Assassin's Creed II: The open world that found its footing

Assassin’s Creed II shipped on 17 November 2009 for PS3 and Xbox 360, a PC version following in March 2010, and it exists because the first Assassin’s Creed had proven a parkour-and-stab fantasy people wanted while also proving, mission by mission, how little Ubisoft Montreal initially had to fill that fantasy with. Altaïr’s Holy Land was gorgeous and mechanically thin: every investigation before every assassination reduced to the same three flavours of tailing, eavesdropping and pickpocketing, repeated across nine near-identical targets. Assassin’s Creed II is the sequel that took the criticism seriously, and it remains the clearest example in the franchise of a studio diagnosing its own first attempt and rebuilding around the diagnosis rather than just shipping more of the same map.

Ezio is the fix nobody names first

The obvious headline change is Ezio Auditore da Firenze, a Florentine nobleman’s son who watches his father and two brothers hanged on false conspiracy charges and spends the game learning the Assassin creed his family kept from him, from callow rich kid to hardened operative across roughly two decades of in-game time. Altaïr was a blank, disciplined vessel; Ezio is vain, funny, grief-driven, and visibly changes shape as a person between Florence and Venice. That’s a structural fix as much as a writing one — a personality-free protagonist gave the first game’s player nothing to want beyond the next waypoint. Give the player a reason to care what happens to Ezio specifically, and the same climb-stab-flee loop underneath carries far more weight than it did a year earlier.

The performance underneath the writing matters too. Roger Craig Smith’s voice work gives Ezio a register the first game never had access to — wounded and sarcastic in the same scene, capable of genuine grief at his family’s execution and, three hours later, genuine delight at showing off a new gadget to Leonardo da Vinci. Ubisoft Montreal also solved a smaller but telling problem: Altaïr’s Assassin’s Guild in the first game was an abstraction, a fortress you occasionally reported to; Ezio’s mentors are named, specific people — his uncle Mario at Monteriggioni, Leonardo as inventor and confidant, Caterina Sforza and Rosa the thief guild leader — each occupying a distinct relationship to the plot rather than functioning as a quest-giver with a single line of dialogue.

The villa is the real invention

The mechanical addition that mattered more than any weapon, though, was Monteriggioni. Ezio’s uncle Mario gives him a ruined family villa to rebuild, and money spent renovating its shops, market and defences generates a passive income that grows the more of the town you restore — turning exploration and combat rewards, which had nowhere useful to go in the first game beyond the next assassination, into capital you’re actively investing. It’s a small, unambitious economy by the standards of a dedicated management game, but it did something Ubisoft’s open worlds have leaned on ever since: it gave collectibles and side income an actual sink, a reason a player who’s finished the story keeps circling back to the map.

Layered on top of that is the Glyph puzzle system, a series of symbol-decoding minigames hidden in murals and tied to a mysterious Subject 16 from the modern-day Abstergo frame story, each one solved puzzle unlocking a short video that reframes the whole Animus conceit as evidence of a coming global catastrophe. It’s a strange, only-2009 kind of metagame — puzzles about crop circles and the Mayan calendar sitting inside a Renaissance murder story — but it gave the much-maligned present-day sections, which most players tolerated rather than enjoyed, an actual mechanical hook rather than just cutscenes to sit through between assassinations.

Da Vinci’s workshop is the third leg of the economy, and it’s the one that best demonstrates how deliberately Ubisoft Montreal was reading its own first game’s complaints. Bring Leonardo the Codex pages Altaïr hid across Italy and he reverse-engineers new equipment from them — a poison blade, a hidden gun, improved armour — turning a pure collectible hunt into a gear-progression system with a face and a workshop attached to it. It’s a small piece of design, easy to take for granted now that nearly every open-world game since has some version of an inventor NPC turning scavenged junk into upgrades, but in 2009 it was a genuinely new answer to the question of what a climbing-and-stabbing game does with everything it asks you to pick up along the way.

The city design itself deserves separate credit. Florence, San Gimignano’s medieval tower skyline, Forlì’s fortress and Venice’s canal-threaded rooftops are each built around a distinct silhouette and a distinct climbing rhythm — Florence’s Duomo is the tallest, most theatrical single climb in the game and functions almost as a tutorial boss for verticality, while Venice trades height for density, its canals forcing you to think about water and gondolas as part of the traversal puzzle rather than obstacles to route around. That variety of city shape is one of the quieter reasons the map never collapses into the sameness the first game was criticised for, even across a campaign roughly twice the length.

