Two years ago, the first Assassin's Creed sold millions while evoking grumbles that its free-running, pickpocketing, killing and escaping routine was too, well, routine, repeating a formula with little variation from the first slice of hero Altair's sword to the last. What some saw as a shallow game, I described as a short-session game masquerading as an epic, a game that discouraged lengthy play sessions but rewarded the occasional indulgence of its strong core gameplay loop. It was more of a Pac-Man than a Zelda.

Two years later, Assassin's Creed 2 appears as a marvel, occurring mostly in 15th century Italy, starring the amateur assassin Ezio Auditore — he, like Altair, an ancestor of true series hero Desmond Miles — and embarrassing its predecessor as if it had been little more than a tech demo. What was tested and tamed in the first game is tweaked and topped in a new one that spans playable cities, countryside and decade of the Italian Renaissance. Killing is done in new and interesting ways. Extraordinary buildings are climbed. Tactics are evolved. Mysteries upon mysteries are introduced and sometimes solved. And, by the end, the series earns as its peers not Pac-Man but Metal Gear, The Da Vinci Code and Lost, as Ubisoft and Ezio alike take their stab at greatness.

Loved
The Adventure Evolved: It may be an odd point to start on, before mentioning how this game looks or even how it plays, but the best achievement of Assassin's Creed 2 may be how it flows. This is a game with a specific story to tell about Ezio, the son of Italian nobility. He is a man whose family and life is demolished before the player's eyes as events force him to become an assassin who scours Italy for conspiracy clues and rightful victims of his vengeance. It's an adventure that is told through a weave of exposition and gameplay that defies the usual frayed conventions of story taking turns with interactivity. In Assassin's Creed 2 you are most definitely playing the story, the mechanics of the first game and those introduced in the new, propelling an adventure that is full of changes and surprises. For example: The game's fifth chapter contains nine missions, which introduce Ezio and friend Leonardo Da Vinci to Venice in a walking tour, leading to a mission that involves rushing a wounded new character from corrupt guards, indoctrinating ones' self into the wounded persons' guild of thieves through a series of trials, learning new moves, and then returning to the scene of the wounding to assassinate a corrupt official. It's all story. It's almost all played.

History Made Virtually Real: For those of us who can't recall when the Covenant first invaded, why Ganon keeps getting angry or any of gaming's other major made-up narratives, Assassin's Creed 2 offers the hooks of real historical places and people. I've been to Florence but not climbed the magnificent Duomo until Assassin's Creed. I've heard of Da Vinci and read about Lorenzo De'Medici but not met them until Assassin's Creed. The ability to both encounter historical figures and, for those of us who stayed awake in history class, predict who might appear next, adds both intrigue to the series and the excitement of being able to trace and guess where this adventure will wind up. Let World War II no longer be the beginning and end of gaming's exploration of historical fiction.

The Killing And The Climbing: For those who don't care about story flow, yawn at history or think that's all nice but still demand that their game play well, AC2 thankfully satisfies. Ezio is a deadlier assassin than Altair, capable of killing two men at once with the retractable blades hidden in his wrist-guards, able to more nimbly and swiftly scale buildings and descend from them like a bird of prey. Combat on the ground, once the enemy is alerted, typically consists of Ezio surrounded by eight or so angry guards who politely take turns to attack while the player waits for counter-kill moments, or, better yet, opportunities to wrench a weapon away and turn it on its owner. Neither the climbing or killing is all that complex, but both are easily executed, fun and rendered beautifully.

The Structure: Assassin's Creed creative director Patrice Desilets has already admitted that the first game in his series was too conventional, that it introduced a gameplay formula that it never tweaked. He promised to play with it in AC2 and his team of over 200 developers has delivered. The main flow of the game consists of the aforementioned memory chapters, covering different years of Ezio's life and divided into mandatory missions that are activated from within the game's open environments and advance the story. They seldom follow formula, as one rooftop assault on archers feels nothing like the participation required in a carnival or the visiting of a prisoner that are the subjects of other objectives. Off the critical path, there is a bevy of diversions: Optional assassination missions, optional free-running races, hundreds of collectibles to gather, classic art to buy and more. Even those side-challenges that do repeat themselves do so with flair, such as the handful of "beat -up" missions that always wind up having the player punch a cheating husband. And best of all, are the tombs, mostly optional missions heavy on platforming and relevant to the series in a way I can't bring myself to ruin here.

