I don't know the exact details of events, but I assume they would have had the ability to have bought the rights to their old code - but they either passed on it or were outbid.
It would depend on their view of how fundamental the broken bits of the game were - starting again is often easier than trying to resolve faults. Some of the bugs in both AC09 and IC2010 could hint at systemic issues in the codebase that would have been hard to track down.
On the flipside, I'm one of many who think IC2010 is the best game on the market, and three years of refinement on that codebase would near certainly have resulted in a game that would be right up there with what Big Ant promises to be.
The major issue in retrospect seems to be that if you're going to rebuild something, rebuild it better. Either they didn't have time to do that, or they chose the wrong tool in Unity.
It would depend on their view of how fundamental the broken bits of the game were - starting again is often easier than trying to resolve faults. Some of the bugs in both AC09 and IC2010 could hint at systemic issues in the codebase that would have been hard to track down.
On the flipside, I'm one of many who think IC2010 is the best game on the market, and three years of refinement on that codebase would near certainly have resulted in a game that would be right up there with what Big Ant promises to be.
The major issue in retrospect seems to be that if you're going to rebuild something, rebuild it better. Either they didn't have time to do that, or they chose the wrong tool in Unity.