Assassin’s Creed 2 Retrospective — Deliberate Design vs What is Fun
I tend to find that sequels are the usually the best of the franchise. Jak II. Uncharted 2. Portal 2. Borderlands 2. The first game gets its footing, establishes a new world and tries things out to some combination of success and failure. The second game gets to benefit from an existing universe and knowing what aspects people did and didn’t like about the first game, and therefore can hit the ground running instead of stumbling through half baked ideas.
And that’s exactly what Assassin’s Creed 2 (AC2) does. AC2 knows what we want and it gives it to us: faster parkour, slightly improved combat, more varied missions, less modern day segments, a less oppressive atmosphere, and so on. Therefore AC2 is superior to AC1 in nearly every way, right? I hesitate to say yes. The problem is I must reconcile that this game doesn’t feel like it has the same amount of deliberate design and vision in it as AC1 does, and yet it’s so much more fun. This is not to put the game down at all, it remains my favorite in the franchise all things considered. But that doesn’t mean it’s not without some disappointments.
I will be making references to thoughts I’ve shared in my AC1 retrospective. It’s not necessary to read that one to understand this one, but it will help provide context for why I feel the way I do about AC2. Spoiler warning from here on out for AC1, 2, Brotherhood, and 3. It becomes hard to discuss these games without considering their relationship to later games.
Modern day
The Main Plot
Patrice Désilets once told Polygon:
Assassin’s Creed, I said it before — it’s a sci-fi story. You go through the Animus. The end of the world is not in the medieval time. The end of the world is in the present time. You’re trying to save the world of the present time, and then Altaïr’s story is a different story.
I made it clear in my last article that I’m a firm supporter of the modern day story. It provides a context for why we’re reliving memories, and it serves to add a tension as Abstergo inches closer and closer towards their goal. I was excited to see where this plot will go, what comes next in this thrilling saga.
Which is a shame because to be honest I found the modern day in AC2 to be far more disappointing than in AC1. As I said in the AC1 article, “AC1 had this tension, you were a prisoner, and your captors desperately want something that only you can find…The constant in-and-out was a reminder that you’re getting closer to something.” AC2 feels like it’s missing this, both on a smaller and larger scale. This time around you’re reliving the memories of Ezio, the young adult of a noble family in Renaissance Italy. You’re reliving his memories to find something, but even members of the modern day crew admits it’s a hunch based on what a previous Abstergo captive stumbled onto. All they know is there’s something important at the end of his story. And I love Ezio’s story, I think his character development is handled a bit better than Altaïr’s, but I can’t feel it building to something big. Templars are conspiring, but what exactly about? What’s the modern day crew hoping to find? No one really knows. Turns out there’s an Apple of Eden, the Papal Staff which is actually another piece of ancient technology like the Apples, and “The Vault.” What is the vault, what does it hold, where is it? Literally no one knows until the last half hour of the game. The Apple of Eden and the Papal Staff similarly don’t come up until the tail end of the game as well. So for all the hours Desmond will spend reliving Ezio’s memories, no one even knows he comes into possession of an Apple until the end of the game.
This is coupled with the fact you’re pulled out of the animus far less than AC1. Before it was after every memory sequence. In this game, it’s about twice in the whole game. Add in the modern day section at the very beginning of the game, and that’s only three short sections across a couple dozen hours of gameplay. In AC1, the constant in-and-out was a reminder that you’re getting closer and closer to something. Warren gets mixes of excitement and anxiousness as he desperately inches closer and closer to his goal. You don’t get that in AC2. You don’t get reminders something big is coming, you don’t even know what the big thing is. If you haven’t played the first game, the ending likely comes out of nowhere, having failed to be communicated that powers that be are warring over some insanely dangerous artifacts that are intertwined with the truth of human history (unless you did the truth puzzles, more on them below). This is where I think the devs took the wrong approach to complaints about AC1. Yes, the modern day segments were restrictive walking and talking sections that didn’t lend themselves to being played. AC2 did not suffer this restriction, however, with Desmond free from Abstergo’s grasp. There was an opportunity for him to actually go out in the world and do things, not just play around in a warehouse. At the midpoint of the game Desmond gets pulled out of the animus to demonstrate the parkour skills he’s picked up so far. What if this came at the begging of the game as a test to see what Desmond picked up from Altaïr, then a couple hours into the game when he’s pulled out of the animus for the first time, he’s put in a trial by fire situation where he has to do a supply drop for some assassins on the field? It would go a long way to making him really feel like he’s a part of the brotherhood again, it would be a modern day segment that doesn’t restrict you to walking and talking but instead you could be running around rooftops and fighting security guards and what have you. This would be akin to what we got in AC3, but by the time we got those modern day sections it was four games too late. The average player didn’t care if AC3 tried the spice things up, the hate had already settled in. AC2 should have been the first to try to make modern day more fun, not make it even less prevalent in the game.
