Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed franchise has always featured a thrilling single-player campaign, but originally the game featured a drop-in cooperative mode.
In a recent interview with the Official Xbox Magazine UK, Assassin's Creed 3 mission director Philippe Bergeron said that the original Assassin's Creed once featured an ambitious co-op mode, which was eventually drooped as the game's narrative developed.
"Before we knew about the Desmond story and Animus link, we had a huge co-op component in there," Bergeron told OXM. "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."
Assassin's Creed series' virtual reality time traveling machine, the Animus made it difficult to feature the cooperative gameplay mode.
"For us it was really part of the single player experience, 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," he explained to OXM.
"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 franchise has since added a multiplayer component and has featured many missions with a computer-controlled companion. It is surprising that the development team didn't implement cooperative mode by simply tweaking the narrative slightly to have someone join the assassin Altaïr ibn-La'Ahad.
Recent rumors suggest that the next entry in the franchise will feature cooperative gameplay as player return to the setting of Revolutionary America. Ubisoft has also previously hinted that Connor's story could become a trilogy if fans took to the Native American protagonist.
What do you think about Assassin's Creed featuring a cooperative gameplay mode? Do you want to play as Connor again or do you want to see another assassin take the reigns? Let us know what you think in the comment section below...