The Assassin’s Creed franchise is one of the most successful open-world sandbox-style videogames to ever grace consoles. Even when you’re not trying to get revenge on the game’s main antagonist, there’s usually a slew of side-missions to keep you busy. It’s part of what’s made the games so playable after all these years.
But, if a recent anecdote from a Ubisoft employee is true, this wasn’t about be the case for the series’ first game. The Fight AI Director for 2007’s Assassin’s Creed, Charles Randall, says the game was almost shipped out without the side-missions intact. It was thanks to the intervention of the child of Ubisoft CEO, Yues Guillemot.
Randall talked about this in a Saturday morning Twitter feed (first reported by Eurogamer):
“So we’re all ready to ship the game, first submission goes pretty well, and then…the news…the CEO’s kid played the game and said it was boring and there was nothing to do in the game,” Randall said. “Oh yeah I forgot the key part. We have to put all these side missions into the game in five days, and they have to be bug-free, because the build is going to be burned directly to disc and released to retail.”
Your eyes don’t deceive you – the team working on AC had five days to add in the side-missions. And all because Guillemot’s son observed that there wasn’t much to do in the game’s open-world environment. Randall and a group of his colleagues spent those days in Montreal’s Peck Building, desperately trying to include them before deadline approached.
But, as Randall himself observed, it wasn’t completely bug-free. One infamous mission can have a Templar target fall through the game’s world and die, which doesn’t register on your Gamerscore. This means that the achievement for completing all of these side-missions remains unobtainable for the remainder of the game.
Randall notes that this occurs when you approach the Templar “from the wrong direction”.
While Assassin’s Creed is an old game (released back in 2007), it’s interesting to know that such a big feature of the games was a last-minute addition.
Looking forward to Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla? Let us know in the comments below!
“