Assassin’s Creed Origins Promises Living Characters, Boss Fights, And More New Features

At E3 2017 Ubisoft pulled the curtain back on Assassin's Creed Origins, and for the most part it looked like…an Assassin's Creed game. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but the game didn't look as innovative as some others at E3. What will set Assassin's Creed Origins apart from past entries?

It seems the biggest change may be the other non-playable characters in the game. In past Assassin's Creed titles, NPCs felt rather lifeless – important ones just sat around waiting to give you quests and the rest milled around the streets on simple, pre-programmed routines. Well, in a recent interview with Kotaku, Assassin's Creed Origins director Ashraf Ismail promised the game's NPCs will now have lives of their own…

"We developed this new technology to be able to populate thousands of human NPCs animals that have a life, have a persistency, that have schedules, that have places to go to sleep, places to go eat, go to the bathroom, work. This is married into the quest structure.

You have to go after [a target]. Through the quest you find pieces of info about his life. During the day he's out scouring the land on his chariot. At night, he goes home to his fort and sleeps in his cabin. The idea is – 'There you go: you have that info, he's your target. Do what you want.' Do you want to go in through the stealth approach to fight him? Do you want to go out in the open world where he is on a chariot and is an awesome vehicle combat situation? But it's a completely different situation. We play around with this a lot."

Sounds like Assassin's Creed Origins is going to be a modern, more-complex The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, which is a very good thing. Ismail promised other innovations, including more open combat, and the addition of legit boss fights.

"We wanted boss fights in the game. We really wanted an AC with boss fights. So, we've littered the world with tons of optional content to fight bosses, but also in the main questline."

Again, sounds like Origins may be going in a more structured Zelda-style action-adventure direction, rather than the "million random markers on a giant map" open world approach of past games. I'm all for that!

Assassin's Creed Origins sneaks on PC, Xbox One, and PS4 on October 27.

[via Kotaku]