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Assassin's Creed Mirage (PC/Xbox/PlayStation) - update: Digital Foundry PS5/Xbox Series Technical Review

Brian

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Kal-El814

Kal-El814

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Anyone else playing this?

 

I’m at what I assume is most of the way through the game, and it’s a fun “throwback” with a lot less filler than Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla.

 

Some light, non specific spoilers.

 

 

Spoiler

There’s essentially nothing at this point that talks about the modern era. Some stuff teases what I assume will be the Valhalla connection, but it’s all gonna be super backloaded at this point. This isn’t an issue from a gameplay POV at all, but I imagine this is SOMEONE’s first AC game and if you do some of the side stuff and get the pimp armor… it’s gotta make no fucking sense at all. :p

 

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Kal-El814

Kal-El814

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9 minutes ago, stepee said:

I wanna play it but I’m trying to finish CP77 by Friday as it is and now my nights are going to be mostly Sonic soooo

 

It's a fun game but there's nothing in there that's so new and wonderful that you need to drop something else to get into this one.

 

I'd wager that the main campaign is probably Bro length, but 100%ing it is gonna take less long than Bro did.

 

I suspect that it being "smaller" than the last 3 is why this cost $50 at launch. Not gonna complain about that, the hole game-to-dollar math in this series has been f'ed for a while. :p

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stepee

stepee

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10 minutes ago, Kal-El814 said:

 

It's a fun game but there's nothing in there that's so new and wonderful that you need to drop something else to get into this one.

 

I'd wager that the main campaign is probably Bro length, but 100%ing it is gonna take less long than Bro did.

 

I suspect that it being "smaller" than the last 3 is why this cost $50 at launch. Not gonna complain about that, the hole game-to-dollar math in this series has been f'ed for a while. :p

 

I freaking love AC though, I bet I’ll have a blast with this. Just how it is this fall though, even stuff I’m hyped for has to wait!

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Kal-El814

Kal-El814

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I was closer to the end than I realized lel. It's over.

 

So... fun game!

 

I played on hard because I'm a Real Gamer (tm) and while I'm sure the game told me what that does... I don't think the game was ever hard. The regions are difficulty coded with a recommended rank buuuuuut I don't think it does anything? Your hidden blade is always a OHKO when you're assassinating and later game swords mainly give different vibes as opposed to straight up better stats. Honestly the hardest thing in the game is interacting with NPCs who occasionally need Basim to be positioned JUST SO for the prompt to pop up.

 

The notoriety system is back to some extent. If you get seen killing guards by civilians, you'll creep up from 1 - 3 wanted levels. At 1 guards will kinda take note of you and maybe follow you, at 2 they'll chase you on sight, and at 3 they'll send beefy boys after you. Some of the objectives have guards mixed in with civilians so if you want to be your sneakiest, stabbiest boy you kinda have to look out when you're murdering... but you don't really have to engage with it all that much. Nothing like the original where you couldn't run without taking heat.

 

To @legend's comment in the Spidey 2 thread... I don't think this is a game you have to 100%, even if it wouldn't take long. My clock was at 22 hours or so and I'd guess my file is at 90%+ completion. As you unlock gizmos, you can customize them a bit and there's definitely overlap. Your noisemaker can be made lethal, your trap can be made lethal, and your smoke bombs can... be made lethal. There's a bit more to it than that and you CAN combo them to make your own fun when you're sneaking around (throwing fireworks to get people near an exploding barrel and then watching everyone die horribly in the world's most predictable fire IS fun), but I wouldn't chase stat points and materials to get everything unless you wanna be fancy. I'd guess you could finish the story in about 15 hours.

 

If you're a REAL AC Head like @stepee or maybe @legend like 8 years ago or whatever and you're really invested in the lore and and wanna know how Mirage and Valhalla and the larger narrative is going... do you need to play this game? No. :p

 

More spoilers below, I'll ruin the whole ending and there IS some stuff to be ruined, so click at your own risk.

