If you thought the last few Assassin’s Creed games were a bit too unwieldy, Ubisoft may have some good news for you. Creative director Stéphane Boudon told GamesRadar that the team is taking Assassin’s Creed Mirage back to the stealth series’ roots, eschewing the recent trend toward massive RPGs that last for more than 100 hours in favor of creating a character-driven game with elements pulled from the first Assassin’s Creed entries.
“Origins, Odyssey, Valhalla are all great games with the promise to live an epic journey in a strong fantasy,” creative director Stéphane Boudon told GamesRadar. “Their scopes have been calibrated to fulfill those ambitions as they all embrace the RPG mechanics. But amongst our fans, we started hearing the desire for a character-driven story, focused on the core pillars of the first ACs in a more intimate scale. It resonates with us as well as developers and this was the starting point of the project.”
Mirage will follow Basim’s early life, 20 years before he met Eivor as a seasoned assassin in Valhalla, and while Boudon said the team is using early AC games as a blueprint, modern hardware means they can do much more than was possible in the mid-2000s.
“The increased hardware power and the extended expertise we developed also allow us to have a richer and denser map compared to the first ACs,” Boudon said. “It means for us more gameplay opportunities, more interactions between systems, more depth. It also means incredible and immersive details to treat Baghdad as one of the main characters of Mirage.”
The goal is making Baghdad feel alive and natural and reworking familiar tools and stealth mechanics to give them more flexibility and let players create their own playstyle.
Assassin’s Creed Mirage is planned for release sometime in summer 2023 for PS4 and PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S, and PC.
Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF
