User blog comment:Odranoelluta/Poll For The Next Game Location/@comment-4206713-20120224022928/@comment-84391-20120229042341

Mind you, my pick, hands down, would be Napoleon's campaign in Egypt; Napolen is the leader of the Templars, and he invades Egypt to secure Pieces of Eden, and also to secure an alliance with Tipu Saheb, an enemy of the Ottomans. The MC is an Ottoman or Mamluk Assassin who trying to stop the Templars. Obviously the MC couldn't kill Napoleon, but he/she could assassinate Tipu, and eventually takes on an apprentice, Suleiman al-Halabi. After Halabi is sufficiently trained, they undertake a mission to assassinate Napoleon's second-in-command, General Kleber. They succeed, but Halabi is captured and executed, giving the MC a devastating personal failure, and setting up an epic redemptive final mission. Sequences similar to the Altair sequences in Revelations would put the MC in the shoes of First Civilization scientist Re-Horakhty, as he undertakes a dangerous mission for the Capitoline Triad, while being opposed by his traitorous lieutenant, Apophis (yep, the inspiration for Journey of the Sun).

With Japan, only two timeframes would be feasable, 1599-1637, or 1854-1875. The sakoku period, where there was NO contact with Europe (aside from the Netherlands, who were given ONE trade enclave in Nagasaki), would make Templar/Assassin stories pretty much impossible and would overall be a terrible fit for the series. The early conflicts with the Portuguese and/or the fall of the Shogunate in the 1860s would be well-tailored for AC though.

As peace and prosperous as the Victorian Era was on the outside, lot of stuff happened behind closed doors, like a private little war for the future of another country. Although Narodnaya Volya were most influential in Paris, they did have safehouses and printing presses in London, where their ideals resonated with those who were forgotten or spat upon by the Victorian Establishment. The Tsarist secret police, the Okhrana, knew this, so they had agents in London, the most well known being Boleslaw Malankiewicz and Casimir Pilenas, it really was more spies, terrorists, and spy hunters than you could shake a stick at. Then came Jack the Ripper. He had nothing to do with the Volya or the Okhrana, mind you, but his crime spree led to Scotland Yard's "Ripper Inquisition." Basically, any "undesirable" was a suspect, Jews, illegal immigrants, and political dissidents. Invariably, they would be cleared of the murder suspicion, but during the investigation, they were conviently discovered to be guilty of another crime that justified imprisonment, exile, or deportation. This is why Jack was never caught, the murders were the perfect way to ruin or get rid of anyone who ruffled the feathers of the Victorian establishment, because most of them were in "that part of town." Not hard to draw a parallel to the US War on Terror.

If you look at the villains of previous games, in addition to them really existing, they fall squarely into two categories: either they're really bad but not as obvious as Hitler or Stalin (the Borgias and Girolamo Savanarola fall into this category), or they're the type that don't really seem that evil when you read about them in the history books (Robert de Sable and Prince Ahmet fall into this category). So when asking the question "who should the villain be," in keeping with this consistent pattern, two men come to mind:

1. Napoleon. I'd say most of us are pretty clearly divided as to whether or not he would be considered a hero or a villain. He was a conqueror, but was a lot more respectful to Jews and Muslims than most of his contemporaries. He's a good fit for the AC Templars, remember Assassins=Good and Templars=Evil is an overstatement, UbiSoft has stated it's supposed to be a gray conflict. Making Napoleon the Templar's big cheese would be a good way to remind us of this. He could easily fit into either the French Revolution or Egypt.

2. Peter Rachkovsky. This guy was bad like the Borgias, though not well known. He directed the Paris branch of the Okhrana, the Tsarist secret police, and was responsible for most of their victories against Narodnaya Volya. He did this by using agent provocatuers, including one mysterious one codenamed Proteus (or Prodeus), whose real identity is (I think) unknown to historians. From 1884-1902, he was in Paris, but as stated above, he had agents in London and even New York. But what makes him such a bad guy is this: he is author of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an elaborate hoax detailing a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world. Why did he do this? Because he *wanted* to stir up racial hatred against the Jews, to deflect attention away from the Russia's social problems. So he could easily have a villainous role in either a Victorian England or Russian Revolution story.

The MC would not be able to actually kill either of them, but Ezio didn't kill Rodrigo Borgia. The MC could easily hand them a similar symbolic defeat.

Wow, that was a long post, am I turning into Brad Meltzer?