The Hidden Blade Assassin's Creed in Depth

In this video I demonstrate new world record blitzes for Tamir and Talal, as well as a super consistent way of escaping without hiding after the Tamir assassination. Actually, all of the stuff in the video is really consistent. I shave off almost half a second from the current WR on Tamir (1.03s versus 0.6s) and almost two seconds on Talal (24.00s versus 22.3s). I'll talk a bit about the setups and methods I use below.

Tamir
After dropping down into the courtyard, I move away from the pool just a little bit to trigger the cutscene start. Then I quickly position Altaïr for the assassination. If you wait too long, there will be civilians in the way, so you have to be fast.

After the scene you need a bit of luck; Tamir can walk several different directions, and if he goes for anything else than across the pool, you automatically lose a second or so. If he does go for the pool, it's pretty much a superfast blitz.

I honestly believe this is the fastest any setup is ever going to get unless we find a way to get in the huddle.

I timed this blitz from the white flash to the first frame of the kill animation, which amounts to 0.6 seconds.

The way escaping without hiding works is by putting enough distance between Altaïr and the pursuers. 50 metres to be exact. I accomplish this in the video by climbing up onto the souk, where the guards can't follow Altaïr, which gets me enough distance to escape by the time I reach the roof garden. Sometimes it's a bit later, but it works pretty much every time.

Talal
Honestly, Aurel pretty much found this, but his blitz setup didn't have the lamp jump so it's a lot slower than mine. I'll talk about the lamp jump a bit first because it's actually very easy (90% consistency easily) if you know what you're doing.

Obviously, your stick is going to have to be somewhere in the southeast region, but just blindly pointing your stick isn't going to work. There are two things you want to avoid while trying for the lamp jump: jumping straight back, and jumping straight to the side. The way you do this is by looking at the camera angle and compensate for that. Sometimes it will be centered behind Altaïr, so you point the stick a little more to the east side. Other times it will be kind of to the side like you see in the video, so in that case you point it a bit more to the south side.

The rest of the blitz is fairly straightforward. Worth noting is that I jump to the wooden bit of the roof after exiting the building rather than jumping diagonally, more towards Talal. This costs a tiny bit of time, but this way it's more consistent whereas the diagonal jump tends to fail the air to assassinate; this attempt was the first try where I didn't make any stupid mistakes like forgetting to press to assassinate.

Another thing that's worth to note is that the kill animation actually starts before the camera angle changes. This is from a reload, so I timed this blitz from the first frame of movement (which is Altaïr turning) to the frame right before the camera angle change (as Altaïr starts his jump), which amounts to 22.3 seconds.

I am positive that a sub-22s blitz on Tamir is possible, with the diagonal jump and going from the actual scene. It's way more trouble than it's worth though, so I am not going to try for it.

Hope you enjoyed the vid, and maybe someone finds the motivation to try for a sub-22!