Desmond Miles returns to Renaissance Italy to follow the life of his ancestor Ezio Auditore. After seeing his home destroyed, Ezio travels to Rome in an effort to rebuild the Assassin Order and bring down the Borgia family, who rule the city with an iron fist. Along the way, the modern day assassins hope to discover the location of the Piece of Eden, or 'The Apple' before the Templars find out first.
Page 1 of 3
Standing outside the Villa Auditore as Desmond and activating Eagle Vision reveals a trail of red footprints leading to the Assassin insignia, an unused navigational aid the developers later admitted was an oversight, since red was meant to signal danger, not direction.
Brotherhood wasn't just Ezio's second outing in Rome, it was the first time the series let you play against other people. Before this, Assassin's Creed had been a strictly solo affair, so bolting on a full competitive multiplayer mode was a genuine gamble for Ubisoft.
The multiplayer side of Brotherhood wasn't handled by the same team that built Ezio's Rome. That fell to Ubisoft Annecy, the studio previously responsible for the multiplayer in Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, and lead designer Arnaud Mametz has talked about the headache of translating a stealth game built for one player into something that worked for a crowd.
Brotherhood shifted a million copies across Europe in under a week, which at the time made it the fastest-selling Ubisoft title the continent had ever seen. Ubisoft's own marketing chief credited the multiplayer mode for turning what had been a single-player brand into something with much broader appeal.
Frenchman François Federspiel holds the Guinness World Record for completing Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, clocking in at 2 hours, 23 minutes and 41 seconds back in March 2013. He's since gone on to set similar records for other entries in the series.
By May 2011, just half a year after launch, Ubisoft confirmed Brotherhood had shipped 7.2 million units, pushing the whole franchise's lifetime shipments up to around 29 million at that point.
There's a reason Lucy Stillman doesn't make it out of Brotherhood alive. Former creative director Patrice Désilets has said Kristen Bell tried to renegotiate her contract for future games, and when a deal couldn't be reached, the writers simply killed her character off instead.
Roger Craig Smith voiced Ezio Auditore continuously from his teenage years at the start of Assassin's Creed II right through to his death at 65 in the short film Assassin's Creed: Embers, giving the character an unusually consistent voice across a good decade of material.
Ubisoft deliberately left this one un-numbered. The team felt fans expected a fresh ancestor and a new setting whenever the number went up, but Brotherhood was really just Ezio's story continuing straight on in Rome, so calling it a sequel rather than a numbered entry made more sense.
Patrice Désilets, the creative director who'd shaped the series from the start, departed before Brotherhood was even shown off at E3 2010. Ubisoft's line at the time was that he'd simply taken a creative break once his part of the job was finished.