The honest case against it

Combat never asked to be looked at too closely, and it still doesn’t reward the scrutiny. The core loop is a counter-attack system: wait for an enemy’s weapon to flash, press the counter button, watch a canned animation resolve the fight in Ezio’s favour, repeat against however many soldiers have surrounded you. It’s spectacle rather than challenge — you can chain-counter your way through five armed guards with minimal risk once you’ve learned the tell — and the series would spend the best part of a decade unable to shake that reputation, up through games as late as Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag still leaning on the same basic counter rhythm underneath a very different setting.

The side content is also only partly reformed. Courier missions, race challenges and the Glyph hunts are genuine variety, but a handful of the old tailing and pickpocketing missions from the first game survive intact, and the Codex-page collectibles that unlock Altaïr’s old armour set are a pure completionist grind with nothing built around them beyond the collecting itself. And the pacing of Ezio’s revenge plot sags in the Forlì and Venice stretch, where several missions exist mainly to introduce future-instalment characters — Caterina Sforza, the Barbarigo family, the deepening Borgia conspiracy — rather than to advance what’s in front of you.

The notoriety system, new to this game, is a good idea that never gets sharp enough teeth. Committing crimes in view of guards or town criers raises a wanted level, and you can bribe heralds, tear down wanted posters or bribe corrupt officials to lower it back down — a genuinely thoughtful simulation of a Renaissance city’s information network. But the actual consequence of high notoriety rarely rises above “guards notice you a bit faster,” and a player who never engages with the bribery-and-poster mini-loop at all suffers no meaningful penalty for ignoring it, which makes an otherwise clever system feel optional in a way its Florence-as-lived-space ambitions deserved better than.

The modern-day sections, for all the Glyph puzzles do to enliven them, still move at a crawl relative to the Renaissance plot surrounding them. Desmond spends most of the game confined to Abstergo’s Animus lab and a small research facility, and the handful of times the story lets him walk around and talk to Lucy or Vidic, the pacing stops dead for exposition that a tighter edit could have delivered in half the screen time. It’s the one part of the design Ubisoft Montreal hadn’t yet worked out how to make as compelling as the history it was framing.

Where it sits

Assassin’s Creed II’s real legacy is proving Ubisoft’s open-world formula could be fixed by addition rather than replacement — keep the parkour and the assassination fantasy, bolt on an economy and a character worth following, and the same city stops feeling like a checklist. That’s the exact same lesson Batman: Arkham City applied to its own open-world sequel a couple of years later, keeping Arkham Asylum’s combat intact while giving the player somewhere bigger and more purposeful to use it. Compare either to where the Assassin’s Creed formula ended up by Valhalla and Shadows, both of which inherited Ezio’s investment-loop DNA and grew it into something closer to a full RPG, for better and for considerably longer.

It’s worth remembering, too, how quickly Ubisoft moved to prove the fix wasn’t a one-off. Brotherhood followed barely a year later, folding Rome and a recruitable-assassin system into the same Ezio arc, and Revelations closed the trilogy out in Constantinople the year after that — an annual-release cadence that would eventually become one of the franchise’s own long-running criticisms, but which in 2010 and 2011 read as a studio that had genuinely found a formula and wanted to keep building on it while the ideas were fresh. Ezio himself became the character the whole early franchise measured against, to the point that later protagonists — Connor in AC3, Edward Kenway in Black Flag — were explicitly written to contrast with his warmth rather than repeat it, a strange kind of tribute for a series to pay its own second entry.

None of that erases how much of AC2’s texture is period detail doing quiet historical work. Leonardo da Vinci as an actual character, sketching flying machines Ezio gets to test decades before they’d fly for real, the Pazzi conspiracy and the historical hanging of the Florence conspirators loosely dramatised into the plot’s opening act, the Borgia family’s real documented ruthlessness supplying a Templar antagonist who barely needed embellishing — Ubisoft Montreal’s research team treated the Renaissance setting as more than scenery, and that specificity is a large part of why the game still reads as a place rather than a level fifteen years on.

Spoilers below

The endgame reveals that the entire Templar plot Ezio has been unravelling — Rodrigo Borgia’s pursuit of the Apple of Eden, an artefact of Precursor technology mistaken for a divine relic — connects directly to the modern-day plot, when Desmond, reliving Ezio’s memories in the Animus, is shown a message left by the Precursors warning of an imminent solar catastrophe. Ezio confronts Rodrigo inside the Sistine Chapel’s Vault and, in the game’s most pointed thematic beat, chooses not to kill him despite every reason to, on the grounds that killing him wouldn’t undo his father’s death and would only cement a cycle of vengeance the game has spent thirty hours complicating rather than endorsing.