Even if that’s asking for too much, there’s still one clear missed opportunity to keep modern day relevant: the modern day crew can now all talk to you and each other while you’re in the animus. It’s really not groundbreaking stuff, but it was absent from AC1, and is a welcome addition this time around. The modern day crew has a chance to react to things that happen at the same time as you, and character reactions are a major way of developing characters. I think if they weren’t going to take you out of the animus after every memory sequence, then they should have at least had the modern day crew talking to each other at least once a sequence, if just to contextualize the events that just happened and let you know where you stand in the story.
I think the biggest problem I have with the story is that the game doesn’t even end on a proper conclusion. The game does have a crazy climax like AC1. You fist fight the Pope (truly a fan favorite moment in the franchise). You unlock The Vault. And what is inside but a message from Minerva. Yes, the Roman god, but not quite as you’d expect. Minerva is the first of several that you meet that are “The Ones Who Came Before,” the “First Civilization,” or as they called themselves, “The Isu.” It’s here in the ending that it’s confirmed that the Roman “gods” were real people, but their civilization was so far advanced from humans that humans struggled to understand and conceptualize these beings, deifying them in the process. It was them who built the Apples, and the Papal Staff, and other pieces of ancient tech that Abstergo has sought out. Minerva dispenses a warning through Ezio directly to Desmond, in what is a very meta moment as she understands that Ezio’s life will be viewed through the animus. She tells of a solar flare so powerful that her people were unable to stop it, and thus it was their extinction event. Humanity survived and inherited the Earth, but another solar flare is coming and now it’s up to Desmond and co to prevent it from happening again.
I love this moment. Let me be clear. It is a wonderful expansion of the lore established in the first game. It answers just enough questions while keeping the door open to continue to learn so much more. It’s visually impressive in my opinion, and Minerva’s speech carries a lot of weight. But this ending barely does anything to resolve any plot threads. There is no meaningful reason why the plot points of AC2 couldn’t have been incorporated in a retooled Brotherhood. Ezio loses his Apple shortly after the events of AC2, and it is through the course of Brotherhood that he gets it back and the modern day crew gets to see where Ezio leaves it for them to retrieve. If Brotherhood opened with Ezio obtaining the Apple, would that really be much different from Altaïr going to retrieve the Apple as the very first memory you relive with him? AC1 did not start with Altaïr as a teenager, we were not forced to live through two decades of his life to eventually see the moment where he gets the Apple, so why must we sit through the events of AC2? The warning about the end of the world from Minerva could have just as easily been incorporated with the ending of Brotherhood where Ezio gets another opportunity to meet with some Isu. The modern day crew does not walk away from AC2 with any useful information, even if the pending end of the world is an exciting wrinkle in the story.
I’m not trying to argue that AC2 shouldn’t exist, only that its role in the franchise is ill justified. What I wish would have happened was that AC2 was given more context in this universe, for the past and present to be far more intertwined than what we got. Part of the game’s plot is for Desmond to intentionally experience the “bleeding effect,” the effect where experiencing enough of your ancestor’s memories allows you to pick up on their skills and abilities. Thus he will gain “years of experience in days” by reliving Ezio’s life. This falls apart a bit when you consider AC1, because all Desmond walked away with from that game was Eagle Vision, but no physical skills. Halfway through AC2, and Desmond is a parkour expert now thanks to the bleeding effect. How does that work? Things fall apart even further when you consider that Desmond dies at the end of AC3, accomplishing very little with the “years of experience” he picked up. Maybe judging AC2 by the conclusion of a game that came out three years later is unfair. But as much fun as I had with it, it feels like a game you could honestly skip and lose very little context for the next games. Again, I don’t want to skip this game, I want it to have more significance to the plot. Otherwise, AC2 is at best the first half of a story where the ending is the only thing that matters.
