Engaging Navigation
Players may be wary of Ubisoft’s repeated boasts that Origins is going to be the largest Assassin’s Creed ever, and, normally, I’d be right there with them. When it comes to video games, size does not equate to quality. However, when I heard that the team behind Assassin’s Creed Origins is Ubisoft Montreal, I became practically giddy with excitement. Players may remember them as the same team behind Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. With that in mind, there is no better group of developers suited to tackling the vastness of Egypt.
Ubisoft Montreal managed to fill the long stretches of endless ocean in Black Flag with engaging naval battles, intriguing treasure hunts, exciting bounty hunter missions, and whimsical pirate shanties. A lesser studio would have stumbled when it came to world building, leaving the player to their own devices on the lengthy voyages from one side of the map to the other. Yet Ubisoft Montreal went the extra nautical mile to ensure their world felt alive.
So for as large as Origins is promised to be, players can rest easy knowing that they won’t be left to make their own fun. Ubisoft Montreal is going to make the desert sands come alive with a life all their own. Hell, if it’s anything like Black Flag, navigating the world might be even more fun than some of the actual story missions.
Living NPCs
Speaking of the world, the player won’t be the only one consciously living in it this time around. The NPCs in Origins are programed to live their own lives. They’ll wake up with the rising sun and go to bed when the sky darkens. They’ll go to work, buy food from the market, and even get into arguments. This means the player will never have the same experience no matter how many times they run up and down the same street.
Although the social aspect of this will help the world feel more alive, the truly intriguing takeaway is how this might affect Bayek’s missions throughout the game. For the first time in any Assassin’s Creed game, players will have to actually hunt their prey. Players will have to learn routines and track their targets, as well as consider possible NPC interference, before tackling each mission. This adds a level of strategy to Assassin’s Creed that the franchise’s formula desperately needed. It promotes stealth to as equally an appealing approach to tackling a problem as open combat – something previous games have fallen short on.
Of course, this means hiding in plain sight will require more effort than wandering into a mindless crowd of people, but being able to incorporate human behavior into an assassination means the player won’t automatically fail if they’re spotted. It will probably also lead to some more exciting chase scenes and infiltration missions as well.
Strategic Combat
That isn’t to say that combat is no longer a viable option. In fact, Ubisoft Montreal gave the franchise a fresh take on how it handles open combat that looks a lot more fun and engaging than its predecessors. Previous Assassin’s Creed games felt like The Legend of Zelda. The games thought they could fool the player into thinking combat was difficult and nuanced by making fights longer through waiting and countering.
They weren’t harder, of course. Sure, waiting to counter kill eight enemies is certainly longer than waiting to counter kill three enemies, but it’s not harder. Plus, since enemies were always nice enough to wait their turn before attacking, players never had to really respond to multiple attacks. Typically, the closest enemy in any given fight would be the next one to attack, and, ultimately, the next one to fall. The one exception was Unity.
Much like Unity, Origins features enemies that will surround and gang up on the player. However, unlike Unity, Origins will give players faster foes that will hit a whole lot harder. I was shocked by how quickly I was killed off by just regular soldiers in the E3 2017 demo. Yet I wasn’t discouraged. Combat feels visceral, bloody, and dangerous, and actually invokes a pang of fear when more than three enemies are closing in on Bayek. It feels so much like For Honor, and if getting another game that features For Honor’s strategically dangerous combat doesn’t sound like a good time, then I don’t know what does.
Custom Role-Playing
Although the franchise has dabbled with RPG mechanics in the past, Assassin’s Creed has never fully embraced the genre. Before Origins anyway. In Origins, players will have more control over their desired play style than any other Assassin’s Creed game has offered.
A wide variety of weapons, from dual sabers to spears, and a diverse range of bows means that players will have plenty of choices in how they want to fight. Different types of armor will also have as much effect on Bayek’s movement and stats as his appearance. All of these treasures come in different rarities and will be hidden throughout the world for the player to find and experiment with.
So for those of you keeping track at home, this means Assassin’s Creed Origins is shaping up to have a world as exciting to explore as Black Flag that’s also filled with lifelike NPCs, bad guys that will fight the player in For Honor brawls, and customizable weapon RPG elements that are ripped right out of a something like the Witcher III.