Tactical Variety: One of the game's best attributes is its redundancy of options. Many games offer little more tactical choice than to kill with an axe, a fist or a fire spell. Assassin's Creed 2 builds upon its predecessor by presenting a more interesting choice of approaches: Will you pursue your goal by free-running across rooftops and risking the attention of archers? Why not barrel through the pedestrian-clogged streets instead? Or walk through them, blending in with the crowd (and pickpocketing the crowd at the same time)? How about breaking off from the flow of the crowd and hiring a group of prostitutes to lure some guards away? Or maybe poison those guards? Or swim past everyone? Etc.

Mysteries And More Mysteries: Assassin's Creed 2 appears to have been made by people who share The Da Vinci Code novelist Dan Brown's fascination with secret societies and centuries-spanning conspiracies that involve dozens of historical figures. They also are probably fans of Lost, given how effectively they pepper their game with mysteries that, when solved, typically reveal even more tantalizing mysteries. Through an unexpected puzzle-gameplay twist that I won't spoil here, a player of Assassin's Creed 2 can begin to discover some of the secrets of the series' lore, injecting a nice amount of mystery and sleuthing to a game that already was doing action and adventuring so well.

The Teases: The finale of the first Assassin's Creed has nothing on the entirety of Assassin's Creed 2 in terms of hinting at possible subject matter for sequels and spin-offs. You may finish this game, like me, eager for Ubisoft to consider pulling an Activision and exploiting every possible future release. Because, given what's discovered in various parts of the new game, it's hard not to want the developers to bring to video game systems the adventures they hint at involving everyone from Marco Polo or Cleopatra to, well, some people from way back in the day.

Desmond Miles: Like the first game, this sequel takes place in the interactive, buried memories of Desmond Miles, a man living just a couple of years ahead of us and whose ancestors were the assassins Altair and Ezio. The first game interrupted Altair's adventures several times to subject the player to locked-room barely-interactive Desmond sequences. First-game Desmond could do little but walk and talk. New-game Desmond is capable of more but is also playable less frequently. Perhaps he too could be an assassin, the game suggests. And perhaps Ubisoft could pull a Kojima Productions, as it seems set to turn its Raiden — its unpopular alternative to the action stars of its series — into a protagonist gamers want to be. Not quite there, but getting closer.

Hated
Touchy: There is little to complain about with Assassin's Creed 2 other than the touchiness of its controls. The game often requests that the player climb and leap from windowsill to ledge to brick outcropping to wooden post with grace and speed. That happens best when players treat the free-running flow of the game as if it is a racing game, but all the steering and speeding up sometimes, strangely, sends Ezio leaping in the opposite direction you pushed, ruining everything. It's hard to tell if the controls are too sensitive, too smart or if the player is in error, but the sophistication of so much of the rest of the game is sometimes undone when the great assassin clambers not to the roof but falls from a facade to plunk into the water below.

Assassin's Creed 2 looks great, plays great and avoids all of the pitfalls of its predecessor, which might be enough praise for some. But its finest achievement is to present one of gaming's most mature adventures, a game that can be played and tell a story at the same time, a game that assumes its players are educated and curious, and willing to be teased and willing to test its limits.

The level of craft and care evident in the creation of Assassin's Creed 2 — to say nothing of the level of obsession with conspiracy — is on par with those of the creators of the Metal Gear Solid series. This is big budget with polish. This is technology put in the service of artistry. Climbing and killing might wear thin by the end of the next game if the current formula of Assassin's Creed is maintained, but given the willingness of the series' creators to think and execute boldly that is evident in this sequel, complacency and obviousness are two things for which Assassin's Creed is little at risk.

Assassin's Creed 2 was developed by Ubisoft Montreal (and affiliated studios) and published by Ubisoft for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 on November 17. Retails for $59.99 USD. A PS3 copy of the game was given to us by the publisher for reviewing purposes. Completed the campaign, including one, freely downloaded bonus mission, in 24 hours, 14 minutes, for about an amusingly specific 82.4% completion rate, with about a third of the side-tasks left undone. Laughed at the game's Super Mario reference.

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On Friday, Azaïzia Aymar, the Ubisoft community developer for Assassin's Creed II, tweeted this fun fact: "AC2 will feature 7 spoken languages for a total of 87,206 lines of recorded voice dialogue."

Of course, driving up the total is the game's multilingual support, but even at one-seventh of the total, that's still more than 12,000 lines per version. Impressive, but sounds like a spit in the ocean next to The Old Republic's script, said to be the equivalent of 40 novels.

