History Headscratchers / AssassinsCreedBrotherhood

*** [[VideoGame/AssassinsCreedRevelations Revelations confirms this]] in the end; [[spoiler: Altaïr hid the apple under Masyaf, and it stayed hidden in his vault under the castle. The Templars eventually penetrated the vault and retrieved it, and it eventually was destroyed in Denver.]]

* Couple of things in the modern portion of the game bugs me. In Monteriggioni: first of all, why is there no one outside at night? You'd think someone, anyone, would be awake and about during the night. And why does everyone bother to send e-mails to each other when they're right next to each other in the Sanctuary? Where are these meetings Lucy keeps mentioning? And finally, Desmond can go outside and see red footprints leading into the Vila entrance later in the game...and he doesn't tell anyone about it. Why would he not mention that the Templars are right there?!
** 1. I was always under the impression that Desmond was running around Monteriggioni just before sunrise. I have no idea if it is different in Italy, but the crack of dawn is pretty early for people to be around a random Tourist attraction. 2. The team watched Desmond sneak around and pick up bits and pieces of information by being nosy at Abstergo. Honestly, they don't want to tell him everything so I guess this is their way of being as discreet as possible around him. It doesn't work, but that's the best theory that I can think of and it kind of bugged me to. As for the location of the meetings, I assume that when Desmond calls it a day, they rest at the inns within the walls of the Monterrigioni. If you look around, there are restaurants and locales and all kinds of stuff. 3. No idea why the player wasn't able to mention that. Then again, who says that the threat wasn't already taken care of. They were in the area for weeks. Those footprints appeared after the first few days.

* About the capes in Brotherhood. Why do the Auditore cape and the Borgia cape do ''exactly'' the same thing? Both reduce your notoriety to 0% and keep it there. For some reason, (apparently because after the Villa attack, the Auditore cape was in possession of the Borgias) guards will ignore your actions while wearing the Auditore cape. That's right -- Being in a white, hooded Assassin cloak, with the Auditore cape on and shoving a hidden blade into someone's neck won't raise your notoriety meter. WTF? Wouldn't it make more sense to have the Borgia cape keep you at 0%, and the Auditore cape keep you at 100%, just like in AC II? There isn't even a cape that makes your notoriety meter stuck at 100%. It's almost like the developers made a ''big'' mistake and accidentally gave the Auditore cape the wrong function.

*** Did you bother reading the description of the Auditore cape? The cape was ''owned by the Borgia'' at the time. Anyone walking around while wearing that cape is ''clearly'' in the favor of the Borgia if they were given said cape. The only other reason they'd be wearing the cape would be if they were an Assassin, and [[RefugeInAudacity we all know that's just ridiculous!]]
** The Borgia Cape is gained by gathering all 101 Borgia Flags. The Auditore Cape, on the other hand, is gained when you have 100% completely renovated Rome. In other words, you have destroyed all the Borgia towers and own every building in the city. You control the city's mercenaries, courtesans and thieves. Vigilantes are at every street corner ready and willing to aid you. In other words, the ''entire city'' is united behind you and against the Borgia. Your notoriety doesn't rise because ''no one dares report your activities'' -- including the guards, they're terrified of you! The Borgia Cape, on the other hand, identifies you as a servant of the Pope. Even if you do something to get noticed, no one is going to report you. And even if they do, no one is going to go after you. Surely only Captain-General or Alexander VI gifted that Cape to you? It would be suicide to put the word out against you. Make sense?

* Wouldn't it have made more sense to release the Christina missions as DLC for Assassin's Creed 2 and work them into the main story like the previous DLC? It would have flowed much better as part of the main story and it would have shown a more vulnerable side to Ezio, particularly later in the story, where I felt he had become a little flat. I know they wanted to promote Brotherhood and all, but would anyone have not bought Brotherhood if it didn't have the Christina missions?
** The Christina missions were added very late in development by a very reluctant dev team under pressure from fans for more development of the Christina character. It was probably so far into development of Brotherhood that releasing it as DLC would have just been silly.

** According to Page 13 of the Codex, constructing a Hidden Blade is very difficult, both because of the mechanisms and because the metals they use in the blades are very difficult to obtain. Even when Altaïr was around, he stated that the Hidden Blades were a fairly scarce resource and they would have to be very careful in picking who would carry a second one for that exact reason. From this, we can reasonably conclude that the Hidden Blade is a precious resource among the Assassins. If Ezio is rebuilding the order, it would make sense that he would choose to not expend the limited resources of whoever is constructing the Assassins' primary weapon when he's already got a Hidden Blade of his own. He can afford to wait until he's found Leonardo to rebuild his second one. Its the classic example of the leader putting the equipping and arming of the men first ahead of his own.

