At E3 2017 Ubisoft pulled the curtain back on Assassin’s Creed Origins, revealing plenty of juicy gameplay footage, but a lot of questions remain. The makers of Origins recently discussed the game’s complex living NPCs and boss fights, and they touched on a ton more in a lengthy interview on The Game Informer Show. You can listen to the entire thing above if you have around 50-minutes to spare, or you can scroll down for some highlights.
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During the interview, Assassin’s Creed Origins director Ashraf Ismail broke out the ol’ measuring tape, comparing the size of the game to past entries in the series.
“[Memphis] is a fairly large city, I think Alexandria’s slightly bigger, but very slightly. If I compared them to previous cities in the past, I could say they’re at least twice the size of Havana from Black Flag. I don’t think the size of the city matters, it’s the experience you have inside of it, it’s how alive it is. We filled these locations with quests, actually making each city unique to itself.”
Continuing his “it’s not the size of the world, it’s how to use it” point, Ismail promises his game will contain a ton of explorable tombs.
“We have a ton of tombs. They’re super cool. We run the gamut of puzzles, navigation puzzles, navigation challenges, some combat challenges. There’s a lot of different tombs with a lot of different flavors. Yes, there are traps in some, there are hidden secrets. We tried to have fun with tombs, there’s a ton of tombs in the game.”
Hmmm, the previous information about NPCs all having their own schedules made Assassin’s Creed Origins sound a lot like The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, and these tombs make it sound like Breath of the Wild. Not that taking inspiration from Zelda is a bad thing!
Elsewhere in the interview, Ismail touches on Origins‘ modern-day element, which has been kept entirely under wraps so far. Opinions on that aspect of Assassin’s Creed tend to be mixed, but it sounds like Ubisoft won’t be turning their back on it.
“When it comes to modern day and marketing, I’m not sure [the PR team] want to talk about it, or when. What I will say is that one of the reasons we hesitate to discuss it is that we know it’s an important element for the series, we’ve read what our fans talk about, what they ask, and what they wish for. Part of me wants people to be surprised by the experience.”
Assassin’s Creed Origins sneaks on PC, Xbox One, and PS4 on October 27.
[via Game Informer]