Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood – Part 1-2

As we will soon discover, choosing to spare the Pope’s life after breaking into the Vatican itself for the express purpose of killing him certainly won’t have any negative repercussions.

I have faith that Ezio and his family won’t suffer for this in any way.

Streamed at https://www.twitch.tv/newdarkcloud

Well. We’re all going to be wrong some times.

Jokes aside, the decision to have Ezio spare Rodrigo’s life at the end of Assassin’s Creed 2 is emblematic of what I mean when I say the development team wasn’t prepared to make another Ezio game. Though I personally disagree with it, and did so even at the time, it is a choice that signals a capstone in Ezio’s character arc. It shows how he’s grown from a young man with a thirst for vengeance into an Assassin with the wisdom to only take life when it is necessary, and at no other times.

We have to hand wave away all of the guards we slaughtered to get there, but that’s a separate conversation. For now, let us just accept that this can easily be a fitting character moment to end our time with him. If Ezio’s tale ends there, we don’t have to think about the consequences of that action. And since he had to live in order to pass on his genetic memory, we can presume that he lives a long and happy life afterwards, as suggested in the intro for Brotherhood.

Unfortunately, despite the obvious narrative impetus to move on to another ancestor (or, as the premise might suggest, the Modern Day starring Desmond), that wasn’t the end of Ezio’s tale. Instead, it was decided that a new game would need to be developed in a year, and thus the team had no choice but to tap back into Ezio’s story.

So that previous decision, which would work as the finale of an arc, now has to be reckoned with a way it was clearly never intended. As the player, we are now forced to reckon with the inevitable, ruinous aftermath of this choice, and dissect its consequences. The mere premise of continuing with Ezio invites the kind of scrutiny that could have otherwise been avoided, and now the writing team has to scramble to backfill a justification that wouldn’t have been necessary otherwise.

I’d say they didn’t do a great job of it, but the reality is that given the problem and the resources/time they had, the cold truth is that the writer and development team like did the best they could in the situation they were given.