Pixel Amiss

AKA mild curiosity for the hidden blade

I still remember the first time I saw the first Assassin’s Creed being played. I was at a friend’s house, and he was showing his newest acquisition on his Xbox 360. It was captivating – it was the first time I saw and played on a seventh-gen console, if I’m not mistaken. And it was a big deal, as I was still on my trusty PS2 and Gameboy advance (and cursing the gods while trying to play Fable at 5 FPS on my crappy Dell laptop).

Now that I think of it, he also gifted me his Oblivion PC copy when he moved to the Xbox version (the fool!). His parents worked in advertising, so they had quite the disposable income. I owe him many thanks for introducing me to some of my favourite games and franchises. Wonder how he’s doing.

I was pleased with my gaming options, mind you. Those were the last years of gaming magazines, and they used to give away full games and demo disks just dripping with affordable goodness. And my father still had gaming publishers among his customers, I think, so he’d manage to slip me some leftover review copies under the desk once the PR cycle ended. But this was different: the level of detail was unthinkable, the animations incredible, the gameplay exhilarating (the thing that captured me the most? The fucking quilting on the Templar’s gambeson-tunic thingies). To this day, I think the first game is still my favourite one in the whole series (ranking even above AC2, the shock!).

There was profound craftsmanship, deep intentionality behind the controls and moment-to-moment that eclipsed any monotony in quest design. Something that was lost while iterating from entry to entry (to the point that newer entries have lost their identity and should be called something else). The same sense of intentionality was in Patrice Désilets’ last game, Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey. But all that’s for another article.

I’m (not) going to complain

You surely have met someone, online or in real life, who expressed similar views. “The games suck now.” “Remember AC2?” And so on.

Yeah, I’m one of those.

Look, I tried.

Both Origins and Odyssey managed to pique my interest based on the strength of the setting alone, so I gave both a try – the former I never finished, the latter yes (I think, memory’s hazy). They are overall competent games. And it’s true that the old template was getting stale, although I believe that this was mainly due to everyone losing sight of the reasons behind most of the decisions made way back when. Unity was largely misunderstood (and the bugs didn’t help), and Syndicatewas probably killed by its own ambition, but it doesn’t change that both games were received with a general “meh”.

By 2017 the ground was fertile for a new formula, so a gamble was made. And it paid, no doubt. The grognards complained, but the copies sold. Something was working, but it wasn’t working for me.

Oh no, must be the season of the leaks

The past few months were enveloped in quiet attention. I’m not going to call it excitement – this is not the kind of work that should elicit that, methinks. But curiosity, yes. We started hearing about a DLC-turned-game that sought to recapture the old times. When we were young. When we wanted to be free to do what we wanted to do. And all that jazz.

We heard of a return to form. A The Force Awakens-styled attempt at recalling the golden age, with something eerily similar and yet new and flashy and waiting for your sweet cash. Back to the Middle Ages, back to the Middle East, back to the Assassin Brotherhood.

We heard of a possible remake of AC1. That would use this new game as a starting point.

Then we got a title. We got pictures. We were so close. We were ready for September 10^th.

Assassin’s Creed Mirage, wot we know

The date came and went, with actually very little info. The announcement consisted of a pre-rendered trailer (overflowing with call-backs to Assassin’s Creed II’s own) and a few minutes of interview with Sarah Beaulieu, Ubisoft Bordeaux’s Narrative Director.

Not much meat, to be honest. We know the protagonist is Basim, a Assassin Hidden One who appears in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla at the beginning of the game, does fuck all throughout and is somehow involved with gods possession at the end (TBH, I haven’t reached that point yet). This is his story.

The trailer gives us some glimpses into what might be.

We are going to Baghdad, a couple of decades before our Viking escapade. We are going to visit the Brotherhood just before it took that name, but the iconography is already there. The white robes are almost those we saw in 2007, even though they share the over-designed quality of modern games. The hidden blade is front and centre, and (a true miracle) worn the right way around.

There’s hiding on benches and climbing on buildings to get the jump on our targets, because we are Assassins and that’s how we roll. Or, how we will roll in 2023 – no precise release date in sight.

Nice. But not much.

And wot we were told

No gameplay was shown at this point, which is a disappointment. But the press was able to meet the developers behind closed doors and get some extra details that confirmed some of our hopes.

The focus is on stealth, parkour and exploration, firmly planted in the urban setting of 861 Baghdad. Four districts to play in, with the time-tried loop of “find target, execute, escape” that made this series famous.

There won’t be dialogue choices or gear looting. Levels are gone, even though we are going to see some form of progression tied to the plot and a skill tree – I suppose something resembling what we had in the later years of the “classic era”.

We are going to see a limited set of weapons and gadgets, but customization should be relegated to limited upgrades to what we have, probably putting us between AC1 and Brotherhood in terms of loadout variety.

Which is, honestly, very good. I love RPGs, they are my favourite genre, but they must be done properly. Whatever we got since 2017 were RPGs like Call of Duty is a war simulator. Dropping the façade is a plus. The franchise was never approached as a roleplaying game, even though it wanted to be called like that.

Take me back to the place I belong

What we get, in the end, is a prequel of sorts, focused on one of the few characters that actually made people happy when Valhalla came out. But I don’t expect too many ties to the predecessor, at least on the surface.

Time and space separate us from what we last saw in the AC world. There will, I think, be more overt supernatural imagery, taking after the heavy mythological components of the Hidden Ones trilogy, but in a more classic frame.

Because I believe the whole point (as they stressed in the promotional material, this is a big anniversary for the franchise) is to make a remake without making one (at least yet). To go back winking so hard to strain our eyes.

Much like The Force Awakens did for Star Wars, Mirage feels, at this point, a way to make something new without having to make it. I’m fine with it because, unlike Star Wars, that’s what I was asking.

Hope never dies

Point is, WE ARE GOING BACK, BOYS. Back to the roots, back to the creed, bigass city, climbing, stealth. A proper hidden blade. This can be good. Please let this be good. Ubisoft used to be one of my favourite publishers. A little over two years they put out Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry 2, Rainbow Six Vegas, and the Prince of Persia reboot.

AAA gaming lost something in the past decade, the common wisdom says. Ubisoft had quite a few shitstorms in the meantime, but they should have thrown out the trash by now. Maybe it’s time for a redemption story for the soulless corporation hunting for your money. So that it might become a soulless corporation hunting for your money with exciting games.