I really like what I've seen of Assassin's Creed Mirage so far. Though Assassin's Creed's shift into open-world action-RPGs has resulted in plenty of good ideas coming to the series, it's created a trilogy of games that oftentimes feel disconnected from what came before. I love Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla, but all three, to various extents, put the Assassin's Creed experience into too big of a setting or overshadow all the cool real-world history with a less-impressive supernatural flair.
In comparison, Mirage looks a lot more like the series' earlier games. You play as Basim Ibn Ishaq, a young street thief in Baghdad who is inducted into the Hidden Ones (the precursor to the Assassin Brotherhood) and is tasked with hunting down members of the Order of the Ancients (the precursor to the Templar Order). Unlike the more recent Assassin's Creed games, in Mirage you can't pick between two playable characters, and there aren't dialogue options throughout the story. There's no giant, branching skill tree of abilities to parse, and the scope of the game more closely resembles the medium-sized Assassin's Creed games.
"[Mirage] is going to be a condensed experience," Assassin's Creed Mirage art director Jean-Luc Sala told me. "It's a more focused game. The size of it is something like a Rogue or a Revelations, just to give you an idea of the scope."
So players can expect Mirage to probably be a bit larger than the earliest Assassin's Creed games, like the original or Brotherhood. However, it sounds like it's no Black Flag or Odyssey. "For the size of the city or the map, you can expect something that is as dense as Paris in Unity," Sala said. "We do have some wilderness around, which was not the case in Paris. Paris was just Paris, and there was very small Versailles stuff just for the flavor. But we do have more than Baghdad [in Mirage]. We can go outside the walls and see some nice places."
Alongside being a more condensed experience in comparison to Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla, Mirage will also put a greater emphasis on social stealth and parkour abilities. Unlike Bayek, Kassandra, and Eivor, Basim is not a warrior who can safely tank hits and openly engage multiple enemies. If you're trying to assassinate a target, you'll need to be strategic in your approach, stealthily laying traps and being a hidden blade in the crowd. And if you are spotted, it might be better to escape and try again later--fighting your pursuers may put you in an early grave.
"Basim is definitely not Eivor," Sala said. "You have to pay attention to that, what you do, how you play. If you are hit, you are hit. You are going to regret it really, really soon. If you start to fight with big, chunky enemies, thinking this is like Valhalla, you are going to die really fast. You need to just take your time, look around. ...It's more a bird of prey playing with their prey approach. Take your time, look around, be smart, move quick, kill, disappear, think again, look around. So it's really that: you kill and vanish, then come back again. If you are static, it's no good."
Sala describes Basim as one of the fastest protagonists in the Assassin's Creed series, possessing plenty of gadgets and skills that help him quickly move through Baghdad, like the pole vault, which allows Basim to swiftly cross gaps while running. "The pace of parkour is definitely faster than the previous games, so you have some tools to help you to go fast," Sala said. "So the parkour base is improved, faster. You do have new vanishing tools that help a lot. The corner swing is back, so you can just go really fast, turn around, and go somewhere else. It's a mixture of old and new mechanics, but nothing revolutionary."
Basim is even able to pull off a new multi-kill assassination that sounds a lot like a more murderous take on the Fear Multi-Takedown from Batman: Arkham Knight, allowing him to effortlessly kill several targets at once in quick succession. "It's not something you can do all the time," Sala said. "You learn it, and you improve it. Perhaps, at the beginning, you are not able to use that with more than two enemies, but perhaps it can go better. It's not exactly Matrix bullet time, but you have the opportunity to recharge this ability, and then, when you think, 'This is the best moment to take down several enemies,' you just quick-shot them, and it happens." When I asked, Sala said he was not yet allowed to reveal how much Basim can improve this ability or how players are able to do so (I assume it's tied to story progression or a specific side quest), but that those details would be revealed eventually.
Frankly, I love everything that I'm hearing. This is a style of Assassin's Creed game we haven't seen in a very long time. And it wasn't until I was attending a Ubisoft preview event to check out Mirage, and then subsequently talking to Sala about the game, that I realized just how much I've missed this style of Assassin's Creed. It sounds like a game that borrows elements from multiple Assassin's Creed experiences from the past 15 years, but ultimately most closely emulates the structure and vibes of the original game. Mirage even takes place just 20 years prior to the events of Valhalla, which is also around the same time as the first Assassin's Creed.
"[Mirage takes place] 100 years before the creation of the Creed," Sala clarified. "You will see the fortress of Alamut, and it's in ongoing construction--the building is not finished, and it's going to take, for some reasons, a lot of time to be completed. But once it's completed, that's when they start to be the Assassins and stop being the Hidden Ones. That switch is going to be the same for the Order of the Ancients and the Templars. It's still a little bit too early, but you can expect that the next step of history is going to have the Hidden Ones come out of the darkness and into the light and say, 'We are Assassins. Now, we are no longer hidden.'"
Mirage is by no means a reboot for Assassin's Creed, yet I couldn't help but feel like it might almost act as a narrative on-ramp for lapsed fans or newcomers to the series. In GameSpot's Assassin's Creed Valhalla review, I talked about how that game tied up a lot of loose threads in the series, referencing pretty much every mainline Assassin's Creed game and lingering plot point. And now, in an interesting twist, its follow-up, Mirage, evokes similar imagery to the very first Assassin's Creed, as both games take place in roughly the same location, just 300 years apart. Basim and his fellow Hidden Ones even wear robes not unlike what Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad and his fellow Assassins wear in the original game. Plus, the aforementioned Alamut is a fortress that inspires the Assassin Brotherhood to build similar structures across the Middle East, including the fortress of Masyaf from the first Assassin's Creed. I pointed this out to Sala as we spoke, commenting that it almost feels like, following Valhalla, Ubisoft is giving the Assassin's Creed series a small reset. He disagreed, saying that Mirage simply feels that way given the nature of the franchise.
"Not a remake or reboot, it's just like every Assassin Creed game, which has to bring a new character, new setting, a new time period," Sala clarified. "This is the DNA of Assassin's Creed, to always bring something new and fresh. And that happens to be exactly the good formula to bring the good vibes for the old geezers--like you and me--and to still be something fresh and new for newcomers."
And to that point, Mirage is not representative of a drastic shift for Assassin's Creed. The series isn't going back to this style of game from now on--we're still going to get Odyssey- and Valhalla-sized experiences. For example, Project Red, an upcoming Assassin's Creed game set in feudal Japan, is being made by the same team that developed Odyssey and sounds like it will be similarly giant in scope. The same could be true for Project Jade (an upcoming mobile game set in China) or Project Hexe (an upcoming console/PC game seemingly set in the Holy Roman Empire during the witch trials). And, granted, it makes sense that Ubisoft would continue making games like Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla. Those three games have sold a lot of copies, making them some of the most popular Assassin's Creed games ever. Why would Ubisoft stop making games like them if so many fans are buying them?
"We just thought it was time to bring some stuff back," Sala said. "[Mirage] is not the future of the franchise, it's not a side step, it's not backward. It's just that this is here, and you can enjoy it, so let's celebrate."