 

Spoiler

If you've played Valhalla you know Basim is Loki. Basim has no idea at the start of the game, but the player does. If you didn't play Valhalla, the genie tormenting Basim is just random, and if you have, you can probably guess what it is in the first 15 minutes of the game and be correct. There are no real breadcrumbs until close to the end where it's clear to the player what the Assassins have been hiding and what The Order has been trying to get at. Then Basim realizes he's Loki and makes one reference to doing what he sets out to do in Valhalla and that's it. That's not a bad thing at all, it's just weird to dedicate a whole game to following up on Valhalla DLC; who knows how many people even played that.

 

Also I don't know that the Nehal thing... worked. It came off like they needed a twist because of the other stuff I mentioned so... that was it.

 

So there you go. It's a fun game that has maybe 30% of the content of Valhalla, most of the gameplay vibes from AC2, and feels like a weird middle ground between what AC was and what it, presumably, will be with Infinity or whatever that's called. If you thought Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla were some overstuffed bullshit but you miss killing people from shrubs while wearing a hoodie AND want a game you can finish sometime before the heat death of the universe... here's your chance. AC: Mirage, everyone.

 

Also short callout for not running into a single bug, crash, glitch, or derp throughout the whole game. Miracles.

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TwinIon

TwinIon

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I'm busting through this and while it does capture some of what I liked about the original AC games, there are some things that have been annoying me.

 

One is that the movement feels like a step back from those games in form, function, and feel. While I'm sure there are more killing animations, it seems like animations moving through a crowd have been toned down. It was a bit odd just how handsy some of those OG protagonists get with random people, but it at least looked like they were pushing their way through a group rather than just gliding through. It also just seems slower and more difficult to free run. It's been a couple years since I replayed much of the earlier games, but Basim just seems slow and plodding, likely a result of the Valhalla engine. Too often I feel like a hulking Viking rather than a nimble assassin.

 

My other annoyance has to do with the building layouts. I know this has always been the case, but for some reason I'm really feeling how "video gamey" the building interiors are. I was playing through a mission to steal something from a bath house that is in use and open to the public, and it was locked down harder than most prisons. Most doors don't open at all, most of them that do were barred from the inside, and a couple were blocked by a shelf I could move. I understand the realities of game design at play here, but it's pretty illusion breaking that every building is like that. In my opinion it also violates one of the things I always liked best about the AC games, which is player choice in how to approach situations.

 

If there is only one possible way into every building, I feel like I'm solving a puzzle rather than breaking in. Instead of navigating a bath house or a library, I'm looking for that one open window I can throw a knife through to unbar a door. I'm not choosing between sneaking past guards at the front door or taking a path through the roof or finding a hidden entrance on the side, I'm just searching for the one annoying hole the devs put in this vault publicly accessible building.

 

I also feel like the skill trees are really shallow. I'm often looking at my options to spend skill points and not really feeling like any of them would make a big difference. The very first choice was between three useful skills, but after that I've hardly cared. The penultimate skill on the "stealth" tree is to improve pick pocketing chances. Who cares? I'm enjoying it well enough, but I never feel like chasing after upgrades in this game.

 

We'll see if I change my mind, but right now I'm rather disappointed with how this turned out. It's so much more "slightly expanded DLC" than it is a focused and purposeful AC game.

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TwinIon

TwinIon

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I powered through to the end, completing a significant but not comprehensive selection of the optional content, and I think this is probably the least essential mainline AC game to date. Even though I really enjoyed Origins and Odyssey, I liked the idea of AC reducing scope and making an "old school" style AC game, but I think Mirage only succeeded in the former. Everything is smaller, but I wanted that reduction in size to bring with it a refinement that Mirage lacks. Almost everything added back to Mirage feels half baked or at least unimpressive. We get social stealth and a notoriety system, but both are simplistic and frustrating at times.

 

It's not a bad game, it's just that we have so many better AC games at this point that there is nothing to make Mirage stand out. The basic gameplay is fine, and technically the game is very solid, but nothing about it made me feel like they made the most of this opportunity.

