As an Assassin's Creed girlie, I enjoyed Assassin's Creed Mirage, a pared down (but still big game, which is really just proof of how bloated AAA games have gotten, but I'll stop because it's not time to take my personal bugbear for a walk) Ass Creed game that was closer to the simplicity of the older games in the stab 'em up stealth-action series. Yesterday creative director Stéphane Boudon and art director Jeal-Luc Sala took to Reddit for an AMA, and in response to a question about plans for Mirage DLC, Boudon said no - but that they have ideas for more stories for Basim.
]]>The latest Assassin's Creed Mirage update is giving me flashbacks to that inglorious period in game design when every other action game had an insta-fail stealth segment to wind people up between cover-based shoot-outs and, I don't know, three-part glyph puzzles or what-have-you. Out today for PC at 12pm UTC, 1pm GMT, 7am ET and 4am PT, the 1.07 patch adds Full Synchronization Challenge, a permadeath mode (originally teased last year) that not only permakills you when you're slain by enemies, but also deletes your save file when you commit crimes such as slaughtering civilians, or going outside of "authorised map locations".
]]>Good news for those Assassin’s Creed fans who’ve already finished Mirage - a far more accomplishable task than in the series’ last few games - and are itching to dive back into the streets of ninth-century Baghdad for a fresh challenge: New Game Plus will arrive for free next month, along with a punishing new permadeath mode.
]]>Good news, people who prefer their videogame graphics crispy rather than hazy and rainbow-edged! Ubisoft are working on an Assassin's Creed: Mirage patch that will let you toggle off chromatic aberration - aka the blurring of outlines and details for artistic effect, which you might consider appropriate to a game subtitled "Mirage", but which some people absolutely despise.
]]>Assassin’s Creed Mirage is, so says the Alice B review, "the most enjoyable Assassin’s Creed game for years." That’s thanks in part to a returning focus on classic AC stealthing in a single, densely detailed city, and this back-to-basics approach extends to the technical side too. Mirage cares not for being the glossy poster child of ray-traced glamour; it’s just a game that looks pretty nice and runs well on PC, older hardware and Steam Decks included.
It also keeps its list of graphics settings relatively brief, though there are a few in there that can dish out some extra frames per second at little cost to the visuals. Here it is, then: your complete guide to Assassin’s Creed Mirage’s PC performance, from its refreshingly reasonable system requirements to its best settings combinations.
]]>Very much like an assassin sliding a poison needle into your wrist while shaking your hand, Ubisoft have added Denuvo's anti-piracy/anti-cheating DRM software to Assassin's Creed: Mirage in the game's day-one update, aka patch 1.0.2. We've known for a while that the game would use Denuvo, together with the VMProtect software, but what's baking the noodles of many players is that the Denuvo functionality has been snuck in after the Assassin's Creed: Mirage review embargo, denying critics the chance to assess its impact on the game.
]]>I'm close to being whatever the Assassin's Creed equivalent of a Pokémon genwunner is. It's not like I'm snobby about the newer, more action-oriented Creeds; I welcomed the shift brought in by Assassin's Creed Origins, which shook the series up a bit, and I loved Cassandra kicking her way around Ancient Greece. Valhalla, although it had a relative dearth of things to parkour around, was a fun open-world RPG. Which I suppose is the point.
Assassin's Creed hasn't been a game about a group of assassins following a creed and striking from the shadows for a long time. Here I would say that Basim, protagonist of Assassin's Creed Mirage kicks down the door and kills everyone in the room, except this new entry in the series is smaller, more focused, and once again concerned largely with stealth, and is all the better for it. So it's more appropriate to say Basim snuck in through an open window and is choking everyone out one by one.
]]>Prior to joining RPS and coming into a possession of an Actual Contemporary Gaming PC, I did all my gaming on a plucky Erazer laptop from circa 2014. The old warhorse has certainly had some adventures, to the point that it isn't really a laptop anymore but a hovering debris cloud of plastic and metal, constellated by strips of sellotape, from which a moving picture may be hesitantly conjured by means of screamed insults and the careful deployment of desk fans.
