SANDS OF TIME
After a year in the shadows, Ubisoft’s biggest series re-emerges to show off its wild side
A year is a long time in videogames – but not, it seems, in videogame marketing. It all started so promisingly: Ubisoft’s announcement that there would be no entry in the mainline Assassin’s Creed series in 2016 was a bold one, and, after years of creative stagnation, probably the right one too. Millions of unit sales were willingly cast aside as the publisher said it would be “stepping back and re-examining” the well-worn template of its safest bet. Unity left a sour taste in 2014; a year later Syndicate mostly washed over us, an overfamiliar murder tour of old-timey London notable only for the novelty of its setting and its charming dual protagonists. Despite that, we missed the series last year, and walked into our demo at this year’s E3 excited to see what had changed. Apparently not much had. The world is really big now, they said. There are more objectives. Hey, we stuck some feathers on a Watch Dogs 2 drone and now you’ve got Senu, a fully controllable tactical eagle. It’s the same old Assassin’s fans know and either love or blithely ignore, only... better, kind of. Not quite. The truth is, despite what the semi-automatic marketing spiel and restrictive demos might suggest, that Ubisoft has actually done it: Assassin’s Creed is different. That’s where all that extra development time has gone; not on simply making a better version of what has gone before, but on making something else. And while a new RPG structure, a rebuilt combat system and an AI world far wilder than we had expected does have us – and, we suspect, Ubisoft – a little worried about what exactly the definition of an Assassin’s game now is, we can’t help but feel that it’s a good problem to have.
It’s a journey upon which the team at Ubisoft Montreal embarked four years ago, fresh from finishing up development on Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. “We knew that in terms of mechanics, of fundamentals, there was stuff that needed to be rewritten,” Origins producer and series veteran Julien Laferrière tells us during our visit to the Montreal studio. “Because we had time in front of us, we said, ‘OK, we have the opportunity.’” Director Ashraf Ismail agrees: “We needed this time, four years, to ship a game of this scope. We felt that, from an intention standpoint and a technological standpoint, we were at the stage to make this type of game. We also felt that the [series] would need it by this point.” In Black Flag, Ismail and his core team had deepened the strategy and progression of Assassin’s Creed III’s naval combat. The resulting success inspired them to take a bigger risk with the fundamentals of Origins. “What we saw was that the RPG element [in Black Flag] worked really well,” Ismail says. “It was sort of subversive and hidden, but it was an RPG element.” And thus, with its new quest structure and levelling systems, Origins is an RPG, all but abandoning the series’ stealth-action tradition. It is set not just in a single, scalable city, but across the seamless expanse of Ptolemaic Egypt – although, of course, still within Abstergo Industries’ magical mystery memory box, the Animus. Protagonist Bayek levels up: kills and exploration earn him XP, golden damage numbers popping up over heads. Looting corpses no longer merely yields pocket change and smoke bombs, but weapons and gear of various uses and rarities. Most importantly, missions have been replaced with a quest system that is finally designed to let you spin multiple plates at once, rather than forcing you to quit out of one mission and fail it in order to begin another.
There is still a main narrative questline, telling of how Bayek’s actions lead to the formation of the Brotherhood, but there are also sidequests – hundreds of them, we’re told – to simultaneously take on. Given the series’ past penchant for bland, frustrating design in missions off the beaten path, our instinctive reaction is a sort of hollow dread. But this,
AS THE MISSION WEARS ON, WE BEGIN TO APPRECIATE THE INCREASED FREEDOM OF APPROACH AFFORDED TO US
we’re assured, is a different Assassin’s, with quests and objectives rethought. Put it this way: there are no more tailing missions. “There are some people who just couldn’t care less about stealth,” Ismail says. “There was frustration when you had a mission that demanded you play stealthily and would even desynchronise [Animus terminology for ‘fail’] you if you didn’t. We don’t want to make missions like that anymore. We want it to be much more open.”