 

I would have loved to see make better use of the space they had. Give us more interesting and impressive layouts. Give the player more options for how to approach situations, give us more interesting puzzles to solve, and refine the interior spaces so they make some kind of sense. It really doesn't help that I've been putting time into Cyberpunk, where interiors almost always give you multiple points of entry and egress while still looking like they function as the space they're meant to represent. A garage will have space for tools and offices in the back. A home will have a bedroom and a bathroom and an office. Sure, not every apartment in a megastrucutre is accessible, but what is feels real and provides various gameplay opportunities.

 

Mirage does none of that. It falls back on a tiny number of entry solutions over and over again, leading us into spaces that have no logic and have no sense of place. How does anyone in Baghdad function when every door is barred from the inside?! Why not have doors that are locked, allowing us to find the key holder AND also allow us to break in through a window or find a hidden passage? In Mirage it's pretty much always one or the other. They don't even bother to combine the very few mechanics they do have in fun ways. I kind of love the feeling in Cyberpunk of having found a terribly circuitous way into a building only to find there was a straightforward path.

 

The same goes for the even more limited puzzles. I love finding some crazy puzzle solutions in ToTK, but in Mirage there are almost no puzzle like mechanics, and what is there gives you no real gameplay opportunities. What would be the harm in just allowing us to pull shelving outside the tiny box provided? What's the worst that could happen? A player finds some new way to get into a room? Heaven forbid.

 

I'm fine with shrinking AC games back to a more reasonable size, but in doing so they really spotlight the shortcomings of the game design that might be less troublesome in a more sprawling game world. I know the development path of Mirage didn't put them on track to do that, but it's still something that I would love to see the series pursue. Get better at giving us cool places to go fun things to do in them, and then think about expanding the game again. 

 

-

 

Also, as someone who didn't finish Valhalla, WTF at that ending. I had to google an explanation and it only made me feel like they missed some story possibilities.

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Keyser_Soze

Keyser_Soze

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1 hour ago, TwinIon said:

I powered through to the end, completing a significant but not comprehensive selection of the optional content, and I think this is probably the least essential mainline AC game to date. Even though I really enjoyed Origins and Odyssey, I liked the idea of AC reducing scope and making an "old school" style AC game, but I think Mirage only succeeded in the former. Everything is smaller, but I wanted that reduction in size to bring with it a refinement that Mirage lacks. Almost everything added back to Mirage feels half baked or at least unimpressive. We get social stealth and a notoriety system, but both are simplistic and frustrating at times.

 

Is this considered mainline? It was originally supposed to be DLC but they wound up making it a stand alone game. Which might be why the way you feel like you do. :p

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TwinIon

TwinIon

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56 minutes ago, Keyser_Soze said:

Is this considered mainline? It was originally supposed to be DLC but they wound up making it a stand alone game. Which might be why the way you feel like you do. :p

 

When they decided that it wasn't going to be DLC, and when they sold it at $50, I think so. I'm sure you're right. If this had been cut down even more and was a $30 "Assassin's Creed Valhalla - Basim's Mirage" or something, I'd be inclined to think of it differently, but it's not.

 

46 minutes ago, stepee said:

It’s definitely not the big new AC, I look at it like Black Flag, a cross gen release to fill a gap while they finish the first current gen only entry.

I suppose you can argue about different tiers of AC games, but to my mind there are mainline games that got full console releases, and then there are the various smaller spin-off games. Wikipedia organizes it that way.

 

Still, even if you compare this game the other second tier games like Rouge or Syndicate, I think Mirage is the least of them, given when it was released and what it accomplishes.

 

 

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stepee

stepee

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34 minutes ago, TwinIon said:

 

When they decided that it wasn't going to be DLC, and when they sold it at $50, I think so. I'm sure you're right. If this had been cut down even more and was a $30 "Assassin's Creed Valhalla - Basim's Mirage" or something, I'd be inclined to think of it differently, but it's not.

