Assassin's Creed II

• 1. Introduction

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  Assassin's Creed II is a 2009 action-adventure game developed by Ubisoft Montreal and published by Ubisoft. It is the sequel to the 2007 game Assassin's Creed. Its hero is Ezio Auditore da Firenze, a young man in Renaissance Italy. His story reaches the player through the borrowed memories of a descendant living centuries later. What pushes Ezio into a decade-long hunt across Italy? What did the developers cut from the finished game, and how did it find its way back to players? And why did one version of the game provoke so much anger over a simple internet connection?

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• 2. A Family Betrayed

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  Ezio was born in 1459 into a wealthy Florentine family, and by 1476 he had grown into a charismatic but reckless young man. Then his father Giovanni and his brothers Federico and Petruccio are framed for treason and executed by a corrupt magistrate named Uberto Alberti. Ezio retrieves his father's Assassin equipment and kills Uberto in revenge. He and his surviving family, his mother Maria and his sister Claudia, flee Florence for their ancestral home in Monteriggioni. There his uncle Mario explains that the family belongs to the Assassin Brotherhood. Mario also reveals why Giovanni died. He had uncovered a conspiracy masterminded by the Templar Order, the Assassins' sworn enemies.

  A decade of pursuit follows Ezio's training, and most of his targets are Templars from noble families such as the Pazzi and the Barbarigos. Allies gather around him along the way. Leonardo da Vinci, an inventor, equips him with gear based on information left by the Assassin Altaïr Ibn-LaʼAhad. Lorenzo de' Medici, a statesman, owes Ezio his rescue from a Pazzi assassination plot. Caterina Sforza, the Countess of Forlì, joins them as well.

  The Templar Grand Master turns out to be Rodrigo Borgia, who plotted to control Italy and seize a powerful Apple of Eden. In 1488 Ezio intercepts the Apple and confronts him. Rodrigo says he intends to open "the Vault", which he believes will grant him god-like powers. He nearly overpowers Ezio, but he must flee and abandon the Apple when Ezio's allies arrive. Mario and other Assassins believe Ezio is "the Prophet" destined to open the Vault, and they formally induct him into the Brotherhood. Rodrigo had lost the Apple, but he had not given up on the Vault.

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• 3. Minerva's Warning

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  Desmond Miles, voiced by Nolan North, begins the game rescued from Abstergo by the undercover Assassin Lucy Stillman, played by Kristen Bell. She takes him to a safehouse and introduces her team. Shaun Hastings, voiced by Danny Wallace, is a historian and analyst. Rebecca Crane, voiced by Eliza Schneider, is the technician. The team has built its own Animus and plans to train Desmond as an Assassin through the "bleeding effect". That effect lets a user pick up an ancestor's skills at a rapid pace. Desmond is told to relive the memories of Ezio, voiced by Roger Craig Smith.

  Side effects of the bleeding effect soon reach Desmond, and he experiences a memory of Altaïr. Inside the Animus he finds glyphs that resemble drawings he found in his cell at Abstergo. When deciphered, they reveal a video of two human slaves stealing an Apple. The video ends with the ASCII codes for "EDEN". The team theorizes that the two humans are Adam and Eve, the first man and woman.

  Several memory sequences are too corrupted to access, so the team sends Desmond to the final memory, set in 1499. Ezio discovers that the Vault lies beneath the Papal Palace and infiltrates the Vatican. There he battles Rodrigo, now Pope Alexander VI, who wields the Papal Staff, another Piece of Eden. Ezio defeats him but spares his life, having overcome his desire for revenge. He then opens the Vault with the Apple and the Staff.

  The hologram of Minerva, voiced by Margaret Easley, greets him, and she knows that Desmond is listening. She explains that her people, the First Civilization, created humanity to serve them and were later destroyed by a catastrophe. The survivors joined forces with humanity and built a network of vaults to preserve their technology and prevent a future disaster. Before vanishing, Minerva tells Desmond that only he can fulfill the "prophecy". Both Desmond and Ezio are left confused.

  Warren Vidic, voiced by Philip Proctor, then leads Abstergo agents in an attack on the hideout, forcing the team to evacuate. On the way to a new location, Lucy tells Desmond that the Assassins have detected strange events in the Earth's magnetic field. A solar flare is scheduled in a few months, and it will likely trigger the same event that ended the First Civilization.