87,206 Lines of Dialogue in Assassin's Creed 2 [Hot Blooded Gaming]

The Assassin's Creed 2 Experience is a completely free iPhone App released by Ubisoft that keeps fans up to date on the latest news, screenshots, and trailers on their small Apple device. Perhaps a homage to Apple's earlier dedication to gamers and gaming, the app also comes with slide puzzles featuring Assassin's Creed 2 visuals, with leaderboards in case you are that completely competitive that you have to be the best slide puzzler. Freak.

All of this, plus a bridge to the Assassin's Creed 2 Twitter Experience, allowing you to kill your friends over Twitter, which is a functionality I know a lot of you have been waiting for. The app is available right now. The game is available on November 17th.

"A game is a dialogue," Patrice Desilets was telling me earlier this month when we sat down at the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle to discuss Assassin's Creed II. He is the game's creative director, but his work is pretty much complete while the team back at Ubisoft Montreal wraps the game up for its fall release.

I had asked Desilets if he'd kept a checklist of complaints players of the first game had. I imagined there had been a list because, when I last spoke to the game's executive producer, Jade Raymond, about Assassin's Creed II in New York it seemed that all of the feedback about mission variety and pacing were being addressed.

"For Assassin's Creed we received a real answer from the player," Desilets told me. He wasn't keeping a checklist but he'd heard the responses. He knew what the feedback was. That last game, acclaimed and popular as it was, was too routine, it confused people and it frustrated them. If what Desilets told me about what he and the 200-plus developers working on Assassin's Creed II for Ubisoft is accurate, most of that will be remedied by the sequel. But not everything — because Patrice Desilets is the rare video game developer who discusses taking the messages he gets from the gaming public and then sending them a message back. He's also still struggling with some key ideas that shape the works with which he is involved.

Let's start with a lesson absorbed: The first game was, "too obvious," Desilets said, finding another way of vocalizing the critique that multi-million-selling Assassins' Creed proved to be too repetitive. "We never played with the game structure. At the beginning of the game, we said to the players there's nine guys to kill. You'll do your investigations first. You'll assassinate. You beat it. At the seventh one it's still the same, and never did we play with that. So that was the first thing I threw in the trash can. I was like, 'Let's forget about this game structure.' Let's really hide the game design elements of the game structure and more have a narrative structure that is the game structure."

And here's a lesson resisted: The world of the old game frustrated collection-minded gamers, who discovered that there was no reward for finding all of the hidden flags in Assassin's Creed. And while Raymond told me in New York earlier this summer that there will be rewards for some collecting in Assassin's Creed II, Desilets informed me: "There are still some collectibles that are pretty useless." Then he laughed.

My last meeting with Desilets, back in 2007, had been unusual and therefore memorable. He had shown up to my old offices at MTV with a review build of Assassin's Creed, and then hung out while I started his game. Review builds of games often come in envelopes and boxes but neither before nor since have they arrived in the hands of the lead creator of the game. He was as gleeful about his team's work then as he was when I talked to him again two weeks ago in Seattle.

As Desilets laughed about refusing to offer rewards for every single collectible in Assassin's Creed II, I reminded him how happy he was to tell me back at MTV that flag-collecting in the first game did not yield rewards. "I know, and I still like it," he said in Seattle. "That's why I'm still smiling. And I know there's a big debate about that. I'm not a collector person. I don't collect a lot of stuff, so I don't get it. I don't understand." I suggested he was giving the finger to obsessive collectors. "It's not the middle finger," he said. "That's too [strong], but yes, I'm playing. I'm playing with them. It's a dialogue. I need to talk also. This time there'll be something else, but I'll still be smiling in my living room."

Desilets is not an altogether stubborn man. He'll yield as he aims to please. He also admits he's changing.

For the first Assassin's Creed Desilets was driven to explain away the artifices of game design. Why is a game character controlled by a controller? Because he is a remembered ancestor of someone else, manipulated by an advanced device called the Animus. Why are there game levels? There weren't. There were memories. Two years ago, making invisible the most game-y aspects of a video game was important to Desilets. He's softened. "I've let go a bit," he said. "I think in AC2 you'll find a lot more video gamey elements and I'm fine with it. The head's-up display, it's there. There's a lot more information. I realized it's important people understand. Some didn't in AC1 and we lost them. I don't want it to happen again."

Desilets said players ran into unnecessary confusion in that last game. For example, they didn't understand which guards were eying their hero assassin. The new game adds icons that appear above the guards or at the borders of the screen to indicate the position of off-screen patrols. "That is video gamey," Desilets said. "And I can live with that in 2009. I'm getting older. I'm getting wiser."

