Producer Sebastien Puel talks exclusively to NowGamer about all the new features in Ubisoft's sequel

Although it’s difficult to admit mistakes, Ubisoft appears to have taken a very mature approach towards collective negative feedback from the community about the first game. What do you feel are the most improved elements in this sequel?
It’s not hard to recognise mistakes, but when you’re trying something this ambitious it’s hard to get it perfect first time around. The first game brought something new to the industry by bringing scripted environments and open environments together but when we started Assassin’s Creed II we recognised that our focus was on the diversity and variety of the experience. We looked at every part of the game and asked ourselves how we could bring more depth and variety to it. For example, there’s an assassin preparation, we completely redid that and have allowed it to be driven by the story, we make sure there are a much broader set of objectives and mechanisms to do, so there’s no set structure it’s just a story unfolding. That ensures every mission and what you do in each mission is different. What’s important to us is that nothing in the game is ever predictable.

How easy was it to strike a balance between historical accuracy and fantasy and what factors go into that creative process?
There’s always a fine line with that, just how much do we ground the game in reality? We’re not doing a historical re-enactment, we’re making an action game we just think it’s cool to base it in a real setting and on a real period of time. Obviously you want to keep it as authentic as possible to increase the immersion. Because at that point in Italian history families were important and the conflicts that existed between them, we’re using real families and real feuds, but as a fiction tool we’ve added others as well as introducing new families so we have a narrative tool to make our protagonist accepted in this world. We always try to re-create the environments as accurately as possible but gameplay comes first. We want the game to create the atmosphere and general feel of the Renaissance and we had historians helping us out with that, spotting elements in the script and environment that were out of place.

There seems to be far greater scope for players to create their own solutions to gameplay problems this time, was that the team’s primary aim?
Yes, as I said it’s all about diversity and to make sure the players have the right elements to play in a creative way, so we give them different ways and weapons to get the job done, but it’s up to them how they do it. You can also combine various weapons and techniques to create something a little different.

… continued