Ezio is older now and the game registers this in how he moves through Rome — more deliberate than the young man of AC2, more aware of what power costs the people who don't have it. The distinction between seeking power and freeing those beneath it is Brotherhood's central ethical argument: the Borgias consolidated power, the Templars maintain power, and the Assassins exist to dissolve it. Ezio is not trying to become Rodrigo Borgia. He is trying to make Rodrigo Borgia impossible.

The Roman people are the game's moral ground — the citizens oppressed by Borgia taxation, the shops shuttered by Templar influence, the population that cannot organize its own liberation and needs the Brotherhood to create the conditions where liberation becomes possible. Freeing them is not a side objective. It is the point.