The Truth
To focus on something I do love and think was handled excellently, lets look at the glyph puzzles. Pieces of info left behind for you by Subject 16, Abstergo’s previous captor before Desmond. Truth be told, the glyph puzzles built more hype for me than the main story. Each one slowly ramps up the information it gives you, starting with proof Abstergo is a puppet master for the world, and ending with the origin of mankind and their relation to the First Civilization. The fact that Abstergo secretly runs the world is the least shocking revelation from these puzzles is a testament to the crazy heights the lore is soaring to. And then, each puzzle concludes with a clip of a video you’re clearly not to meant to see, stored in a menu location called “The Truth”. When you solve them all, the clips are combined and sorted and you get to see the full video: Adam and Eve stealing an Apple and escaping from some sort of production facility. Bluntly put, seeing Adam and Eve was one of the biggest “Oh shit” moments for me growing up. My thoughts on the ending of AC1 was “the world just got a lot bigger, and a lot scarier.” Compare the ending of AC1 to this moment, seeing biblical figures as real persons in human history, and having it woven into framework of this universe. Well this was turning that feeling up to 11. Plus the puzzles leading up to it were implying that the first assassins were those who stood up to the powers that oppressed humanity, so seeing Adam and Eve escaping felt like I was seeing the true birth of the assassins. It wasn’t meant to be plot driving information, but the drip feed of information meant I was always giddy to see what comes next, I was always anxious to learn the next dark secret of human history. It felt like something I needed to learn, it was info that humanity deserved to know.
Now forget everything I said about Adam and Eve because the franchise clearly did. Again, it’s not AC2’s fault that later games failed to capitalize on these ideas, but it does cheapen the experience at decent amount knowing it goes nowhere.
Gameplay
Parkour and the Cities
Climbing is twice as fast now and it’s probably the single biggest quality of life improvement the franchise sees until the ability to fast travel to any viewpoint in AC4. I feel like Ezio jumps in unintended directions more often than Altaïr did, but I feel like it might be due to more complicated map geometry. The map definitely has more verticality and improved streets to climb around, but I think it also trips up the game itself as it tries to guess what you’re jumping for, and it seems to miscalculate more. I still didn’t have nearly as many problems as the memes surrounding Assassin’s Creed would lead you to believe. Otherwise, parkour is largely the same as it was in the previous games. There’s the added ability to grab hanging pots/lanterns and use them to swing around corners, but that’s just a small new inclusion, not really changing the parkour in any noteworthy way.
Despite the small snags they introduce to parkour, the new cities are a delight to run through. Florence is such a cozy city to begin the game in (no doubt a deliberate choice to strengthen the opening half hour of the game). San Gimignano is a fun combination of modestly short buildings and skyscraper towers. Forli is an unassuming city, not much to be said there. And then there’s Venice. What a beautiful city. The canals, the towers, the vibrancy of it all. The whole game is beautiful, don’t get me wrong, but Venice was begging me to explore it. I don’t know which city is more conducive to the parkour, Florence or Venice, but either way dashing across the rooftops in both cities was a pleasure that never got old. The parkour may have gotten only minor updates, but a good city to explore made it that much more enjoyable regardless. And I liked AC1’s cities, it’s just that AC2’s are some of the best in the franchise in my opinion.
In my last article I said “it also feels like the devs noted the routes between each mission, and included convenient scaffolding and platforms and whatnot to make crossing rooftops easier specifically in the direction of missions.” Now that I think about it more, perhaps AC1 had strong visual cues that led me to the climbable surfaces and across the rooftops. I believe walls had less handholds on average, thus handholds were more visually distinguishable and I naturally navigated towards them. In terms of scaffolding to help you cross between rooftops, I similarly no longer think it my have been deliberate routes so much as the city density worked in my favor. AC2 being more spread out means even if every building has the same number of beams and scaffolding jutting out, I still won’t always be able to cross the rooftops. AC2 introduced tightropes that you can use to cross, but they aren’t a web connecting every building to every other building in every direction. Sometimes I got to the edge of a roof and I had to choose between finding a less direct route to my destination, or just jumping off the building. This happened less frequently in AC1, but not because the city was designed specifically to prevent this. Just that streets were narrow enough to jump across. I wouldn’t recommend changing AC2’s map to replicate AC1 either; AC1’s dense maps almost feel claustrophobic, fitting with the oppressive atmosphere. Every city in AC2 feels like a breathe of fresh air, and cramping things together isn’t the way to go. It’s hard to pick which I prefer honestly. AC2’s cities are a pleasure to be in, but AC1 is the superior parkour playground.
