Assassin\'s Creed is basically finished. After a four-year development cycle that began right after Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time shipped to retail, the Assassin\'s team at Ubisoft\'s renowned Montreal studio is now putting the last touches on the first submission build of the game before it goes into rigorous testing. Sure, bugs will come back from Sony and Microsoft\'s approval teams, and the developers will have a precious handful of weeks to fix those bugs, optimize the frame rate, and apply that last, vital coat of polish. But the game\'s feature set, level design, and mission structure are now set in stone. We were pleasantly surprised at the breadth and diversity of the gameplay when we had a chance to sit down with that nearly finished build for an extended tour of Acre, one of Assassin\'s three primary cities, with a little guidance from creative director Patrice Désilets.




The Crusades weren\'t really a pleasant time for anyone.

So far, Ubisoft has publicly presented only the core gameplay conceit of Assassin\'s Creed: You infiltrate the environment, kill your target, and get out--stealthily if you can, but in a hail of arrows if necessary. However, while exploring Acre, we came to realize that you\'ll be doing much more than simply slaying your way through the Crusades-weary holy land of the late 12th century. The game\'s three cities--Acre, Jerusalem, and Damascus--will be populated with thousands of citizens going about their business. You\'ll often have the opportunity to embroil yourself in that business--to your own ends, of course--even when it isn\'t directly involved with your quest to kill your current target.

First, we\'ll give you an idea of the general flow of Assassin\'s Creed. Early in the game, master assassin and main character Altaïr will commit some kind of dire mistake, though the nature of that mistake is unclear. Consequently, his esteem will diminish in the eyes of his assassin\'s guild and result in the loss of most of his equipment and abilities. It\'s more than a little reminiscent of that now-classic Metroid design archetype: Start out with everything, lose it all, and spend the rest of the game getting it back. Altaïr\'s acquisition of new abilities and gear--such as throwing knives for taking out enemies silently at range, or a ledge-grab move that will let you secure a handhold while falling--will correspond to the elimination of his targets. These targets will include notable figures of the Crusades spread out across all three cities, and you\'ll have the freedom not only to move between those cities at will in an open-world fashion, but also to pursue those targets in any order, within the limits of the storyline.