**** Well, all Assassins have the hidden blade on their right arms, right? So in order to make one that works, you just need to copy the same mechanism with only minor adjustments for size. But obviously your left hand has a different layout, so to speak, of bones, muscles, that sort of thing. Obviously the left hidden blade is just a reversed model, but you'd need someone who was quite knowledgeable about the human body to be able to get it to the precision the blade needs to be. So in short you'd need someone who was knowledgeable in both medicine and craftsmanship to do it.
***** Obviously they needed someone as skilled as {{Leonardo da Vinci}} to build it. What I asked was why they needed ''a whole separate set of schematics'' to build it. Why couldn't Leonardo have just puzzled it all out himself? It can't possibly be that hard to take the standard hidden blade model and build a mirror-image of that same design. Certainly not for someone like Leonardo da Vinci, a man whose engineering skill is generally regarded as unmatched by anyone else in his lifetime.
*** In that case, I was under the impression that Leonardo building the second hidden blade the first time in Florence was less "we can't build it without the schematics" and more of "here are schematics for a reversed blade...hey, that's a cool idea, let's make one!"
** Take a look at the hidden blade the recruits are carrying before they achieve Master Assassin. Their hidden blade looks crude and not as well designed as Ezio's. Also, at that point of the game, you can only recruit few people so I assume that the Assassins not engaged in field work (Machiavelli) just lent theirs.

* Why does it take so long to load the start menu and map? I know this sounds petty, but thanks to the inclusion of 100% sync tasks, any mission where you can fail that task in the first few seconds (such as not taking any damage when the start of the mission has you fighting dozens of enemies at once), odds are you're going to be restarting the level several times over. The start menu may only take a few seconds, but when you're doing over and over and over, it gets really annoying really fast.

** The loading period after "Skip Cinematic" is just as annoying, since most games just deal with this by, you know, a button press, rather than having to pause mid-scene, selecting the option, and then being sent back to whitespace while waiting for the game to reload.

* Is it just me or do the characters not seem to care much about Mario's death? I think he's mentioned maybe once or twice after being killed off. Considering that the death of Giovanni, Federico and Pertruccio was the catalyst that kicked off the entirety of the previous game, this just feels weird.

*** True, but that doesn't necessarily mean they were close. Ezio was busy doing assassin stuff so much during those 20 years that his relationship with Claudia became a total wreck. Maybe Mario was so busy doing mercenary stuff that Ezio and Claudia never had a chance to get all that attached to him.
** From what I saw in my playthrough, Ezio and Claudia ''did'' seem distressed and affected by his death. The difference between the deaths of Ezio's father and brothers and the death of Mario is that both Ezio and Claudia are older and have become accustomed to violence and death by the time of Brotherhood. They have such an intense reaction to their father and brothers' death because it came out of seemingly nowhere, they were unaccustomed to death and danger, and they were teenagers. By the time Mario dies, they're aware of the Assassin order, and are aware of the dangers of being associated with it, and are quite simply much older and more mature and able to handle it better. Even then, they do speak of Mario fairly often, from my observation.

** OP here. Genetic Connection is one thing, but lineage is a completely different matter all together. One might be related to Ezio at one time, but there was no way they could have known if they were related to him by being a distant nephew or niece or a friend of a friend. Direct lineage means that one's genealogy is directly linked to him/her. It's a lot tougher to locate one specific person's history to just one guy. And yes, Ezio was not celibate in the slightest--or at least not the period Cristina died in his arms--but you can't compare him to Genghis Khan and his sons who were notorious for their breeding. We are talking about one man here in a period where people don't live long and anything can happen. We are unsure if Ezio ever spawned a child, but judging by Desmond's genetic memory, Ezio wasn't shagging at the level of, say, the Borgias. Sure, Abstergo/Templars can use a Lineage team to track people's genetic history down. However, they don't exactly know who was an Assassin and who wasn't or, better yet, who is an Assassin and who isn't.

** While I may just be remembering something incorrectly, did Abstergo not rig the Animi to work just like a videogame, ignoring the whole problem of bloodlines and relations by making, essentially, a videogame in the Animus? Just use uploaded memories of the Renaissance templars like templates without worrying about the subjects being related.
*** The problem is syncing up with the memories. As noted in AC1 you can't take a new user and drop them straight into a stressful memory, because their mind rejects what is happening and fights the process. So while you could view some memories without being a descendant (ala the DDOS from Project Legacy) it limits what you can see without your mind rejecting it and desyncing you. Plus the DDOS only shows you events as they occurred and offer no control, which is another problem with the technology. The only use of the animus in a context where it is not showing your ancestor's memory is the Multiplayer section of Brotherhood, and in that case it's not showing you memories but rather putting you in a fabricated environment, and whenever you perform the actions that your persona did, the bleeding effect transmits those instances of muscle memory into the bleeding effect.

