Assassin's Creed Almost Had Co-Op

Assassin's Creed

The original Assassin's Creed was excellent (don't listen to the haters), and laid the foundation for one of the best new franchises of the industry.

But did you know that the first title was initially supposed to have included a big cooperative gameplay component? According to what ACIII mission director Philippe Bergeron told OXM UK, the team had anticipated featuring a drop-in co-op feature but unfortunately, they realized that it just "didn't fit:"

"Before we knew about the Desmond story and Animus link, we had a huge co-op component in there. But it just became too hard to do: the engine couldn't support it, and then the metaphor we had above it didn't support it."

Bergeron went on to say that co-op was one of those great ideas at the beginning that "just didn't make sense in the end." They wanted to focus more on the single-player experience and they eventually concluded that co-op didn't make sense in the storyline. Here's part of Bergeron's explanation, which seems perfectly logical to me:

"There was no way to reconcile having multiplayer or co-op in an ancestor's memories. Your ancestor lived his life in a certain way, so assuming you had branching storylines, it creates a paradox. It didn't fit."

Got no problem with that. Everything has multiplayer of some sort these days. Sometimes, it's just plain unnecessary and even silly when considering the storyline and theme.

Tags: assassins creed, assassins creed co op, ubisoft, ac coop

2/4/2013 9:26:21 PM Ben Dutka

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