 

I suppose you can argue about different tiers of AC games, but to my mind there are mainline games that got full console releases, and then there are the various smaller spin-off games. Wikipedia organizes it that way.

 

Still, even if you compare this game the other second tier games like Rouge or Syndicate, I think Mirage is the least of them, given when it was released and what it accomplishes.

 

 

 

Well, Syndicate is my favorite and I consider that a many entry so idk it’s confusing :P I definitely still want to play it but I’m kinda tempted to wait for the ios version next year to have some of that novelty even out some of its rough edges for me.

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Kal-El814

Kal-El814

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On 10/19/2023 at 12:40 PM, TwinIon said:

I powered through to the end, completing a significant but not comprehensive selection of the optional content, and I think this is probably the least essential mainline AC game to date. Even though I really enjoyed Origins and Odyssey, I liked the idea of AC reducing scope and making an "old school" style AC game, but I think Mirage only succeeded in the former. Everything is smaller, but I wanted that reduction in size to bring with it a refinement that Mirage lacks. Almost everything added back to Mirage feels half baked or at least unimpressive. We get social stealth and a notoriety system, but both are simplistic and frustrating at times.

 

It's not a bad game, it's just that we have so many better AC games at this point that there is nothing to make Mirage stand out. The basic gameplay is fine, and technically the game is very solid, but nothing about it made me feel like they made the most of this opportunity.

 

I would have loved to see make better use of the space they had. Give us more interesting and impressive layouts. Give the player more options for how to approach situations, give us more interesting puzzles to solve, and refine the interior spaces so they make some kind of sense. It really doesn't help that I've been putting time into Cyberpunk, where interiors almost always give you multiple points of entry and egress while still looking like they function as the space they're meant to represent. A garage will have space for tools and offices in the back. A home will have a bedroom and a bathroom and an office. Sure, not every apartment in a megastrucutre is accessible, but what is feels real and provides various gameplay opportunities.

 

Mirage does none of that. It falls back on a tiny number of entry solutions over and over again, leading us into spaces that have no logic and have no sense of place. How does anyone in Baghdad function when every door is barred from the inside?! Why not have doors that are locked, allowing us to find the key holder AND also allow us to break in through a window or find a hidden passage? In Mirage it's pretty much always one or the other. They don't even bother to combine the very few mechanics they do have in fun ways. I kind of love the feeling in Cyberpunk of having found a terribly circuitous way into a building only to find there was a straightforward path.

 

The same goes for the even more limited puzzles. I love finding some crazy puzzle solutions in ToTK, but in Mirage there are almost no puzzle like mechanics, and what is there gives you no real gameplay opportunities. What would be the harm in just allowing us to pull shelving outside the tiny box provided? What's the worst that could happen? A player finds some new way to get into a room? Heaven forbid.

 

I'm fine with shrinking AC games back to a more reasonable size, but in doing so they really spotlight the shortcomings of the game design that might be less troublesome in a more sprawling game world. I know the development path of Mirage didn't put them on track to do that, but it's still something that I would love to see the series pursue. Get better at giving us cool places to go fun things to do in them, and then think about expanding the game again. 

 

-

 

Also, as someone who didn't finish Valhalla, WTF at that ending. I had to google an explanation and it only made me feel like they missed some story possibilities.


I think this is all true. Feels like I enjoyed it more than you did but none of this is wrong. 
 

AC has always had problems with interiors that aren’t huge, the mechanics don’t lend themselves to stealth well enough since you can’t Batman or Spidey your way around. And while some places have a few ways to get in, those few ways do get samey. 
 

I think the notion of something like a B scope game from an AAA franchise is interesting and Mirage shows it has potential. But there was probably a bit too much baggage with this one to make it pop. 
 