Combat
It’s hard to describe the difference between AC1 and AC2’s combat, so the best I can do is speculate. It feels like they made the counter window on attacks wider, but I could be wrong. It feels more button mash-y, but maybe that’s on me. I still stick to using the hidden blades in combat, but now I can go on the offensive with them. Which after seeing them in action as offensive weapons, I’m not so sure that was a good idea. In AC1, there were a surprising amount of opportunities to kill enemies with the hidden blade. When they are taunting you, if they flinch after another enemy is killed, if they’re thrown to the ground, or of course with a counter kill. In AC2, enemies don’t taunt and don’t flinch if another is killed. Counter kills of course still work, as does insta-killing an enemy on the ground. But with less opportunity to chain kills, I’m left waiting around for a counter kill opportunity. Or, I could button mash attack until they either die or another enemy finally attacks me. Like the last game you’re supposed to be able to time your attacks for more damage or a faster kill or something but to be honest that timing is finicky and after an entire game of trying to time it right, I could never really tell if I was getting it. You yourself can taunt now to make enemies attack sooner, but I find the timing between the taunt and the enemy attacking to be really inconsistent, and it throws off my counter kill attempts. Sometimes they attack almost immediately after pressing the taunt button and the game won’t let me counter so soon after triggering the taunt, so it’s usually a risk I avoid. Overall I just don’t find the combat as enjoyable. AC1 had a hidden depth to its combat that AC2 doesn’t. The only way I can describe it is the combat makes you feel like a master because of how easy it is for the player to kill enemies, not because the player can master the combat in any meaningful way.
Social Stealth
What has improved in this game is social stealth. Blending in crowds, using courtesans or thieves to distract guards, throwing money to create crowds that slow down guards. There’s a lot of improvements over the old “walk very slowly near some scholars” method of hiding from guards. I won’t say that social stealth approaches having depth yet. Its mechanics are surface level, so it’s not a system to experiment with and try new things. I do give the devs credit for expanding the player’s arsenal though. The devs agreed that social stealth was a pillar of gameplay, and expanded it to be more than a single use skill. It’s a small detail, but I also love how in the Carnivale section the fact that Ezio is wearing a mask means he won’t gain any notoriety this entire time is great. The game acknowledging that Ezio is faceless in the crowd makes the notoriety system not feel like it’s tacked on.
Notoriety
Speaking of notoriety, again it’s surface level mechanics that don’t require much thought from the player. Pickpocketing, killing guards or couriers, or just upsetting guards can cause Ezio to accrue notoriety. Fill up the meter enough and you become notorious, causing guards’ detection meters to start filling on sight. Because I spend so much time on the rooftops, guards would aggro for me whether I’m notorious or not, so often my notoriety was not that pressing of an issue to deal with. To reduce notoriety, you can rip posters off walls, bribe town criers to stop speaking about, or kill officials who pose as false witnesses against you. And that’s all there is to say. Kill guards or steal and the meter goes up, do one of three actions and the meter goes down. It’s an improvement over AC1 where the guards were far more touchy and likely to aggro, as it gives players agency to control public perception. It’s just not a particularly engaging system. Tear down posters as you run past them and there’s a good chance that’s the most you’ll ever interact with the notoriety system. Still, I like that gameplay can still reinforce tenets of the creed even if they aren’t explicitly stated in this game. “Be a blade in the crowd” isn’t just assassin posturing when the game has repercussions, however easily mitigated they might be, to being a known threat to the public.
