Don’t you just love it when little titbits pop up after a few years? According to Philippe Bergeron Assassin’s Creed originally featured co-op. Imagine that, an actual co-op mode for Assassin’s Creed with all sorts of endless possibilities.
The original Assassin’s Creed launched in 2007 and obviously featured no such thing so what happened and why why it scrapped?
Philippe Bergeron who most recently served as mission director for Assassin’s Creed III told OXM the following.
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. Co-op was one of those big things at the beginning that just didn’t make sense in the end.
For us it was really part of the single player experience, to have in-and-out co-op, and in the end we never thought it made sense in the storyline that we had for the Animus.
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.
It’s always very interesting to read up on cancelled concepts and such, five Assassin’s Creed titles later and the co-op mode has never returned although Brotherhood did add multiplayer. It’s fair to say that co-op will remain nothing more than a dream right?
Not quite, late last year Ubisoft were sending out a survey that asked consumers for their views regarding a co-op mode. Better late than never I guess but the idea of dual assassinations with a friend does sound exciting and I’d be more interested in that then the multiplayer modes we’ve come to expect.
Regular readers of the site may be aware of my review of Assassin’s Creed III where I had a love/hate relationship with the game. Maybe it’s best if Ubisoft stick to getting the basics right instead of further bloating the series by trying to do too much. Now that THQ has gone under it wouldn’t be a bad idea to try to convince Patrice Désilets to return to the series, the Assassin’s Creed titles have arguably gone downhill after he left.
Source: OXM
Via: Eurogamer
