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Shepard's Video-Game Pie - Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood Is Out

  Back in October, Ubisoft flew me--and other reviewers--to Rome to preview Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood. The first day they brought us to the Palazzo Taverna, a historical structure dating back to the 1500s and once owned by Lucrezia Borgia, daughter of Rodrigo "Evil Pope" Borgia and one of the characters in the game. There, the Ubisoft reps served us lunch and gave us access to a preview of the game, showcasing the first several sequences as well as a later one, and also the game's multiplayer. Finally, some of the game's production team were on hand for interviews and general chat. All the Assassin's Creed games are, at heart, platforming adventurers, the spiritual successors to Ubisoft's earlier Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time series. They're also science fiction, sometimes near-future technothriller, and sometimes historical conspiracy. The series' central protagonist is Desmond Miles, a modern Assassin and descendant of Assassins (in the sense of the historical Arabic Hashishin sect, not small-a assassins who kill for money) who uses a machine called the Animus to explore his own genetic memory. For most of the game, you-the-player control Desmond's ancestors in historical settings, fighting an ages-long war between the Assassins and their enemies, the Knights Templar. In the present, Desmond occasionally fights the Abstergo Corporation, the modern inheritors of the Templar legacy. In Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, Desmond ventures into the memories of his Italian ancestor Ezio Auditore da Firenze, the historical protagonist of AC2. The game opens with a prologue that picks up at exactly the point where AC2 finished: Desmond is accessing Ezio's memories in the Animus, which is in a van fleeing a compromised safehouse. Ezio has just finished beating the Pope in a fistfight and discovering an ancient pre-human temple under the Vatican, and now he has to flee with his uncle Mario back to his villa in the small Italian city-state of Monteriggioni. The game starts by giving you every powerup you had at AC2's ending, and then takes them away from you one by one as Cesare Borgia's army overwhelms Ezio's villa and wrecks everything he owns, ultimately leaving him destitute and injured on the road back to Rome and revenge, again.

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Following the prologue is a decent section set in the present, with Desmond and fellow Assassin Lucy working together to navigate the modern ruins of Ezio's villa. This resembles the self-contained "Assassin's Tomb" environments from AC2, and in voice acting recalls the snarky flirting between the Prince and Farah in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. Brotherhood evidently contains more than just one sequence playing as Desmond in the present, and unlike the first Assassin's Creed, ones that involve more than just walking slowly around a room. Following that, Desmond straps himself back into the Animus and explores Ezio's memories of his return to Rome, meeting Niccolo Machiavelli (his rival for control of the Assassins' Brotherhood) and starting the overthrow of the oppressive Borgia rule of the city. And now an explanation of game mechanics. The big publicized new feature is the way Ezio is now the head of an Assassin's guild. You can find and rescue anti-Borgia rebels and recruit them as Assassins, sending them to Machiavelli for training, and then summon them to kill your targets. You can also send them out beyond Rome to perform assassination missions, which earns your minions experience points you can use to upgrade their offense or defense. Calling Assassins to help you in the field seems to be based on a timer—every time interval, you get a minion token, which you can use to summon two of them. What I noticed more, though, was the change to the combat system. The Assassin's Creed games have always had combat that's easy to learn and tough to master. You can win almost every fight just by mashing the attack button, but if you want to win stylishly, there's assassination kills, counterattack-kills, multiple weapons, disarms, throws, throw-reversals, taunts, etc. Brotherhood adds the assassination string—if you kill an enemy with an assassination-type kill, either by being sneaky or performing a counterattack, you can instantly assassinate a second target by holding your analog stick in his direction and hitting attack while the murdering animation plays out on the target you're killing right now. In theory, this means you could chain together an assassination string long enough to kill every guard in a group, but unlike in previous AC games, in Brotherhood enemies can attack you while you're you're performing a kill, and if you get hit during an attack with a long animation, you get knocked out of it. Stringing together more than two assassinations means paying close attention to every enemy around you and picking your targets. I'm really looking forward to getting good enough at assassination strings that I can chain together eight or nine kills. Multiplayer also looks interesting. The Assassin's Creed games are huge endeavors--lots of separate teams working on different components. The team that did the Assassin's Tombs in AC2 didn't handle the open city bits. Brotherhood's multiplayer comes to us from the team who handled the Splinter Cell games' multiplayer. Remember Splinter Cell 2 team-based competitive multiplayer? With one team playing a first-person shooter and the other team playing a third-person sneaker trying to hide from the big-gunned soldiers? There was nothing else like it on the market. It was, as they say, critically acclaimed.