Ezio’s Story
The plot with the “The Spaniard”/Rodrigo Borgia is ok. The modern day lacked tension for the longest while until talk of the Vault and artifacts finally started coming up, but even then none of the characters in the past even knew what the artifacts/vault did. That unfortunately demotes the Isu stuff to being macguffins. It doesn’t matter what they are or what they do, they’re just catalysts for the story to move forward. Which is usually how it goes in these games, I realize, but it feels like a step down from AC1. You got to see the apple halfway through that game, you got to see Altaïr defy death thanks to Al Mualim. Al Mualim knew what the Apple was capable of and was manipulating events to stay in power. In AC2, no one knows, and you’re hanging on the words of a prophecy until the very end. And the ending is where I have the most gripes.
By all rights, Rodrigo should have died at the end. Ezio is hell bent on revenge right up to the end (still talking about getting revenge only minutes before the game ends). But then at the very last second, the very last time we see Rodrigo in this game, Ezio decides revenge won’t fix the harm that has been done. Sure, that is character growth…but the events of Brotherhood 100% confirm that Rodrigo should have been killed, and that Ezio sparing him was nothing short of reckless. All the characters in Brotherhood chastise Ezio for sparing him, and Ezio admits that yeah, he should probably kill Rodrigo first chance he gets now. I get it, the date of AC2’s ending wouldn’t have coincided with Rodrigo’s real death date. Brotherhood would have been well into development already and its plot decided: Cesare’s takeover of Rome. Therefore AC2 cannot delay its timeline to line up with Rodrigo’s real date of death without skipping over the events of Brotherhood. It’s just a shame that they backed themselves into a corner like that. Ezio’s noble forgoing of revenge just doesn’t work when everyone can recognize that Rodrigo is dangerous and in one of the highest positions of power in Europe. Ezio can let go of his hate and rage, and still accept that he has a responsibility to kill Rodrigo. It just falls apart as the closeout to Ezio’s character arc.
What does have satisfying payoff is learning that all the NPC’s who have aided you in your journey were secretly Assassins. No, they weren’t all wearing white hooded robes like we might expect, but they are assassins nonetheless. The reason this “twist” works is because it makes perfect sense thematically. Assassin philosophy is to work for the liberation of the people, to protect them from would be oppressors. Antonio and the Thieves Guild may be just that, thieves, but they specifically target the upper echelon who extort the citizens. Paola may lead a brothel, but she’s keeping vulnerable women from living on the streets. They may not immediately read as assassins in the way the members did in AC1, but working with paupers and prostitutes to ensure others aren’t taken advantage of sure sounds like “working in the dark to serve the light” to me. Being an assassin isn’t just about climbing buildings and stabbing people, useful as that may be sometimes. It’s about doing what you can for the sake of those around you, and I think it’s brilliant that Ezio spent his life being taught this by assassins. He was being guided to help others because he knows it’s right, and not to be driven by revenge or a sense of duty like assassins of old were expected to.
Content
Collectibles
God I hated collecting the feathers.
No really, that’s how I’m going to start this section. Feather number 100 out of 100 didn’t spawn correctly for me and I had to restart the game a couple times to get it to spawn. Then the Auditore cape glitched and I had to visit every city several times before that trophy popped. What a mess.
There’s 330 treasure chests in the game, and by the time I hit ~100, the small amount of money they gave was rendered irrelevant by the economy system. If they trimmed the collectibles to 1/3 of what there currently are, I think the game would prevent collectathon burnout way better. As it is now, it’s needless padding that I genuinely think is meant to at least partially mock completionists. That’s not a conspiracy theory, it’s in line with comments Patrice has made in the past.
Main Missions
The main story missions are far more varied than AC1. Most story missions are uniquely crafted (barring the clear padding, addressed below). This comes with the caveat that player engagement is less necessary now. Don’t worry about reviewing collected intel and devising a plan to reach your target. Ezio and friends will discuss it in a cutscene and there’ll be waypoints telling you exactly where to go mid mission. Don’t get me wrong, these missions can still very well be fun. As much as I respect AC1, absolutely no part of it evokes as much enjoyment as flying Da Vinci’s machine across Venice. I just wish there was at least a mix of structured missions and investigations for the player. Just because the investigations in AC1 were boring doesn’t mean investigations in general are boring. There’s still enjoyment to be found in stalking your target and finding opportunities to snuff them out. If you don’t believe me, I’ll kindly refer you do the Hitman franchise that’s built entirely on this concept. I’m not arguing that AC should be a hitman clone, just that I think the devs erroneously tried to distance all aspects of AC2’s missions from AC1, and failed to recognize they were throwing some great ideas out in the process. But ultimately, AC2 pivoted so hard that the franchise didn’t recover from this for years, not until Unity.
