Assassin’s Creed Mirageisn’t shying away from its “return to roots” style, even plastering the saying across its marketing. AfterOrigins,Odyssey, andValhalla, Ubisoft is keenly aware that fans want something smaller and more tightly designed–creative director Stéphane Boudon said as much in January earlier this year. And that has manifested with a game that goes back to the scope of earlier titles, with a map size similar to Unity’s Paris.
“The size of the map, [Ubisoft] compared it specifically to Constantinople in Assassin’s Creed Revelations and Paris in Assassin’s Creed Unity,” Easy Alies said in a preview video on its YouTube channel (thanks,Press Start). “They said it’s about that big.”
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Unity has a total of 23 viewpoints, 21 of which are in Paris. For comparison, Origins has 62, Odyssey has 95, and Valhalla has 72. That should put into perspective what a major shift in scope Mirage is. However, there will still be mounts like camels and horses, and the city is divided by bodies of water, meaning that we can still sail on small boats. This keeps the newer traversal system of the more modern games, which we saw a snippet of in the gameplay reveal.
Back in January,Boudon discussed the smaller approach to Mirageand what its “return to roots” slogan really means; “Origins, Odyssey, Valhalla. They are all great games with the promise to live an epic journey in a strong fantasy. Amongst our fans, we started hearing the desire for a character-driven story, focused on the core pillars of the first [Assassin’s Creed games] in a more intimate scale. It resonates with us as well, as developers, and this was the starting point of the project.”
While it’s taking us back to a map size similar to Revelations and Unity, Boudon also said that it will be a vast improvement over Assassin’s Creeds 1, 2, and 3, with a “richer and denser” map, “more gameplay opportunities”, and more depth.
Not only will the map size and scope be similar to early Assassin’s Creed games, but also the stealth and parkour. We saw in the gameplay reveal that old-school Eagle Vision is back, marking objectives in yellow and enemies in red, on top of the birds-eye-view manually controlled eagle that can mark key points for us.
Senior game designer Marco Maresca also said that Mirage’s approach to parkour is"closer to the Ezio games". That means we won’t see Basim scale mountains like Bayek and Kassandra, which is not only to return to the classic feel of the series, but to keep “the flow and momentum going”.
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