Assassin's Creed cut its 'ambitious' co-op mode for Desmond

The original Altair-led Assassin's Creed once featured a "huge" co-op component that was later cut to make way for Desmond's Animus-dipping storyline set in the present day, Ubisoft has revealed.

Speaking to OXM, Assassin's Creed III mission director Philippe Bergeron revealed that the series' 2007 debut entry featured an "ambitious" co-op mode set across the Third Crusade timeframe.

"Before we knew about the Desmond story and Animus link, we had a huge co-op component in there," said Bergeron, "but it just became too hard to do: the engine couldn't support it, and then the metaphor we had above it didn't support it."

"Co-op was one of those big things at the beginning that just didn't make sense in the end," added Bergeron. Assassin's Creed would later inherit a form of multiplayer in 2010 as part of Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, the third game in the series.

Each subsequent game has also featured a multiplayer mode, but no game in the series has yet attempted to integrate co-op into the single-player campaigns.

"For us it was really part of the single player experience," said Bergeron, "to have in-and-out co-op, and in the end we never thought it made sense in the storyline that we had for the Animus."

"There was no way to reconcile having multiplayer or co-op in an ancestor's memories. Your ancestor lived his life in a certain way, so assuming you had branching storylines, it creates a paradox. It didn't fit."

The latest three-part chunk of Assassin's Creed III DLC, the single-player Tyranny of King Washington campaign that's separate from the main game, will kick off on February 19.