* Couple of things in the modern portion of the game bugs me. In Monterrigionni: first of all, why is there no one outside at night? You'd think someone, anyone, would be awake and about during the night. And why does everyone bother to send e-mails to each other when they're right next to each other in the Sanctuary? Where are these meetings Lucy keeps mentioning? And finally, Desmond can go outside and see red footprints leading into the Vila entrance later in the game...and he doesn't tell anyone about it. Why would he not mention that the Templars are right there?!
** 1. I was always under the impression that Desmond was running around Monterrigionni just before sunrise. I have no idea if it is different in Italy, but the crack of dawn is pretty early for people to be around a random Tourist attraction. 2. The team watched Desmond sneak around and pick up bits and pieces of information by being nosy at Abstergo. Honestly, they don't want to tell him everything so I guess this is their way of being as discreet as possible around him. It doesn't work, but that's the best theory that I can think of and it kind of bugged me to. As for the location of the meetings, I assume that when Desmond calls it a day, they rest at the inns within the walls of the Monterrigioni. If you look around, there are restaurants and locales and all kinds of stuff. 3. No idea why the player wasn't able to mention that. Then again, who says that the threat wasn't already taken care of. They were in the area for weeks. Those footprints appeared after the first few days.

*** ^Confirmed in the Da Vinci Disappearance DLC in brotherhood; two of the paintings were destroyed, but the Borgia took the rest.

* Who was that woman who gave Ezio shelter after he escaped Monteriggioni? She says Machiavelli sent for Ezio, implying she works for him, but then Machiavelli says he didn't send for Ezio because he thought Ezio was dead, implying she's working for someone else. Also she watches Ezio put on his Assassin gear and play around with his hidden blade without any sign of surprise, implying she knows of the Assassin Order. I went through the whole game expecting this woman to come up again but she never did. What gives? Who was she working for? What agenda does she have?

*** Why exactly was Machiavelli so damn cryptic about the whole thing? Yeah, being a puppetmaster is fun., but this is war, you jackass. Play it straight with us and we can make sure we don't run rimshot into one of your schemes and get a whole bunch of people killed.

* Whatever happened to the other members of the Assassin Order, like Antonio and Paula and Sister Teodora?

*** They're likely fairly safe anyway. Florence and Venice are controlled by Assassin allies, and are ''not'' tiny towns like Monterigionni, which still took a massive Borgia army to destroy. They're fairly safe from overt Templar attacks, and, being Assassin-controlled, they're generally safe from subversive Templar efforts once Ezio has dealt with the Pazzi and Barbarigo forces. The majority of Ezio's friends and all of his surviving family are in Rome, and Antonio, Theodora, and Paola can take care of themselves when they've got the armies of Venice and Florence at their backs.
*** That's what your Brotherhood is for. Ensuring peace for those guilds. Don't you read the contracts? Defend the Courtisans in Florence?

** Since the Templar Lairs were originally released as store-exclusive pre-order bonuses, they couldn't have put anything too desirable or necessary in there. At least the Palazzo Medici have a few more cutscenes with Lorenzo. What Just Bugs Me is that the Auditore Crypt - which is accessible to anyone with the game and an Internet connection - has no bonus for completing it beyond the bit of lore about Domenico Auditore.
*** A unique weapon would have been nice at least. Mass Effect 2 had exclusive weapons for players who bought from certain retailers. I don't see how this should be any different.
** Well the one in Florence never bugged me, because it was Lorenzo's secret treasury. Ezio isn't a big enough jackass to just take all of his stuff, so he just grabbed a handful instead. Can't say a really concrete reason for anything about the Lairs in Venice, but I'd like to think that Ezio either didn't want the Templars to realize that Ezio found any of their hideaways (Since they can be entered stealthily, if I remember correctly), or he just went back and told Antonio for the Thieves' Guild to steal later on.

* If Ezio put the Apple in the vault under the Colosseum, where did Napoleon get his one? Cause it's quite clearly there when the modern day Gang go fetch it and [=AC2's=] truth puzzles show that Napoleon had an apple in his possession. Who would have replaced it?

*** [[VideoGame/AssassinsCreedRevelations Revelations confirms this]] in the end; [[spoiler: Altaïr hid the apple under Masayaf, and it stayed hidden in his vault under the castle. The Templars eventually penetrated the vault and retrieved it, and it eventually was destroyed in Denver.]]

** Read the Scrolls of Romulus. Brutus found the temple first. He even drew sketches of it. And showed where it was. Ezio must have thought after reading the Scrolls that this was a good hiding place. He was right since it remained untouched for 500 years.

* Why is it that in Brotherhood, you have to wait until you meet Leonardo before you can use the two hidden blades again? Ezio still had his father's one during the battle of Monteriggioni and Machiavelli made another one for him. That's two. Even if the first was stolen after he passed out on the way to Rome, you begin recruiting new Assassins before you meet Leonardo and they all have hidden blades, so either Ezio or someone else operating in Rome's Assassin guild has the ability to make hidden blades. Why didn't Ezio get one from that person?
** IIRC, the design for the second hidden blade was distinctly different than the design for the first. It was hidden in a Codex page, after all, and no one else ''has'' a second blade, probably for this exact reason.
** That's another thing. What makes the second blade so special? It doesn't seem to be any different from the first blade and it doesn't have any of the extra accouterments (i.e. the gun or the poison blade/darts).

