Do you remember those secondary missions from the first Assassin’s Creed in which we had to collect flags and assassinate Templars? As it turns out, the game was originally going to come out without any of them , but they were added at the last minute.
This is how Charles Randall, one of the developers of the 2007 title, tells it in his Twitter thread. Assassin’s Creed was practically ready , they had gotten the first approval, but then, one of Randall’s classmates told him that “the son of the CEO has played it and said it was boring because there was nothing to do .”
It was then that the team made a crucial decision: the game had to be filled with side missions . However, they only had five days to do so.
oh yeah I forgot the key part. he says “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.”
— Charles Randall (@charlesrandall)
Oh yeah, I was forgetting the most important part. He told me: “we have to put all these side missions in the game in five days, and they have to be bug-free, because this build is the one that is going to go straight to disk and is going to be released in stores.”
Randall insists that even though that’s what he heard, he doesn’t really know if the CEO’s son was the real reason that started all of this. The process of adding content or last minute corrections to a game is completely normal in any development.
They finally made it. Both Randall and his companions worked tirelessly during those five days until the side missions were ready and bug-free. Well, save one.
Apparently one of the Templar assassination side quests caused the target to disappear if we approached it from the wrong direction. After this it would not come out again , since the save file considered it dead, although the mission did not. The only solution was to start another game over.
The developer admits that he does not remember anything that happened in those five days , and that it is a miracle that the game “didn’t melt your consoles or something .” In any case, he explains that this was all voluntary on the part of the people involved. Also, they did not have to create new art for this content, as the flags already existed in the game. They just added more spawns and put gameplay around them.
One more example of how development processes are sometimes not how we usually believe. Many of the elements that we see in games can be the result of last minute decisions , and it is something common.