Older and wiser, Desilets does still feel the push and pull about how video-gamey his video games are. "It's still important for me that you get lost in the experience," he said, earnestly searching for the best way to express his ideas.

"Sometimes to me playing Assassin's Creed is not playing a video game. I don't want it to be. You're playing an experience."

I pushed him to elaborate. He brought up another game. "Playing Hitman — and I have nothing against Hitman — It's not playing the fantasy of being a Hitman. It's playing a video game about a hitman and it's unfolding a puzzle. That for me is very gamey and something I don't want to do... [Assassin's Creed] is all about being this assassin in this period of time. It's not about being an assassin in a video game. I'll give you an example. I'm sure people would expect an assassin in a video game to hide in shadows. It's not about that. It's like: Those are video game rules. And for me, no, that's not what I want to be playing or experimenting. I'm more into an experience than a video game, but we've put a lot more video game elements into AC2 than AC1."

As Desilets tried to distinguish "video game" from "experience" I could already envision the responses to this dialogue between Desilets and his gamers. Might they accuse him of pretension or say he's quibbling with semantics? Desilets talks about losing one's self in Assassin's Creed, of "not only playing it for numbers or objectives." It can transport you. "You're elsewhere for while," he said. "That's what I call the 'experience.'

Maybe the "video game" term is a label that is losing its relevance, he suggested. "We decided at some point in history that it's called a video game," Desilets said of the things he and thousands of other people in game development create. " A lot of stuff in video games are rules, common rules. You have to do it because it's like that. I think, the more technology enables us to create worlds, it will be less and less about video games. AC1 we went really far in that idea. Maybe too far for where we are. That didn't stop anyone from buying the game, because we sold a lot. But I know it stopped a lot of people from appreciating what it was. So this time around, I'll let go like I said."

The dialogue, it seems, will continue, not just between Desilets and his customers but among Desilets' competing instincts as well.

Assassin's Creed II ships in November for the the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC. Play it as a game. Play it as an experience. Just don't expect there to be a reward for everything you find within it. And know that while you're playing it, Desilets might be in his room, smiling, ready for your response.

See that Batman shot at the top of this post? I took it with my camera this morning. That's the view I get of Batman during most of my time playing the Dark Knight's new game, Batman Arkham Asylum. Patrice Desilets told me earlier this month during an interview at the Penny Arcade Expo, that he's also been playing the game — good game, he tells me, but Assassin's Creed 2 will be better — so I thought he might have something to say about staring at the backs of characters.

Desilets is the kind of developer who would dwell on such things. He likes surmounting game design cliches or at least smoothing out their awkward aspects. In the first Assassin's Creed, he grappled with explaining in the game's fiction why a game character is controlled with a controller and why a game might be presented in levels. The explanation for both involved an in-game device that enabled a modern-day character to explore his memories — the bulk of the playable game.

Back to Batman's back — and to the backs of the lead characters in Assassin's Creed games: I like the Batman game, too. And I'm impressed by how Batman's cape billows when I make him run or punch enemies. I do spend a lot of time looking at his back, though. When I played Assassin's Creed, I spent a lot of time staring at the back of that game's hero, Altair.

So, I asked Desilets about this issue — call it a "problem" if it bothers you.

It's not really a problem for him, he said. Because he won't let it be. His answer to my "back problem" question introduced me to... "The Patrice Mode Camera."

People who don't use the Patrice Mode Camera, regular gamers like you and I, typically stare at the backs of characters. Not Patrice.

He doesn't wind up staring at his character's back that much when he plays Assassin's Creed thanks to his special camera mode which really is named in the game's code after him. His development team has freed him of such rear-watching plight by programming this camera mode that runs the way he wants it to. It lets him switch off the game's default camera and have it never snap back into a computer-selected position until he gives it permission to.

"As soon as I touch the camera, I don't want anyone to change it," he explained to me. "I lock it on a guard and a guard will pass by. The camera will flip." The Patrice Mode Camera won't stay centered behind the Assassin's Creed hero. It will follow the guard, maybe putting the front of Desilets' own character in the shot, but never — ever — snapping back to a default, programmed camera position. That guard could be all the way down the street and around the corner. It doesn't matter. "Don't put it back to the way it's 'supposed to be,'" Desilets explained to me, espousing the concept behind the camera mode. He wants to be the cameraman. He wants to set up the shots.

I like this idea of doing one's own camera work in games. I've tried it in Mario platformers, lining up jumps better by switching to side views. But I tried Assassin's Creed again this morning, and even using its lock-on camera I was not able to engineer the effect Desilets described.

