There’s a tension in every open-ended game (or even every game, period), a tension between avatar and surroundings, figure and backdrop, between the simplifications which allow players to interpret and act upon the world they’re given and the fertile, vital unpredictabilities of that world – in short, between the rules of ‘gameplay’ and the ruled-upon ‘setting’. Faced with so challenging a dichotomy, many developers lean one way or another. The randomly generated ASCI landscapes of cult hit Dwarf Fortress are famously more than a match for their colonists, for instance, while Jak II’s capaciously chunky steam-punk environs are quite passive, sterile, despite their graphical liveliness.

Ubisoft Montreal’s Assassin’s Creed series tackles this tension head on, and therein perhaps lies its claim to greatness. Where other third-person sandboxers cloak the enmity between order and chaos in make-believe, Assassin’s Creed transforms it into a component of the make-believe, a premise. Your character, Desmond Miles, springs from a long line of assassins, each engaged in a shadowy war with the Illuminati-like organisation known as the Templars. To penetrate the centuries-old mysteries of Abstergo, the vast military-pharmaceutical corporation the Templars have become, Desmond must tap into the “genetic memories” of his ancestors – 12th century Arabian backstabber Altair in the first game, Renaissance nobleman Ezio in this one – reliving their thoughts and deeds with the aid of a high-tech VR machine termed the “Animus”.

I've been to Florence. The Duomo looks even better when you're standing on top of it.

What this effectively means is that the game’s rules, regulations and – of course – limitations exist as a game within the game, “externalised” for consideration in the form of the Animus’s mechanisms and interfaces. It’s an elegant transposition of a key design concern – elegant enough that we can overlook both the contrivedness of the temporally riven plot and the present-day cast’s painful lack of charisma – and one which underlines the assuredness with which Ubisoft has mediated the conflict between gameplay and setting.

“Eagle vision” encapsulates this mediation rather handily. Approach a busy thoroughfare in Venice from aloft and you may struggle to make sense of it: the developer’s fidelity to the original clothing styles, building materials, types of shop and social mannerisms is as impressive as before, and while the engine is a few steps behind the times (tearing, pop-in and frame-rate drops are all very evident) it pushes out a respectable level of detail. Hold down triangle, however, and the Animus will dim the global lighting, strip out the rich yet impractical distractions and swathe enemies, friends and objectives in shimmering, arcade red, blue and golden auras.

Enemies now poke through haystacks when alerted. Fortunately, you can return the favour.

The mostly unchanged free-running mechanic works on the same principle of equilibrium. Hold R1 and X button down and the Animus will take over the business of picking and gripping individual handholds or leaping from beam to beam, leaving the player to handle broader questions of high road or low road, whether to scurry along a clothing line or leap from a fluted stone pillar, whether to make use of the side-route subtly advertised by a cluster of pigeons or carve out a path of your own.

Ubisoft’s put the first episode of its spin-off series Assassin’s Creed – Lineage on Youtube. We thought it was the best piece of CGI we’d ever seen till we realised that most of it was genuine film footage. Bah.

They’ve really thrown the kitchen sink at this one. Wish the swordplay was that seamless in the game.

Lambert criticised Rocksteady Studio’s warmly received Batman: Arkham Asylum for want of originality – “it’s a game with mechanics you know about, that you’ve already experienced in other games” – but admitted that there were similarities between the projects.

“The team in Singapore, thanks to its expertise, brought us all the linear – what we call “secret locations”, linear maps. So when you talk about linearity we do have linear maps, we have five hours of Batman-like settings, where everything is more “set up”.”

These more prescriptive elements were introduced, Lambert explained, to break up the flow of the game.

Death from above.

“Not everything is about killing and stuff, because we want to make sure you get a bit of breath air, changing the pace. It adds a lot to the game experience, for sure. Around 5-7 hours of gameplay.”

Be sure to check out the full interview. The game’s out for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 on 20th November in Europe and 17th November in North America, with a PC version following early next year.

15th century Venice’s rooftops were considerably more populous than those of 12th century Jerusalem, by Ubisoft Montreal’s estimate at least. The bowmen pacing from one cornice to another are old news, perhaps, but there are now gaggles of lowlifes squatting round sodden camp-fires in among the turrets. I interrupt my progress along the skyline to give one particular trio a closer inspection. A mugshot pops up in bottom-left as I near, and a tap of start button opens the relevant entry in Assassin’s Creed 2‘s comprehensive database, adrift on a sea of silvery digital pretence.

