Assassin’s Creed’s Side Missions Were Added In Just Five Days

The latest entry in the long running action adventure series, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, will bring us into 9th century Britain during Viking raids. It’s hard to believe the franchise is still going strong 13 years after the release of the initial game. Speaking of which, an interesting fact just came to light about the first title in the series that, well, may explain quite a good deal about it.

If you’ve never happened to play the original Assassin’s Creed, it was praised at the time for its historical setting, incredible attention to detail, and intriguing storytelling. What wasn’t so well received, however, was the game’s very repetitive gameplay structure and its seemingly endlessly side activities with little reward. In the case of the latter, it could have seen influence from an unlikely place: a CEO’s kid.

As explained by former Ubisoft programmer Charles Randall, the kid of the company’s CEO got a hold of a copy and complained how boring the open world was and there needed to be more to do. Randall and his team was tasked with adding a variety of side quests and other things to do. The kicker? They only had five days to do it.

Randall does go onto clarify that he isn’t sure if the only reason they were tasked to add the content was the CEO’s kid or not, and that last minute additions to games aren’t uncommon (seems he wasn’t too fond of some articles that have already been written on this), but either way, it was an incredible feat to have add all of that in such a short time. Kudos to Randall and the rest of the team, it’s hard to imagine an Assassin’s Creed title without a ton of side material, so it clearly was something that impacted the series going forward.

Assassin’s Creed was originally released in 2007 and, as of writing this, has never been remastered or ported to current systems. It launched on PS3, Xbox 360, and PC.

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