If you hated collecting flags in the original Assassin’s Creed, you can blame the child of Ubisoft’s CEO Yves Guillemot, who complained the game was boring after playing a nearly finished build.
This story comes from a Tweet thread posted by Charles Randall. He worked on the first Assassin’s Creed game as a programmer. He explained that he and his team were ready to ship the game when they got some news: The CEO of Ubisoft let his kid play the game and they found it boring.
This immediately forced the team to have conversations about what to do and after thinking about it, Randall and the others decided to add side activities, like collecting flags and assassinating templars. But they would only have five days to design, build and add all these new side missions and they would have to be completely bug-free, because the moment Randall and his team were finished the game was being burned to discs and shipped.
While this wasn’t easy, Randall admits that ultimately the kid was right. “…there was nothing in [Assassin’s Creed]’s first submission except the critical path story and like… high points.” So it sounds like the game needed more stuff to do, but creating ALL that stuff in less than a week sounds like a nightmare.
Miraculously the game shipped and all that side content that was created quickly worked without any issues or bugs. Well, except one really annoying bug that players sometimes encountered when trying to get all the achievements in the game.
One assassination target wasn’t set up correctly and if players approached this target from the wrong direction it would cause the enemy to fall through the world. This didn’t give you credit for the kill, but according to the game he was now dead and would no longer spawn. This would prevent players from completing every assassination and would force them to restart the game if they wanted to collect all the achievements.
While Randall apologizes for causing players some frustration, he says is just happy they were able to pull this off at all and that they didn’t ship with game-breaking, or worse, bugs. “But I know it’s a miracle that the game didn’t just melt your console or whatever,” explained Randall.
Looking back at the entire incident, Randall says that it was a group effort that everyone volunteered for and that ultimately the game did need more things to do.
Of course, now Assassin’s Creed games have the opposite problem, but it is wild to think about a time when an AC game was going to ship with just story missions and some towers to jump off.