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Assassin's Creed 2: Blending fiction with history

• By Patrick Shaw
• November 04, 2009 12:27 PM PST
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Assassin's Creed 2 director talks about blending history with fiction and how they learned from the first game's mistakes.

In this exclusive interview with Assassin's Creed 2 creative director Patrice Desilets, he highlights the challenges of recreating Renaissance-era Italy, fixing the first game's most glaring problems, and how the series' main creed of "nothing is true, everything is permitted" is something that you can apply to everyday life.

GP: Assassin's Creed 2 now takes place in Italy. Why did you decide to bring the franchise there?

Patrice: The main motivation to bring the Assassin's Creed series from the Holy Land to Italy has to do with the backstory of the original game. In the first AC, we introduced the story of Desmond, which is set in the present. He's hooked up to the Animus, which allowed him to explore his DNA and relive the life of his ancestor Altair.

For the sequel, we needed a new ancestor and thought "where do we go and where can we take our game that'll be as cool as the Crusades?" We did our research and brainstorming and finally thought of Italy, which is a really beautiful place. We could do the Italian Renaissance, bring that world to life and it would make for a great fantasy. It would also be easy to find a link between the Middle East and Italy.

GP: AC2 is not just set in a different place, but it also takes place over two-hundred years after the events of the original game. How did you retain the look and feel of the original despite the significant changes in location and period?

Patrice: There are two hundred years between the two games, but there wasn't a huge change in history. Basically, the Renaissance is the end of the Middle Ages. It's not like we went from the Crusades in the Middle East to the middle of Los Angeles. One of the reasons we chose the Renaissance was because it still had the back alleys and merchant stands that are a staple of the AC series. The colors of Italy were something that we had to come up with, though. It's something that's quite unique. Making a game is a big challenge, but making the jump between the two time periods wasn't.

There's also a link between the two main characters, Altair from the first Assassin's Creed and Ezio from Assassin's Creed 2. But I won't reveal what those links are right now. This universe we're building, though, makes sense. It's real. Cory May, the scriptwriter of both games and I worked extremely hard to ensure that the story made sense. So, you have to play through both Assassin's Creed games to understand it all. Now, with the second one you'll understand a bit more about what went on in the first game such as further explanation about the assassins, the Templars, the pieces of Eden, and what's going on with Desmond.

It's a sequel, but there's a brand new story at the same time, the story of Ezio and the assassins.

GP: Climbing buildings and then leaping off them was one of the most satisfying things to do in the first Assassin's Creed. Were you able to implement more gravity-defying gameplay due to the new architecture?

Patrice: One of the main differences between the two games is how tall the buildings are. Italy's locales gave us this layer that we didn't have in the first game. In the original Assassin's Creed, we had buildings that were three stories tall. In this game, we have buildings as tall as five-stories. You can perform much longer stretches of free running than in the first game. Without the Italian Renaissance and its buildings, the gameplay would be quite different.

GP: Italy's architecture has undergone a lot of changes since the Italian Renaissance. How did you go about filling in all the blanks?

Patrice: Well, the key landmarks in Assassin's Creed 2 are still there today, but for everything else we had to create generic buildings that we could use like Lego blocks. We combined structures together this way to make our own landmarks. For example, the house of the Auditore, Ezio's family, is not a real landmark that you can visit in Florence. We created streets and houses this way. The locations in Assassin's Creed 2 are as accurate as we could make them -- they're not perfectly accurate because it's still a video game and there are some technical constraints with the Xbox 360 and PS3's hardware.

Marcello Simonetta, the historian who's written books about Italian history and served as our tour guide in Italy, was even impressed by the authenticity of the game. He noted that we've done an amazing job of making Assassin's Creed 2 feel like Italy back then.

GP: How many real buildings did you recreate in the game?

Patrice: Assassin's Creed 2 was not done with numbers in mind, so it's tough to give you an actual number. It's not like the first game where you had three cities, nine assassinations, and so on. There are a ton of buildings in Assassin's Creed 2, though.