* Couple ofthings in the modern portion of the game bugs me. In Monterrigionni: first of all, why is there no one outside at night? You'd think someone, anyone, would be awake and about during the night. And why does everyone bother to send e-mails to each other when they're right next to each other in the Sanctuary? Where are these meetings Lucy keeps mentioning? And finally, Desmond can go outside and see red footprints leading into the Vila entrance later in the game...and he doesn't tell anyone about it. Why would he not mention that the Templars are right there?!

** Probably searched for some people present in Ezio's memories and that had Templars/Abstergo worked as descendants. They ARE a world-wide company, it's probably not that hard to find these guys.

** They were probably using satellite and drone surveillance to look for Desmond and co. rather than border patrols. They do have a [[TheMasquerade Masquerade]] to maintain, after all.

** As noted on the information listing in [=AC2=], most professional painters of the time specialized in making copies of existing famous works. You weren't buying the originals in the first game, you were buying duplicates.

** According to Subject 16's puzzles in ACII, there are at least five Apples. The controversy comes from the fact that in the first game, Lucy tells Desmond that Altaïr's Apple was destroyed in the Denver incident in 2012; in ACII, the implication is that Ezio's Apple is the same one. Of course, as we see in Brotherhood, Ezio's Apple is still around in the present day and has been in a Vault beneath Rome for over 500 years. Presumably then, Ezio's Apple is a different one from Altaïr's.
*** [[VideoGame/AssassinsCreedRevelations Revelations confirms this]] in the end; [[spoiler: Altair hid the apple under Masayaf, and it stayed hidden in his vault under the castle. The Templars eventually penetrated the vault and retrieved it, and it eventually was destroyed in Denver.]]

** Also, as discussed in VideoGame/AssassinsCreedII YMMV page on MotiveDecay, the Assassins seem to have gone from stopping evil acts and schemes of the Templars, as we see Altair doing in ACI, to "Killing anyone who is remotely allied with the Templars and keep humanity's free will at all costs, even if at the price of war and destruction". Plus, I think that Ezio has a lot of moments that show just how the Assassins aren't much better than the Templars or even the Hermeticists. They're dead-bent on their own vision of how to make a better world, and they're willing to kill for it. While Altair/Ezio might rebuke or ignore whenever a Templar tries a NotSoDifferent BreakingSpeech, a sharp-minded player can see that the JerkassHasAPoint. Either [[FridgeBrilliance the developers had this in mind(Subtly showing how all sides of the conflict had their points and similar flaws)]], or it's unintended and we're supposed to be playing under ProtagonistCenteredMoralty(Otherwise, the game's name would be Templar's Creed, Hermeticist's Creed, etc...). The Hermeticists may have been huge jerks in killing Lucrezia's former lover, attacking Ezio and beating Leonardo, but the Assassins are not beyond allying with morally ambiguous people or empires. ([[DarkActionGirl Caterina]] [[LadyOfWar Sforza]] was no saint, Julius II(Rodrigo Borgia's successor as Pope and huge enemy of the Borgia Family) wasn't that noble and, in Revelations, the Assassins ally with the Ottoman Sultan and Empire, but we're shown multiple times that they're very little different from the Borgia, and the Assassins just accept them because, well, they don't have any other option. One gets the impression the Assassins are more interested in killing Templars and following their Creed than taking more reasonable courses of action towards helping mankind...
* 'Project Legacy' example: We see the death of [[spoiler: Niccolo di Pitigliano]] from his own point of view, and we get memories from [[spoiler: Perotto Calderon]] after he has [[UnusualEuphemism passed on his genetic material]]. If you think about the series' established rules of GeneticMemory (or, indeed, revisit the Altair flashback in [=AC2=]), this gets a ''little'' confusing...

* I was not sure where to put this, since it kind of spans the whole series, but I decided on brotherhood, since its in this game that the clearest example occurs. The apple of Eden was designed by the First Civ to exploit genetically engineered neurons in the human brain in order to create illusions and control the minds of men. I was under the impression that that was all it does. The only time in the first 2 games when it does something different was when it created a map to the other apples, which is feasible given that they are such powerful tools, and when it opens the vault, but at that point it was combined with the staff, so all bets are off. However, in Brotherhood, people start talking about it as if it were some kind of font of knowledge. How? how did the apple "reveal" to altair advanced metallurgy and explosives technology? How did it show Ezio Cesare's activities after escaping from prison? Its a universal remote control, not a scientific database or a spy satellite.

** That doesnt answer my question. I know that the apple can create any kind of illusion, but the only way I can think of that it could be used to gain knowledge would be for its wielder to use it like some kind of 3 dimensional smartboard for knowledge the wielder already had. However, Ezio did not know where cesare is any more than Altair had any idea how a firearm worked. The apple gave them knowledge. Heck, in Altair's case, what it showed him could not have possibly come from a human source (since pistols were almost unheard of until around AC revelations). This is not part of what we were told the apples functions were. Its an enslaver, not a computer

* So did Abstergo basically buy off the entire Italian government in order to catch Desmond and Company? Because otherwise they would've had an extremely easy time taking any land route out of Italy as it's a member of the Schengen Area and therefore has no border checks on any land routes into or out of the country. The border checks can be reinstated, but only at the order of the national government. I'm not discounting that Abstergo bought off the Italian government in order to reinstate border checks in order to catch them, but don't you think that's a little overkill?