Padding
The game definitely has its share of padding. The assassination contracts are really pretty meaningless. There’s so many of them, but they don’t build to anything, they don’t have their own mini storyline or anything, they don’t compliment the plot in any way, they’re just there. If you were to skip them entirely and not do a single one, you wouldn’t miss anything at all. Which describes a lot of missions in a lot of games, sure. The difference between AC2 and say Origins is that in Origins all the filler missions are scattered around the map and have a voiced NPC behind them. In reality, all that amounts to is set dressing. It’s still just “go here, kill X.” In AC2, there’s just a lot of backtracking to the pigeon coop to start the next mission. So even if other games have similar amounts of filler missions, it still doubly sucks how little effort went into the assassination contracts here.
There’s definitely padding in the main story too, and I think accusations of later games being short can be attributed to the main missions not involving as much fluff in between the story beats. AC2 has a fair amount of “Ezio, go over here and kill these rooftop guards” that precede almost every main mission. It doesn’t contribute anything meaningful to the game. Now, the missions do work narratively. An example is when I had to clear out guards so the flames could be lit for the flying machine mission. That was understandable within the context of the story, but the content of the mission was still bland. The game spawned some generic enemies in some very generic locations, said go kill them, and that’s it. Antonio could have just as well said “My men will clear a path for you and light the pyres,” and no meaningful gameplay is lost. So in this way, the mission as it is can be considered fluff. On the other hand, I think what fans want to see is for content to be more fleshed out. What if you had to steal a map showing guard patrol routes, work with Da Vinci to plot a flight path and required pyre locations, then Ezio had to travel to each one to see if there’s guards to be cleared out? That would be better than just triggering the mission and having the exact guards marked as targets for you.
Side Missions
The game has a few side missions that aren’t assassination contracts. Races, courier missions, beating up cheating husbands. But all combined, that’s about a dozen(?) missions in the whole game. Way too little, especially when a couple of them were actually memorable. One race was to impress a lady, and one husband beat-up mission was actually an armed guard. Small, largely irrelevant details, but still a step up from a thief saying “I’m the fastest guy around, think you’re faster?” or beating up random civilian NPC’s. I would have loved to see these get more elaborate, more unique set ups, variations, etc. They scraped the surface of being fun side content, but they’re gone before they do anything really fun with the concepts. The courier missions never did anything interesting, but you got to read the letters of famous historical figures so that’s cool I guess?
Assassin Tombs
If you aren’t scouring the map for the hundreds of the collectibles, and you aren’t doing the main story or misc. side missions, what else is there to do? That’s right, the assassin tombs (and DLC Templar lairs). A gameplay highlight of the franchise if you ask me. Parkour challenges that take you through city landmarks and crypts. Some have you chasing a guard down before he can alert others of you presence, and others are just all about nailing the parkour challenge of it. Now, I’ve already discussed the parkour. It’s good, but lacking in real depth or complexity. These parkour challenges rarely require a move that the player doesn’t regularly use in the open world. Climbing up along the clear handhold path on a wall, or jumping from beam to beam aren’t new or novel concepts for players, but I think they are so fun because of two key details: they provide a spectacle that you normally only get climbing the most famous of landmarks in the open world; and they provide rare opportunities for a continuous chain of movements. Parkour lacks depth, so these sequences are rarely difficult (barring fighting with the camera), but there is still something to be said about visualizing a path, about intuitively knowing where to go next and how to get there. And when you pull it off first try, it is so satisfying, especially when you’re doing it through crypts or cathedrals. Unfortunately parkour is still prone to hiccups even here, so more than I’d like Ezio would jump in the wrong direction or latch onto something unintentionally. I never felt like I was struggling with the controls, but there were one or two deaths from a wrong jump at the top of a very tall climb. A blemish on what is otherwise some of the most fun I’ve ever had in these games.
Miscellaneous
DLC
I played Bonfire of the Vanities back in the day, but I never bought Battle of Forli. I was mildly excited to see what Battle of Forli was like, because I remembered Bonfire being an ok addition, even if it wasn’t groundbreaking.
