Another week, another major video game release. And while the news is still dominated by the moneymaking behemoth that is Call of Duty: Black Ops, an altogether more intricate and richly defined title launches today.

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood is the latest in Ubisoft's highly successful series of visually stunning action adventures. Following the travails of a secret society of assassins through hundreds of years of European history, the games combine acrobatic exploration with twisting conspiracy narratives and gutsy combat. While the opening instalment explored the chaos of the Crusades-era Middle East, Assassin's II and its follow-up move the action to Renaissance Italy, where the killer sect must once again confront its ongoing enemy, the shadowy Knights Templar order, now harboured within the increasingly powerful Catholic church.

What's interesting about the series is its successful use history as a game mechanic, and its ability to construct realistic environments around the largely fantastical story. The evocations of cities such as Jerusalem and Rome, while not always painstakingly accurate, have a sense of place and life that is almost unique in the video game sector.



Unsurprisingly, the design team talk of long field trips to each location, with artists taking thousands of photos and hours of video footage. While researching Florence for Assassin's Creed II, co-writer Corey May studied Machiavelli's contemporary history of the city, and consulted an array of historians. In a blog post on the process he wrote, "The Vasari Corridor is not in our game. Nor is the Uffizi. They hadn't been built yet. The façade of the church and clock tower in Venice's Saint Mark's square didn't look quite as they do now. San Gimignano had more towers. And on and on."

The titles have also employed the vast processing power of the modern console to create bustling urban populations. One of the key gameplay features of the series is the ability of the lead character to hide within crowds of computer-controlled civilians; although just watching the various thieves, prostitutes and noblemen going about their business is often interesting enough. Real-life historical figures are also drawn into the vast conspiracy-laden plot. In Assassin's Creed we witness the military brilliance of legendary Muslim leader, Saladin, in Assassin's Creed II, we make friends with Leonardo da Vinci, and in Brotherhood the key antagonist is Cesare Borgia, the son of Pope Alexander VI, whose family the game links with the Templars.

Indeed, the whole set up is so fecund with narrative and interactive possibilities, so rich in atmosphere, so sensuous, that what Assassin's Creed does most of all is make you wonder why more games don't explore historical themes. Let's face it, the mainstream games industry is pretty much a chronological wasteland. There are the RPG titles set in vague mythological realms and there are the shooting games, which sub-divide World War II and its successive conflicts into a series of set-piece battles, freed of context or compassion. "You're talking about relatively straightforward gameplay driven experiences," says Dan Pinchbeck, an experimental game designer and lecturer in game narrative at Portsmouth University. "In a WW2 shooter, you're not into the intricacies of wartime European politics or the nuances of Nazism, you're just hacking through a town whilst soldiers shout 'Mein Leben!' around you. It's just a peg to hang the action off."

It's only really the military strategy titles that have delved deeper into the past. But again, titles like Shogun: Total War and Sid Meier's Gettysburg, don't give us any sort of social economic insight into the eras – they're just interesting backdrops, employed to provide weapon and unit variety. It is history as armoury.

Meanwhile, a glance at TV and literature shows how different things are elsewhere in popular culture. The costume drama is a staple of family viewing, the combination of period detail and timeless narrative themes regularly combining to massive ratings success. And the historical novel is a reliable mainstay of the fiction charts, from the popularist tomes of Ken Follett and Dan Brown to the Booker winning works of Hilary Mantel and Barry Unsworth. History is a fertile literary sandbox because it tells us that humanity has changed so much without ever really changing at all: hey presto, instant profundity! Why can't video games explore this too?

The galling thing is, games are the perfect medium for historical fiction – through their unique interactivity, they don't have to tell us about life in previous ages, they can show us; and we can live it. Having just re-read Oliver Twist, I was desperate to visit the wretched labyrinthine streets where Bill Sikes and Fagin lived out their miserable lives. But they're gone; the rotting buildings and stinking alleys of Victorian Bermondsey we're ripped down in the slum clearances at the end of the century. Yet they could be brilliantly recreated in a game – as could the devilish thieves, usurers and drunkards of Dickens' novels.