Brotherhood's multiplayer is likewise different from standard multiplayer. Everyone chooses a character archetype, and you spawn in a map with the other players plus a ton of computer-controlled bystanders who use the same character models—so at any given time, a map might have five or ten hooded executioners, only one of whom is human-controlled. Everyone has one target; everyone is someone else's target. Your goal is to figure out which of the characters is your human-controlled target, while not drawing attention to yourself since one of the other players is hunting you. You get points for killing your target or escaping from the person hunting you. I played it for maybe 45 minutes. It's neat. On our second day in Rome, we toured the city and visited the Colosseum and the Pantheon, both of which are in the game, as well as the Forum which isn't, as it was still buried during the 1500s. We ate big meals (fried sea-snails!) with far more wine than I'm accustomed to, and I had a lot of really interesting conversations with Brotherhood's writer Jeffrey Yohalem. I think I'm a fan of the Assassin's Creed games for slightly different reasons than most people. They have great gameplay and an extraordinary level of polish, but lots of games have those. Unlike most games, though, they're very smart. The first Assassin's Creed starts out by claiming that the titular Creed is a set of three rules 1) Don't hurt innocent bystanders, 2) Stay hidden, and 3) Don't betray the Assassins. This is a lie. The Assassin's Creed is this: "Nothing is true; everything is permitted," a quote historically attributed to Hassan-i Sabbah, the real historical founder of the real historical Hashishin sect. The first Assassin's Creed game, as a narrative, is about what that means and specifically how it means different things to different people. At the beginning of the game, Altaïr thinks the Creed is a license to do whatever the hell he wants, including ignoring the three rules, and he's an asshole. Over the course of the game, he puzzles out with the help of his mentor that it actually means not to place unquestioning faith in any external dogma, and serves as a reminder that since nothing will ultimately prevent you from doing whatever you can get away with, you'd best cultivate a sense of personal responsibility strong enough to ensure you don't take action you might later regret. Then at the end of the game his mentor betrays him and reveals that this is all bullshit, and actually the Assassin's Creed is just a license to do whatever the hell you want since no one can stop you. Altaïr finishes the game by deliberately rejecting al-Mualim's final revelation and choosing to live according to his earlier conclusion about the Creed's meaning.

This is actually significantly smarter than most video game writing—for starters, it's an accurate portrayal of the multiple layers of initiation real cults put their followers through--"Yeah, what we said last time was a lie, just one you needed to hear because you weren't ready for the truth yet like you are now"—and much more sophisticated than the writing in ACII, which was good but was ultimately just a bog-standard story about a young man coming of age while pursuing a revenge quest. Unfortunately, ACI game delivered its narrative through long, unskipable cutscenes. I didn't mind, but this annoyed a lot of people, including, as it turns out, Jeffrey Yohalem, who wants Brotherhood's narrative delivered in ways more suited to gaming's strengths as a medium. Yohalem talked about writing the whole game as a treatise on leadership, and what makes a good leader versus what makes a leader who merely seems good. He talked about deliberately opting out of the obvious path for the rivalry between Ezio and Machiavelli, and making them intellectual rivals, each of whom strives to win the other over to his point of view while working together, instead of just making Machiavelli the twist villain at the end. What I saw of Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood was a game that might very well have all the ambition of the first game in the series and all the polish of the second. Like every preview, what I was shown might not accurately reflect the final product, but the whole time I was there I didn't see a damn thing wrong with the game. I'm excited for this one. STEPHEN LEA SHEPPARD