Among the sicker jokes I've played on various editors as a freelancer is to review triple-A games on this sorrowing technological Igor, which - I swear to you - physically flinches and begins to whimper frantically when presented with any game more demanding than Far Cry 2. Thing is, I'm pretty sure I can run Ubisoft's forthcoming Assassin's Creed: Mirage on this hapless relic. The publisher have released minimum and recommended system specs for their latest historical throat-slitter, and they're pretty dang reasonable.
]]>I don't know about you, but after spending 100+ hours in both Assassin's Creed Odyssey and Assassin's Creed Valhalla, I'm well up for an AC game that reins its open world in a bit and goes back to the sort-of single city stab-athon the series used to be. The ones where stealth actually mattered, and you felt like a proper assassin working from the shadows. Assassin's Creed Mirage is all this to a tee - as Ubisoft have taken great pains to remind us over the last year as they gear up to celebrate the series' 15th anniversary.
And after spending three hours playing some of its early mission sequences, I can confirm this is very much a game whose sole purpose is to scratch that nostalgic itch good and proper (before we inevitably hurl ourselves into the still very ambiguous void of whatever the heck Assassin's Creed Infinity is). If, however, you don't have much fondness for those older games, and prefer the more action-oriented RPG-ing of recent Creeds, Mirage is probably going to feel like a step backward from all the things you know and like - and you may be better off waiting until the next big open world entry set in feudal Japan pitches up instead.
]]>Assassin's Creed Mirage will release a week earlier than originally announced, bringing its release date to the very beginning of October and giving it some extra breathing room ahead of Alan Wake 2, Lords of the Fallen and the Metal Gear Solid Master Collection. Christ, it’s still a busy month though, isn’t it?
]]>With the news that Assassin’s Creed Mirage won’t get any post-launch DLC, we of the Electronic Wireless Show podcast are wondering: what are some good games that only need playing once? Not out of a lack of enjoyment or interest, but because they were so satisfying that they left nothing else to want. Or because it would be too hard to recapture the joy of a first playthrough. Or maybe because they just ended really damn well. Whatever the reasoning, join us as we ponder our favourite games that we’ve never returned to.
Plus! We chat about the games we have been playing, from Nate’s eel-dense management adventures in Clanfolk to my wilfully patch note-ignorant return to Minecraft. I also explain Team Fortress 2’s new seal mode, and Nate hijacks my thrilling hardware section on EU battery legislation to improvise a new trip up the Tower of Jocularity.
]]>We already knew that Assassin's Creed Mirage will harken back to the more intimate, focused scope of the older games in Ubisoft’s sneaky-stabby time-hopping series. It looks like that restrained approach will extend to its post-launch content too, with its devs saying that they don’t currently have any plans to extend the game after release with DLC or other expansions.
]]>The next Assassin’s Creed game will continue the series’ past mixture of stab-people-in-the-face stealth-action video game and learn-interesting-things-about-real-places history simulator with a feature dedicated to teaching you about its ninth-century setting of Baghdad.
]]>Award for the Summer Game Fest demo with the quickest pace goes to Assassin's Creed: Mirage, the upcoming 'Creed that promises to take the series back to its stealthier roots. I saw roughly 20 minutes of gameplay in a hands-off presentation, where our boy Basim does some stabbing and some stealthing in what strikes me as a game that'll honour its promises. When they describe combat as the "backup option", you know they're onto something.
]]>The season of big video game announcements - otherwise known as NotE3 season - is in full swing and Ubisoft have decided to join the trailer festivities by teasing their own showcase. The Ubisoft Forward show will be broadcast live from Los Angeles on June 12th at 6pm BST/10am PDT, with a pre-show starting 15 minutes earlier. The publisher also released a small clip to confirm that AssCreed, Avatar, and The Crew: Motorfest will all make an appearance, alongside a non-descript mystery game. Take a peek below.
]]>Update: Ubisoft have confirmed that Assassin’s Creed Mirage’s will arrive on October 12th, with a lengthy new trailer shown during this evening's PlayStation Showcase. I've embedded the new trailer below.
]]>I'm playing Assassin's Creed Valhalla right now, and it's too bloody big. This is my second stint, jumping back in after playing for 14 hours when it came out in 2020 then abandoning it - and I'm beginning to remember why. It's a pretty but largely empty-feeling time, with woefully repetitive mission design and characters I only have a passive interest in. It's good, therefore, to see Assassin's Creed Mirage creative director Stéphane Boudon make more noises about how the next Creed game will be smaller and "more intimate".
