Welcome to a new article, dear reader! Today I am going to share my thoughts on Assassin's Creed Origins, which I played just enough to form an opinion. There will be minimal to no talk about the story because of two reasons: I have not progressed that much into it, because I was busy exploring and doing side quests, and spoiling a game which was only released last year would not have been such a great idea.
The game starts really abruptly, pitting you in a tutorial fight in which you learn to dodge, block, attack and break the enemy's guard. This combat system is really reminiscent of Dark Souls, with the catch that there is no stamina management involved. This is a really great idea for a game like Assassin's Creed, where, if you start a fight you can't win, you have to rely on your skills to run away and hide. So, the combat system gets a thumbs up from me.
How about traveling? You are now always running at full speed, no more button combos to sprint. At first, this seemed like a weird idea, me being used to press at least the thumbstick and another button, but, and I hate the word I am going to use, streamlining really keeps the pace (pun not intended) of the game pretty high.
Exploration and resource gathering have received a revamp too. Now you have a mount in the game. The basic one is a camel, which is awesome, but you can change the skin of said mount, making it a horse or even a chocobo, which is more than just neat. A new mechanic, the Animus Pulse, lets you highlight hidden passages and all loot containers in a circular area near our protagonist, Bayek of Siwa. The hunting mechanics which appeared in the Far Cry games from number 3 onward and also in Assassin's Creed III and IV are back, meaning that you have to kill some of the local wildlife to get the materials necessary for upgrading your equipment. Even ye olde eagle vision has received a revamp, making its name literal now. Bayek has an eagle by the name of Senu, whom he can send to survey an area, look for treasures and mark enemies.
Speaking of equipment, this game has randomly generated weapons which sometimes drop from the enemies, like a toned down version of Borderlands or Diablo, which is an interesting new direction for Assassin's Creed, but it does not intrude that much because of the scarcity of these items, so I am cool with it, at least for now.
So far, movement and combat are good and the loot system would not be missed if it fell down a flight of stairs. We are off to a good start for a huge game, and believe me, it is just gigantic. In the meager six hours I have played it, I only finished the first assassination mission and fully explored two regions of the map (the full map consisting of about 120 square kilometers, almost as much as The Witcher III, which had about 140). The size would not matter that much if it was just empty space, but it is filled with outposts you can clear out, ruins you can explore for rare loot, quests, which, for the first time in the series' history, are not copy-pasted bullshit, but actually little side stories which are fun to explore (the Witcher vibes are still coming, huh?). So, game world also receives a glowing thumbs up. Let's not get too hasty though, because this game found a pretty artificial way to limit your exploration: you can not go everywhere, because there are enemies with levels much higher than yours in the areas you are not supposed to go at that respective moment in the story, but at least the game is kind enough to list the levels of enemies for each region even before reaching them, so, at least, they are not hiding this barrier.
The game is, again, split into modern day and past segments, which is a prominent feature of the series, except for Unity and Syndicate, which only had present day cutscenes, which were genuinely pointless. The present has a small hub area inside the tomb of Bayek, the Animus being connected directly to his mummy, which is actually pretty awesome.
All in all, Assassin's Creed Origins is better than it had any right to be, showing that a longer development time can really help a game become truly mind blowing and I hope Ubisoft will postpone launches in the future to help the developers make unique experiences.
If you are interested, you could also take a look at my retrospective of the Prince of Persia series.
Sources: the cover image comes from thevideogamgallery.com, the tutorial image comes from pcgameshardware.de, the cuddly camel image comes fromvg247.com the map image comes from usgamer.net, the modern day image comes from gameinformer.com.
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