Perhaps Patrice Mode Camera will be in the sequel. Perhaps I'm just not skilled enough to use it yet. But if this frees us from looking at the wrong end of more video game characters, then I'm willing to learn something new. Bring on Patrice Mode, Patrice. I'm ready.

Today Bethesda confirmed that WET, Wheelspin and Medieval Games will all be playable at the show and that they will be talking up Brink.

Ubisoft's list of games at Gamescom includes Avatar, RUSE, Silent Hunter 5, Red Steel 2, Rabbids Go Home, Academy of Champions and Assassin's Creed 2.

With games like Modern Warfare 2, RAGE and APB on the offering as well, it looks like the show will have something for everyone. And don't forget Sony is holding a three-hour press conference. EA and Microsoft also plan to make announcements at the show.

During a demo of the game in New York played on the PlayStation 3 E3 build of Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed II on Wednesday, Raymond capably flew her new game's hero, Ezio, over the streets of 15th century Venice using Leonard da Vinci's winged flying machine. She swooped him down to murder some bad men. And she managed to simultaneously field every question I could think of about how the new game will compare to the first Assassin's Creed.

Raymond described new hero Ezio as a more "badass" assassin than the first game's Altair. She emphasized this while having Ezio unsheathe blades tucked under his sleeves and simultaneously stab two soldiers, one in front of him to his left and one in front of him to his right, dead. Part of this new viciousness is attributed to a sterner motivation. Ezio's father and brothers have been killed during a power struggle of Italian nobles. His mother and sister are in hiding.

To demonstrate an Assassin's Creed game is to demonstrate new ways to murder. Raymond had Ezio scale a tower and pull a guard from over its ledge to a plummeting death. She had Ezio get up from a bench, kill a man, and then put him on the bench, an exhibition of how the locations that in the first game were just hiding spots are now also places to stash corpses. Later, when she had Ezio swan dive into a wagon of hay, she showed how the sequel's smarter enemies will root through hiding places. Bad move, smarter enemy. Raymond had Ezio kill the man and throw his body into the hay. One limitation: while Ezio can swim, he can't yet kill anyone while underwater. Room for character growth in the sequel?

Raymond promised more assassinations in the new game than in the first. And she said that players will be forced to use more varied strategies. "In Assassin's Creed, people had one strategy, like 'I always run away,' or 'I always stop and fight,'" she said. Not this time. Bigger guards will be tough to stand and fight but will be slower and easier to escape on foot — retreats helped by Ezio climbing more swiftly than Altair did. Smaller guards will be swifter, though even they can be evaded once the player gets out of an area of alarm, denoted, Grand Theft Auto-style, as an unsafe zone on the player's mini-map. Getting out of that zone gets Ezio out of trouble. "There won't be any endless chases," she laughed.

Some new systems will make Assassin's Creed II play differently than its predecessor. A new notoriety system will get Ezio into greater trouble if he's played as a reckless killer. A faction system will enable Ezio to gain alliances. For example, doing missions for thieves would make it possible for thieves to return the favor by pickpocketing guards and causing distractions. Raymond described the flow of the game as more narrative-driven than the previous game. She repeatedly referred to the first game's flow as falling into a "pattern." The player would get their assassination assignment, go to the assassin's guild in a given city, perform a few basic and recurring mission types, progress toward the assassination itself, flee and then repeat. Patterns won't hold in the new game. And instead of just a few recurring mission types, Raymond said the new game will offer 15. She wasn't one to say the first game had problems. "Frustrations," was her word, and they've been recognized and are being addressed.

The sequel has a day-night cycle, which Raymond said will affect how crowded the game's streets are. The first game's hero, Altair, could blend in with monks to avoid the suspicion of law enforcement. In the new game, Ezio can blend in with anyone in a crowd, appearing to be lost in conversation (though, sadly, he isn't going to stand on his head with the clowns who play at a party in Venice, Raymond informed me). A thinner evening crowd will leave the player fewer civilians with whom to blend.

Like the last game, the new one will cover more than one metropolis. Ezio will have a horse and travel across Italy. The regions and his adventures will be stitched together, as one big landmass in the first Assassin's Creed merged Altair's exploits in 12th-century Jersusalem, Acre and elsewhere. Ezio will travel from Venice to Florence to the Tuscan countryside, the connecting terrain being better filled, Raymond said, with gameplay opportunity than the barren hub zone of the first game. Players will be able to fast-travel to locations they've already discovered and utilize other, still-secret methods of transportation.

