Before Assassin’s Creed Origins, I was a gameplay programmer.
I built things players could touch.
Weapons. Interactions. Features.
If players liked them, they talked about them. If they hated them, they talked about them even more. Either way, there was feedback. My work lived on the surface of the game, where players experienced it directly.
Then I joined the AI team.
It completely changed the way I measured success.
The world behind the player
One of the biggest systems I worked on was what we called stations.
Stations were interaction points scattered throughout the world: places where NPCs would eat, sleep, work, pray, trade. They weren’t just animations. They represented everything a character could do when they weren’t reacting to the player.
In previous entries in the series, NPCs would simply play an animation without truly understanding what they were doing. If the player bumped into them, blocked the interaction, or something unexpected happened, the illusion quickly fell apart. Characters would snap out of animations, pop onto tables, fall through geometry or simply get up calmly, like nothing happened.
The internet noticed.
There were countless videos on YouTube of Assassin’s Creed NPCs behaving in absurd ways. Reddit threads full of screenshots. Entire compilations dedicated to AI breaking in increasingly creative fashion.
It was funny.
It was also a sign that something wasn’t working.
For Origins, we wanted to change that.
NPCs became aware of the activity they were performing. They knew whether they were sitting, standing or prone, sleeping, praying, working, etc. They understood how to enter an interaction, how to leave it normally, how to recover if the player interrupted them, and what to do if the interaction suddenly became impossible.
The goal wasn’t simply to make better animations.
It was to make the world feel coherent.
Waiting for the reaction
We spent years building those systems, and as release approached, I was excited.
Not because I expected players to talk about stations. Nobody outside the team even knew what a station was.
But I expected people to notice the difference.
I had seen all those videos from previous games. Surely people would compare them. Surely someone would notice.
The game launched. Nothing.
No Reddit thread praising the AI.
No YouTube videos explaining how much smarter NPCs were.
No articles comparing the new system with the old one.
Just… nothing.
At first, that surprised me.
Then, a few weeks later, I caught myself doing something unexpected.
I started searching for videos of NPCs breaking.
Looking for complaints
I searched YouTube. Reddit. Forums.
Anywhere players usually shared ridiculous AI moments.
I wasn’t looking for praise anymore.
I was looking for evidence that we had missed something.
And I couldn’t find much.
The endless compilations from previous games had largely disappeared.
The NPCs weren’t perfect. No game AI ever is. But they were no longer generating the kind of moments that shattered the illusion.
That’s when it finally clicked.
Players weren’t ignoring our work.
They were accepting it.
The invisible craft
As a gameplay programmer, I had spent years building features players actively used.
As an AI programmer, my job was different.
I wasn’t creating the experience anymore.
I was protecting it.
Every interruption handled correctly.
Every NPC recovering naturally after being pushed.
Every believable transition between activities.
Every bug that never became a funny video online.
The better the system became, the less players thought about it.
And that’s exactly how it should be.
Nobody finishes a movie and says, “The editing was invisible.”
Nobody praises a game because the save system worked exactly as expected.
People only notice those things when they fail.
AI turned out to be the same.
No news, good news
These days, when I work on systems that live in the background, I don’t look for compliments anymore.
I look for complaints.
The Reddit thread showing NPCs behaving absurdly.
The YouTube compilation of broken interactions.
The bug that somehow escaped us.
And when I don’t find them, I smile.
Because one of the biggest lessons my time on Assassin’s Creed Origins taught me is that the best work often disappears into the experience.
Players remember the moments you create.
But sometimes, the work you’re proudest of is measured by the moments that never happen.