The producer on Assassin’s Creed Unity has revealed that Ubisoft had previously planned on introducing co-op for the pseudo-historical adventure franchise as far back as 2009’s Assassin’s Creed II.
Speaking during an interview with VideoGamer.com, Vincent Pontbriand revealed that Ubisoft had tested the mode for Ezio Auditore’s critically acclaimed Italian romp for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.
We’ve wanted to do [co-op] for a very long time," he said. "We actually started to prototype it during AC2, a very long time ago. Then we started work on trying to implement online into the engine. The engine wasn’t built to allow for that, so what we came up with was the PVP multiplayer that came out with Brotherhood, so it actually came out later than AC2. But it branched out from the AC2 code and became its own separate thing.
"But it just wasn’t possible to have a seamless experience [on the previous engine]," Pontbriand continued. "The engine was not made for that. The PVP mode was more self-contained and just a snippet of the experience. Fans and people were starting to ask for co-op, but we had to wait for the right moment, and we had to actually spend a lot of time and energy to re-code the entire engine to suit co-op because what we really wanted was the co-op experience to be a shared experience.
"That’s what people were asking for. They’re not looking for synchronising opening doors or pulling levers, they wanted to share their AC experience with their friends. In order to do that, you have to support replication for every single system. So for PVP assassination, the only thing we replicated was the position and orientation of other players. But everything else, the crowd for example, was unique to each player’s session, it wasn’t replicated at all. I could see NPCs that you couldn’t see, but it didn’t matter for the gameplay at all."
Assassin’s Creed Unity is due out in November for PS4, PC, and Xbox One. The game takes place during the French Revolution, and introduces a brand new protagonist in the assassin Arno.