The most infamous Assassin’s Creed NPC is no more. Ubisoft has released a patch to fix an issue with the remastered version of Assassin’s Creed 2 — in Assassin’s Creed: The Ezio Collection — where a particular NPC looked much worse than he did in the original game, this time having a strange, clown-like face.
Eurogamer reports that Ubisoft’s new patch for the collection removes this NPC from the game entirely. This doesn’t mean that there is no longer a character present in the scenes he is supposed to be in, or even that he was ‘replaced’ by a different character, as Assassin’s Creed 2 has always had a unique way of handling NPCs in the game, even in cutscenes. The way it works is that NPCs are generated randomly, with different faces, hair, clothes, and other features, and then placed randomly at specific locations when there is a cutscene.
The face in question was also in the original version of the game, but because it was visually much darker and muddier, it just didn’t look as bad. Since the remastered version made it very clear just how unflattering this face truly is — and since several comparison videos pointing it out have gone viral — Ubisoft has removed the face from the game, meaning its randomly generated NPCs are now safe from public ridicule on the internet.