Okay, I take it back. I’ve long said that Assassin’s Creed is over, dead, and buried, and that it has departed so far from the essence of the original games that the series is barely about Assassins anymore. Mirage, however, has proved that Ubisoft is prepared to return to its roots, finally giving us a game where an Assassin acts like an Assassin. But I was immediately struck by a thought while watching the Mirage gameplay trailer streamed during the PlayStation Showcase – isn’t this just the original Assassin’s Creed?
Seriously, I got deja vu watching it. Basim looks a lot like Altair did in the original Assassin’s Creed, with the iconic hidden blade and hood. We see him leaping from high surfaces to pin down his enemies with an all-too-familiar slicing sound effect. The setting is a dusty, mostly beige, pre-modern Middle Eastern city. Basim parkours over obstacles, uses smoke bombs, crouches on ledges, and infiltrates buildings. It truly is a return to tradition, but I can’t help but wonder if Ubisoft has over-corrected.
Don’t get me wrong. I think it’s great that Ubisoft is making a smaller game, one that hopefully will lack all of the unnecessary padding and bloat of its predecessors. I’m also glad that it’s listening to players who have been asking for a more assassin-y Assassin’s Creed, sick of fighting soldiers, participating in huge-scale battles, and swinging gigantic swords. I am one of those players, and I’ve been craving stealth gameplay more than anything as the franchise evolved over the years. There hasn’t been an Assassin’s Creed game that has captured my attention since the Ezio trilogy, and I’m relieved to see Mirage might actually be fun to play, for the first time in a long time.
But Mirage is almost too close to what I miss. The gameplay trailer seems to be saying very clearly, ‘we heard you, and this is what you asked for’. Ubisoft seems to be missing the point. People don’t want the exact same thing, they want the same spirit. It still needs to be an improved same thing. I didn’t see any new or even developed mechanics in the game, although it certainly looks better than a game that came out over 15 years ago. It seems to play exactly like 2007’s Assassin’s Creed, and that worries me.
After all, what is the point of a series if not to innovate and iterate on itself? I don’t want to play Assassin’s Creed again, I want to play a new story that personalises the heart of the series to each unique protagonist. I want to see how Basim is special, and what makes him different from the others. Nothing we’ve seen so far about this game has made me think that it’s anything particularly special, and I really do want to be excited about it. Ubisoft is right – this is what I asked for. Kind of. Mirage might be returning to its roots, but I still worry that it won’t be much more than a vehicle for microtransactions, a clone of its first game that doesn’t offer much more than what it thinks players want. I hope it proves me wrong.