The news of Assassin’s Creed Mirage represents a return to form for those unhappy with Ubisoft’s new direction for the franchise. 2017’s Assassin’s Creed Origins saw the developer take what was once a stealth-based, narrative-driven series and turn it into a sprawling adventure RPG. This change has been met with pushback by fans who enjoyed the core elements of the initial Assassin’s Creed games. Luckily for them, Assassin’s Creed Mirage looks to bring the series back to its roots by centralizing social stealth in its gameplay and Basim Ibn Ishaq’s youth in its story.
However, those dreaming Assassin’s Creed Mirage will bring yet another new age for the Ubisoft series are sorrowfully mistaken. It has already been reported that the next mainline series game Assassin's Creed Codename Red will likely be in the same style as Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla. This means that even in the event Assassin's Creed Mirage is a hit, Ubisoft is already planning to make more Assassin's Creed adventure RPGs in the future.
Why Assassin's Creed Mirage Won't Prevent Future RPGs
Ubisoft has its reasons for planning more Assassin's Creed RPGs after Mirage, the most important of which is money. Despite a subset of fans having issues with the direction Ubisoft has taken the series, many others have celebrated it. In fact, the newer Assassin's Creed games have not only been some of the most successful in the series, but in the developer's history. Valhalla became the highest-earning Assassin's Creed game in early 2022 when it grossed over $1 billion, and according to Ubisoft's 2021-22 Fiscal Earnings Report, it also became the developer's second largest profit-generating game before 2022. This goes to show that the new, RPG-styled Assassin's Creed installments have a dedicated fan base who are willing to buy the games and their DLCs. Deviating from the new formula now could mean missing out on further record-breaking growth for Ubisoft and the series.
Returning the mainline Assassin's Creed series to its roots could also be a bad call in the modern era of gaming. The open-world adventure genre is the bread and butter of AAA games nowadays. The earlier Assassin's Creed entries even played a part in bringing this change, as Altaïr's travels between cities of the Holy Land were fresh in 2007 when the original Assassin's Creed came out. Games like Assassin's Creed Valhalla are now pushing the genre to its limits by enabling players to literally travel between continents. Suddenly limiting this freedom of exploration to a city as it appears Assassin's Creed Mirage seeks to do may alienate returning and future players from the series, as they expect Ubisoft to keep pushing the adventure genre's limits.
Even though Assassin's Creed Mirage isn't signaling the end of Assassin's Creed RPGs, it at least shows Ubisoft recognizes fans are interested in the social stealth that earned the series its initial fame. Fans of the more recent entires in the Assassin's Creed series are too bountiful for Ubisoft to justify completely reversing course now, though. Perhaps what Asssassin's Creed Mirage really represents, then, is that players can have both stealth and adventure in the same series.
Sources: Ubisoft