We had to pick our battles when recreating Florence because there were too many landmarks in the same location.

Italy's cities aren't large and vast like major cities in the United States. They're all crammed together, so we had to decide which ones to cut in order to make room for others.

We reused some structures from the first game, but only a few. Something that I'm proud of is that in AC2, you can see big architectural differences between Florence, Venice, and Tuscany. We actually had to put forth the same amount of effort every time we created a new city for Assassin's Creed 2.

GP: Several historical figures appear in the game like Leonardo Da Vinci and Machiavelli. What were some of the challenges you faced when blending historical figures with fiction?

Patrice: We knew how to blend the two this time around. In the first game, it was a bit more difficult. We didn't know where to stop when dealing with history. For Ezio in Assassin's Creed 2, we put together the entire timeline for his character. We determined his birthday and his death, and then had to put in what historical events happened during his life.

The historical side is much more present in this game. The main story is Ezio's, but there are historical events that you will play a part in, such as the Pazzi Conspiracy. This was when the Pazzi family tried to replace the Medici family, the rulers of Florence during the 15th century. This important date in Italian history -- April 26, 1478 -- is the basis for an actual mission in the game.

We used historical moments for mission designs. We've ironed out the kinks in storytelling from the first game. When you play the sequel, you'll see that we really know our subject this time around. At the end of the first Assassin's Creed, I didn't have the smile that I have now. I was really torn apart and now I'm a lot more relaxed because I believe we have made the best Assassin's Creed ever.

GP: The assassins from the first game lived by a creed comprised of three tenants: don't compromise the brotherhood; don't kill the innocent; be discrete. Does Ezio live by this too?

Patrice: Not really. This time around the creed is less up front and less of a factor. It's more about Ezio, who doesn't even have a clue they exist at first. We put the creed on the side. There's still the main creed of "nothing is true, everything is permitted." I hope this is something that the player kept from the original Assassin's Creed. It's not just a creed in a video game... this may sound weird but it's a main truth of life. Everything around us is an illusion and you can do whatever the hell you want with it.

We're now in Italy because we decided to make this game. Suddenly, you and I are here. It's because "nothing is true, everything is permitted."

GP: Before earning his assassin status, Ezio's story in the game begins while he's still a young nobleman. Can explain how he gradually evolves into a hardened assassin as the game progresses?

Patrice: We based the game's structure around Ezio. At the beginning of the game, he doesn't have all of the skills of an assassin, which is very different from the first game. He'll meet people who'll teach him the skills.

Ezio is a prodigy, though. I wanted the protagonist to be someone who's special. He'll use his talents to be even better than Altair. Ezio is actually much more advanced than Altair by the end of the game. It'd be nice to have a fight between the two to see who'd win, but that's impossible. The Animus is not a time traveling machine, but more like a Blu-ray or DVD player. Once you decode the DNA, you're stuck with those memories.

That's why we made it so that when you do something differently from the way Ezio would remember it, the game "desynchronizes." For instance, if you lose a race in the game, we're not going with the standard video game convention of a game over. Ezio actually won the race in his real memory, so you have to too.

GP: One of the biggest criticisms of Assassin's Creed was that it lacked variety and suffered from repetitive gameplay. Have you addressed this in the sequel?

Patrice: I think mission variety is one of the main things we worked on with the second game. The reason there wasn't as much variety in the first Assassin's Creed was because we didn't have the proper tools to implement it. We came up with set mission types and then reused them, just putting them in different locations. Some players didn't mind the repetition, but others saw this and didn't like what we did.

With the original Assassin's Creed, you also had the story in the beginning of the game and not a whole lot changed until you got to the end of the game. It was always the same structure and you were constantly doing the same thing.

The story in Assassin's Creed 2 is much more compelling, so we had to create new tools for better mission types. Even as early as the beginning of the game, we have a courier mission, a fighting mission, and a race. These weren't in the first game.

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