Former Newsweek reporter N'Gai Croal, dropping in on our interview, stumped Raymond when he asked if Ezio's horse was a descendant of Altair's. She was on surer footing in addressing my question about the return of collectible flags, saying that this time the items that can be collected in the game will unlock things, like new areas to visit.

As with the first game, the sequel will occasionally bring players to the present. In fact, the game will pick up with where modern-era protagonist Desmond left off — right after the cliffhanger conclusion of the last game. Raymond described the modern sections of the game as being "more focused on action sequences," which, compared to the placid locked-room modern moments in the first game, wouldn't be a hard goal to attain. She said that players will go to the present less frequently than they did in the first adventure.

Players of the upcoming PSP Altair-based Assassin's Creed: Bloodlines will be able to transmit money and weapons into Ezio's arsenal for the PS3 game. That's a fun Easter egg, but players of Hideo Kojima's 2008 Metal Gear Solid 4, which included an alternate Altair costume for hero Solid Snake, might imagine a cooler possible Easter egg for Assassin's Creed II. Is Kojima returning the favor and letting his franchise seep into Ubisoft's? Raymond's response was a laugh, a smile and the words: "Maybe… maybe not."

Assassin's Creed II is slated for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 release on November 17.

The clip includes some gameplay, a few very short comments from the panel and a brief interview with the guy responsible for the Assassin's Creed 2 film shorts being produced.

The movies will be using the "real environment" from game as the backdrop. It looks like that means real actors will be greenscreened into footage from Assassin's Creed 2. Interesting.

Ordinarily, retailers listing a game with an unconfirmed platform version shouldn't rate much attention. It could be mis-entered into a system somewhere. But VG247 was adamant that something called "Assassins Creed II: Discovery" would hit for the Nintendo handheld. Ubisoft would neither confirm nor deny it to them on Thursday.

We've reached out to Ubi PR either to smash the rumor or get the same response VG247 received, which is none. If anything comes through I'll update it here.

Assassin's Creed Discovery Headed to DS November 20 [VG247]

The three short movies willl focus on the story of Ezio's father, Giovanni Auditore da Firenze, and will be a prelude to the Assassin's Creed II storyline, offering insight into the Assassin's Creed II storyline and characters.

Ubisoft was unclear about how this storyline will fit in with the Playstation Portable's Assassin's Creed: Bloodlines, which was said to be the only thing connecting the first console game to the second.

The short films will be discussed later this week during a Comic Con panel.

"Ubisoft has detailed its vision for convergence over the past two years. Now at Comic-Con we are exclusively revealing one of the first building blocks to this strategy with Assassin's Creed: Lineage," said Yannis Mallat. "We'll be discussing the links between the game and the short film series with some of the key players of the project. We are thrilled to be able to share the results of our efforts with the Comic-Con audience."

The graphics and some of the play looks improved for this latest iteration, but will it be enough to outperform it's predecessor.

Mario can swim. Sonic would not. A jump in the water used to kill the anti-heroes of Grand Theft Auto. Altair, the deadly hero of Assassin's Creed couldn't get wet. His successor can.

Large bodies of water are fatal in inFamous, act as pools of quicksand in the new Bionic Commando and are just off-limits in games as wide-ranging as Animal Crossing and everything beyond the first 30 minutes of undersea adventure BioShock.

Problem: Swimming Can Be Boring
There are smart and serious design reasons for the omission of swimming in so many top games. But before even thinking about those, a fair assessment is that video game swimming can be dull. There may be fans of Super Mario Bros.' World 2-2 and the opportunity it affords players to throw fireballs underwater at squids. There may be fans of swimming in Metal Gears and Zeldas. Swimming, though, isn't what carries most games, and it's frequently a source of gamer frustration.

"Swimming is not as fast as running or jumping or flying, and is generally not as fun," Darren Bridges, a game designer at Sucker Punch, the studio behind the swimming-not-permitted hits inFamous and Sly Cooper. "The gameplay [for swimming] is often bland: mashing a single button in the best cases, and just pointing the stick in a direction at the worst."

Pete Wanat, veteran producer of many games, including Scarface: The World Is Yours, backed Bridges up. Scarface, which was primarily played on land as an open-world crime adventure in the style of a GTA, allowed swimming — until players got too far adrift and were chewed by a shark. But it also gave players the option to have hero Tony Montana stay dry and summon a boat. That ability, he wrote via e-mail "hopefully kept players in the action and not doing the 300 medley in Miami Harbor trying to reach the nearest dock." That was a merciful decision, explained Wanat: "Because in almost every game, swimming long distances is ultra boring."

