What Assassin’s Creed Origins Needs to Get Right

Ubisoft has largely relied on the same gameplay mechanics and storytelling techniques for Assassin’s Creed that, somewhere around Revelations, started to make the series feel a bit tedious. From opening up various parts of the map with leaps of faith, to using much of the same counter-attack fighting techniques, Assassin’s Creed has grown in little ways over ten years, but for the most part, the games have largely remained the same and have been repetitive in terms of the approach to memory sequences.

Despite this, the longevity of the series has spoken for itself: Fans are still invested and wanting more. Now as the series moves forward with Assassin’s Creed Origins, we wanted to explore what this new game needs to do in order to keep fans invested and how it can live up to the legacy of the franchise, while simultaneously taking it in a new direction.

Though the maps in Assassin’s Creed have always been expansive, the games were never considered open world. That’s changing with Origins, as the game is ditching the decade-long mini map and seems to be taking pointers from open world titles like The Elder Scrolls and The Witcher 3, which use a compass to direct players to their next quest and incorporate a number of NPCs for missions. 

With the new setting of ancient Egypt, Ubisoft Montreal is expanding the map in ways we have never seen. The entire country is open to exploration with unique regions and a new quest system which, if you choose to play through them, can impact the landscape of Egypt and its people. This new freedom seems to be exactly what Assassin’s Creed needs to keep it fresh. However, if it’s not executed well, or if the quests weakly feed into the overarching narrative of Origins, or if they don’t make use of the dynamic history of ancient Egypt, it can leave us longing for the smaller world map of the previous games.

Ubisoft promises Origins is “full of life”, with smarter characters and dangerous targets that change location as often as real people do. While that sounds promising, historically, the side quests and side characters in Assassin’s Creed have had a tendency to get ignored because of their repetitive nature and the lack of motivation to pursue them. Instead, players have been accustomed to moving through the main story of the games without engaging in too many activities that would take them off course.

The new, open-world feel of Origins could be a hit or miss. On the one hand, yes, the world will be much larger. On the other, though, if there’s nothing substantial to fill this world or if the quests all feel similar like in previous games, then players will come away from Origins with an underwhelming experience at best. An unmemorable one at worst. It almost reminds me of ReCore in that aspect- a world that was large and had so much potential, but in the end it seemed like no one knew what to do with it.

With Assassin’s Creed Origins, Ubisoft has to immerse players in the world of ancient Egypt enough to make us care about the setting and its people, and not just solely rely on the historical intrigue of this great empire to pull us in. This could be done by having players actively engage with the history of ancient Egypt and not just passively experiencing it via the historical database (which also gets largely ignored in favor of powering through the games).

It will be interesting to see how exploration is different without the use of eagle vision in Origins. Instead, we will now be using an actual eagle that’s able to scout the landscape and gain new abilities as we progress through the game. This change in the gameplay was a great way of recognizing what players love about the series while finding a way to expand on it.

Assassin’s Creed Origins boasts more action, a huge world, and memorable quests, and from what we have seen of the game thus far, it looks like Origins is everything the other games in the series wanted to be (or should have been).

Assassin’s Creed Origins will be released on Friday, October 27th on PS4, Xbox One, and PC. Join LoadingXP this week as we continue to celebrate ten years of the series.