One of the things that I always found charming about the first few Assassins' Creed game was the way they settled into the gaps of history. The places and time periods they encompassed - the Middle East during the Third Crusade and Renaissance Italy - are riddled with historical uncertainty.

Some of the most famous real-world figures that appear in these games have uncertain years of birth, missing years of their lives that historians can only guess at, and relationships that are more educated guess than definite fact. Some of Ezio costume also AC fans' love. One of the fun things about playing Altaïr and Ezio is that they could slip believably into these gaps, providing a fictional narrative that fit snugly against what we actually know.

One great example of this is the finale of Assassin's Creed II. The game ends with a one-on-one fight against the game's primary villain, Rodrigo Borgia, better known at the time as Pope Alexander VI. The problem was that I'd been reading up on the historical figures in the game, so I knew he was not due to die until a few years later.

Sure enough, Ezio ends up losing his weapons, hidden blade replica, and the fight becomes a bare-knuckle brawl. (Not many games can say their grand finale is a fistfight with the Pope!) In the end, with Borgia still alive, Ezio finds what he needs in the Vatican and leaves the Pope alive to suffer the ignominy of defeat.

True to form, nobody knows precisely how Borgia ended up dying; it appeared to be poison, but nobody could say for certain what it was or who had administered it. The persistent rumour was that his son Cesare accidentally poisoned both himself and his father while trying to murder a rival bishop. Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood made Cesare's role far more explicit.

In contrast, last year's Assassin's Creed III was suffocated by volumes of historical detail. Rather than settling neatly into the gaps, it simply trod roughly on known facts. The American Revolutionary War is a period studied fanatically by countless professional and amateur historians, and the events of that war are known in great detail from start to finish.