For me there’s a lot of video gamey ness to the AC series. I don’t find this breaks my immersion because the character I’m playing as is canonically in a simulation.

If the Animus wasn’t there as a framing device there’s a lot of stuff that I would find extremely hard to look past. I think it’s a great way to justify loads of stuff that would otherwise marr the experience.

The game character coming out of the Animus appears a lot up to AC3. There’s sections in AC 4 in the game dev’s offices, I’ve not played Unity, and there’s the stuff with Layla in Origins (incidentally, it’s only just occurred to me that I went to school with someone called Layla Hassan!).

There’s a lot more of it in the Desmond games, including part of AC3 where one gets to do assassin shit in modern times.