After hearing all that, we have high hopes when we’re dropped into our latest demo, ready to be let loose upon ancient Egypt. A fully scalable city is one thing: an entire country is quite another. “Building
Black Flag, we went for a world that was about wilderness,” Ismail says. “There were cities, but it was really about the grandiose nature of the world. We wanted to continue doing that with Egypt. We wanted to go to a place that, yes, had villages, and caves, and cities, but also ensure that there was a big element of the wild in it.”
In the old tradition, we immediately make a beeline for the highest point we can see – a pyramid, naturally – safe in the assumption that a map-revealing viewpoint will be waiting at the top. But after shimmying up to the shining golden capstone we’re rewarded not with fog clearing into a sea of mission icons, but with a handful of question marks. They are now presented as opportunities; as suggestions, rather than didactic objectives.
“Just this small change triggers the natural curiosity of people,” Laferrière says. “Even the way the land is built, using dunes, mountains or hills, creates natural obstacles that make you want to go on top of that hill to see what’s on the other side. And it plays very well with the variety of biomes we have.” The differences in terrain ripple across the horizon: ripe green swamp lies to the south, while villages and supernaturally purple mountains stretch out to the west, beyond our golden desert. It is a vast, gilded playground, and life goes on across the entire country, even when Bayek’s not around to impact upon it. “The AI is fundamentally different in the way we populate the world,” Ismail says. “Every NPC has an agenda. Farmers, priests, animals, crocodiles, hippos – they all have a lifecycle, schedule and agenda.”
Unfortunately, we’re denied a chance to put that to the test, and are instead chivvied into a sidequest – which proves painfully familiar at first. A robbery sets us on the trail of a Greek geographer’s notes, a process that mostly involves using Senu to pinpoint objectives from the air – Eagle Vision indeed – then trotting our camel between markers, talking to various NPCs in order to figure out exactly what happened. Yet as the mission wears on, we begin to appreciate the increased freedom of approach afforded to us. Thanks to careful design and Origins’ introduction of a non-linear skill tree, there are multiple ways to go about reaching our quarry.
Said new skill menu is split into three interconnecting branches: Warrior, Hunter and Seer. Ability points acquired from stone tablets hidden in Egypt’s many tombs can be fed into the various sides: Warrior perks make Bayek more proficient in all-out, handto-hand combat, while Hunter abilities support more of a ranger playstyle with the bow. Seer is the most nebulous – Ismail describes it as a “manipulation style” that helps players achieve objectives more indirectly, using tools such as firebombs and smoke screens, letting Bayek hold his breath underwater longer, or alter the time of day.
As you’d expect, you can spend points wherever you please, tailoring Bayek’s abilities to fit your desired playstyle. This, in turn, has influenced the dev team’s approach to mission design. “Quests need to be open enough that you could use any approach you want, and have it be valid,” Ismail says. We soon see his point. A familiar haystack beckons below Bayek’s perch; swan-dive into it, and we could fight our way through a narrow cave with brute force. With Origins’ new, FromSoft-style brand of melee swordplay, it’s a more appealing prospect than the button-mashing action of previous titles. But running along the top of the ravine are abandoned walkways for archers, forgotten bundles of arrows offering up opportunities for silent, distant headshots. Bushes throughout the cave, meanwhile, provide cover for stealthy takedowns. In the end, we tear through the camp using a mix of all three approaches, reach our hostage, and
set her free. It’s an improvement, certainly, but we’d rather be somewhere else. To be sent here, with such promise apparently awaiting us out in the world at large, seems a bit of a waste.
Things change dramatically in the final part of the quest. The bandit’s ringleader is our target, and we’re told he should be riding around on horseback somewhere near the Pyramid Of Khufu. The marker, however, tells us he is not. We’re advised to try out our Dawn & Dusk ability, in order to fast-forward time and hopefully bring him a little closer. The marker ends up even further away. It’s a funny moment, and judging by reactions around us, was clearly not part of the plan for our demo. The horseman, it seems, has one of his own. It’s the first real surprise of the day.
