Virtual Tourism

I’m spending a couple days in Venice, Italy in a month so I’m preparing the best way I know how: By replaying Assassin’s Creed II. A good chunk of the game takes place in a fairly faithful recreation of Renaissance Venice, 

I haven’t played it since I first did, fourteen years ago, a sentence that’s truly staggering to type out when I realize just how old that erstwhile next-gen gaming franchise is solidly in its teens. But despite its age, Assassin’s Creed II holds up. The game iterated on its 2007 predecessor, fleshing out and enlivening its historical worlds and also deepening its exploration, stealth, and combat mechanics. Plus the plot got a whole lot more robust, with its main character having an actual character arc.

Compared to the more recent games in the series, like Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, the game feels like a relic. The open world, while big, is downright compact compared to contemporary games in the genre — the islands alone in Odyssey are nearly two hundred times bigger than Florence and Rome combined. There are side quests and collectibles, but they are decidedly limited in number. There’s a lot to do but it does not feel endless —and they don’t get a chance to wear out their welcome. 

Assassin’s Creed II feels precise. The side quests and collectibles are fun to do, but don’t quite cross into the line of feeling like another checklist to cross off (though collecting those feathers might be a bit much). More than anything, though, the limited size of the map does mean that it’s knowable. You can learn your way around the city and not always rely on markers on your minimap to know where to go.

That’s something I loved about the older Assassin’s Creed games, especially the three games about Ezio: I knew my way around virtual Florence, Rome, and Constantinople. By keeping the area contained, it lets the player really get to know a space. It’s like how I know my way around Destiny 2’s strikes and multiplayer maps. Get too big and you’re just chasing icons on the map. 

I ended up visiting Istanbul a couple years after playing Assassin’s Creed: Revelations and my familiarity with the game’s virtual recreation of the city (albeit, as it was five hundred years ago) gave me a footing while exploring the real world city. It didn’t preclude needing a map, but it did mean that if I was looking at Galata Tower I knew where the Hagia Sophia might be (and knew a thing or two about it). Call it the inverse Spider-Man — in that game, I knew where things were because of how faithfully it recreated New York. I was familiar with Istanbul because of how well Assassin’s Creed: Revelations recreated Constantinople. And because it was content to be contained within a finite, knowable space, I could become familiar with it. 

Playing Assassin’s Creed II all those years ago, I remember talking with friends about how much fun it would be to visit these cities in real life. I wanted to go to Florence and Venice and Rome to see how it compared. There was no expectation it would be a 1:1 recreation, but it’d be fun to see St. Mark’s Basilica after climbing all over it in a simulated world. So yes, I’m replaying Assassin’s Creed II not because I’m nostalgic for sneakily stabbing bad guys, but because I’m studying up for a visit to Venice.