Bonfire Preview Assassin's Creed: Mirage: Reclaim the original fun of the series

The latest canonical sequel to Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed series, Assassin's Creed: Mirage, will be released on October 5.

The game is led by Ubisoft Bordeaux Studio. Compared with the recent "mythological trilogy", although "Phantom" still adopts an open-world setting, it reduces RPG elements and emphasizes more linear narrative, returning to the three elements of "parkour, stealth, assassination".

At the end of August, at the invitation of Ubisoft, we went to Ubisoft's Shanghai office near Caohejing to try out some chapters of the game, and here is a brief introduction to the features and highlights of the new game.

Grow up with Basim

"Mirage" is set in Baghdad in the 9th century AD, when the Islamic region was in the midst of a critical period of the Abbasid dynasty's decline and prosperity. The protagonist of the new work is Basim ibn Ishaq, who once played an important role in "Valhalla" - that is, the reincarnation of Isu Loki.

This demo is not played from the beginning of the game, but is divided into several main parts: the first stage is the prologue petty theft involved in the accident, the second stage is to come to the Invisible Base Camp to receive training and officially join the organization, and the third stage is the free experience in the middle and late stages.

My favorite of these three parts is not the open-world part, but the training content of the second part. At that time, Basim was a newcomer who could not even complete the "leap of faith", and then he would follow the assassin master Rosanne and others to hone his skills, exercise his will, personally participate in the mysterious ritual (yes, even the most painful part), and transform into a real assassin - this is a process that has not been fully shown in the previous "Assassin's Creed", and I believe it is also the reason why these three content experiences were specially arranged for us.

By the way, during the third part of free exploration, I also accidentally trigger a side event - a child is at a height hoping that he can also complete the "leap of faith", but does not have enough courage. Basim personally demonstrated it to him, plus various linguistic incentives (mockery?). ), and finally helped the children successfully complete this challenge, which is also a kind of "creed" inheritance in a sense. (PS: You can pay attention to the name of this child in the official version, there is a surprise)

Moderately streamlined, but with reservations

As we mentioned earlier, "Mirage" is actually a subtraction based on RPG-based "Assassin's Creed" such as "Valhalla".

One of the biggest changes is naturally that there will no longer be so many equipment with different values waiting for players to "brush". With the exception of the two weapons, the equipment system is more "skin" in nature, just changing the appearance.

In terms of growth factors, Basim mainly strengthens his assassination skills by upgrading skills and items.

Basim has three skill trees of Phantom, Liar, and Hunter, of which "Phantom" is aimed at assassination, "Liar" can enhance Basim's various prop effects, and "Hunter" emphasizes reconnaissance and preemptive ability.

As in previous titles, the protagonist can also assist in combat with props such as throwing knives, smoke grenades, and noise bombs, which can be enhanced with materials such as steel blocks, leather, and parts. The enhanced Throwing Knife has a longer effective range, higher damage, and more maximum number, while the Smoke Grenade lasts longer and interferes with enemies in a larger area.

The default keys for "Phantom" are still R1 and R2 for light attacks and heavy attacks respectively, L1 is to block with a sword, and L2 is used to aim with long-range props. The block also has a "bounce" design, which can bounce the enemy back to the stumbling state at the moment of the enemy's attack and turn the situation around, which is more useful when one-to-many.

But as a return work that emphasizes more "hidden assassination", I personally still discourage one-to-many fighting, and the barbarian king of "Valhalla" will definitely die, definitely. In my actual experience, it can feel a bit difficult to fight with more than 3 enemies, so run away or use power-ups.

And the game will also encourage players to use "assassination" at the system level.

Each successful assassination of the player accumulates a "focus bar", which can be used to perform a one-hit "perfect assassination" when necessary - it can kill multiple enemies at once, which is very refreshing. The maximum number of Perfect Assassinations is related to the number of focus bars, which at this stage are three blocks, but the upper limit can be increased by skill.

▲Perfect assassination

If the action of performing the task is too "obvious", it will gradually arouse the vigilance of the guards. Players need to lower their wanted level by tearing up the wanted warrants scattered around the place, bribing officials, and so on - if you don't, you'll have to go to the assassination with the wanted person, and the guards of the city will chase you all over the street.