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• 4. Renaissance Italy Rebuilt

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  Five cities anchor the open world of Assassin's Creed II: Florence, Venice, Monteriggioni, San Gimignano and Forlì. The developers recreated each one to suit the game's late 15th-century setting. Between them lie the Apennine Mountains and the Romagna region, and the Vatican opens only for the final mission. Landmarks include St Mark's Basilica, the Rialto Bridge, Santa Maria del Fiore, the Sistine Chapel and the Ponte Vecchio. Horses can be ridden only outside the major cities, and gondolas appear most prominently in Venice. A carriage features in one mission involving Leonardo. Swimming is a new ability.

  Civilians in these streets behave more like real people than they did in the first game, and some can be caught coughing or sneezing. A day and night cycle gives the game a sense of time and places certain missions and events at particular hours. The Animus 2.0, an updated version of the machine from the first game, supplies the in-game reasons for these changes. It also offers a database of historical notes on landmarks, characters and services the player meets.

  Real figures from the period move through the story, including Leonardo da Vinci, Niccolò Machiavelli, Caterina Sforza, Bartolomeo d'Alviano and Pope Alexander VI. Whole families appear too, among them the Medici, the Pazzi, the Barbarigo and the Loredan.

  At the Auditore family villa in Monteriggioni, Ezio keeps his personal headquarters. The grounds hold vendors who sell medicine, weapons and clothing dyes. Earned florins pay for upgrades, which bring discounts at the shops and increase the passive income the villa generates over time. That income piles up in a chest inside the villa and must be collected regularly. Buying paintings and upgrades for Ezio also raises the villa's overall worth.

  Roughly 150 missions fill the game, and two thirds of them belong to the main storyline. The rest are optional side quests such as assassination contracts and races. Mission structure varies, so an escort job might turn into a chase and then an assassination. Investigations are less explicit, and missions often follow people or a narrative instead. The cities also hide catacombs and caves, which the developers compared to the Prince of Persia series. Exploring them rewards the player with an Assassin's Seal. Collecting all six unlocks the Armor of Altaïr, stored in a concealed section of the villa.

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• 5. Leonardo's Arsenal

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  A young Leonardo da Vinci translates the Codex pages that Altaïr, the first game's hero, left behind for future Assassins. From those schematics he builds specialized weapons for Ezio. They include dual hidden blades, poison blades and the hidden gun, a miniature wheellock firearm. His flying machine, based on real-life aeroplanes, can be piloted during one mission.

  Unarmed, Ezio can disarm opponents with counter-attacks, which makes combat more complex than in the first game. If he steals an enemy's weapon, he can follow up with an attack that kills instantly. Vendors in every city sell generic swords, cutlasses, maces, axes and daggers. The player can also grab improvised weapons such as brooms or halves of a spear. Ezio can even mock an enemy during a fight.

  Mercenaries, courtesans and thieves can be hired to fight, distract and lure guards, respectively. Money thrown on the ground, or a corpse that has been carried and dropped, also works as a distraction. Enemies come in several types, some more agile or stronger than others. Some of them search the hiding places where Ezio was last seen. Ezio can dive underwater to break a guard's line of sight. He can also blend with any group of people, rather than one specific type as in the first game.

  A notoriety system makes guards more alert depending on Ezio's behavior, location and current mission. Bribery, removing wanted posters and assassinating corrupt officials all reduce that infamy. Health works differently too. Synchronization with the Animus means the character recovers only from minor injuries, while grievous wounds need a street-side doctor or medicine. Medicine can be bought from doctors or found on bodies. Eagle Vision, the ability to identify specific people and landmarks, now works in third-person view and while moving. Larger pouches carry more throwing knives and medicine. Players can also buy artwork for the villa, find new armor and dye Ezio's clothing.

  Owners of the PlayStation 3 version could connect the console to a PlayStation Portable holding a copy of Assassin's Creed: Bloodlines. Doing so unlocked six additional weapons.

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• 6. Building the Game

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  Yves Guillemot of Ubisoft confirmed on the 26th of November 2008, during the company's financial performance report, that the sequel was in development. Michael Pachter then speculated on the GameTrailers show "Bonus Round" that the setting would shift to the French Revolution. That guess turned out to be false. Work had begun shortly after the first game's release, using a newly updated Anvil game engine.

  In April, Ubisoft released a promotional video showing a skull, hidden blade designs and Leonardo da Vinci's flying machine on a scroll. On the 16th of April, Game Informer published details and pictures of Ezio, a new teaser trailer appeared, and Ubisoft officially announced the game. In an interview in May 2009, Sebastien Puel said the team had grown to 450 members, triple the size of the first game's team. On the 1st of June 2009, a four-minute cinematic trailer debuted at E3. The next day Ubisoft showed a six-minute live gameplay demo at the Sony Press Conference. Creative director Patrice Desilets told GameTrailers that Desmond would do more than walk around and discover clues.

