A former Assassin's Creed's developer has revealed that the original games' horses are, essentially, "just a twisted f**ked up human skeleton", alongside some other harrowing development titbits.
Game developer Charles Randall explains on Twitter that the team had to improvise when creating horses for the game due to technical limitations. As such, they mangled the model of a human skeleton to make it look like a horse (thanks, RPS). "Cheers to the amazing animators and riggers that managed to make that guy look like a horse," Randall tweets.
Ubisoft also didn't have the budget for a custom skeleton or mesh for a one-armed character called Malik, leading the developers to turn one of his arms inside out to give the illusion the appendage was missing. "I assume if you could get the camera to clip into him you'd see a tiny little scrunched up arm inside the bicep," he adds.
Also the horse in AC1 was just a twisted fucked up human skeleton, because our tool chain only worked with biped in 3ds max. Cheers to the amazing animators and riggers that managed to make that guy look like a horse!June 23, 2022
My favourite story is how Ubisoft dealt with players leaving a level's playable area. They couldn't, so the game was programmed to kill the your character if they ever managed to escape the level's boundaries. "Up until that point I always said 'If all else fails, kill the player,'" Randal says. "Was super happy to finally get to put it into practice." Gulp.
This isn't the first time Randall has shared stories about Assassin's Creed's development. In 2020, he revealed that Assassin's Creed has side content because Yves Guillemot's kid played it before launch and thought it was boring, leading to a five-day scramble to implement the new content.
If you're after some other development titbits, we reported on how a pivotal Fallout 3 DLC moment hinged on a constantly exploding illusory mansion earlier today.
Where does the original rank on the best Assassin's Creed games? Click the link to find out.