Assassin’s Creed Originally Featured Story Based Co-op
A new interview with Philippe Bergeron, Assassin’s Creed III’s mission director, has revealed that the very first game in the series originally contained a ‘huge’ co-operative component. This pinch of information comes courtesy of OXM, who go on to reveal that the mode was cut because it “became too hard to do”.
Bergeron explains it as such, “… 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.”
“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.”
Philippe’s mention of branching storylines is of some interest too, and hints towards the potential depth this co-op mode may have held before the design team found themselves snookered by Assassin’s Creed’s narrative framework.
Assassin’s Creed does have multiplayer now of course – it has done since Brotherhood created the motif of being an Abstergo agent in training – and I do rather enjoy its unique brand of sneaky sneaky stabby stabby competitive play. That said it’s hard to ignore how brilliant it could have been free-running with a friend, talking tactics and arranging elaborate assassination theatrics.
Of course it probably would have just boiled down to ‘I get to stab the target’, ‘no me’, ‘no me’, before one of you makes a run for it and you wind up not talking to each other for a week. The cut was probably for the best, then.
Assassin’s Creed III is available now for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Nintendo Wii U and Windows PC.
