[Note: I know I haven't been posting hardly at all lately. I have tasked good buddy Paul with giving me a topic to write on to start getting me back into the habit. This is the first one.]

The hype machine for Assassin’s Creed 2 has started up apparently with the realease of a teaser ahead of the official reveal next week. As I watched it got me thinking back to the first game a bit (which I posted some early thoughts on) and how it ended.

Those initial complaints of mine carried through the entire game pretty much. By the time I finished it I was left empty by how badly the gameplay itself fell flat. It was great in short bursts but the lack of variety and “meh” combat really hampered the experience in general. In my opinion you really did get some sense of the fact that the vast majority of the development cycle was spent on technical aspects of the game, not the gameplay itself.

Luckily, however, I did also get the feeling that while the devs were working on the engine they did manage to work out a story that was pretty interesting. I do think the dialog was a bit rough in places, but the overall story did grab my interest and by the very end with all its lose ends I felt that they were setting themselves up for a successful second game.

The majority of the technical aspects should have been worked out at this point so now they can focus on something that didn’t quite make it in the first game: Making it fun.

The teaser doesn’t say much, but here’s what I got out of it:

• the handy-dandy hidden blade will make a return
• it will most likely be set during the Renaissance (or at least, we’ll be playing in that time period through the genetic memory magic machine)
• there could very well be a flying contraption

Sounds good to me. The sections where I was most interested in the first game involved slowly walking around a modern apartment engaging in linear, non-branching dialog or looking at bizzare scrawls on the walls and floor. Let’s hope the second one improves on that.