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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.
The Ezio Collection bundled remastered versions of Assassin's Creed II, Brotherhood, and Revelations together for PS4 and Xbox One back in 2016, complete with sharper graphics and every piece of single-player DLC. The multiplayer modes didn't make the cut, though.
Revelations almost didn't exist in the form we got. Ubisoft had announced a Nintendo 3DS exclusive called Assassin's Creed: Lost Legacy back at E3 2010, which would've had Ezio travelling to Masyaf to dig into the Holy Land. It got quietly canned a few months later, but the story wasn't wasted, lead writer Darby McDevitt basically took that same premise and folded it straight into Revelations.
If Subject 16 sounded a little different to you this time round, that's because he was. Cam Clarke voiced him in AC2 and Brotherhood, but for Revelations the North American version swapped him out for Graham Cuthbertson instead.
Ezio's love interest Sofia Sartor wasn't dreamed up from scratch, art director Raphael Lacoste insisted her look come straight from Albrecht Dürer's 1505 portrait 'Portrait of a Young Venetian Woman.' It's a nice bit of circularity, because that very painting shows up as an item you have to retrieve for her during the 'Portrait of a Lady' memory.
One of the story missions is called 'The Spy Who Shunned Me.' Say it out loud and it clicks pretty fast, it's a play on the James Bond film 'The Spy Who Loved Me,' tucked in there for anyone paying attention to the mission list.
The Hookblade wasn't always meant to be its own weapon. Early on it was pitched as just an add-on for the Hidden Blade, something to bolt onto what Ezio already had. Somewhere in development the idea grew into a standalone item that ended up defining a big chunk of how you move around Constantinople.
Ubisoft actually put a number on how much the Hookblade sped things up: roughly 30 percent quicker traversal than in the earlier games. Makes sense when you consider Ezio's supposed to be pushing 50 by this point and needs all the help he can get scaling rooftops.
Bomb crafting was the other big new toy in Revelations, and Ubisoft went all in on it. Mix and match the right shells and ingredients and you could theoretically cook up more than 300 different bomb combinations across lethal, tactical and diversion types, though Ezio could only ever carry 15 at a time.
The familiar Eagle Vision got a rebrand and an upgrade for this one. Now called Eagle Sense, it let Ezio lock onto a target and get a rough read on where they were headed next, handy if you wanted to sprint ahead and rig an ambush before your mark ever showed up.