So un-fun is a lot of video game swimming that developers who plan to include it often cut it. "Most [development] teams want their character to do everything under the sun, but reality kicks in and they start tearing out the ability to dance and swim pretty fast," veteran game designer Dave Perry told Kotaku. "Many games have you instantly drown. Plenty just let you go up to your ankles. Some let you swim off into oblivion with nothing out there, and then you have to swim back. If there's no good reason to swim (nothing to find or do), then it's a waste of valuable team attention, so that's why so many teams just trash the idea and focus on something more important instead."

Swimming Bans Help Game Creators
Maybe many games are better off without empowering heroes to do the backstroke or the doggy-paddle.

Developers say that omitting swimming helps them. Making a dive in the water deadly can add a core element of the game's difficulty, no matter how absurd that element may be to the game's fiction — or how much the fiction must be stretched to accommodate it. Really, should water barricade a bunch of athletic freedom-fighters and animals?

"Fictionally speaking, it really doesn't make sense to have water as a boundary in the Sly Cooper games," Bridges admitted. "There, I said it. The three main characters are Sly the Raccoon, Bentley the Turtle, and Murray the Hippo. Real raccoons are decent swimmers, and turtles and hippos spend the majority of their lives in water, but our heroes had to swear off water as part of their transition to
the video game universe."

Capcom's Bionic Commando producer, Ben Judd, stressed to Kotaku that the metal arm of his game's hero is just too heavy to keep its hero — a guy who can survive multiple bullet shots and steep falls — afloat.

That's the story explanation.

The real reason they limit swimming from games like Sly and Bionic Commando is to add an aspect of difficulty to their games. Heroes like Sly or inFamous' Cole McGrath are so strong that other obstacles won't do. "Cole and Sly are both excellent climbers," said Bridges, "So tipping a car sideways to block an alley entrance is not enough to keep them out." He noted that "water is often a better alternative than other boundary options, such as 'Steep Mountains,' 'Giant Walls,' 'Flaming Lava Fields,' or 'Infinite Cliffs.'"

Judd described how water was used to add challenge to Bionic Commando: "With Bionic Commando, we needed something that could be used as an obstacle that would both limit where Spencer could go but also prove to be a danger so that if he fell into it he could die… early levels have very few 'pit traps' at all. If you fall, you just need to climb back up in early levels. Around the middle of the game, we use water as a device that people want to avoid. But if they do fall into it, there is a small window in which they can hook onto something nearby and avoid death because we didn't want any insta-kills so early in the game. Toward the end of the game, there are more tried and true pitfalls that will kill you if miss the swing."

And if water won't kill a games' heroes, stuff in the water might, like that Scarface shark. Or, as Drew Murray, lead designer of PlayStation 3 first-person shooter Resistance 2, reminded Kotaku, there's the Fury, a classic deadly-swimming-enemy type seen in that game: "The Fury went through a number of iterations, from its initial design as a 'Chimeran walrus' that would be fast and deadly in the water but slow and lumbering on land (with arm-mounted guns to boot!), to our final design as a purely aquatic enemy that essentially acted like a sign next to a toxic lake reading 'Swimming Here Is Hazardous to Your Health!"" he said. "We also used them in several places as timing-puzzle challenges for swimming sections, where the player would have to time their swimming based on the speed and location of furies in the water."

Just Add Swimming
There are so many reasons not to have swimming in games, that the addition of it can be a feature worth promoting. It's a literal game-changer, as players who transitioned from the death-water of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City to the pearl-diving-permissible depths of GTA: San Andreas can attest.

To add swimming, developers need to draw more graphics, tweak their camera system, add animations and find that elusive fun in video game breaststroke. Some have determined all that works' worthwhile.

The Assassin's Creed series is making the move from non-swimmable to swimmable with this fall's sequel. The sequel's lead game designer, Patrick Plourde, told Kotaku, "We listened to the feedback of the players who were pretty vocal that the fact that that Altair couldn't swim wasn't feeling right for a master Assassin – they were right. Also our new setting which included Venice has a much stronger need to interact with water. So that explains why swimming wasn't in Assassin's Creed but is in Assassin's Creed II."

Swimming wasn't available in the first game, Plourde said, simply because the team knew water wasn't going to be an important enough part of the game's terrain to make getting in it worth the development energy. The threat of water wound up shaping one port-based assassination mission in that first game, forcing Altair to hopscotch across moored boats. In Venice, new Assassin Ezio will have to have other hazards to worry about than a bad soaking.