And Assassin's Creed has proven that historical games don't need to be literary or intellectually worthy. The games are smart and engaging, they pique your curiosity about the Templars and the nobles of the Renaissance, but they don't shove it down your throat. For the most part, Brotherhood, like its predecessors, is about leaping from rooftop to rooftop, chasing down enemy targets and putting them to the sword. You can also use your power and influence to rebuild areas of the city and encourage commerce, but you don't have to. You can just kill people.

Perhaps part of the problem is budget. Producing a fully explorable and graphically rich recreation of a real city is not cheap; the Assassin's Creed II team reached over 200 people during the development cycle, and the budget will have easily exceeded $25m. Elsewhere, the other truly major historical title of 2010, Rockstar's western adventure Red Dead Redemption, was in development for six years and is estimated to have cost around $40m to produce. Even before the current generation of high-end consoles, historical games have often proved to be a challenging endeavour. The Last Express, a hugely compelling adventure set just before World War One was released in 1997 after a then almost unheard of five years in development, the title's detailed 2D animation taking up much of the time. Two year's later, Sega's densely detailed eighties-set drama, Shenmue, cost a record-breaking $60m.

Sure, it's possible to explore history in games without spending a fortune on graphics. Channel 4 Education has commissioned a whole range of browser-based titles like 1066, Bow Street Runner and 303 Squadron, that manage to say a lot about history and provide compelling gameplay experiences without being astonishingly beautiful. But they are niche educational titles. In the mainstream games industry, the look is the thing. As Pinchbeck puts it, "You could have a hugely real historical text-based adventure, and it could be a brilliant, brilliant game, but you're not going to capture that sense of wonder, of Ezio squatting on his perch high above the city, watching the sun set over Renaissance Italy."

Then there's the understandable concern that gamers don't actually want to delve about in the past. The traditional demographic – males aged between 14 and 30 – don't tend to be the ones watching Lark Rise and Antiques Roadshow on a Sunday night. And of course, young males in the world's biggest market for games – North America – don't have a direct geographic interest in the bulk of Western history. Conversely, when Rockstar started ploughing money into Red Dead Redemption, celebrity games analyst Michael Pachter declared that it wasn't blockbuster material because, "the U.S. West will not be particularly appealing to European audiences."

But then of course he was wrong, because even out here in Europe we've grown up with the brutal, cool imagery of Leone and Eastwood. And more importantly, gamers understood that what underpinned the game was the familiar Grand Theft Auto system of open-world exploration, crude jokes and ultra-violence. Red Dead, however much Rockstar denied it, was Grand Theft Horsey. It will be interesting to see how the publisher's next epic adventure, LA Noire, fares. This dark crime thriller, set in the corruption-ridden LA of the forties, seems to be a pure detective procedural, in which narrative and intrigue dominate. But the trailers already show that the developer, Team Bondi, is employing familiar Rockstar tropes – snappy dialogue, intimidation, explosive violence…

And that could well be the key. The best historical games have worked by appropriating elements of history that work alongside familiar gameplay concepts. "Historical elements can enhance a game's atmosphere on many levels, provided the period being referenced excites the audience, and that those historical elements are integral to the fabric of the gameplay," says Charles Cecil, founder of Revolution Software and designer of the historically-tinged Broken Sword titles. "If the history resonates with the audience then a heightened sense of drama can be built, and the immersion enhanced through authenticity. And, to be honest, wonderful, dramatic history is so exhilarating that it would often be harder to invent anything more exciting. But get it wrong, and the opposite effect is achieved and the use of history can feel irrelevant and clichéd."