  At Comic-Con 2009, Ubisoft revealed that the humorist Danny Wallace would voice a new character, the sarcastic historian Shaun Hastings. The character's face would be modeled after his own.

  On the 24th of September 2009, Ubisoft announced that the PC version would slip to the first quarter of 2010. The company said the team needed "a bit more time for the dev team to deliver the best quality game." The game reached PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in November 2009, Windows in March 2010 and OS X in October 2010.

  Two chapters, The Battle of Forlì and Bonfire of the Vanities, were cut from the game because of time constraints. Ubisoft announced the first on the 1st of December 2009 as the first of several downloadable expansions for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. It arrived on the 28th of January 2010, and the second followed on the 18th of February 2010. In the story they appear as Sequences 12 and 13, placed right before the final memory, Sequence 14. The game explains their absence by saying the Animus corrupted several memory sequences, which Rebecca later repaired with a computer patch.

  The Battle of Forlì begins in 1488, soon after Ezio takes the Apple from Rodrigo. Ezio, Mario, Leonardo and the Assassin Niccolò Machiavelli decide to send the Apple to Caterina Sforza in Forlì. The city is besieged by mercenaries led by Checco and Ludovico Orsi, hired by Rodrigo to obtain a map made by Caterina's late husband. The map shows where Altaïr's Codex pages are, and those pages lead to the Vault. The brothers kidnap Caterina's children. Ezio kills Ludovico and rescues the children, but Checco steals the Apple. Ezio kills Checco and recovers it, only to be stabbed while a black-robed stranger takes the Apple again. After Caterina nurses him back to health, Ezio takes the map and follows a trail to a monastery. There an abbot names the thief as Girolamo Savonarola. The expansion was meant to flesh out Caterina, who had only a minor role in the base game. It also holds the only replayable memory in the game, with Ezio piloting Leonardo's flying machine over Forlì.

  By 1497, after searching for Savonarola and the Apple for nearly a decade, Ezio finds them in Florence. The friar has used the Apple to remove the Medici from power. Ezio plans to draw him out by assassinating his nine lieutenants, who preach in the city during the bonfire of the vanities. The angry crowd turns into a mob, and Savonarola comes out to preach to them. When that fails, he tries to use the Apple on the crowd, but Ezio disarms him with a throwing knife. The mob carries Savonarola to the Piazza della Signoria to burn him at the stake. Ezio believes no one deserves such a painful fate, so he ends the friar's life with a stab to the neck from his hidden blade. He then tells the confused crowd that everyone should follow their own path, as his mentors taught him. The expansion also opens Florence's southern district, which the base game keeps closed. Later re-releases of the game include both expansions, with no option to skip them.

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• 7. Selling Ezio

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  On the 20th of October 2009, Ubisoft announced a series of short films for YouTube called Assassin's Creed: Lineage. Ubisoft's Hybride Technologies, which had previously worked on the films 300 and Sin City, developed the three parts. They mix live action with computer-generated imagery and serve as a prequel to the game, with most of its cast. The story focuses on Ezio's father, Giovanni Auditore. The first film arrived on the 27th of October 2009, and the other two followed on the 13th of November 2009.

  On the 12th of November 2009, themed virtual items arrived on PlayStation Home to promote the game and Assassin's Creed: Bloodlines for the PSP. Xbox Live Marketplace received avatar items and an Ezio costume. More items reached PlayStation Home on the 19th of November and the 3rd of December. An Ezio costume that players could wear around PlayStation Home arrived on the 26th of November. Ezio's Purple Assassin costume reached LittleBigPlanet on the 8th of December. A trailer called Visions of Venice used the song Genesis by Justice. Penguin Books published a novel based on the game, Assassin's Creed: Renaissance by Oliver Bowden, in November 2009.

  Jesper Kyd composed the score, and it was recorded at Capitol Records with a 35-piece string ensemble and a 13-person choir. Melissa Kaplan sang the featured vocals. The soundtrack became available as a download on the 16th of November 2009. Fourteen of its tracks also came on a disc with the special pre-order Black Edition.

  The Black Edition, sold in Europe and Australia, packs an Ezio figurine in a black outfit. It also includes three bonus areas and missions, an art book, a premium console theme, behind-the-scenes videos and two desktop wallpapers. The White Edition has one bonus area and mission and a figurine of Ezio in white. The North American Master Assassin's Edition has a figurine, two bonus areas, an art book and a Blu-ray with music and behind-the-scenes videos.