]]>Happy New Year, folks! Crikey, there are a lot of games coming out this year, aren't there? When I first asked the team to put together their most anticipated games for 2023, I was thinking we'd have a reasonably sensible number of things we were all looking forward to, you know, somewhere in the region of the 43 games we highlighted at the start of 2022. Very quickly, though, it became apparent that, actually, there are simply loads of games the RPS Treehouse is personally excited about this year, and cor, it would be rude not to include every last one of them. I'll be upfront: there are a fair number of TBA games on here that probably aren't going to come out in 2023, but as ever, we remain hopeful and optimistic all the same. So let's dive in.
]]>It's time to say your goodbyes to Eivor - and your surprise, early hellos to a new character from Mirage, the next game in Ubisoft's eternal series of stab 'em ups. Asassin's Creed Valhalla's free, final content update has arrived a week early, sending Eivor off to North America for one last hurrah.
There are actually two links to Mirage, because this final chapter features *more* of its protagonist, Basim, who Valhalla persevere-ers will have already met. I bailed after 15 hours and so have very little idea what's going on, which is a shame because I'd love a chinwag with Shohreh Aghdashloo.
]]>Want to know everything about Assassin's Creed Mirage? Assassin's Creed is 15 years old, and it's going back its roots with Assassin's Creed Mirage. It will take place in Baghdad, following Basim Ibn Is'haq prior to his appearance in Assassin's Creed Valhalla, and have a renewed focus on the stealth-assassination roots of the franchise. That means those who played Valhalla shouldn't expect a similar experience with Mirage, despite having clear story connections.
If the above information on Assassin's Creed Mirage has piqued your interest, then you can take a deep-dive into the details below. On this page, you'll find everything you need to know about Assassin's Creed Mirage, including info on the gameplay, release window, setting, story, size, protagonist, and various editions available for preorder.
]]>Assassin’s Creed: Mirage's age rating is leading to some speculation on forum ResetEra that it could feature gambling for real-world money, following the game's reveal during the Ubisoft Forward event. An ESRB 18+ rating that lists "real gambling" appears to be in effect for the upcoming back-to-basics Assassin’s Creed set in 9th century Baghdad. If you missed the first look at Mirage over the weekend then you can watch the cinematic trailer below.
]]>A not-insignificant part of the Ubisoft Forward livestream tonight was dedicated to Assassin's Creed. To celebrate the doughty action-adventure's 15th anniversary, senior community developer Alice Terrett was joined by a, to his credit, very excited Danny "it's the Daddy" Wallace, to lay out an almost MCU-like timeline of every Assassin's Creed thing happening for the next good while. It includes new DLC for Valhalla, and a mysterious horror-ish tease. But top of the list, after next year's more trad and compact Assassin's Creed Mirage, is Assassin's Creed: Codename Red, the next big flagship open-world RPG for the series. And it's set in feudal Japan.
]]>As was leaked, and then hurriedly confirmed by Ubisoft about a week ago, the next Assassin's Creed game to come out will be Mirage, in 2023. It's not going to be quite the massive open world adventure 'em up that the last few entries have been (don't worry; one of those is on the way as well), but a more classic AssCreed experience to mark the series' 15th anniversary. This milestone has made me realise that the Creedsperience has taken up almost half of my current lifespan. Or, to put it another way, I fear that playing Assassin's Creed Mirage may induce a pathetic but very real existential crisis in me.
]]>What sounds like the entire Assassin’s Creed line-up for Saturday’s Ubisoft Forward presentation may have been leaked online. Unnamed sources have supposedly told TryHardGuides that three new AC games will be announced during the event, with an instalment set in feudal Japan being among them. Bloomberg backs up the report, stating that the other games purported to be in development include one set in the 16th century that could be dealing with witches, and a mobile game set in China.
]]>Leaked Assassin’s Creed game Mirage is real, Ubisoft have confirmed, and they’re planning to show more of it at next week’s Ubisoft Forward event. All we know for sure so far is that the game exists, it’s definitely called Mirage, and returns to the Middle Eastern setting of the original Assassin’s Creed. I rather like the blue highlights to the assassin’s robes in this one.
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