Just Remove Swimming
For all the nice things that swimming might add to a game, it's not a must. Some designers have de-emphasized it. See the drop in swimming content from Super Mario Sunshine to Super Mario Galaxy.

Others are removing swimming completely. That's happening in the next Ratchet & Clank. That series' creative director, Brian Allgeier of Insomniac, explained how swimming had served Ratchet well in the past but proved a reasonable omission for the next adventure, Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time: "On the Ratchet & Clank games, we included swimming as another means of exploration and felt that it rounded out a nice set of moves for our main character," he said. "Ironically, water was also used at times as a level boundary along with lava, toxic goo, and fall-to-death areas to prevent people from exploring too far. Sometimes we've used swimmable and non-swimmable water together. For instance in Quest for Booty, we had a lagoon area in the Hoolefar Island level where Ratchet could swim, but further out there was deadly water that bounded the level. For A Crack in Time we've decided to change course and not include swimming. We're putting a lot of new gameplay features and modes in this game and decided that swimming wasn't Ratchet's strongest suit. Plus we also wanted to avoid the confusion of swimmable water versus non-swimmable water. So he won't be swimming in the latest game in favor of Hoverboots, Clank time gameplay, new gadgets, and a lot more."

Who would miss swimming in a game, anyway? It's not like Insomniac is cutting the ability to hover, shoot cartoon weapons or smack enemies with a big wrench. That's what the people pay for.

As 2009 turns to summer for many of us, and as you dip your toes in the pool or step toward a crashing beach wave, enjoy this one easy thing you can do that so many video game characters can't.

Swimming can be a chore in games, a hassle for gamers and game makers. But wouldn't we all rather swing giant hammers and double-jump over cars instead?

Sure, there are gameplay trailers out there, coming from E3. But Gametrailers' breakdown of what you can expect to do in the game likely done with Ubisoft's assistance is nonetheless a thorough and enjoyable look at the targets of Assassin's Creed 2, how you'll eliminate them, who will help you, and where you'll pull off the jobs. It's a great way for those of a casual interest to get up to speed with a sure-fire blockbuster.

Assassin's Creed II GT Pop-Block: Venice [Gametrailers]

Called the "Black Edition", the limited edition box set will ship in "black packaging", and come with a "unique authentic holographic signature". Whatever that means.

Included will be a "64-page finely crafted leather style hardcover and parchment-finish" book, which has stuff like concept art and developer interviews, a copy of the game's soundtrack, an Ezio action figure (pictured), some "behind-the-scene interviews" and 3 "in-game bonus quests".

As far as price goes, currently it's only being listed in PAL territories, at £69.99 in the UK (USD$115) and AUD$149.95 (USD$121) in Australia. Since most games cost around AUD$100 here, you can probably expect the US version to come in at around $80-90.

Day four, meanwhile, was slim pickings — although that Fat Princess trailer really had me laughing. The Super Mario Galaxy 2 trailer was my favorite from day three without a doubt, although Final Fantasy XIII was pretty cool. Give me Yoshi in space over emo any day.

Anyone want to nominate a Best of E3 clip?

Day Three
Watch The PSP Go Sliding In Action
Ratchet & Clank Future E3 Developer Trailer
Gran Turismo 5 Trailer Has, Yes, Car Damage
Super Mario Galaxy 2 Screens And Trailer
A New Final Fantasy XIII Trailer For You To Watch
Heavy Rain Trailer Falls On E3
Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles E3 Trailer
Assassin's Creed 2 Gameplay Glides In
Kratos Is In The New Soulcalibur
Whip It With This Castlevania: Lord of Shadow Trailer
Natasha Bedingfield Serenades A DSi

Day Four
You Ever Wonder What The Bottom Of An Avatar Shoe Looks Like?
Today's Most Relaxing Trailer? Echochrono
The Grinder E3 Trailer
Plus-Sized Fat Princess E3 Trailer
Taste Hot Monkey Vengeance!
This Is The Most Technically Impressive Thing I've Seen All Week

In Assassin's Creed 2, Leonardo da Vinci is your friend and own personal inventor, making a flying machine you can use to GO KILL PEOPLE. Talk about a Renaissance man.

Thanks an1sh!

The results actually weren't that bad; so it seems Ubisoft intends to continue the trend with Assassin's Creed 2. Liveblogging from the press conference, Luke Plunkett says that these "proper films" will start showing up this fall ahead of the game's November release date.

"Ubisoft are, they say, no longer a games developer," Luke reports. "They're an entertainment provider, able to create games, movies, the works."

Hm. Maybe we'll can look forward to more films like this one.