The first Assassin’s Creed was originally going to have multiplayer

Here’s a fun little bit of inconsequential game history for you. According to Dualshockers, who attended a talk by Julien Merceron at the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie in Paris, Assassin’s Creed was originally going to have a multiplayer mode.

While this feature was removed at some point in development, a bug was found much later on where if a second controller were plugged into the console, a second Assassin would appear. This hints that the multiplayer was going to be local, and more than likely some sort of co-op.

Narratively, co-op in the first Assassin’s Creed would’ve been interesting. The game saw Altair demoted to the bottom rung of the Brotherhood, and he was incredibly unpopular with his peers due to his arrogance. Trying to fit another Assassin into that would’ve been tricky.

Ubisoft has been toying with different types of multiplayer for most of the series’ history. Brotherhood was the first to have a fully playable competitive multiplayer mode, which lasted until Unity, which swapped that out for a four player co-op mode instead. Syndicate completely removed all traces of multiplayer, returning the series to the purely single-player experience it was for the first two games.

Still, co-op in Assassin’s Creed is definitely something Ubisoft should consider for future games. I couldn’t try it in Unity thanks to the many, many bugs, so while I would love to, I’ve yet to take on the Templars with a friend…