The Assassin’s Creed series has always done one thing spectacularly
well: throwing the player into a beautifully-realised historical city and give
them free reign to wander around and explore the sights and sounds as much as
they choose. It’s the open-world of Grand Theft Auto, but in times and
places much more distant and exciting than the faux-American cities of the GTA series. The newest game in the series, Assassin’s Creed: Revelations is to
take place in the city of Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul), notable
historically for being located in between the Black Sea and the Aegean Sea near
Greece, the meeting point between the Middle East and the Mediterranean.
This new trailer shows us
a glimpse of ‘Life in Constantinople’, and suggests that the world-building is as
strong as ever. The city looks like an exotic, interesting place to explore,
and the fusion between East and West will undoubtedly be welcome to gamers
tired of climbing over the rooftops of renaissance Italy in the last two Assassin’s Creed outings. Ezio Auditore’s return, bearded and older
than in the previous games, should bring an interesting dynamic to the story:
an Italian nobleman and Assassin thrust into a brand new setting and forced to
go about his business in a city alien to him.
While I grumbled about the historical inaccuracies of the previous Assassin’s Creed games, they always got
the cities absolutely spot-on and this new video suggests that the trend is
continuing in Revelations.
