COLLECTOR’S ADDITION

Assassin’s Creed set

Ubisoft, and the industry, on the path toward the free-roam collectible hunt as a dominant art form. Yet the game nearly didn’t have collectibles at all. Those 420 flags and 60 killable Templars were distributed across the Kingdom during just five days in late development – so late, there was no time for testing. The build in which they were implemented was burned directly to disc and released at retail, selling eight million copies. “It’s a miracle that the game didn’t just melt your console or whatever,” Charles Randall, the game’s fight system AI lead, recently tweeted. The result, though, was remarkably bug-free – excepting a Templar who had a chance of falling through the world, denying the player a kill and 100per-cent completion.