Assassin's Creed Mirage Devs Discuss Advantages of a Smaller, Denser Setting
Assassin's Creed Mirage devs have taken a less-is-more approach to building Baghdad's dense city.
Assassin's Creed Mirage is due out early next month, which means the developers at Ubisoft are starting to roll out all of the stops in an effort to build up hype ahead of October 5. One of the main selling points for Assassin's Creed Mirage is that it's a more streamlined experience compared to other modern games in the franchise. Instead of a massive world full of hundreds of hours of content, Mirage players will get to enjoy the densely packed city of Baghdad as they work their way through a shorter, more intimate story. Recently, members of the dev team sat down with ComicBook.com's Chris Killian to discuss how they're using the smaller city to build an even more engaging final product.
Assassin's Creed Mirage's Version of Baghdad
"Our world is smaller, but at the same time, we had to treat it like a city that is way denser than in the previous games. So, bringing back dense cities, narrow streets, parkour, et cetera, is another challenge, to be honest. What is way different is the playtime. Our storyline is shorter, is more dense, it's condensed. We wanted to have a story that is finished at some point with no RPG or very light RPG aspect is the process. But working on a city like Baghdad as you experience it is not easy. It's another complexity to be honest," said Fabian Salomon, Mirage's producer in response to a question about the benefits of a smaller world.
Visual director Jean-Luc Sala followed that up by saying, "When you have a world to fill, you fill landscapes and you can bring that. And we wanted to be focused on the city, even if [the game is] a little bit larger than just the city. Baghdad is the city, and the rest is more village-sized than the city. But, making less can help us to make more. And this was a perfect moment to say, 'We want to have this amount of level of detail.'
"When you are on the rooftops and look around, it's amazing how many houses and landmarks and things you can see all around. And that's something we couldn't do at the time of AC1. It was really small Jerusalem, really small Damascus, and so we went big in that way. But we wanted also when you are at street level, looking at the market, looking at a store, to have an incredible amount of details also at that level. So, it's both way macro and micro."
Assassin's Creed Mirage's Release Date
Assassin's Creed Mirage launches on October 5 for PlayStation, Xbox, and PC platforms. Today, it was also announced that the game will come to iOS next year when Apple launches the new iPhone 15 Pro. And if the relatively small city of Baghdad isn't enough for you, rest assured that Ubisoft has several more Assassin's Creed games on the way. In fact, there are no less than five games currently on the docket that we know about, all of which will be coming out over the next several years.