What we've seen over the last five years is titles that have succeeded by merging period detail with the seemingly universal adolescent pre-occupations of science fiction and fantasy. Hence, we've had Insomniac's Resistance: Fall of Man, which blends '50s Americana with an alien invasion story, and Bioshock, which ingeniously combines art deco architecture with steampunk technologies and cybernetic augmentation.

Assassin's Creed plays this game too. In Brotherhood, da Vinci's engineering brilliance is employed by the Borgia clan to manufacture modern day weaponry – so we get the realism of the artist's genius combined with the need for rocket launchers. And then there's the big one. Framing the historical action is a sci-fi story set in the near-future, in which a character named Desmond Miles explores his genetic memories via a high-tech virtual reality machine named Animus. The history sections are actually his ancestral reminiscences, and the game is a quest to discover powerful artefacts that the assassins and Templars have been fighting over since the Middle Ages. Assassin's Creed is essentially a time-travel yarn for the quantum era.

Interestingly, the sections where you control Desmond have largely been criticised by gamers. "I think the dual timelines is dreadful really," says Pinchbeck. "In the first game, it really felt like a badly conceived attempt to artificially block off areas of the map, and I think what that shows is a bit of an underestimation of gamers. For me, it comes from what Eric Zimmerman and Katie Salen call the 'immersion fallacy', that this mythic idea of full immersion is the Holy Grail for games. But gamers really don't care about seeing the edges of the system that much. Sure, we hate invisible walls, but we're also used to having system-type information suddenly appear in a virtual world without it causing us any issues. So I'd have been happier just with a wall saying 'Level not available' than this complicated, half-baked Animus stuff.

"But what's interesting is then it becomes the core IP of the franchise. Now, maybe this was in there from the start, but the genius of the dual timeline from a marketing point of view is that you have a consistent fiction, of Desmond and Lucy and the modern Assassins bookending the actual story, which is then a historical fiction you can pick up and put down in any time period you like – AC renaissance, AC industrial revolution... And of course it gives you license to do whatever you want in the actual historical world that doesn't technically fit, or isn't historically accurate, because you can just go 'Animus!' at any point."

But the conceit works; it's a way in. When Ubisoft produced its original teasers for the first Assassin's Creed, the company showed sections of the Crusades gameplay, but with certain characters glitching on and off the screen like malfunctioning holograms – the company never explained it, but built a mystique around it, played on the disconnect between history and technology. It was successful. Despite very mixed reviews, the title shifted eight million copies. Could a straightforward historical adventure have done that?

The hope is, titles like Red Dead, LA Noire and Assassin's Creed represent the standard-bearers for a new generation of games grounded in history, in reality, in humanity. "We're starting to see, in a wider sense, that generic sci-fi, contemporary conspiracy settings, supernatural bioterrorism and all that guff is fine, but we've been around those worlds so often that they lose their edge," says Pinchbeck. "Meanwhile, there are fantastic, extraordinary places and times historically that we can raid. That's the brilliance of AC, that it sets up these amazing worlds that we recognise from life outside of gaming. We almost import a sense of life and reality from our pre-existing knowledge of history to these game worlds, we supply a lot of the context ourselves, and there's a real kick from running around 15th century Italy, or 11th century Jerusalem.

"In a wider sense, right across media, history is subject to revisionism to an extent that it's never been before. This has a lot to do with the nasty aftertaste of postmodernism, where the idea of truth has been thrown out and relativity is all that's left. So AC kind of belongs in this trend in one way, where history becomes a kind of cultural IP bank account, that's there to be raided and adapted. But there's also a second, longer trend of fictionalising history - let's face it, Cecil B DeMille played fairly fast-and-loose with it, and cinema like that is probably the real ancestry of Assassin's Creed."

It will be interesting to see where the series goes next. May has said that a guiding design principle has been to explore historical periods that don't usually feature in games. Between the Renaissance and the modern era, there are rich, wholly unexplored pickings. Bermondsey, quite possibly, awaits.