Assassin’s Creed Mirage has been marketed as a back-to-basics AC game, which means that every design decision Ubisoft makes for it is subject to increased scrutiny. Like its protagonist Basim moving from roof to roof, it has a tightrope to carefully walk.
Mirage should focus more on stealth than recent RPG entries have, but shouldn’t bring back the insta-fail missions of the early games. It should be more contained than the past few sprawling open-worlders, but not so small that it doesn’t justify its $50 price tag. It should emphasize stealth by making Basim less imposing in combat than Eivor and Cassandra, but shouldn’t lean so far in the other direction that you can only attack after a successful parry as in the early games.
It’s a difficult balance to strike. More than for other triple-A franchises, going back to its roots is a fraught endeavor for the Assassin’s Creed series. These games have tried on many different identities over the series’ 16 year run, focusing more or less on stealth, combat, the Animus, ship combat, homesteading, and parkour from entry to entry. What might be “classic AC” for one fan will be a relic from a worse era for another.
So, when I saw a clip from YouTuber JorRaptor’s preview of Mirage going around on Twitter in which Basim highlights an enemy on a ledge, then teleports to their position to kill them, I wasn’t surprised to see a negative reaction from some AC fans. The game is supposed to be going back to the series’ roots, and the original AC was hyper-focused on traversal, tasking you with getting to grips with its bizarre controls so you could sneak up on a target andkill them before being spotted. It could be a difficult game to play and, paired with the small number of targets, it made each kill feel hard won. By allowing you to skip over the work of climbing a wall, Mirage is yada yada-ing the process that the first Assassin’s Creed reveled in.
And yet, some of the best stealth games to release in the time since the original AC have had similar mechanics. Specifically, I’m thinking of the three Dishonored games and Deathloop, all of which allow you to set a point in space then warp to it. This ability allows these games to do different things with stealth, with overhead platforms that you could only reach with this magical skill. Other games might have to provide more abundant time with the guards at the other end of the hall, but Dishonored can up the challenge on the ground by giving you a path to the sky.
Of course, “Dishonored did it” doesn’t mean that AC has to do it, too. But, stealth games have evolved in the 16 years since the first Assassin’s Creed game launched. Dishonored, The Last of Us, Metal Gear Solid 5, the modern Hitman trilogy, and the Batman: Arkham games were all released since Desmond’s first dip into the Animus. Few players would be satisfied with a game that played exactly like AC played in 2007, and the team at Ubisoft has to decide which modernizations they’ll bring to the old formula.
Should a Blink-style ability be one of them? I don’t know. I like Assassin’s Creed well enough in all of its iterations, but I’ve never been one of the series’ diehard fans. The problem for Ubisoft is that those diehard fans will never agree with each other. You can’t please everyone. I hope the team behind Mirage is making the choices necessary to make it the best game it can be, whether that’s perfectly in line with old school Assassin’s Creed or, more likely, not.