Assassin’s Creed III Almost Had Co-Op

Assassin’s Creed III was, as I see it, a disjointed game with bits of gameplay that were all over the place and barely held together by some semblance of a connecting driving motive. It wasn’t a bad game just one that was quite lacking in areas and in need of cohesion. It then seemed a bit ironic if not more so intriguing that Ubisoft dropped a planned co-op multiplayer from the game because it simply “it didn’t fit”.

The game seemed almost setup for co-op with the tie-in AC III: Liberation game on Vita and the wide open frontier which could serve as your playground or the stage of an epic two man game of hide and seek. In fact, some of the mission would actually have been more fun with a co-op buddy to work with. However, the mode was scrapped for a surprisingly thematic and canonical reason in addition to some technical issues such as the game’s supposedly amazing engine not being able to handle it. I actually respect that from Ubisoft, while co-op may have been cool there was no way to justify it in the game and  that’s one of the reasons it was scrapped.

Assassin’s Creed 3 mission director Philippe Bergeron revealed as much during an interview with OXM.

“Before we knew about the Desmond story and Animus link, we had a huge co-op component in there,” he 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.”

He added, “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.”

Would you have wanted to see some AC III co-op action? Possibly with Ben Franklin as your companion and maybe a small team up with Haythem?