Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood - The Da Vinci Disappearance

Lore & Background

The Da Vinci Disappearance retains the open-world action-adventure and stealth gameplay of Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood. The new storyline is incorporated into the existing campaign rather than launched separately, appearing on the map as a series of recovered memories once the player has completed Sequence 3. The player controls Ezio while navigating Rome and two newly created environments, using parkour, social stealth, melee weapons, and assassination techniques carried over from the base game. The single-player campaign consists of eight missions, estimated by reviewers to take between two and three hours to complete. Its objectives include following and pursuing suspects, infiltrating guarded compounds, fighting Hermeticists, recovering Leonardo's paintings, and examining them for concealed diagrams. Several missions require Ezio to remain undetected, with discovery causing immediate desynchronization, while the two new environments place greater emphasis on climbing and environmental puzzles than ordinary missions in Rome.

The expansion adds the Assassinate and Escort modes to Brotherhood's multiplayer component. Assassinate is a free-for-all mode for six to eight players without automatically assigned contracts; players instead identify other human-controlled characters among crowds and manually select them as targets. Escort divides eight players into two teams, with one protecting computer-controlled targets as they travel between checkpoints and the other attempting to assassinate them; the teams exchange roles between rounds. Its multiplayer content also includes a map modeled on the Alhambra in Granada, containing interconnected indoor, outdoor, and vertically layered areas. Four playable character models—the Dama Rossa, Knight, Marquis, and Pariah—were added, together with new assassination animations. The expansion also introduced ten achievements or trophies, some tied to the storyline and others requiring particular combat, movement, or horse-riding actions.

In 1506, Ezio visits Leonardo at his workshop in Rome while attempting to arrange passage to Spain, where he intends to continue pursuing Cesare Borgia. Leonardo agrees to introduce him to a ship captain but first asks Ezio to find his absent apprentice, Salaì. Ezio locates Salaì gambling at the Thieves' Guild and helps him fight a group of robed men who have been pursuing him.

Reader's Guide

The Da Vinci Disappearance is significant as the first paid story expansion for Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, following two free multiplayer updates released as the Animus Project updates. It was developed by Ubisoft Montreal, with Julien Laferrière serving as associate producer—his first project in that position, after he had supervised user-interface, menu, and visual-effects work on Assassin's Creed II. Ubisoft later described his work on the expansion as preparation for his role overseeing game design, mission design, and technology on Assassin's Creed III. The expansion was shown at Microsoft's February 2011 Games Showcase in San Francisco, where GameSpot's Kevin VanOrd played its first five missions and interviewed Laferrière. VanOrd reported that Ubisoft Montreal had chosen to give Leonardo a more central role after his comparatively limited involvement in the main campaign, while the developers integrated the missions into the existing sequence structure so that they could be played without completing the full story. The expansion received 'generally favorable' reviews according to Metacritic, with the Xbox 360 version holding an aggregate score of 75 out of 100 based on 13 reviews, and the PlayStation 3 version holding 76 out of 100 based on nine reviews. Reviewers frequently praised the expansion's characterization, voice acting, platforming sequences, and quantity of content, while responses to its mandatory-stealth missions, chase sequences, length, and story were divided. Later scholarship has examined the expansion's representation of the relationship between Leonardo and Salaì and the use of its concluding coordinates across the wider Assassin's Creed transmedia narrative. Its single-player campaign was later incorporated into Assassin's Creed: The Ezio Collection, alongside the other solo downloadable content from Assassin's Creed II, Brotherhood, and Assassin's Creed: Revelations, released for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in 2016 and later for Nintendo Switch in 2022.

Did You Know?

• The expansion was released on March 8, 2011, for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, and was included without a separate charge in the Windows release of Brotherhood.
• The expansion introduces a fictional group called the Hermeticists, who seek a temple associated with Pythagoras.
• The concluding coordinates (43 39 19 N, 75 27 42 W) were recognized by modern-day Assassins monitoring Desmond Miles as the location of a temple.