Assassin's Creed: Revelations

Video Game
STUDIO Ubisoft
RELEASED 2011

Ezio auditore da firenze travels to constantinople on his quest to find the five keys of masyaf to unlock a library left behind by Altaír Ibn La Ahad, to find an artifact known as the Apple of Eden. To prevent it being found by the Templars. Not knowing what they might do with It Ezio leaves the apple in the library for desmond to find. Ezio then goes away with Sofia Sartor to live out the rest of his life with Her.

Knowledge

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Assassin's Creed: Revelations Source

Built Across Six Studios at Once

Just how big a production was Revelations? Big enough that Ubisoft had six different studios working on it simultaneously, a scale that dwarfed anything the series had attempted before it.

Assassin's Creed: Revelations Source

The Faces Behind Mocam

Ubisoft rolled out a new facial animation process for Revelations called Mocam, blending traditional keyframe animation with performance capture. Game Informer likened it to what L.A. Noire was doing, though the side effect was that returning faces like Ezio, Altaïr and especially Desmond looked noticeably different from how players remembered them.

Assassin's Creed: Revelations Source

Desmond's Coma and the Black Room

The framing story picks up right where Brotherhood left Desmond in pieces. After being forced to kill Lucy, he slips into a coma, and the only way to pull him back out is by diving through the Animus into Ezio's memories, which is really the whole reason we're reliving Constantinople in the first place.

Assassin's Creed: Revelations Source

Assassin's Dens Take Over From the Towers

Brotherhood had you burning Borgia Towers to loosen the Templars' grip on Rome. In Revelations that system gets swapped out for Assassin's Dens scattered across Constantinople, each one demanding a different set of objectives before you can flip it to your side.

Assassin's Creed: Revelations Source

The Spider Assassin Achievement

There's an achievement called Spider Assassin that unlocks if you scale the Hagia Sophia in under 25 seconds. The name's not subtle once you notice it, it's a nod to a certain wall-crawling Marvel superhero, following the same trend as the Batman-referencing achievement from AC2.

Assassin's Creed: Revelations Source

Floats Like a Butterfly, Stings Like a Scorpion

Get into a scrap with a citizen or a guard and you might hear onlookers yell 'Floats like a butterfly, stings like a scorpion!' It's a twist on Muhammad Ali's famous description of his own fighting style, swapped just enough to keep it from being a direct quote.

Assassin's Creed: Revelations Source

We'll Call It a Draw

Beat the same brawler three times in the memory 'The Brawler' and he'll grumble 'Ah... we will call it a draw, alright?' That line is lifted almost word for word from the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, who refuses to admit defeat even after losing all his limbs.

Assassin's Creed: Revelations Source

An Old Trick Resurfaces With Jamal

Right after Ezio leaves Masyaf for the first time, there's an Assassin named Jamal standing around who can be silently killed with zero repercussions. It's a deliberate throwback to a nearly identical, consequence-free easter egg buried in the very first Assassin's Creed.

Assassin's Creed: Revelations Source

Two Composers, One City

Jesper Kyd, who'd scored every mainline game up to this point, handled most of the single-player music and leaned into Greek, Renaissance and Middle Eastern instrumentation to match Constantinople's melting-pot setting. Lorne Balfe came in alongside him to write the main theme along with the cutscene and multiplayer music.

Assassin's Creed: Revelations Source

A Real Orchestra for a Fictional Empire

The score wasn't just synths and samples, the Malmö Symphony Orchestra was brought in to actually perform it, giving the Constantinople soundtrack a weight that pure digital instrumentation wouldn't have managed on its own.