Battle of Forli comes first chronologically. It’s…entirely forgettable. It’s a handful of missions that are basically “kill some guards here,” and 2 assassinations that are barely a step up from the assassination contracts. I would have been mad if I had paid for it back on the PS3, it just was so short and did nothing memorable.
Also, the flying machine makes an inexplicable return thanks to this DLC. You can climb a tower in Forli and ride it around now. It’s fun to fly around, but it’s just suddenly there waiting for you to ride, and there are bonfires around the city ready for you too. I don’t get it. It’s nice to ride it around again, but I really don’t get it.
Bonfire of the Vanities is much better, comparatively speaking. It’s still just ok as far as content goes, but it looks like far more effort went into it than Battle of Forli. You get a new section of the Florence map, a new parkour mechanic with the springboard jump (which never worked first try for me), and a bunch of assassination missions. All of which were at the quality level that the contracts should have been at. The missions were short, but every one was unique, and you get a death confessional where every target talks about their relationship to the allure of power. Then at the end, Ezio kills the main target and speaks to the crowd about taking responsibility for their own lives, and not looking to masters to tell them what to do. Thematically great stuff, even if the missions are all really short and straightforward.
Both DLC’s kind of interfere with the pacing of the ending. Not terribly so, but they definitely come out of nowhere. The first time I ever played the game I didn’t have either DLC and didn’t feel like content was missing at all. Playing through it now, it definitely feels like content inserted at the last minute, not like a part of the story that was missing.
Graphics and Audio
The PS4 remaster is beautiful. Basically all my performance complaints about AC1 on my PS3 are gone. No stuttering, no screen tearing, clearly running at 1080p and not 720. The art direction of this game is superb too. The cities in AC1 matched the tone of the game, yes, but man the cities in that game don’t hold a candle to the ones in AC2. Textures and models clearly are still dated, it’s not like the game looks like other top tier PS4 games like Uncharted or Horizon Zero Dawn. But at the same time, its more polygonal look helps prevent it from aging too poorly. I replayed Watch_Dogs again late last year, and despite being 5 years newer, it’s aged worse because the attempt at realism meant the flaws became glaring. AC2 looks just old enough that I’m not left saying yikes when the camera zooms in too close because the characters weren’t too realistic to begin with. The game has aged, but this remaster lets me say the game has aged gracefully.
Sound quality is much better in this game. It was a pain point in AC1 for me, but the issue is almost 100% fixed this time around. The ambiance works this time, with no voices sounding like they’re inches from your ear and (almost) no clearly compressed audio files. I believe the remaster reused all the original audio files, because there is still one audio clip when Ezio tears down posters that sounds really bad. But it was the only instance in the game I could find.
Characters
The women in the family really got shafted in this game. Which is such a shame because they start off with so much personality. I really enjoy the beginning of the game interacting with the different family members. Yes it’s a tragedy the brothers and father die, but it’s a catalyst for the rest of the game. But why do Claudia and Maria become irrelevant? Claudia becomes the bookkeeper, and for the rest of the game all she says is “You here to take a look at the book?” Which is a slight step up from Maria becoming a mute for the rest of the game (barring the cutscene you get for collecting 100 feathers, which let’s be honest almost no one’s going to do). Ezio’s on a quest for answers and justice, and getting support from his remaining family would have been great to watch. But the only one you really interact with for the rest of the game is Mario.
Other characters are a delight through and through. I still fanboy over the fact that Leonardo Da Vinci is your best friend in this game, and I thought he was portrayed really well. The other characters similarly had unique personalities and really helped to keep the main plot fresh as Ezio went from assassination to assassination. I don’t think the Templars were as compelling in this game as they were in AC1, but Ezio’s companions made up for it.
Deliberate Game Design
What I want to close out on is the deliberate game design as I’ve seen it in this game. This idea that even when giving the player “freedom” they’ve still been funneled to do things that the devs intended. A simple example I can give is the path it takes to climb to the top of viewpoints. In AC1, it was rarely a straight shot up, but rather you had to look for the handholds. Your path might be impeded, but worry not because you can find a way to push forward (except the devs 100% planned this out already). I think due to AC1’s initial design philosophy, much more of the game needed to have a natural flow that took you through the game. From climbing up to viewpoints, to points of interest actually being visible from viewpoints, the streets and buildings layout that funneled you towards missions.
