Assassin's Creed 3: Tried-and-True Or Tired Out?

So within the past few days, we had our first glimpse of gameplay for the next title in the Assassin's Creed universe, Assassin's Creed 3. It gave us a few glimpses of the improvements to the game, as well as hinting at the storyline this game will follow. However, I am decidedly unimpressed with almost everything the trailer had to offer. Let's take a look at the gameplay shown during the trailer...
I must say, what was shown was unimpressive. The gameplay remains almost identical to the previous iterations of the franchise, stretching all the way back to the first game, first released in 2007. Granted, there are many advances to the combat and available moves, but nothing is overly different and it feels a bit too familiar. I'd actually liken AC to CoD. In my opinion, AC has become the CoD of action-adventure games. Throwing in a few new things, but without true innovation. Yearly updates with improvements. It's not as bad as CoD, but the comparison is there. In short, it's stale and has become formulaic. The only thing that I would say this game has going for it is the setting. There is a HUGE shortage of games set during the Revolutionary War and it's a nice change of pace from the WW2, modern warfare, and future warfare settings that have long since been the norm in the industry for quite a few years now. There was that one History Channel Civil War game, but that didn't turn out quite so good... But I digress. All-in-all, AC3 is going to have to do a lot more work to impress this gamer. At this point, it looks like it's nothing more than an expansion pack, as opposed to a true sequel.