to make the skills actually work. Forcing several rounds of skill tree redesigns.

Citan, for being a complete and utter moron. The man just refused to listen to advice and stuck to his own retarded vision for what he thought the game should be. No matter how many times we as testers told him something wouldn't work as designed, he'd just go ahead and do it anyway and then eventually realize we were right all along. Yet, even after that, he still refused to learn.

And Jessica, who basically took a check and did nothing, handing the reins completely over to Citan to do whatever the fuck he wanted (see above). She also refused to listen to us testers, no matter how much we backed our suggestions up with facts.

Sad, really. What was once a great franchise became a joke after AC2.

Well, the game tanked, naturally there are people who made mistakes. I don't think just those three are at fault though - MS has to take a lot of blame for its marketing. Much of AC2 was meant to fix AC1's flaws - so to invite the entire AC1 playerbase in with, what was it... less than a month before release? And with the game - cliche as this now is - very much unfinished and untested was to invite a massive amount of bad publicity in.

In hindsight, maybe MS was rushing because it was thinking about getting out of MMOGs, and the success of AC2 was to be a deciding factor - I don't think they really supported it post-release. And didn't pretty much everyone jump ship after release anyway, handing the thing over to a very junior crew.

It's not like AC2 differs fundamentally from, say, WoW. In fact, they share a great deal of similarities. But one's the highest selling MMOG ever - and one's shutting down in December. It can't all be down to design.

As for surprise about why now - not so much. The figures for Legions would have come in and I would guess they weren't good enough to keep going. I doubt they wanted to do it - they would have known how pissed off people would get - but if it's going to kill the company to keep it running, what's the choice there?

(also, does it actually qualify as a franchise if the second game fails?)