Assassin’s Creed 2 remaster patched to remove ‘weird NPC face’

Ubisoft has patched the remastered version of Assassin's Creed 2 in Assassin’s Creed The Ezio Collection, going back in time to Renaissance Italy to erase a strange-looking background character from an early cutscene.

The update, which was released yesterday on both PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, brings The Ezio Collection to version 1.02. The official patch notes on the Ubisoft forums say only that the update “fixed a visual issue that may appear” in a cutscene in Assassin’s Creed 2, and that it addressed a problem with background music and high synchronization points.

The notes that show up in the PS4 dashboard’s update history are a bit more specific about the change, however.

“FIXED - A weird NPC face appears in Assassin’s Creed 2 Sequence 1, Memory 1,” the PS4 patch notes say, along with a note about the aforementioned music issue. You can see the PS4 update history in the screenshot from Eurogamer below:

Eurogamer

The NPC in question was discovered by Polygon during a playthrough of the Xbox One version of Assassin’s Creed 2 in The Ezio Collection. As you can see in the comparison image below, the character is very different from the one we saw in the original Xbox 360 version of Assassin’s Creed 2, and while beauty lies in the eye of the beholder, it doesn’t seem unfair to say the new guy looks “weird” compared to his predecessor.

Ubisoft Montreal/Virtuos/Ubisoft via Polygon

It’s worth noting that according to Ubisoft, the game populates the cutscene with a random NPC in that spot, so this particular weird, wide-eyed Florentine gentleman was unlikely to appear in every playback of that cutscene. And now, after patch 1.02, he won’t appear at all.

We’ve reached out to Ubisoft for further details, and will update this article with any information we receive.