While the real life members of the Pazzi Conspiracy were publicly executed, we’re playing as an Assassin. It’s only natural that the game fudges history to let us deliver justice.
I was looking for the exact moment where Roger Craig Smith switched from doing young Ezio’s voice to older Ezio’s voice, and I appear to have missed it. I can tell watching through this footage that he’s already begun to use the older Ezio’s voice in his performance. Credit to him because the transition is so natural that it slipped by me even as I was actively looking for it.
The other item worth pointing out is that while it wouldn’t be impossible to pull off a sequence like this in the original Assassin’s Creed’s structure, it would be difficult to do convincingly. As much as I would personally prefer that structure, this more linear, narrative-focused and mission-driven template allows the design team more flexibility with crafting the overall experience in exchange for reducing the degree of player freedom with each assassination mission.
Admittedly, I find it difficult to reconcile my desire to have more open-ended assassination missions, and investigations into each target, with the cold reality that with part of why Ezio is such a beloved character is because he goes through a strongly-defined arc over the course of the game. Said arc is made as powerful and affecting as it is precisely because Ubisoft’s development team can more rigidly define the order of events in a way they could not with Altair in the first game.
I think, even if it left me personally out in the cold, I respect the decisions that were ultimately made to move to this updated style. At the very least, it was obvious that Ubisoft still had immense respect for their original formula and tried to incorporate as much of it as they could while updating and iterating on it.
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