Assassin’s Creed Mirage takes plenty of inspiration from the earlier games of the franchise, but that doesn’t mean the series is entirely resting on its laurels. Some areas of the game try to evolve the experience in new ways from its original roots, taking a different direction than the trajectory of previous transformations. One aspect that sees some freshening up is the way that AC Mirage treats quests, and the changes in this particular regard are better than any that have come before, fixing some crucial problems that have long troubled the series.
The use of quests in Assassin’s Creed has always been a little more complicated than in many action-adventure titles, with a good helping of side content serving to offer some distractions from the main storylines. In recent years, this side of the experience has ballooned in size, with Assassin’s Creed Origins and subsequent games featuring huge open worlds and doubling down on RPG elements. At the same time, the overarching ways in which the franchise handles quests have failed to do justice to the amount of content included, ultimately making for a serious waste of potential.
Investigation Makes AC Mirage Quests Interesting
The biggest fundamental change to the way AC Mirage approaches quests comes in the form of the Investigation system, which offers a structure for the way that all quests are handled in the game. The concept of codified investigation is nothing new for Assassin’s Creed, with investigations first appearing as a type of mission available in the original game. Providing some kind of visual link between missions and targets is also a familiar element, which has previously added to the satisfaction of crossing a name off of a hit list.
AC Mirage, however, expands on these ideas to make an Investigation system that is significantly more compelling than anything that’s come before. Every quest is placed onto an Investigation screen rather than a traditional quest log, which showcases intuitive links between subjects and centers individual stories around central figures or subjects. Not only does this concept seem like a better representation of how Basim would actually follow threads and make discoveries, it makes for an approach to progression that feels more consistently engaging and rewarding than any of the various ways that the series has presented quests before.
Assassin’s Creed Mirage Focuses On Agency
Despite the open-world aspects of Assassin’s Creed games and the ability to take on many side quests in any order, important story elements remained aggressively linear prior to AC Mirage in a way that could often feel like it was placing blinders on players. A focused central narrative is usually a good thing, but a reliance on an overdose of UI elements and markers indicating exactly where an Assassin or Hidden One should go can feel like an active assault on agency. Recent games haven’t a surplus of changes to figure things out, making expansive worlds occasionally feel like dressed-up hallways when it comes to following quests.
Searching out a location or trying to determine the allegiances of an individual in Assassin’s Creed Mirage typically works off of a series of clues, which can help Basim put together an overall picture of the scenario. This kind of research isn’t new to the series, but its application is more interesting than ever before, as it allows for guesswork and rewards intuition in a way that hasn’t been heavily employed in the past. If a player can draw a line without having every piece of information at Basim’s fingertips, it’s sometimes possible to skip over the remaining aspects of the investigation, making missions feel self-propelled rather than extrinsically enforced.
Assassin’s Creed Mirage Quests Require Planning
The improvements to agency and heightened value of planning can also be found on the scene of most missions in AC Mirage, which take off the training wheels that many prior games have featured and reward tactical behavior. To take one example, although Bayek can snoop around houses for clues in Assassin’s Creed Origins, most missions simply show him exactly where to go, and infiltrations rarely offer a level of challenge that necessitates or even incentivizes scoping out the area with his eagle Senu to formulate a proper plan. Basim, on the other hand, is frequently tasked with casing the joint in order to set up a successful job.
Finding a viable angle for an infiltration often requires a bit of on-foot scouting, as Basim can find people willing to provide distractions or civilians with critical information about a target. Taking to the sky with Basim’s eagle Enkidu also feels more valuable than Eagle Vision ever has before, as knowing the position of each guard in an area is sometimes the only way to avoid blowing cover, which can be more disastrous in AC Mirage than in recent games. Although quest markers will lead Basim to the general area of missions or to specific NPCs to interact with, Mirage frequently leaves him to his own devices once he arrives.
The Investigation System Should Stay In Assassin’s Creed Games
Assassin’s Creed Mirage ultimately seems like more of a one-off than the actual future of the franchise, taking a smaller scope and a more classical approach to telling the story of a character introduced in Valhalla as an interlude between bigger modern titles. If anything does stick around from its own ideas, however, the Investigation system would be a valuable addition to future games. Even in titles that focus more on combat than stealth, throwing the ball in the player’s court more frequently would only make things more consistently interesting and compelling.
Whether or not Assassin’s Creed Mirage does manage to influence future Assassin’s Creed games, its renewed interest in deduction and creativity makes for a refreshing change of pace. Basim’s instincts as a street thief and his ability to form his own conclusions support the Investigation system well, and the joy of planning out a perfect assassination in a challenging environment speaks for itself. The approach to quests in the Assassin’s Creed games has long been inconsistently effective, but Assassin’s Creed Mirage finds some excellent solutions.
