Assassin’s Creed Mirage returns to the franchise's roots, with an emphasis on parkour, stealth, and assassinations set perfectly within the urban and desert environments of the ancient Middle East.
The Basim whom players encountered in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla - brooding, malevolent, the secretly reincarnated manifestation of the Norse god Loki - will be given a much fuller (and, presumably, more positive) treatment as the main character of Assassin’s Creed Mirage. Basim grew up in the streets of Baghdad, an orphan and petty thief haunted by terrible visions owing to Loki’s presence within him. The new game will explore Basim’s origins, following him as he becomes a member of the mysterious Hidden Ones, the predecessors of the Assassins, and his struggles as he comes to recognize and accept his true nature as a reincarnated Isu. Set some twenty years prior to the start of Valhalla, Assassin’s Creed Mirage introduces Basim as story protagonist, fleshing out an important franchise character while deepening the series’ quasi-mythological foundations.
Baghdad, the capital of modern-day Iraq, offers the perfect setting for the young Basim - and those playing as him - to hone his talents as an assassin. As the game trailer from Assassin’s Creed Mirage's Baghdad setting, as players will likely discover as they explore both the city’s streets and the cultural and historical context in which the game takes place.
Assassin’s Creed Mirage’s Baghdad Is A Parkour Playground
Although the recent open-world Assassin’s Creed games were well-received, hardcore fans of the series clamored for a return to the franchise’s origins as a stealth game, and Ubisoft seems to have listened. Assassin’s Creed Mirage is a throwback to the roots of the franchise. As shown in the game trailer, Mirage’s Baghdad is a dense city where an assassin can easily blend in with the crowd, clamber up a minaret, or slip down an alley to knife a snooty merchant or corrupt politician. As in the earliest games of the franchise, Mirage features classic Assassin's Creed parkour gameplay, also known as freerunning, a kind of acrobatics used by the Assassins to navigate urban and natural environments in both their horizontal and vertical dimensions. Given the Middle Eastern setting in which these parkour-style moves are made, players might be forgiven for flashing back to the earliest Assassin’s Creed adventures with characters like Altaïr and Ezio, when this style of gameplay was first introduced.
The game’s 9th-century Baghdad is ideal for this, presenting an environment in which players can fully utilize the potential of freerunning. Players will be able to swing around corners while dangling from lanterns, scramble up or pull down scaffolding, set mines and traps, and pole vault across the gaps between buildings. Baghdad also lends itself to the stealth gameplay central to Assassin's Creed Mirage. According to Rebs Gaming on Twitter (via French YouTuber j0nathon), as in earlier games, city roofs will once again offer hiding places and the streets will be full of NPCs, forming crowds into which players can disappear.
Rebs also reports that Baghdad will be the only city in the game, though it will be divided into four sectors, each likely containing its own boss, and surrounded by deserts, rivers, and oases that will also be open to exploration. Baghdad’s densely populated streets are a risk for Ubisoft, however - they recall Assassin’s Creed Unity, which was widely panned for its mechanics involving crowded Paris streets. It is to be hoped that Ubisoft has resolved these older issues in time for its new release.
AC Mirage’s Baghdad Is The Center Of The World
Place is an obviously important element of a game’s setting but so is the time in which it is set, and Assassin’s Creed Mirage, its narrative, and setting promise not to disappoint. Baghdad in 850 was an incredibly complex, diverse, and fascinating place. The city was founded in 762 as the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate, an empire that stretched across much of the modern Middle East and included parts of India and northern Africa. The city was located in a mild climate on the banks of the Tigris River, placing it at the heart of long-distance trade routes, a factor that led to the city becoming a center of knowledge and culture for the entire region. By the middle of the 9th century, advanced banking, legal, and educational systems had been developed, leading to growth in the arts, literature, and entertainment. As a hub of scholarship and learning, Baghdad became known as the center of the world and the locus of what came to be called the Golden Age of Islam.
At the time of Assassin’s Creed Mirage, then, Baghdad was a world center and cultural melting pot, though it remains to be seen how much of that will figure in the actual storyline of the game. For example, the Muslim faith was critical to the people and politics of the city in 850, and it will be interesting to see to what extent, if at all, the game developers incorporate the religious element into the story. The culture of Baghdad at this time was a rich though at times unstable mix of Persian and Arab peoples and languages, and this diversity could add another dimension of depth to the game’s background, main story, and side quests. In any case, it is certain that Baghdad as a center of learning and culture at the time of Assassin’s Creed Mirage will form the backdrop to Basim’s adventures, perhaps contributing to the origins of the Hidden Ones and their eventual evolution into the Assassins.
Sources: Ubisoft/YouTube, Rebs Gaming/Twitter (via j0nathan/YouTube)