The lowlifes are thieves – agile, discreet and very receptive to the jingle of ready cash in reasonable quantities. I decide to give this band some work. A tap of Y transfers a handful of coins instantaneously to their pockets (beats internet banking, doesn’t it?), and the three men fall in dutifully behind.

Being denizens of the heights, my accomplices know red-hot free-running when they see it. Awed exclamations dog my heels as I gallop up a chimney pot, bounce over to the apex of the adjoining building and trot over some projecting beams – all without so much as a downward glance. They’re equally impressed when I hang off a gutter, brace my feet against the wall and kick back into a death-defying thirty-feet stoop onto a patrolling guard, but less so when his friend spots me tugging my wrist blade loose and sounds the alarm.

Time, then, for my new employees to earn their keep. This they do admirably, pouncing on my pursuers and buying me time enough to disappear into the city’s rainy fastness. Safely cloistered atop a tower, I listen to the sounds of battle diminishing and contemplate my next move.

Unless game director Benoit Lambert is telling dirty great fibs, those thieves are just three drops in an ocean of variety. Having failed to give players enough to do first time round, Ubisoft Montreal has carpet-bombed Assassin’s Creed 2 with features. Fond of the wrist blades? Now you can wield two at once. Dab hand at melee? There are maces, axes, falchions and more on offer. Partial to the element of surprise? You can yank people backwards off rooftops by the seat of their trousers, gut them as they peer into haystacks (remember the proverb about the needle?), even drag the poor sods into the drink.

Between the move-list, new weapons (there’s a single-shot gunpowder device, among other toys), the number and size of the cities or the quantity of missions available therein, the developer’s second crack at the franchise is as heavily accoutred as new frontman Ezio’s fetching leather belt.

Ezio – murderous, refined and quite well-off – is the several-times-great-grandson of the first game’s Altair, and several-times-great-granddaddy of modern-day fugitive Desmond Miles. Miles once again features as time-travelling puppet-master, reliving his ancestor’s memories via the Anima machine in order to penetrate deeper into Assassin’s Creed’s millennia-old biochemical conspiracy.

Assassin’s Creed was a frustrating beast, equal parts brilliance and tedium. It loaded our tables with steeples and pennants, astonishingly lifelike NPC throngs and infinitely exploitable parkour playgrounds – but that love of the bigger picture was also its worst enemy, leaving Ubisoft Montreal precious little time and resources to blow on crucial questions of mission structure and variety. The game needed, demanded a sequel, a chance to capitalise on its own ambition. Fortunately, it shifted more than enough copies to warrant one.

Benoit Lambert is Game Director on Assassin’s Creed 2, which transits the action from the Crusades era to Renaissance Italy. He was unlucky enough to bump into us at a hotel bar recently. Insolent questions and heated answers after the cut.

VideoGameDaily: Have you played Batman: Arkham Asylum?

Benoit Lambert: I did.

VGD: Did you like it?

Lambert: Yeah, it’s really nice, really cool – very inspired, I would say, by the controls from Assassin’s Creed 1.

This is Ezio, the new hero. Show-off.

VGD: That’s interesting. One of the things that struck me about that game is that you don’t need a huge non-linear environment to create a fun, open-ended stealth experience. Did you ever consider narrowing the focus when creating Assassin’s Creed 2? Perhaps setting it within one city rather than spreading it across half a dozen?

Lambert: So, you’re saying like, make the game less open?

VGD: Yes, especially given the criticisms of inter-city travel in the first Assassin’s Creed…

Lambert: But I think criticisms were made of travelling between cities not because it was too much travel, but maybe because you didn’t have much to do. If the world is more full, there are more possibilities, more missions there, you would enjoy travelling. Look at games like World of Warcraft – huge games, and you are travelling a lot, but if there are interesting missions there you will enjoy it. If the landscape is different from one place to another, you will enjoy it.

The roof edge takedowns are delightful.

And just to come back to the fact that Batman is more linear, smarter at stealth – Assassin’s Creed is not a stealth game. Assassin’s Creed is an action adventure game where you can fight, do stealth, lots of things – you’re not limited to the stealth aspects. I think games like Thief, for example, are great stealth games but far less linear than Batman. You have a much bigger map, and you enjoy the game more. So I don’t think the size of the world relates to whether it’s a good or bad stealth game.