*** Its actualy Fridge brilliance I think: Imagine you are member of technologially super advanced race, but you use a slave force. For building complex devices and technologies, you would have to give them education HOW it works, and that is dangerous and very long term. I believe Apples do not just mind control humans, but also contains knowledge, so the slaves would have been show what to do by apple.

*** I was under the impression, that Apple of Eden is also the aforementioned Apple of Knowledge. You know, from the Bible. Also, June was it? One of TWCB clearly stated that humans could be turned into reality warpers, as long as they are One. I assumed that Apple, while controlling humans, simply sends them image, and details, of an item TWCB need to create, and humans wish it into existence. Kinda like that. Meaning that Apple is both a tool to control, and a database of both past high tech and future low tech. And also a vessel, me thinks.

** It's primary function may be control, but maybe it has a backup harddrive with some remnant info from the first civilization. As for locating Cesare, it could easily just trace him using the same artificial neurons it exploits.

** That doesnt answer my question. I know that the apple can create any kind of illusion, but the only way I can think of that it could be used to gain knowledge would be for its wielder to use it like some kind of 3 dimensional smartboard for knowledge the wielder already had. However, Ezio did not know where cesare is any more than Altair had any idea how a firearm worked. The apple gave them knowledge. Heck, in Altair's case, what it showed him could not have possibly come from a human source (since pistols were almost unheard of until around AC revelations). This is not part of what we were told the apples functions were. Its an enslaver, not a computer

** It can, it could feasibly create illusion to show people this.

* It can, it could feasibly create illusion to show people this.

* I was not sure where to put this, since it kind of spans the whole series, but I decided on brotherhood, since its in this game that the clearest example occurs. The apple of Eden was designed by the First Civ to exploit genetically engineered neurons in the human brain in order to create illusions and control the minds of men. I was under the impression that that was all it does. The only time in the first 2 games when it does something different was when it created a map to the other apples, which is feasible given that they are such powerful tools, and when it opens the vault, but at that point it was combined with the staff, so all bets are off. However, in Brotherhood, people start talking about it as if it were some kind of font of knowledge. How? how did the apple "reveal" to altair advanced metallurgy and explosives technology? How did it show Ezio Cesare's activities after escaping from prison? Its a universal remote control, not a scientific database or a spy satellite.

** Take a look at the hidden blade the recruits are carrying before they achieve Master Assassin. Their hidden blade looks crude and not as well designed as Ezio's. Also, at that point of the game, you can only recruit few people so I assume that the Assassins not engaged in field work (Machiavelli) just lended theirs.
* Why does it take so long to load the start menu and map? I know this sounds petty, but thanks to the inclusion of 100% synch tasks, any mission where you can fail that task in the first few seconds (such as not taking any damage when the start of the mission has you fighting dozens of enemies at once), odds are you're going to be restarting the level several times over. The start menu may only take a few seconds, but when you're doing over and over and over, it gets really annoying really fast.

** From what I saw in my playthrough, Ezio and Caludia ''did'' seem distressed and affected by his death. The difference between the deaths of Ezio's father and brothers and the death of Mario is that both Ezio and Claudia are older and have become accustomed to violence and death by the time of Brotherhood. They have such an intense reaction to their father and brothers' death because it came out of seemingly nowhere, they were unaccustomed to death and danger, and they were teenagers. By the time Mario dies, they're aware of the Assassin order, and are aware of the dangers of being associated with it, and are quite simply much older and more mature and able to handle it better. Even then, they do speak of Mario fairly often, from my observation.

