It sounds wild at first: The side missions in the first Assassin’s Creed are said to have ended up in the game only because the child of the Ubisoft CEO was said to have been bored in the game. The developers would then have had to develop and install new side quests within just five days.
At least recently, a former developer of the first Assassin adventure claimed that. However, he has his History has been put into perspective again. In order to unravel the confusion and break this curious assertion about the side quests of Altair completely, we will clarify the complete story for you.
Just a misunderstanding?
Who is the source of the rumor? Recently released Eurogamer an article that speaks of a “fascinating Twitter thread” by the then Ubisoft developer Charles Randall. However, the corresponding one Account now private, so we can no longer check the tweets ourselves. According to Eurogamer, however, Charles Randall should have told a curious story about the development of the side quests of the first AC:
“We were already delivering the game, everything is going great and then comes this news: The CEO’s kid tried the game and said it was boring and there was nothing to do in it.
So we had to add new side missions to the game in five days. And they all have to be bug-free because the new build would be burned and released directly onto the discs. “
Which side missions are meant exactly remains unclear. Randall also did not write whether there were no side quests in the game beforehand or whether only a few had to be added. However, the selection is not too big, after all, apart from the main missions of Assassin’s Creed, there were only hundreds of flags to collect and a few Templars to be murdered.
You can find out exactly what that looked like at the time in our old plus video special on the open game world of Assassin’s Creed:
PLUS archive
2:31
Assassin’s Creed – Video Special: Kingdom
Developer partially takes back its story
In the meantime Randall rowed back: He had expressly not spoken of all side missions and he was no longer sure whether the CEO’s child really had anything to do with the matter.
What’s wrong now? It is unclear which parts of the side quests Randall meant. A possible hint can be found in the original article by Eurogamer: There is a bug that crept in due to the hasty development. He sometimes let a certain Templar sink into the map so that the Assassin missions could not be completed.
Since the Templar murders are completely optional and have no effect on the rest of the game, they could have been assembled in a short time.
The one with the grumbling child of the CEO Randall himself heard only second-hand, according to his clarification. At that time he did not inquire further and does not know today whether there is any truth in it at all.
In the meantime, of course, the story has already spread online, numerous pages report about it, even without Randall’s subsequent correction. At the moment, the Eurogamer article, which got the whole thing rolling, is still available unchanged.
But it doesn’t really matter whether a child was involved or not. Either way, it remains astonishing that an AAA developer like Ubisoft comes up with the idea of adding new missions to the game just five days before the game is submitted.
