The Assassin’s Creed series has been around for a long time, almost ten years, in fact. The newest in the series, Assassin’s Creed: Origins is to be released on October 27, 2017, practically on the anniversary of the series’ birth. That’s a good time as any for a revamp, right? Well, Ubisoft, having heard the cries of gamers for better gameplay, decided to finally listen, and has made what they claim will be some major improvements.
First off, the game looks good, doesn’t it? I’m an Egyptology nerd, so it doesn’t take too much to please me with the world they’ve chosen, but I have also played many hours of other AC games, and I can see, well, little difference at first glance. It looks a bit smoother, and the game is as always quite beautiful, but does the world deserve such high praise, or hype, as it appears to be receiving? I believe it does, but only after watching this interview hosted by Game Informer:
Here the French company (I speak French and love hearing from a game development company there), discusses how they revamped the world, the main point being its fluidity and life-like qualities, in other words, a continuous map and AI characters, respectively. Now I love a continuous world, as it makes it feel more complete. I will say, loading between other world’s in the past games didn’t bother be a whole lot, but the fact that you will get to revisit each part of the city whenever you want without a huge loading screen is–wait… the city will be so big that you’ll want to fast travel and then loading screens will be BACK. Okay, so maybe it’s not as big of a perk as it seems, but it’s nice nonetheless.
Then there are the characters movements. The directors talk about the characters being more life-like, and though the numbers of people may not accurately represent that which exists in the cities, their movements are supposedly more accurate to a particular situation.
So, the world is nice, cool. But that still doesn’t really address the complaints of past games. But hopefully this will:
They have moved from “an animation driven system to a code driven system.” As Ismail says, “…it’s much more responsive; it’s much more fluid.” That particularly effects going between swimming and running and riding.
Furthermore, you can now climb just about anything, which can be good and bad in my opinion. That can take away realism, as climbing is pretty hard in real life. I should know, I rock climb. Games really take a characters ability to climb way too far, but it’s a game, so I’m pretty forgiving. However, climbing a sheer face, in other words, climbing where there are no obvious holds, does not make sense, and therefore can take the player out of the world of the game. So much of the game strives to be realistic, that including something close to realism but obviously not, will be noticeable, and maybe not in a good way.
Overall, I’m pretty excited for this game and plan on buying it as soon as I can. You can find information about it on Ubisoft’s Site here.
Rebecca Weir 