Assassin's Creed Brotherhood Remake - Why It Deserves One

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood is my favorite game from childhood. I've beaten it close to ten times. I own the collector's edition. I put roughly eight years into its multiplayer after release, which sounds absurd typing it out, but it's true. Every time someone brings up this series, Brotherhood is the one I bring up back.

Why Brotherhood Earned That Kind of Loyalty

Assassin's Creed II built Ezio. Brotherhood is where Ezio actually became someone. Rome replaced Florence and Venice as the playground, and the story picked up right where II left off with none of the pacing problems sequels usually carry. The Borgia stayed the target, the stakes stayed personal, and the writing never lost the thread connecting Ezio's revenge to something bigger than himself.

I've played a lot of games since. Few stories in this medium hit as hard as Brotherhood's did for me. The pacing, the character writing, the way Ezio's arc closes out here specifically, all of it holds up against anything gaming has put out since. That's not nostalgia talking. I've replayed this thing close to ten times across a decade plus, and it still lands every time.

Rome Itself Was the Real Achievement

The atmosphere in this game is something Ubisoft has struggled to recapture since. Rome felt lived in. Crumbling ruins next to bustling markets, the Colosseum looming over everything, church bells actually meaning something as you moved through the city. Ezio's Villa in Monteriggioni got destroyed at the start of this game, and rebuilding your own base of operations in Rome, recruiting assassins, growing your income, watching your city physically transform as you took back districts from Borgia control, that whole system made Rome feel like it belonged to you by the end.

The music deserves its own paragraph. Jesper Kyd's score for Brotherhood is one of the best in gaming, full stop. It carried scenes that dialogue alone couldn't have.

The Parkour Hit a Sweet Spot Unity Never Found

Movement in Brotherhood felt grounded in a way later entries lost. I'll say this clearly because I know it's a minority take: I liked Assassin's Creed Unity too. But Unity's parkour got so elaborate and animation-heavy that it started working against you as often as it worked for you. Brotherhood never had that problem. Climbing, running rooftops, chase sequences through crowded streets, all of it felt readable and responsive instead of overengineered. You knew what your character was going to do before you did it.

Recruiting Your Own Brotherhood Was Ahead of Its Time

The recruitment system doesn't get enough credit for how good an idea it was. Saving citizens from Borgia guards, training them into full assassins, sending them out on contracts across Europe while you kept playing, calling them in during fights for assists, it gave the entire game a strategic layer nothing else in the genre had at the time. Combined with the economic system, buying shops, renovating landmarks, watching your money multiply as Rome grew stronger, Brotherhood built an entire management layer under an action game and made both halves work.

The Multiplayer Was a Genuine Killer Feature

People forget how big a deal Brotherhood's multiplayer actually was. Nothing else in the genre had anything like it. The core idea, blending into crowds, hunting a specific target while someone else hunted you, staying undetected through disguise and patience instead of gunfire, was completely unlike anything else on the market.

It had rough edges. Balance issues, some frustrating matchmaking moments, systems that clearly needed another pass. I'm not going to pretend it was perfect. But it was inventive enough that I stuck with it for eight years after release, which tells you something about how much there was to love underneath the flaws. If I'm being fully honest, the multiplayer format itself peaked for me a couple entries later, Revelations and Assassin's Creed IV both have more hours logged from me on the multiplayer side than Brotherhood does. But Brotherhood is where it started, and starting something that good from nothing deserves real credit.

Why This Specific Game Needs the Remake Treatment

Ubisoft has remastered pieces of the Ezio trilogy before, but nothing that actually rebuilds Brotherhood the way it deserves. A real remake, not a resolution bump, but Rome rebuilt at the scale current hardware can handle, the city expanded beyond what 2010 hardware could manage, combat and parkour refined with everything the studio has learned since, that's a genuinely exciting idea to me.

The one thing that matters more than any graphical upgrade: keep the story exactly as it was. Don't touch the writing. Don't restructure Ezio's arc to fit some modern pacing trend. Expand the world, sharpen the systems, add new content around the edges if they want, but the core story that made this game what it is needs to stay untouched. That story is close to the best thing this industry has ever produced, and there's no version of "modernizing" it that improves on getting out of its way.

If Ubisoft ever actually announces this, and keeps the story where it belongs while building everything else bigger and better around it, I'm preordering the day it's announced. No hesitation, no waiting for reviews. Just straight to checkout.