Assassin’s Creed Origins
Assassin’s Creed’s gap year has made a big difference
After a much-needed year off, Assassin’s Creed takes us to ancient Egypt. The director of the series’ best entry, BlackFlag, is leading Origins’ development. You play as a character called Bayek, in a story set in 49 BCE, at the end of the age of pharaohs. It’s a more challenging game this time around, with a revamped combat system and special encounters against boss enemies—including fights in a gladiatorial arena. Ubisoft’s ancient Egypt is a gigantic, seamless world, made up of many cities and villages. There’s a lot of new stuff here, and there’s a sense Assassin’s Creed has been infused with ideas from other open world games, including Ubisoft’s own FarCry series. There’s a focus on customising your hero, with a levelling system and the ability to craft upgrades. Combat won’t play itself this time, either, and will rely on your ability to dodge and block with your shield. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by multiple enemies, but the available abilities can help you thin the pack— letting you shoot five dudes at once with arrows, for example.
You also have an eagle pal in this one, called Senu. Ubisoft has steadily been putting drones in everything from Ghost Recon to FarCryPrimal, (owls are just nature’s drones, right?) There are no towers to climb in Origins, so once again, your eyes in the sky are provided by a bird friend. He can scout out the surrounding environment, and feed that information back to you.
Ubisoft has also moved on from the map design of Assassin’sCreed past, which took a meticulously designed, lavish space, and spewed boring activity icons all over it. Here, the developers have moved to more of a quest system, taking Origins closer towards RPG territory.
Infectious
There are even some interesting tricks you can pull, beyond just walking up to a guard and stabbing him. You can poison corpses, for instance, meaning that when a guard checks on his fallen ally, he’ll die too. If that’s not twisted enough, you can toss a poisoned body onto a horse and send it into your enemies, killing them all.
The problem with all of this? Not everything has been overhauled, and Assassin’sCreed’s pretty bad platforming looks like it’s returning as is. Plenty of other stuff has been tweaked, though, and the change of setting is different enough from Assassin’sCreed of old that Origins should offer plenty of exciting things to see once you’re bored of sliding down the pyramids for fun. (As if you’d ever bore of sliding down pyramids for fun.)
the developers have moved to more of a quest system