You can lead a Borgia to water, and then stab him with a hidden blade.
That’s how the saying goes, right? If not, that’s how it probably should go.
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I want to take a moment to appreciate the artistry of the scene. On the outside, it’s treated as any other story mission, and by now when the player sees the prompt, even if they aren’t reading the text saying that there’s trouble, we’ve already seen courtesans get murdered by guardsman both here and in Assassin’s Creed 2. The designers know this, and so that seeds in us the expectation that we’ll need to rescue or avenge Claudia in some way.
The cutscene then doubles down on this, with the girls crying and reporting to Ezio that they were attacked by guards who followed them back to the brothel. Yet another way they prime us to expect that we’ll need to take action, as Ezio barges through the door, only to find that Claudia is perfectly safe, having already killed the guards who went after her courtesans.
And to top it off, she seems almost surprised that we expected anything less of her, prompting both of them to end their sibling rivalry so that they can work together in earnest. It doubles both as a fun way to subvert the player’s expectations while advancing Claudia’s character arc as she steps out of Ezio’s shadow and becomes a capable character all on her own.
It’s a fitting capstone to the sequence, as we move onto the next one.
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