* The whole concept of the multiplayer and the Templar use of the bleeding effect. How is this supposed to work? I was under the impression that the bleeding effect can only happen when the tested subject is related to the person he is following. Vidic stated that the recorded Assassin abilitiies through tested subjects like Desmond just changed their appearances. In other words, the Abstergo employees are just re-using Assassin data and changing the avatar. So it isn't like the actual Templars could do the things an assassin could with the exception of Fiora(The Courtasan), Lia da Russo(The Smuggler), Lanz(The Footpad), and Il Lupo(The Prowler). So how can Vidic hope that the employess gain these abilities when they have no connection in the lineage of the Assassins, or even the avatars themselves (Most of those Templar agents were either killed by other Assassins or Ezio, or the Courtasan)?
** There's probably plenty of people out there who have at least ''some'' genetic connection to the Assassins at some point. A significant number of the people who currently live in Asia, for example, can claim direct genetic connection to Genghis Khan's bloodline (admittedly, he and his sons were quite a, ahem, prolific set of breeders....). The Templars also have a group referred to as the "Lineage Team" whose entire purpose seems to be to keep track of genetic bloodlines precisely for the use of the Animus. More likely than not, the Templars are running employees through the Animus who have some genetic connection to the Assassins, probably tangentially. People like Desmond, Subject 16, and others probably get the special treatment because they are more closely connected to the Assassin bloodline than others. Considering the [[TheCasanova kind of man Ezio was]], his genesprobably got around.
** OP here. Genetic Connection is one thing, but lineage is a completely different matter all together. One might be related to Ezio at one time, but there was no way they could have known if they were related to him by being a distant nephew or niece or a friend of a friend. Direct lineage means that one's genology is directly linked to him/her. It's a lot tougher to locate one specific person's history to just one guy. And yes, Ezio was not celibate in the slightest--or at least not the period Cristina died in his arms--but you can't compare him to Genghis Khan and his sons who were notorious for their breeding. We are talking about one man here in a period where people don't live long and anything can happen. We are unsure if Ezio ever spawned a child, but judging by Desmond's genetic memory, Ezio wasn't shagging at the level of, say, the Borgias. Sure, Abstergo/Templars can use a Lineage team to track people's genectic history down. However, they don't exactly know who was an Assassin and who wasn't or, better yet, who is an Assassin and who isn't.

*** Exactly the idea. We don't know if he spawned a child before Desmond's obvious ancestor. So it is kind of odd to say that Ezio had multiple children before the point of concieving Desmond's ancestor.
** While I may just be remembering something incorrectly, did Abstergo not rig the Animuses to work just like a videogame, ignoring the whole problem of bloodlines and relations by making, essentially, a videogame in the Animus? Just use uploaded memories of the Renissance templars like templates without worrying about the subjects being related.
*** The problem is syncing up with the memories. As noted in AC1 you can't take a new user and drop them straight into a stressful memory, because their mind rejects what is happening and fights the process. So while you could view some memories without being a descendent (ala the DDOS from Project Legacy) it limits what you can see without your mind rejecting it and desyncing you. Plus the DDOS only shows you events as they occured and offer no control, which is another problem with the technology. The only use of the animus in a context where it is not showing your ancestor's memory is the Multiplayer section of Brotherhood, and in that case it's not showing you memories but rather putting you in a fabricated environment, and whenever you perform the actions that your persona did, the bleeding effect transmits those instances of muscle memory into the bleeding effect.

** 1. I was always under the impression that Desmond was running around Monterrigionni just before sunrise. I have no idea if it is different in Italy, but the crack of dawn is pretty early for people to be around a random Tourist attraction. 2. The team watched Desmond sneak around and pick up bits and pieces of information by being nosy at Abstergo. Honestly, they don't want to tell him everything so I guess this is their way of being as discreet as possible around him. It doesn't work, but that's the best theory that I can think of and it kind of bugged me to. As for the location of the meetings, I assume that when Desmond calls it a day, they rest at the inns within the walls of the Monterrigioni. If you look around, there are restuarants and locales and all kinds of stuff. 3. No idea why the player wasn't able to mention that. Then again, who says that the threat wasn't already taken care of. They were in the area for weeks. Those footprints appeared after the first few days.

** Or, y'know, the function of the Auditore Cape on the guard's behavior is an abstraction of how it realistically would have worked, like ''everything else'' in the Animus. If you were walking around in Rome during the Borgia rule, wearing the Auditore Cape, it was an obvious sign that that you were in the Borgia favor and the guards were going to be more lenient. The Animus translates that into not affecting your noteriety.

* What the hell was the dev team smoking? In the mission where you get to drive a tank in Brotherhood they put in a NO DAMGE TO THE TANK EVER apart from bullets? And then put in a Battle royal with THREE Tanks AND explosive barrels? In the end I had to resort to cheat-esque manuveurs. JUST WHY!!!!!!

** I finally got it, so yeah. My point about impossible 100% synch requirements still stand.
** You know, I actually went to try this mission, and it wouldn't be half as bad if you didn't have to do the ''whole damn mission over again'', which means you have to spend at least 5-8 minutes trudging through a tailing part, a combat part, and a free-running part just to get to the tank section. Another extremely frustrating mission is getting 100% synch on the mission "Calling All Stand-Ins". The requirement for 100% is that you have to let your assassin recruits kill your target for you. Sounds simple, right? Not when the game won't count your kills if the recruits kill them with the hidden gun or throwing knives, which they love to use because they spawn on top of structures. Did I mention the entire mission consists of just following an NPC for a good 8 minutes?

** My personal theory is that the really difficult 100% synch conditions aren't really there as a challenge to the player, even though they're possible. The really difficult ones (like the tank mission, or not taking any damage when getting ambushed by a baker's dozen Romulans) are there to drive home the point of how much of a badass Ezio is. They're supposed to be hard, even nearly impossible. That's just how good Ezio is.