Origin of the Creed
Gamers have been playing Assassin’s Creed for 10 years now. In that time, dozens of graphic novels, spin-off games, and even a live-action movie have helped flesh out the franchise’s lore. Yet, one question has never been answered: How did all of this start? Origins aims to answer that question, as well as a few others that, though not as important, have still stumped players for a decade.
Desert Oath, Origins’ companion novel, has already begun to piece together just how an order of super liberal killers came to be, as well as showcase where the practice of wiping killed targets with a feather came from and why the Assassins are obsessed with birds, but there are so many things that we’re still in the dark about. Where and why was the hidden blade created? Why do the Assassins mark themselves with white hoods? How did a group of individuals come to the conclusion that they couldn’t just stop at protecting their home, and that a global fight was the only way to go?
So many questions, and players will finally, finally, have them all answered come Friday.
Not Your Typical Hero
It’s incredible that players will once again have a chance to walk in the shoes (or sandals in this case) of an Assassin who’s a person of color. Of the fourteen adventures that players have had on consoles (counting the expansive Tyranny of King Washington, Freedom’s Cry, Dead Kings, and Jack the Ripper DLC), players have had the chance to play as a minority seven times (Ratonhnhaké:ton, Aveline de Grandpré, Adéwalé, Evie Frye, and Lydia Frye). However, five of those times have been a DLC or shared spotlight, and the remaining two are still half white (and only one of them is a woman).
Considering the Creed both welcomes and protects all walks of life, it’s kind of surprising that there aren’t more Assassins of racial diversity in a prominent role in the franchise. They’re mostly reduced to half a game or DLC appearances. Which is why Origins is so refreshing. I still remain firm in my convictions that Aya, Bayek’s wife who is trained in the ways of the Medjay and the one who’s trying to convince Bayek to believe in protecting both old and new ways of thought, would have been a better choice for the protagonist of this game. Nonetheless, this is still an exciting step in the right direction for Ubisoft.
A Family to Protect
Speaking of Aya, it’s pretty amazing that Bayek has a family at all in Origins. Sure, Bayek is not the first Assassin to have a family. However, whereas most Assassins lose their family in the opening levels of their games, to the point where I can safely say the path to becoming an Assassin is for you to witness the death of a parent, Bayek’s immediate family seems to be very much alive and well for most of Origins.
His wife Aya has been featured prominently in many trailers of the game, and although no trailers have shown Khemu, his son, or Ahmose, his mother, there also has not been anything to suggest that they’re dead. It’s true that Bayek’s father was killed in front of him, again reaffirming my point of how Assassins are made, but it definitely seems that Bayek will have that family support in Origins that so many past protagonists have had to go without. Even Assassins that did have living relatives, like Ezio and Edward, never saw their families until after their adventures were over and done with. Their families were hidden away in giant fortresses or entirely different countries.
How will the tale of an Assassin be different now that players will be controlling one who still has a living family? How will it affect the story that this family will be regularly interacting with him enough to influence his choices (Aya even participates in some of the missions)? Will Bayek takes less risks than the Assassins we’ve see or will his desire to protect the ones he loves drive him to rash decisions? Guess we’ll find out on Friday.
Learning About Egypt
My mom is more excited about Origins than I am. How weird is that? My mom doesn’t even like video games. She thinks they’re too hard. But she loves watching me play Assassin’s Creed. She’s a writer, so she enjoys analyzing the lore with me and sitting next to me as I play through a part of the world that neither of us have had a chance to see in person. She was overjoyed to hear about Origins’ new “Discovery Tour” game mode. The chance to experience the ancient land of Egypt without worrying about fighting, and getting lessons on the country’s history, landmarks, and people? Thank goodness the mode isn’t coming out until 2018, otherwise I’d have to fight her for who gets to play the game first.
This new Discovery Tour mode is something that Assassin’s Creed should have always had. It will make learning more enjoyable, and open this AAA franchise up to the people who haven’t been playing video games their entire lives. Giving people the chance to run through a game and just experience it is going to open up new avenues of gamification and help jumpstart certain conversations, like video games are not just games, for those who don’t play video games regularly.
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