1. Altair was supposed to use a crossbow in Assassin's Creed 1, but it was removed due to historical inaccuracies.
2. At the early stages of development, Al Mualim had an owl on his shoulder, but that was cut.
3. Assassin's Creed 1 was poised to have a drop-in co-op feature during the game's Crusades-era missions. But the introduction of Desmond Miles cut short all that.
4. Early concept art for Assassin's Creed 2 showed Ezio had three Hidden Blades; one on his right, and two on his left.
5. Constantinople was originally meant to be part of the first Assassin's Creed game.
6. Revelations originally began development for the Nintendo 3DS under the name Assassin's Creed: Lost Legacy in 2010. However, it was turned into a console/PC game.
7. Earlier versions of Assassin's Creed 1 had horses in the city, but the developers had to cut them out for debugging reasons.
8. The first installment also had a gameplay sequence where guards could stop you. The devs tagged that behavior the "pin-down" which bore a lot of similarities with a Resident Evil zombie trying to stop you; they had to cut that as well.
9. Connor could originally scalp his opponents, but it was cut from the game since Ubisoft's Mohawk consultants felt that it was an unusual thing for their ancestors to do, and Ubisoft agreed that it was too brutal for Connor's character.
10. Connor's rope dart is the replacement for what was originally conceptualized as the 'chain blade,' a hidden blade upgrade that enabled you to launch the pointy bit into an enemy before dragging them towards you or hanging them over a tree.
The chain blade was deemed too fantastical and removed from the game, but the rope dart - based on a device from Chinese history - serves the same purpose.
11. Canoes were to be part of Assassin's Creed 3, as indicated by a promotional screenshot of Connor rowing one. However, the developers decided to ditch it.
12. Prior to the release of Assassin's Creed 3, Mission Director Philippe Bergeron, stated in an interview that between missions, Connor would be able to free-roam the seas aboard the Aquila. But, this was not possible in the final version of the game.
13. Philadelphia was prototyped for Assassin's Creed 3 but was eventually cut because the developers soon realized that Philadelphia's wide, straight streets wouldn't work very well in an open-world setting.
14. Early on in the pre-production of the Tyranny of King Washington, the developers explored the idea of making Aveline a love interest for Connor, but the idea was dropped as the characters' motivations, and personalities were too different from each other.
15. According to Nolan North, who voiced Desmond, Ubisoft pitched him the idea that each game was where Desmond would learn a new ability. And eventually, after Desmond learned enough skills, he would be "the ultimate Assassin."
The original story as it was written as Desmond goes on these adventures and they said we're probably going to do about six games and each game Desmond will get.
This was the original pitch. Desmond would get the abilities of his Altair and now he has those that it's Ezio. He has them and then it's going to be this guy. And ultimately by that last game he would be the ultimate assassin with all these can be able to time travel back.
16. Connor's unused epilogue speech.
17. Very early on in the development of Black Flag, the team planned to do a story about a 12-year-old kid named Edward aboard a ship with Avery and William Kidd sailing, but the idea was dropped almost immediately as both Ezio and Conor had a similar story arc that spanned 30 years each.
Consequently, the team decided to focus only on a decade time frame, beginning in 1715 and picking up from there. That way Edward remains a young man when the game concludes, but he goes through a tremendous arc.
18. The Hookblade from Revelations was considered for Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag, but the idea was axed due to it being considered too stereotypically pirate-like.
19. Edward and El Tibur'on were originally set to have a confrontation at the end of Sequence 2, which would end with Edward losing the battle. For gameplay reasons, the fight was cut during development, though Edward's final lines to El Tibur'on still bare reference to it.
20. Edward was also originally meant to witness and participate in Mary Read and Anne Bonny's battle against the British, ending with them imprisoned. But this idea was dropped during the initial stages of development.
21. In the E3 gameplay showcase video, Edward could be seen naturally engaging in various activities while blending with groups of civilians, though no such feature made it to the final version of the game.
22. The original concept for Unity was inspired by The Red Violin's idea of following artifacts as they changed hands through the centuries and showing Paris in multiple eras. This idea was regarded as too ambitious, but it survived to form the "Time Anomalies" feature and the Jacques de Molay prologue.
23. The character of Leon comes from one of the initial ideas for Unity, in which Arno was going to be paired up with a little thief.
24. There was an area planned for the first two sequences of Rogue that was cut off for production reasons.
25. Rogue was also set to have Haytham as the main character, but the plan fell through when the writers realized it would come into conflict with Forsaken.
26. During the development stages, the lead writer of Syndicate, Jeffrey Yohalem wanted to have a dynamic London that changed whenever Jacob assassinated the Templar ruining a particular aspect of its ecosystem.
Evie was to directly handle the aftermath, but it was up to the player to decide when to do those missions. The changes included a crashed economy, player's inability to afford many upgrades and refills, difficulties navigating, and having the fast travel feature locked. The developers realized it would make the game very hard to play and cut it.
27. Originally in Syndicate, there was supposed to be a glitch, a connection to the modern world that would manifest as a phone booth for the player to interact with.
28. Another illustration of an unused gameplay idea for Syndicate that came to the game's artist Hugo Puzzuoli at the very start of pre-production had Jacob shattering some old chimneys using his shoulder or feet; the idea was to exploit the environment as something derelict to enable some fun interactions.
29. The Trials of the Gods were initially called "Juno Events" according to map markers on the E3 demo of Assassin's Creed Origins in addition to the titles of these artworks uploaded to the artists' profiles.
Apparently, the appearances of these gods were somehow linked to Juno. Eventually, Juno was completely cut from Origins along with the fourth god, and the segment became a free launch content titled "Trials of the Gods."
30. During the production process of Assassin's Creed Odyssey, it had a completely different title - Odyssey: An Assassin's Creed Adventure.
