The original trilogy was originally meant to end…in space!
If there is one license that has managed to establish itself in the video game sphere as essential, it is Assassin’s Creed. Since the very first episode released in 2007, eleven episodes have been released with over 155 million copies sold. Did you know that the franchise was originally thought of as a trilogy? Indeed, the narrative arc around Desmond Miles ending at the end of Assassin’s Creed III, the franchise should have ended after this episode.
Finally, seven other episodes will have followed. But the ending of Assassin’s Creed III would also have been revised, and the original scenario has absolutely nothing to do with what was finally reproduced in the game.
It was Lars de Wildt, a doctoral student from KU Leuven, who looked into the subject in a study dealing with Ubisoft’s use of religion, according to our colleagues fromEurogamer. After interviews with the creator of the franchise, Patrice Désilets, and the creative director of Assassin’s Creed III, Alex Hutchinson, Lard de Wildt would indeed have learned that Desmond Miles and Lucy Stillman were to escape from Earth aboard a spaceship and create a new human civilization on a distant planet.
“In short, the third game would end with the conflict being resolved in our time, Desmond Miles taking down Abstergo using the knowledge and skills of all his ancestors, including Altair for Assassin’s Creed and Ezio for Assassin’s Creed 2”, says Lars de Wildt. “Also, it’s the end of the world in 2012 and Desmond Miles and Lucy start a new civilization somewhere else, as Adam and Eve.”
Lucy’s name would thus be directly inspired by Australopithecus afarensis, one of our ancestors, as Patrice Désilets told Lars de Wildt. “Boom! They will flee in a spaceship!”, would have concluded Désilets.
A surprising statement given the story arc ultimately adopted to conclude the trilogy, with the end of the world in 2012. Now the main mystery remains: why a spaceship? Many fan theories at the time indicated that the Isus (race encountered in the series) were aliens and that their bunker was actually a spaceship.
Either way, we’ll never really know what the franchise would have been like had the trilogy’s ending been as shown above…