Recently Philippe Bergeron, mission director of the original Assassin’s Creed revealed that co-op had initially been planned for the game when speaking with OXM. In fact it was implemented into the game, However the team hadn’t really found a way to make it work with the character driven story or the engine and it had to be cut from the game.
OXM writes:
According to Assassin’s Creed 3 mission director Philippe Bergeron, the original Assassin’s Creed once sported an ambitious co-op mode, which was eventually cut.
“Before we knew about the Desmond story and Animus link, we had a huge co-op component in there, 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,” Bergeron admitted.
“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 went on.
“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.”