Also you’re a good case study for why this game doesn’t really “work” in the narrative sense. If you don’t know the premise generally and you don’t know the deal with Basim specifically even how the game is framed makes no sense at all. What does desynchronized mean? What the fuck is that ending about? If you collect shards and get what they unlock, what the fuck is that? It just doesn’t work. The seventh Harry Potter book still bothers to frame the overall narrative in the opening chapters because it’s going to be SOMEONE’S first HP book, it’ll have been years since someone read HP6, etc. If the most popular books in the last 50 years bother to frame the story each time, Assassin’s Creed has no business NOT doing that, especially if the entire affair rests on not just the last game, but fucking DLC from that game! 

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stepee

stepee

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13 minutes ago, Mercury33 said:


Do you mean Rogue? Black Flag is Assassins Creed 4 and about as main line as it gets. 

 

I was kind of combining Rogue and Black Flag in my head but kinda still feel the same way as I was thinking tech wise and Black Flag was a cross gen release on the old engine (like this one is) before Unity came out. Also while they called it AC4, I feel like they partly called it that just because how much it feels like a spin off otherwise.  Rogue was a weird previous gen only thing so a little different. 

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TwinIon

TwinIon

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On 10/22/2023 at 9:55 AM, Kal-El814 said:

Also you’re a good case study for why this game doesn’t really “work” in the narrative sense. If you don’t know the premise generally and you don’t know the deal with Basim specifically even how the game is framed makes no sense at all. What does desynchronized mean? What the fuck is that ending about? If you collect shards and get what they unlock, what the fuck is that? It just doesn’t work. The seventh Harry Potter book still bothers to frame the overall narrative in the opening chapters because it’s going to be SOMEONE’S first HP book, it’ll have been years since someone read HP6, etc. If the most popular books in the last 50 years bother to frame the story each time, Assassin’s Creed has no business NOT doing that, especially if the entire affair rests on not just the last game, but fucking DLC from that game! 

 

I agree with what you're saying, but it's not like this is my first AC game. I've played every AC game through to completion other than Valhalla. I got far enough that I had met Basim, but not far enough to have revealed the twist that this game's ending is predicated on.

 

I also think this could have been a great way to try and introduce new people to the series. A smaller game that utilizes the core mechanics and goes back to the same setting as the original game could have been a great intro.

 

As with all the other issues with Mirage, it basically speaks to them needing to move farther away from this being a DLC and more towards it being a worthwhile stand-alone game.

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Kal-El814

Kal-El814

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1 hour ago, TwinIon said:

 

I agree with what you're saying, but it's not like this is my first AC game. I've played every AC game through to completion other than Valhalla. I got far enough that I had met Basim, but not far enough to have revealed the twist that this game's ending is predicated on.

 

I also think this could have been a great way to try and introduce new people to the series. A smaller game that utilizes the core mechanics and goes back to the same setting as the original game could have been a great intro.

 

As with all the other issues with Mirage, it basically speaks to them needing to move farther away from this being a DLC and more towards it being a worthwhile stand-alone game.


Oh yeah, I meant that more in the general way not about you specifically. If someone had no Valhalla experience or little to none with AC there’s just so much untethered stuff in this game. 

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AbsolutSurgen

AbsolutSurgen

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So, about 6 hours into this, and loving every minute.

While I really enjoyed the "Witcher 3" AC games, I am also glad to see the series return closer to its roots.

The focus on stealth is really refreshing.  And so, far I am finding it really forgiving -- you can be REALLY aggressive in your stealth kills.  The combat isn't particularly good -- but I think that is a deliberate design choice -- they don't want you to go in and just fight everyone.

I think that they really put way too many things in the skill tree -- although this is something not unique to this game.  Not having some of the basic tools early on makes the stealth a lot less fun.

The planned assassinations seem really well done -- a variety of strategies that will work, and you can't just ignore them.

The "icon spam" and useless side quests have really been toned down.

 

On a more negative side:

I'm a little disappointed that there is no "present time" levels that are ever present.

There are too many currencies in the game for my liking.  Gold and "experience" are all that's needed.

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