January 22, 2010 - The first downloadable expansion pack for Assassin's Creed II is set for release next week, publisher Ubisoft confirmed this morning via Twitter.
Battle of Forli, the first of two planned DLC packs for the title, will be available worldwide on January 28 for 320 Microsoft points on Xbox 360 or $3.99 on PlayStation Network for PS3. The second pack, The Bonfire of the Vanities, has no set release date, but will be available sometime next month for $4.99
And just as a reminder, each pack will require about 1GB of free memory space, so fans may want to do some house cleaning this weekend to prepare.
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UPDATE: a comment from BenMatlock on January 22, 2010 16:18 PDT
I work at Ubisoft so I can tell you exactly how it happened.
Yes those sequences were in the original script/concept.
However, they were not designed as DLC content. In fact we had no idea what we were going to put out as DLC. But we saw at the beginning of this last summer that we HAD to cut some stuff to finish the game in time (and missing the november shopping season would have a terrible effect on sales...)
Those 2 sequences were in a VERY early stage of development (we don't do them in numerical order, you know. They are made in parallel in order of priority/complexity/etc. This is what we have production managers for) They were also not essential to the main story. It didn't please us to cut it, but at some point you have to make tough decisions to meet deadlines. So we just stopped working completely on them (and on the Firenze city area that's blocked in the shipped game). The content is NOT on the disc. We worked our asses from november until today (yes, today) to complete those new missions.
If it was not for DLC, we would NEVER have gone back to those sequences, you would NEVER be able to play them, and they would still have been cut. So the game as you played it is the whole thing, like a movie as you see it in theater complete, even if you know there are probably more than an hour of scenes that were in the script, were even shot, but were cut. In our case, they were not even "shot" yet, we went back to work after the release to do them
MovieMiguel.com