** Cesare, for the most part, is simply out of Rome and not able to maintain a close eye on his minions. The guys he leaves in charge are not the most terribly loyal or brilliant of men, consisting of a banker who spends most of his time getting baked and throwing revelries and a French nobleman who is planning to betray him and take over Rome. Between Cesare's focus on his campaigns throughout Italy and the fact that all of his secret weapons are getting destroyed, he's fairly distracted from the sabotage occuring in his base of operations. Couple this with the fact that Cesare isnt terribly mentally stable to begin with, and you've got a guy who'd likely miss what's going on in Rome.

** Probably searched for some people present in Ezio's memories and that had Templars/Abstergo workerd as descendants. They ARE a world-wide company, it's probably not that hard to find these guys.

* The modern-day villa at Monteriggioni is in a most peculiar state. Not only is it in poor repair compared to the rest of the town, though you would expect it to be the main attraction. And when you enter it, you find that the secret door is still bolted shut after 500+ years, there is the skeleton noone has bothered to remove even though it is in a rather obvious location, and there is a massive cavern with walls and scaffolding that has not collapsed or rotted away for centuries - all which mean that the villa is actually in excellent shape for being neglected for so long. And you can't blame the abstractions of the Animus either - those sequences are supposed to take place in the "real" world, and the villa is actually stated to be an Assassin sanctuary. It would have made more sense if you explored a well maintained tourist attraction using Eagle Vision to find secret passages and such left behind by Ezio and Assassins from the intervening years instead. To say nothing of silliness like the sword being stuck in the ground next to a tree.

** Da Vinci was passing information to the Assassins, as ''Ascendence'' implies.

*** And he couldn't just ask Ezio for some Assassins to escort him out? Or even just move to the Assassin's Guild? Besides, it's highly doubtable that the Borgia would be smart enough (albeit Cesare is paranoid enough) to have guards in the underground-tunnels. Ezio can keep passing through those un-noticed, and a genious like Leonardo Da Vinci didn't think of that?
*** Its not an issue of hiding, its an issue of ''escaping'' and then ''keeping free''. Da Vinci is a strategic asset capable of manufacturing weapons literally centuries ahead of their time; if he escaped the Borgia would waste no time tracking him down, and if he hid in the Assassins' Guild, they'd begin house-to-house searches, and for all the Assassins' power, they're no direct match for a Borgia army. The only reason Ezio is able to get away with his shenanigans in Rome is because Ceasere is away and leaving the city to a relatively incompetent relation and a power-hungry French noble. If Ceasere returns to Rome and directly controls the Templar operations in the city, the Assassins are in for a world of hurt, and the escape of his resident superweapon-designer would definitely count.

** It's not clear. The Assassin order might not even have a fully unified leadership. Secretive, guerilla forces tend to compartmentalize, especially considering the Assassins have been around since before Abel and Cain. There's likely regional leaders of specific Assassin orders in various parts of the globe, with Ezio being the regional leader of the order in Europe.

* Does anyone else think Ezio could have spared Ercole Massimo, the leader of the Hermeticists? During his last minutes he was unarmed and pleading for his life. While the Hermeticists may be going about it the wrong way, both they and the Assassins have similar motives, making it unlikely that Ercole would have backstabbed Ezio as soon as he turned around. Why didn't Ezio just verbally/physically harass him for a moment, then throw him down into the pit and tell him to get out? It seems Ercole's death was just meaningless.

*** Actually, the DDS isn't a full-blown Animus, but a "Data Dump Scanner", able to force random memories (seemingly coming from their "rightful" owners' minds) into the brains of willing appliants. The introduction cutscene before any memories warns the user of the possiblity of mindblowing glitches. Literally.

** Play AssassinsCreedRevelations or watch AssassinsCreedEmbers, and you will know.

** I had noticed part of this myself. The solution is simple. In AC2 Rodrigo Borgia is the ideal Templar. An Immensely wealthy, internationally powerful and connected, highly cunning and intelligent ChessMaster. In the second game, he is a broken man, after realizing that he was not the profit. Due to this, he effectively gives most of his power to Cesare. Here's the kicker. Cesare Borgia was all the things that are bad in a long term leader. Brilliant short term strategist, Horrible long term planner(as evidenced by him running rome into the ground, and bankrupting his father so that he needed t keep killing wealthy cardinals). He was a narcissistic egomaniac with no sense of his own shortcomings. I'm not even sure he was a templar. Sure he effectively controlled all the papal resources, but I'm not sure he ever controlled any templar forces unaffiliated with the church. Furthermore, even if he was a templar, he was a bad one. Not only was he not content to use the behind the scenes manipulation that the templars have always favored, instead publicly declaring his intent to become King of Italy. In the end, whether he was officially a templar or not,I think Cesare viewed the templar order in the same light as he saw the vatican. Not as something that he was a part of, but as something that gave him power, but retained enough power for itself that it would need to be destroyed later.The templar ideology is of control. Rodrigo was obsessed with power, and so was a good fit for them. But for Cesare, it was about EGO. He's like a spoiled child. What other kind of freak would declare himself to be immortal via NoManOfWomanBorn? Its no wonder the greater templar order views his reign as an embarrassment.

