The first AI designer of the first Assassin's Creed tells what the process of implementing side missions in the game was like in just five days.
Throughout the development process of a video game there are many curiosities, let alone if it is a franchise as large and long-lived as Assassin's Creed, which this fall will see an ambitious new installment with Assassin's Creed Valhalla. The last anecdote that we have been able to know concerns the original installment, released in 2007 and located in tenth place in our Top 10, and that is that they say that he would not have had secondary missions had it not been for the son of the CEO of Ubisoft at the time .
This was reported on Twitter by Charles Randall, chief AI designer of Assassin's Creed, who explains that he was not scheduled to have side missions. With the game almost ready for release, the CEO's son tried it out and found it boring since, according to the boy, there was nothing to do. Thus it was suggested to add some side mission without bugs, but they only had five days to do it.
Thus, Randall teamed up with four or five other studio members in meetings prohibited for the rest of the team during those five days. In the end, and just before the deadline, Assassin's Creed was finished with side missions with almost no bugs, and there were some capable of making it impossible to complete any of them.
Thirteen years of history and multiple changes
This 2020 marks thirteen years since that first installment saw the light, having greatly changed things. The original game was criticized for the repetitiveness of its missions, something that was solved and in what way in Assassin's Creed II, which would lead to the trilogy of one of the most beloved protagonists, the Florentine Ezio Auditore. The recent generation would debut with another successful installment, Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, to enter a time of excessive continuity until the arrival of Assassin's Creed Origins, which would mean a break with the known formula and the arrival of a new way of doing things, enshrined in the massive Assassin's Creed Odyssey.
This is how we get to Assassin's Creed Valhalla, the next installment that will arrive this fall on PS4, Xbox One and PC, and that will be part of the first catalog of new consoles, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X.
