The Hidden Blade Assassin's Creed in Depth

The first mod I ever saw was a camera mod. It allowed the player to disengage the locked-to-third-person camera and place it at different angles and to set it to stationary or mobile. However, the YouTube videos of it are now gone and I cannot find the mod anywhere on the net. I would really like to get my hands on it.

The only other mods I've seen are texture and lighting mods. There are numerous 'outfits' for Altair to wear (I have yet to see anything of decent quality) and you can play the cities at night time (though there are still oddities that make it look pretty weird). There were a few others to do more trivial things like altering the depth filters and animus effects, but nothing that improves the game. Just stuff to mess around with.

Because the game engine does not support modding, it requires some fairly complex hacking and a lot of file replacement. It's nowhere near the plug-and-play modding that most games have.

I certainly hope the game code is left open for moding in AC2. I would love to see what the creative minds on our site can come up with if modding for AC2 was a simple task. It could be really fun, and it might even encourage some people to get the game on PC (I'd have to upgrade my PC first, though)!

You know what's funny also is that Assassins Creed is the game that inspired me to make the next-gen switch from PS2 to Xbox 360. Now a pending group of mods could possibly inspire me to get a new PC and get AC2 for the PC.

As great as it would be, I wouldn't bet on it. AC isn't a series that would be popular for modding, so no tools will likely ever be made available (as it takes time and money to create said tools). Futhermore, it's a completely custom engine that was never designed for modability, so it would require extensive patching (and testing) to accommodate mods.

I would gladly pay $200+ for an SDK and a patch that allowed AC 1 or 2 to be easily modded (so that others could try my mods). Unfortunately, I'm not in any sort of majority, so it'll never happen.

I can already think of a great mod.

I'm sure that somewhere in all that game code is the Eagle flying glitch that we see in all the demos. Someone could mod the game so that we could reactivate it with the touch of a button. Oh, the fun we could have...

On the ac-maps forums, someone pointed to a video which solves the contrast issue on the PC, and actually makes it look really nice and authentic (not photorealistic, but authentic to the style). So I guess that is somewhat improving the game. Also, I saw an Ezio outfit for Altair, but since you can only change how Altair is textured, and thus keep altair the same "shape", it was pretty much the original outfit with a few streaks of red and a cape that seemed to be painted on But since there's only 4 weapons, what sort of mod would really convince anyone to switch to PC? Infinite knives? Yawn. Always exposed? Stupid. Can't really think of anything fun or useful.

It didn't solve the contrast issue at all, actually.

Just because you can't doesn't mean that nobody else could.

I would love to overhaul the combat engine, for one. Changing assassinations (or adding new ones) is another. Then there's the array of weapon and character models that could be changed, allowing for new content. Then perhaps changing some rules, like slowing health regen, maxing out at a much smaller amount of health (or never gaining any from the start), making guards do more damage, etc.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Maybe we could get a gary's mod for Assassins Creed II?

I was talking about mods that are feasible currently. Of course, if the engine was fully accessible, I could think of plenty of cool mods.

Such as custom maps, skippable cutscenes, throwing knives doing less damage, altair getting a flying machine, adding extra story, giving altair 4 legs. However, none of that is possible, so it's not really worth mentioning.

I think a great mod would be the ability to purchase every weapon in the game. By this, I mean that you could purchase and sheath two-handed weapons, long-weapons (which is what red wanted), and even brooms.

That would make a lot of people happy, I imagine.

That's kind of what we were talking about.

Oh, and we could purchase and sheath the Papal Staff of course.

PC Version comes out tomorrow, so we should be seeing some mods sometime soon I imagine. Will any be good? We'll have to wait and see...

I doubt that we're going to see anything other than maybe some texture mods, recolorization of Ezio's clothing, things of that nature. And of course health/ammo trainers.

After all, it's the same engine as AC1, albeit tweaked. After two years, I still haven't seen anything besides texture mods for AC1's PC version.

Precisely.

On the plus side, it should be a cinch to rip the textures I need from the data files.

What I want is to be able to move the camera wherever you want to. Many times I wanted to have a better look at some piece of architecture, but couldn't because the camera insists on focusing on Altair/Ezio's head.

(This game isn't as bad as the first game for which I desperately wanted this feature: Final Fantasy XII on the PS2. So much beautiful scenery, yet the cameras all wanted us to look at the back of the protagonist's head! Let my viewing angle be free!)

In AC2 and Brotherhood you can go into "first person view" by depressing the right thumbstick. Asaic used this feature to make the feather screenshots for our maps.

Yea, I was wondering about this too. I have a feeling ubisoft hid all their frikin game files somewhere. I just can't seem to find any of them. Most games are easily moddable if you can find the game's dll and other files, but most of them are files on Ubisofts DRM.

I have an idea for a costume mod. When Altair kills Al Mualim in memory block 7 he becomes the Grand Master if the Assassin Order so there should be a mod that makes his assassins robes black (because Al Mualims robes were black to signify his high status). But also leave the red in the middle stripe of his robes, leave his greaves and vambraces brown also.

I think there are mods like that.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3U6hTB6WbGA

Interesting, but a mod to change the pattern/texture/bumpmaps of Altair's clothes is probably what most people are looking for.

They'll definately want to chose altair's clothe's color themselves.

What the? I appreciate the video, but that Ninja Skin is way to dark. Ideally, there should be a skin of Al Mualim's clothes that can replace Altiar's robes directly.