* I was not sure where to put this, since it kind of spans the whole series, but I decided on brotherhood, since its in this game that the clearest example occurs. The apple of Eden was designed by the First Civ to exploit genetically engineered neurons in the human brain in order to create illusions and control the minds of men. I was under the impression that that was all it does. The only time in the first 2 games when it does something different was when it created a map to the other apples, which is feasible given that they are such powerful tools, and when it opens the vault, but at that point it was combined with the staff, so all bets are off. However, in Brotherhood, people start talking about it as if it were some kind of font of knowledge. How? how did the apple "reveal" to altair advanced metallurgy and explosives technology? How did it show Ezio Cesare's activities after escaping from prison? its a remote control not a scientific database or a spy satellite.

** Play AssassinsCreedRevelations or watch AssassinsCreedEmbers, and you will know.

** I had noticed part of this myself. The solution is simple. In AC2 Rodrigo Borgia is the ideal Templar. An Immensely wealthy, internationally powerful and connected, highly cunning and intelligent Chessmaster. In the second game, he is a broken man, after realizing that he was not the profit. Due to this, he effectively gives most of his power to Cesare. Here's the kicker. Cesare Borgia was all the things that are bad in a long term leader. Brilliant short term strategist, Horrible long term planner(as evidenced by him running rome into the ground, and bankrupting his father so that he needed t keep killing wealthy cardinals). He was a narcissistic egomaniac with no sense of his own shortcomings. I'm not even sure he was a templar. Sure he effectively controlled all the papal resources, but I'm not sure he ever controlled any templar forces unaffiliated with the church. Furthermore, even if he was a templar, he was a bad one. Not only was he not content to use the behind the scenes manipulation that the templars have always favored, instead publicly declaring his intent to become King of Italy. In the end, whether he was officially a templar or not,I think Cesare viewed the templar order in the same light as he saw the vatican. Not as something that he was a part of, but as something that gave him power, but retained enough power for itself that it would need to be destroyed later.The templar ideology is of control. Rodrigo was obsessed with power, and so was a good fit for them. But for Cesare, it was about EGO. He's like a spoiled child. What other kind of freak would declare himself to be immortal via NoManOfWomanBorn? Its no wonder the greater templar order views his reign as an embarrassment.

* Okay, so towards the end of the game we see Ezio place the Apple in the container beneath the colosseum, and it's implied that it never left said tomb/ruins place until Desmond and Co. found it. HOWEVER, in the previous game there was a glyph, a very early one, I believe it was the second one, that showed George Washington got a hold of it. How did this happen? Are there multiple Apples? is George a time traveler? Did he get it from a time traveler? did someone find the door, guess the password, complete the free-running/parkour challenge, get a hold of the Apple, deliver it to george, either directly or indirectly, and then get it put back ALL within those ~500 years?

* So who had Ezio's babies? Caterina? Or does Assassin's Creed take such liberties with science that your DNA memories are passed down to your nieces and nephews?

** Also, as discussed in VideoGame/AssassinsCreedII YMMV page on MotiveDecay, the Assassins seem to have gone from stopping evil acts and schemes of the Templars, as we see Altair doing in ACI, to "Killing anyone who is remotely allied with the Templars and keep humanity's free will at all costs, even if at the price of war and destruction". Plus, I think that Ezio has a lot of moments that show just how the Assassins aren't much better than the Templars or even the Hermeticists. They're dead-bent on their own vision of how to make a better world, and they're willing to kill for it. While Altair/Ezio might rebuke or ignore whenever a Templar tries a NotSoDifferent HannibalLecture, a sharp-minded player can see that the JerkassHasAPoint. Either [[FridgeBrilliance the developers had this in mind(Subtly showing how all sides of the conflict had their points and similar flaws)]], or it's unintended and we're supposed to be playing under ProtagonistCenteredMoralty(Otherwise, the game's name would be Templar's Creed, Hermeticist's Creed, etc...). The Hermeticists may have been huge jerks in killing Lucrezia's former lover, attacking Ezio and beating Leonardo, but the Assassins are not beyond allying with morally ambiguous people or empires. ([[DarkActionGirl Caterina]] [[LadyOfWar Sforza]] was no saint, Julius II(Rodrigo Borgia's successor as Pope and huge enemy of the Borgia Family) wasn't that noble and, in Revelations, the Assassins ally with the Ottoman Sultan and Empire, but we're shown multiple times that they're very little different from the Borgia, and the Assassins just accept them because, well, they don't have any other option. One gets the impression the Assassins are more interested in killing Templars and following their Creed than taking more reasonable courses of action towards helping mankind...

*** I always assumed that, once the player received more information about the Lucy plotline, it was supposed to imply that Lucy had been sneaking around as a double agent. Not only this, but the Eagle Vision picked viewed it as read because she had turned and could no longer be consider trustworthy or an ally. Eagle Vision shows enemies with a red aura, and that is what Lucy had become; though not inherently visible, his 'sixth sense' had detected this change in alignment.