The second isn’t far behind, and is just how seamlessly we begin the fight with the bandit leader, our being on the back of a camel no impediment to reaching for and using the weapons we’ve become familiar with on the ground. We’ve wrangled with Origins’ new combat once before, at E3, and so are at least a little familiar with the game’s use of a slower system of hand-to-hand death-dealing. For a second time we’re unconvinced by it, especially when, later on, we load into a gladitorial arena and wrestle as much with the camera and the jerky imprecision of our movements as we do with our aggressors. Out in the world, at least, the way in which we’re able to easily switch between different types of combat means that, even if the kinks in the melee system aren’t entirely smoothed out, we will at least have the means to avoid doing too much of it.
This ease of transition between various systems can, once again, be traced back to Black Flag. “Even if it was well-realised visually and felt like you were doing naval combat, it was really built off of behaviour, mechanics, strategies and patterns,” Ismail says. “We took that philosophy and applied it [here] to ground combat, ranged combat, vehicle combat.” The idea is to have types of combat and movement segue invisibly into each other with a control scheme that remains consistent whether you’re fighting on the sand, diving into the Nile, climbing the Sphinx – or firing from a camel.
Indeed, we instinctively know how to pull out our bow while riding and take potshots at the bandit leader. Wheeling round to keep him in our crosshairs is intuitive, too, aided by a welcome touch of auto-aim, and when it’s time to pull out a sword it all just happens as it should. These discrete systems are working, if not in perfect harmony, then at least sitting flush to one another, the joinery invisible.
It makes it abundantly clear that a ten-yearold system and philosophy has been rebuilt
from scratch. “The first prototypes that we did were actually in Unity 3D,” Ismail says. “We had this fight system with balls and cubes running around. We did whatever we needed to do to try and achieve the gameplay we wanted, to set the intentions early, because we knew we needed a long time to fully realise it. This was all stuff that we did even before Unity shipped. It’s one reason we want people to play the game. We can scream until we’re blue in the face that the fighting is different, but people need to play it and feel it.”
Each of the myriad weapons found throughout the world will have its own strategic pros and cons. A heavy axe’s attacks must be slowly charged to knock enemies to the ground, where follow-up attacks will deal bonus damage; staffs deal low damage but are quick and rangey, and attacks can be chained, with a combo multiplier rewarding aggressive play with extra damage. Dual blades are swift and deadly – a mobility perk helps you control space – and are excellent at building your adrenaline meter. A full one can be triggered with both attack buttons for a brief combat advantage. There are two types, dependent on the weapon you’re using: a blue meter indicating a one-shot special attack that must be landed with timing and care, and a yellow one for a Fury mode that briefly increases Bayek’s speed and power. Switch to a different blade, and your meter carries over; you can use a weapon that fills it quickly, then change to one with whichever special attack is more appropriate for the situation. There are bows, too, including a long-range Predator sniper that lets you aim down sights, and the three-bolt, quick-firing Warrior bow that the development team has affectionately nicknamed ‘the shotgun’.
It’s a level of nuance, flexibility and variety that’s unlike anything we’ve seen in Assassin’s
Creed until now. Ismail turns this broad toolset on various enemy types that he spawns, with a debug menu, into this little section of the world, and the layers of his team’s past four years of labour just keep peeling back. We’re shown how to take down a Brute’s shield, how to take on the advanced super fighter’s parries and javelins, and what to do about the trickster Predator, who uses stealth and smoke bombs to chip away at Bayek’s health and stamina.
It’s a lot to take in, then, and it remains to be seen how hardened fans will take to an overhaul of a system that has never felt like much of a focus for the series. We doubt, however, they’ll complain too much about
Origins’ complex, AI-driven world – the possibilities of which are intriguing, and which are only hinted at by our developer-controlled demo by the banks of an Egyptian river.