AC2 lacks most of this. Most, not all. Viewpoints are much simpler to climb, unless you’re on a historical landmark. Sometimes there’s something preventing you from going straight up, but it feels far less common than AC1. Really, there’s just so much more geometry everywhere, that climbing up almost any building is just a matter of pushing up. You don’t really have to look for the walls with handholds, that’s every wall. Streets are wider so often you need to look for the ropes that let you cross. Sometimes there’s scaffolding to let you cross, but it felt less frequent, and less convenient. Something I had actually missed in my AC1 playthrough is that there’s actually a downward decent that lets Altaïr vault downward, either directly to the ground or to a hanging position if the move is performed high enough above the ground. I never used it so I can’t speak to its usefulness, but it’s yet another tool in the arsenal to help the player move around in the world if they experiment enough to discover it. This move is absent in the Ezio trilogy for reasons I don’t understand.
To speak of something it does do right, not only does it retain the birds/hay near ledges to mark possible leap of faith locations, but it also places birds along the intended path in the assassin tombs. It’s a simple feature, but I think it’s the closest the game gets to the HUD-less design AC1 had. There is a marker on the minimap, but that only points towards the final room, and doesn’t hold your hand telling you where to go next. Visual cues still lead the way.
I already touched on the combat, but like I said, AC1 had many opportunities to use the hidden blade in combat. AC2 removed a few opportunities and replaced them with the option to button mash until you kill them. Every time I found a new way to use the hidden blade in AC1, I was ecstatic, like I was genuinely mastering it. AC2 had no such moments with its hidden blade, or any weapons really. You can learn new fighting techniques at the Villa, but I never found myself actually using most of them in fights, and these don’t scratch the itch of discovering through experimentation.
Similarly I already touched on mission design. But AC1 would have an intended way for you to reach your target, and let you figure out what that was. AC2 drops you right where you need to be and puts a waypoint telling you where to go next. There’s really no instances of players asking “What if I tried this” to which the game responds “yes yes what a good idea *nudge nudge wink wink*” The game just tells you to do it. Given most assassinations take place in the open world and not within mission-exclusive areas, there was still absolutely opportunity to survey the land and plan your entry and exit.
The game is still cohesive with AC1 though, which is what allows it to remain my favorite. The whole of the game still at least feels like the devs were working with the animus in mind, ensuring no details majorly contradict what would be the logical function of the device. The puppeteer system (controller face buttons mapped to character limbs) is still in tact here. The completion tracker is still evocative of a DNA strand. The climbing animation has been sped up and the walls are easier to climb, but Ezio cannot magically stick to every surface nor can you simply hold up to scale wall. Ezio still gets major upgrades through story beats: he learns more swordplay techniques from his uncle; he obtains the double hidden blade from Leonardo Da Vinci; he has to practice assassination techniques before he can use them; and so on. Much of the game’s mechanics are still well contextualized within the narrative. Things like weapons and armor are somehow gated by story progression yet entirely irrelevant within the story, but it’s a small grievance. Nothing like skill points/skill trees filled with arbitrarily gated abilities that are given no narrative significance as oft seen in RPG’s. Assassin’s Creed is not an RPG, you are playing a defined person who lived through a specific sequence of events, and the skills and abilities the assassin develops should work within that framework. I think AC2 manages to maintain that philosophy through and through, which is why it continues to rank above so many of the other AC games for me.
By all accounts, AC2 made every change to make the game more fun, and they work well enough to propel the game to the top of my favorites list. The compromises the game makes do not betray what AC1 set up, but rather pivot the game to be less tedious. I wish these compromises didn’t also come at the cost of allowing for player ingenuity. I want to try new things, to see what mechanics are secretly there, waiting for me to discover them. I want to scope out my targets and orchestrate an assassination myself. I want the game to more subtly and intuitively lead the player along intended paths instead of using waypoints as a crutch. If AC is supposed to be about giving Desmond (the player) the confidence to step into the roles of the ancestors, then we need more places where we get an opportunity to “go off script” where players do their best to play the role of the ancestor, using everything they’ve obtained/learned up to this point to try to make the same decisions the ancestor would have. AC2 does not deliver on this and instead steered the franchise in a new, questionable direction.