  Fans complained that earning 100 percent synchronization required three Templar Lairs available only in the White or Black Edition. Those lairs are Palazzo Medici, Santa Maria dei Frari and the Arsenal Shipyard. Ubisoft answered with the Complete Edition, which adds download codes for both expansions and the three lairs. A Game of the Year Edition later put the extras on the game disc. A digital-only Deluxe Edition followed, sold on PlayStation Network for PlayStation 3 and through the Epic Games Store and Steam for PC.

  Assassin's Creed II was the first game linked to Ubisoft's Uplay feature. Progress through the game earns points that redeem rewards, including a new crypt to explore, an Altaïr costume and five additional throwing knives. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Ubisoft's Play Your Part, Play At Home campaign let PC users redeem a free digital copy of the game.

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• 8. Acclaim and Backlash

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  On Metacritic, the PlayStation 3 version scored 91 and the Xbox 360 version scored 90. That made it the highest-rated game in the franchise on the site. Reviews were universally positive on those two consoles and generally favourable on PC. Official Xbox Magazine gave the game 9 out of 10, and the American Official PlayStation Magazine gave it a perfect score. Its British counterpart gave 9 out of 10. Jeremy Parish of 1Up.com gave the game an A-minus. He wrote: "AC2 is everything a sequel ought to be: An improvement on the original in nearly every way."

  The German magazine Computer Bild Spiele reported that the game's publishers offered a pre-release copy if the magazine would guarantee a review score of "very good". The magazine refused and chose to delay its review instead.

  Ubisoft announced that the game sold 1.6 million copies worldwide in its first week. That was a 32 percent increase over the first-week retail performance of the original. As of May 2010 the game had sold 9 million copies. At the 2009 Spike Video Game Awards it won Best Action Adventure Game. IGN named it Action Game of the Year for Xbox 360 and Xbox 360 Game of the Year, and Game Informer also named it Xbox 360 Game of the Year. GamePro and The New York Times gave it Game of the Year. At the 13th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards, it earned nominations including Game of the Year and Adventure Game of the Year. It also drew nominations at the Game Developers Choice Awards and a place in the 2010 book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die.

  GameSpot reviewed the PC version and called it "fun and beautiful", yet found the higher price hard to justify. It said Ubisoft's copy protection hindered the game, which "deserved better. For that matter, PC gamers deserved better too." The Windows version used Ubisoft's Uplay platform, whose digital rights management initially required a constant internet connection. In the first retail version, any progress after the last checkpoint was lost if the connection dropped. Overseas members of the U.S. military also criticized the system, because sporadic and expensive connections kept them from playing.

  Shortly after the Windows release, Ubisoft said the game had not been cracked. Over the following weekend, the servers for Silent Hunter 5 and Assassin's Creed II were hit by a denial-of-service attack, according to Ubisoft. The company said "95 per cent of players were not affected". A server emulator to overcome the system was developed, and a cracked file that bypassed the connection requirement appeared in late April. To make amends, Ubisoft offered Windows owners the extras from the Black Edition, or a free copy of Heroes Over Europe, Tom Clancy's EndWar, Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X or Prince of Persia (2008).

  In December 2010 the system changed, so the player had to connect to the internet only when launching the game. In 2012 Ubisoft announced a patch to remove internet access as a requirement to play. The Windows version now needs a one-time online activation, after which the game, its activation key and the Uplay account are bound together and it can be played offline. The OS X version was not affected by these changes. It still requires a constant connection, and players still lose progress if it is disrupted.

  The game spawned two direct sequels, Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood in 2010 and Assassin's Creed: Revelations in 2011. A spin-off, Assassin's Creed II: Discovery, appeared in 2009. Assassin's Creed: Bloodlines was also released alongside it. Brotherhood continued directly after the events of the game and took place primarily in Rome. It was released on the 16th of November 2010 and added an online multiplayer mode. Its primary antagonist is Cesare Borgia, Rodrigo Borgia's son.

  Talk about Assassin's Creed III began before the second game even came out. Staff considered a female descendant in England during World War II, but co-writer Corey May said the series would never visit that period. Ubisoft's Philippe Bergeron named medieval England in the era of King Arthur and feudal Japan as possible settings. On the 1st of March 2012, the setting was revealed as colonial Boston during the American Revolution, with a Native American protagonist named Ratonhnaké:ton. That game was released in October 2012.

  Remastered versions of Assassin's Creed II, Brotherhood and Revelations were released as The Ezio Collection on the 15th of November 2016 for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. The remaster supports UHD resolution on the PS4 Pro. Online service for the original game closed on the 1st of June 2021. The Ezio Collection reached the Nintendo Switch on the 17th of February 2022.

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