A crocodile’s sudden appearance from the nearby water halfway through an enemy demonstration prompts chaos. It thrashes about in the thick of the fight, causing panicked grunts to accidentally hit each other. It snaps angrily at Bayek before it’s yanked unceremoniously from the fray by the devs like a naughty puppy, if you could despawn a naughty puppy with a mouse click. Back to the demonstration, all goes smoothly enough until an army of chariots gallops over, our little sparring spot clearly visible on their patrol route at this time of day.
“The game world is quite active,” Ismail says, putting it mildly. “We don’t spawn stuff in the player space, and we don’t spawn events around the corner [from you] – Senu can see things from hundreds of metres away. We allow the world to live. You can show up to a camp where you see dead bodies everywhere, dead animals. Okay, so maybe an hour ago there was a big fight here. And we accept the fact that you can just loot and leave, or show up in the middle of a fight. So there’s a lot of really cool emergent stuff that can happen that feels organic.” It is one of the more captivating elements of Origins, and indicative of where all that development time has gone – although it makes for a much tougher demo than previous, more predictable games in the series. No wonder the E3 build left us cold: all the good stuff was switched off. “Well, we accept that we don’t try to demo that stuff, but if something cool happens, like chariots and horsemen coming by while we’re trying to show you a Predator? Why not? Let it happen.”
Ismail has not always been this relaxed about Origins’ unscripted moments of magic, admittedly. He tells of how terrified he was to watch Ubisoft’s chief creative officer Serge Hascoët playing the game when the AI decided to disrupt his plan to stealth-assassinate a sleeping target. “All of a sudden, we see these
IT’S A LEVEL OF NUANCE, FLEXIBILITY AND VARIETY THAT’S UNLIKE ANYTHING ELSE WE’VE SEEN IN ASSASSIN’S CREED UNTIL NOW
guys charging into the base and starting to attack, and there’s a horn blown. We see the captain running out of one of the chambers, and he starts charging into the fight. And at first my reaction was, ‘Oh god, no. No.’” A faction of rebels just so happened to decide to rescue some of their prisoners of war. The captain AI finished the fight, Ismail praying he’ll go back to bed. He didn’t: he instead scaled a tower to begin lookout, the AI now in scouting mode, too riled up to sleep. Hascoët – a fan, apparently, of the silent kill – instead drew his bow. “He killed him and he put the controller down and he looks at us and he’s like, ‘Amazing.’ He was just loving the moment.”
Let it happen, then. But there’s still an appreciable nervousness among the Assassin’s team – little surprise, perhaps, given how long many of them have been working on the series, and the extent to which their new game chucks away many of the old conventions. Laferrière, who has been working on the series since
Assassin’s Creed II, remembers that the change in genre, style and combat meant the team was “pretty anxious – well, a mix of anxious and excited – right before E3.” It seems that chopping up the sprawl of Origins into easily digestible demo-friendly chunks has taken precedence for now, those vital features turned off for the stage and showfloor, giving the impression of a game that, despite its extra time in development, hasn’t changed much. “What you didn’t experience,” Ismail says, “is the fact that eventually, by having all these quests running, by having what we call the ‘meta AI’ – the way the AI lives in the world, the persistency of it – things can cross over each other, can impact one another.”
You could say the same about Ubisoft’s work. It is a publisher unafraid to innovate, to take risks, safe in the knowledge that the ideas that do pay off can be used elsewhere in its catalogue. And so within a game this complex – not just complex to make, but to explain, to market, in places even to play – there are familiar little notes. RPG levelling borrowed from The Division; Watch Dogs 2’ s pilfered drone; a dash of For Honor’s measured combat. Yet for all that it may enthusiastically magpie from its stablemates, Origins has plenty of ideas of its own. Perhaps the grandest of them all is to drop a set of intricate systems, ungoverned, into a vast world, and simply let them do what they will. It’s a marketing department’s worst nightmare, sure. But for a game about the spirit of discovery and adventure, that might just be a positive sign. Whether it will pay off is another matter: all will surely be revealed when the game is, like its most intriguing elements, at last let loose in the wild.