IGN’s article about 5 new things in Assassin’s Creed II (i’ll be going step by step down the list)
5. You can swim.
- ok, so in the first gane you’d be trying to kill a templar who was waiting patiently deep in the harbor on a boat. in order to reach him, you had to jump from pillar to pillar across water and of course youd flick the damn joystick wrong pre-jump and fall in the water and die. weren’t you pissed? i was. anyways, now you can swim and even use water a s a tool for hiding from gaurds as well as killing them. you can now pull guards over the ledges beside bodies of water, i presume in the same way you could pull the gaurd off the lighthouse ledge in the first level of splinter cell 3 (the end of that series, as far as im concerned). im glad they changed this, because things like swimming or jumping are something i would refer to as essential gameplay functions. water is just water, designers, dont be lazy, just make it work.
4. The notoriety system
- i actualy had no beef with this in the first game, but it has nonetheless been changed, and i agree, for the better. you are now able to tell your wanted level aside from your visibility, which is cool because it means you can now manage a high wanted level by being more mellow during environment navigation. i think this is an outstanding change, but not something im going to rant about.
3. Fast Travel
- i rather enjoyed plodding through assassin’s creed by horseback, and when you were done with a misson, you were automatically sent back to the chapel, which was perfect. It removed the unecesary travel rather than just negating travel alltogether. you can now trnasport to specific sides of a city if you wish not to travel, and that makes it very convenient when accesssing the town that you will own, and i imagine, imProxy-Connection: keep-alive Cache-Control: max-age=0 ove gradualy, in this sequel. i think if you fast travel everywhere, your going to miss out on alot of the game. travel was a large part of the first assassin’s creed and without it, you would never discover half of the smaller non-critical objectives, such as the flags or killing the templars, etc. i will be using this feature, but only in moderation. it’s tough to do a fast travel system and a normal way of traveling because it negates the latter, but hopefully ubisoft has found a way to manage the two options.
4. Yea, you own your own town
- IGN was sort of vague about the details for repairing it, but you do have a town of your own with a chapel, weapons dealers, and the like. its a neat idea, i just hope you can use it thorughout ost of the game instead of not being able to fully utilize it until the last mission or so. thats pretty tight, but i dont understand why an assassin would need to or even be capable of owning his own town. perhaps i will find out.
5. you can bust a cabbage open
- IGN has a picture of you about to hit a gaurd with a mace, and the floowing picture is the point of contact. thats pretty awesome, especially if its satisfying to do. they also mention you can disarm gaurds and use their axes and whatnot against them, though i fail to see why i would choose to actively fight guards with their own weapons when mine are designd for murder. we’ll see how this goes, but i dont see this feature being something that could go wrong. it’s mostly just cool. and thats essentially videogames.
as always, here’s the video link. check out those city environments, right? right.

sick, sick, sick.