The game also offers a "Hawkeye" system similar to that in Assassin's Creed: Origins. However, the difference is that this time the enemy has added the "archer" unit, and the falcon will be attacked by the archer, so the player will have to choose whether to kill the archer first or forcibly carry out reconnaissance. The Hunter skill tree further strengthens the Falcon's abilities.

Recreating Baghdad in its Golden Age

In order to make the Golden Age Baghdad "more vibrant", the developers added a lot of playable content to the city, making it another "assassin's playground".

In previous developer interviews, we learned that the size of Baghdad, the "main city" of this game, is about the size of Paris in "Assassin's Creed: Revolution" - performing assassination missions in overcrowded cities is also one of the experiences that developers hope to restore in this game. Although the main setting focuses on Baghdad, in addition to the city, there will be parts of Baghdad outside the map waiting to be explored, so don't worry about the map being too small and not full enough.

In the timeline of "Mirage", China on the other side of the mainland is in the Tang Dynasty, and Baghdad is also one of the cultural centers of the world at that time, where we can meet merchants, monks or diplomats from all over the world - an old acquaintance of Basim is a Chinese tea merchant, speaking about Chinese that we are extremely familiar with.

▲ Tea merchant Uncle Kong

Before officially coming to Baghdad, Basim was given a horse as a mount, and the appearance of the horse could be replaced by purchase. However, most of the scenes when we tried it were in town, and we didn't make full use of the function of "mounts".

Compared with previous works, this work has added more scene props such as drying racks and flagpoles, which players can use as a foothold to achieve smoother displacement - a trailer also has a scene of "using the enemy's head as a foothold", which can indeed be operated in the actual game.

During his mission, Basim can also use "Sidma Tokens" to seek help from various factions in Baghdad, including "Power Tokens" to eliminate wanted or hired mercenaries, "Scholar Tokens" to exchange treasure maps and hire musicians, and "Merchant Tokens" to open special chests or get merchant discounts. According to the game tutorial, the token has other functions, but I have not been able to trigger it in the game for the time being. These tokens can be obtained by completing contracts, opening treasure chests, or simply stealing passers-by.

Contract missions can be understood as a kind of bounty side line. There are a large number of bulletin boards with "contracts" posted in the town, which will provide some special missions similar to side stories, such as assassinating targets, stealing props, escorting allies, etc., as well as various additional conditions such as "no detection", "no killing", "no injury" and so on.

The "black box" can be seen as a more targeted bounty, and the player only needs to assassinate a specific character to achieve the goal, regardless of the means used - hidden assassination, high-profile bombing, or simply hiring mercenaries to rush up are all feasible solutions.

As mentioned earlier, our Assassin protagonist also has the ability to "steal", and the citizens who wander around Baghdad are all objects to steal. When performing "steal", a QTE mini-game is triggered, and if the button is pressed at the right time, you can successfully steal something - some treasures can only be obtained this way, and the difficulty is quite high. Players who are not good at QTE don't have to worry: there is a "steal must succeed" option in the game settings to ensure that everyone does not miss the full collection.

There are also many dry food and fruits in Baghdad that can be used to retrieve blood. In addition to taking the "elixir", stealing some fruit to eat can also quickly restore Bassim's health volume, which is very useful when the potion is not enough, especially when fleeing to avoid pursuers.

Finally, although the acclaimed "Discovery Journey" content is not added to this game, the developers have actually incorporated similar "information" into the game, and players can naturally discover these "historical attractions" during the game, like a new collection element. When players come to these places, a graphic introduction will pop up, written by historical experts, and images from major museums around the world. The current information is that after collecting all the relevant attractions, a special outfit will be unlocked.

Tribute to the origin

As the 15th anniversary of the series, Assassin's Creed: Mirage is a very special work in the canonical series, which can be said to be a game made using Valhalla's equivalent or newer technology, but the gameplay pays homage to the origin of the series.

We played the game for nearly 4 hours this time, and the Ubisoft staff on site told me that I had played about 15%~20% of the content of the game - that is, the whole process is about 20 hours, and the full exploration plus 10 hours or more. Although the game duration is slightly shorter than previous orthodox works, it is not a full-price game at the $70 level after all, and it is still worth trying.

For the new Assassin who has just "cooled" the mythological trilogy, it is a work that allows you to discover the initial joy of Assassin's Creed; For long-time players who have loved the early titles of Assassin's Creed, this is a rare opportunity to relive old dreams.