I just thought of something for AC3. We've all talked about the bleeding effect, and the possibility of AC3 being in different time periods, and even of Desmond being the entire game. But there's something we haven't mentioned, and I just realized it would fit perfectly with all the hints given in AC2.
So, Desmond is almost a trained assassin now, and he has encountered a little bit of the bleeding effect. But he hasn't mastered that yet. Lucy said if he does, which no one has so far, it could be "very useful". What's their mission in AC3? It would be to find the temples mentioned by Minerva right? Where are the temples? They could be hidden anywhere in the world, they could be disguised as famous structures we know today, or some could even be underground.
So, what if AC3 starts off with the player playing as Desmond while he and his team of assassins now travel across the globe in search of the temples. They have general ideas of where each temple is based on other clues/information, but now WHERE it is, or how to get in. So each location would have two designs - modern day AND period. It would be like Soul Reaver, where Desmond explores the modern version of the city, but has to "bleed" into a period ancestor to explore the older version of the same city to pick up clues and discover changes in the city's design and layout in relation to the temple, before he can successfully get into it in modern day. The changes would be in realtime, so if you bleed, the city morphs dynamically, and you can climb certain areas, and then bleed back, to continue, etc.
And to add to the "assassin" nature of the storyline, they could make it even cooler by making it such that Templars have taken over these installations in modern day, while in period era, the assassins had to remove a Templar presence in the area in order to construct or finish the temple. In this sense, it means that different "targets" exist in both eras, but they'll ultimately be the same target in the same place at the finale of that chapter. Ie: When the assassin in the past leaps and strikes the target, the game will shift in realtime into the modern era with Desmond striking the target in the real world.
That would be REALLY cool! :O
Okay, I feel like a fucking insane fanboy now. This obsession with AC has to stop! :lol