10 Creators Who Killed Video Game Characters So They Could Move On

When you think about the critical popularity and commercial success of the early Assassin's Creed games, and how prominent a role their primary protagonist played in all of them, it's bizarre that Desmond Miles is not really considered one of the biggest video game characters in history. He's just sort of, there, milling about in the present while you have all the fun with his ancestors in the past.

Ubisoft intended for his to be a story about living up to a legacy, and how an ordinary man can, in fact, wind up being as big a hero as any historical assassin. It's a nice idea, but they set his ordinariness up so well that by the time Assassin's Creed Revelation rolled around he just felt like a loser who they'd be unable to convincingly continue to build a narrative around.

Simply switching focus to someone else would have been a bit jarring with Desmond still out there, so Ubisoft elected to cut their losses and just kill him off entirely. They gave him a heroic death, one arguably befitting the arc they'd originally laid out for him, and just hoped fans would happily move on in the following games.

They did, even if the game's bugs didn't.