Assassin's Creed Mirage Goes Back to the Roots - Finally!

Do you still remember the year 2007? It was that year in gaming when hits Mass Effect, BioShock, Portal and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare had their premiere. And of course, Assassin's Creed, the first installment of the series, which today is the biggest brand in Ubisoft's library (well – just after Just Dance).

The first Assassin's Creed had it all: parkour in Jerusalem, an assassin's bureau (someone forgot to put a door there) a story that mixed modernity with the middle ages, and cool hoodies which every home-grown cosplayer later wanted to wear. Sixteen years later, after many installments developing the formula and after transitioning game into huge open-world RPGs, the series takes a sidestep and returns to its roots to remind us why we fell in love with the assassins. And on paper – it's doing it right.

My name is (not) Altair

Talking to Sarah Beaulieu, the narrative director of Mirage, I heard that the main inspiration for creating the upcoming game were the two original installments. It was not only about placing the action in a specific region, but mainly about restoring few pillars on which these games were based – urban parkour, stealth, and assassinations preceded by investigations. All filled with combat, which this time fortunately does not rely solely on counterattacks.

If you've played Valhalla, you're familiar with Basim. And if not, be careful, I will spoil(!) a little: Basim was one of the Hidden Ones, the precursors of the Brotherhood of Assassins, and we met him when he came to Norway with Sigurd, the sworn brother of the main character. As the story moved forward, Basim turned out not to be as nice a person as he had seemed, ultimately rebelling against us and becoming a boss to defeat. To make things even more interesting, he survived to the present day (I won't go into details about how this happened) and we control him as a playable character at the end of the 21st century in Valhalla. So, Ubisoft put us in a situation where we were playing the bad guy. However, before Basim reached the point of being a companion alongside Eivor and Sigurd, he had his own story.

Think of Mirage as Red Dead Redemption 2 – we've known for years what an asshole Dutch van der Linde was and how he ended up, but in the sequel, Rockstar made us learn the preceding story, gradually observing the path taken by the gang leader. It will be similar with Basim – we will meet him as a petty street thief who ends up under the wings of Roshan, his mentor. We will follow his progress in the Hidden Ones and most likely reach the point where our protagonist becomes the one we know from Valhalla.

Trip to the Middle East

In Mirage, we will find ourselves in the 9th-century Baghdad, which in size is supposed to resemble Paris from AC Unity. The city will once again become more vertical (oppose to the vast, but fairly flat areas from the latest installments) so that players can satisfy their parkour hunger – and this mechanic in Mirage will be more dynamic than before. Some old, dusty tricks will return, such as hanging elements on houses to help you make quick 90-degree turns while running at heights. We'll also get some new features, such as a pole that will make it easier to move between buildings that are farther apart. Inside the city, we will navigate on the back of a horse or a camel.

Baghdad is also home to the headquarters of the assassins, which will be marked with the relevant sign on the rooftops. Some of them we will have to unlock, to make them accessible. Inside we'll find residents, and available contracts. The tasks will require a variety of actions, including theft, assassination or coming with a rescue mission.

The protagonist will get access to a few useful tools for eliminating enemies, supplementing our basic arsenal. Throwing knives are coming back as well as smoke bombs. Besides, we're going to use a blowpipe and learn how to set traps. In the game, the “wanted system” will also reappear if we do bad things in front of witnesses – you surely missed removing wanted posters or bribing street shouters. We will dip our quills in the blood of our victims once again, but they no longer belong to eagles. Since AC: Origins, they have been replaced by heron feathers.

Although mechanics such as blending into the crowd are returning, Mirage tries to combine the old with the new – we will have an eagle named Enkidu, which, like the other birds in the last few installments of the series – will act as a reconnaissance drone. At the same time, a new system was introduced to the game, which boils down to the true hatred of armed NPCs for birds. If the area we are checking has a marksman, he will try to shoot down our eagle, scaring bird away. Only killing the enemy will allow us to complete the scouting.

The game also includes character development options – Basim has three skill trees described as Phantom, Trickster, and Predator. It can be safely assumed that they correspond to sneaking, using deadly gadgets, and fighting. Basim also got his own unique animations, which were mainly expanded with a range of finishers – you could see a few brutal endings in the trailers.

If during the presentation I understood the developers correctly, we won't find a typical quest menu in the game. Instead, we will see an investigation screen with relevant tracker. Of course, the main villains are still the members of the Order of the Ancients, who sooner or later must finally be baptized as "Templars."

Is this what we've been waiting for?

On paper, it sounds exactly like the game I've been wanting for years. The best elements of the original Assassin’s, which made me buy the next installments of the series every 12 months since 2007, mixed with modern graphics and a few refreshed solutions. A slight preview of this return was seen in the Valhalla add-on set in Paris, where we again had the opportunity to prepare more extensively for stealthy attacks, explore the roads and perform less important executions. It was then that I felt Ubisoft was experimenting a bit with trying to return to those old, obscure assassin experiences. As the preview of Mirage showed – this intuition was right.

Will it work? It seems that everything should work out nicely, however I was a bit surprised that I wasn't given the opportunity to play Mirage, especially with four months left until the release. I hope I'm not jinxing things, but at the moment, it looks like the game just wasn't ready to be tested by journalists. This could mean that the production process could be rushed in final months, or that the game could be delayed. I also have doubts about the main character, to whom I'm prejudiced after Valhalla. First, they put him on the wrong side of the fence, and now I'm not even convinced if he’s a charismatic enough to make me like him. Fortunately, Shohreh Aghdashloo is also in the game, and I can listen to her for hours.