While Assassin's Creed III has its very own co-op Wolfpack multiplayer mode, apparently the first Assassin's Creed was set to feature a fully-fledged and ambitious drop-in/drop-out co-op mode, as Assassin's Creed III Mission Director, Phillipe Bergeron has revealed.

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

According to Bergeron, co-op was cut because it simply didn't fit with what the deveoper was looking to achieve: "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.

"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."

Of course, Assassin's Creed has ventured into the realms of multiplayer since, with Brotherhood introducing competitive cat and mouse game-types and Assassin's Creed III adding the wave-based co-op Wolfpack. Could Assassin's Creed IV bring proper campaign co-op to the table? Who knows?

[Via OXM | Thanks, O0mix0O]