Assassin’s Creed Mirage, between Samurai and Jedi. “Fast and Cocky Basim”

Basim is fast. If we think back to the other protagonists of Assassin’s Creed, there are many other adjectives we could use to describe them: Connor Kenway is versatile, Ezio Auditore is charming and Altaïr Ibn-La’Ahad is stoic. Basim Ibn Ishaq is damn fast. He walks away from a kill before the target even realizes it is dead, before leaping across rooftops, leaping from post to post, and peering around corners to disappear into the crowded streets of 9th-century Baghdad.

Assassin’s Creed Mirage pays homage to the legacy of the series, putting parkour and stealth back center stage in a densely populated city. No more RPG-style numbers – a kill is a kill. If the first Assassin’s Creed is Splinter Cell, Assassin’s Creed Mirage is Splinter Cell: Conviction.

Curiously, the game even picks up a mechanic from Conviction, bringing to Mirage the Mark and Execute ability with which Basim can mark a series of targets before quickly killing them with a series of lightning strikes, moving so fast that to the human eye it appears that is teleporting.

Assassin’s Creed Mirage, agile and deadly —

During the Ubisoft event held in Los Angeles last weekend, we got the chance to see an extended gameplay section and chat with animation director Benjamin Fox about this new, agile and deadly addition to the Assassin roster.

“We worked a lot on this aspect to smooth out the transitions, to make sure that the flow between certain maneuvers flowed cleanly and smoothly,” explains Fox. “We’ve also added some animations to smooth transitions, especially to speed up climbs. There are various tricks we’ve used in animation to make things look a little faster than they are. We also put a lot of focus on the world to get the level design to match the animation system. There was a lot of coming and going between the animation team and the world.”

While combat remains an option, this time it’s more of a fallback when everything else falls apart. An ideal mission will see you enter, kill your target and escape before anyone notices our presence. If you fail, you can kill a target in plain sight and flee throughout the city, a magnificent sun-scorched playground of rooftops, squares and alleyways.

Parkour! —

Parkour is back and exactly as we remembered it, but Basim also has a couple of other tools at his disposal, like the ability to jump from roof to top by propelling us with a pole. With the introduction of a GTA-style “wanted” mechanic, increasingly agile and tougher enemies will begin to hunt us down, if we continue to wreak havoc throughout the city.

Of course, we all need a little chaos in our lives sometimes, and Basim is quick to strike when he’s running out of options (or maybe he doesn’t like the others).

The first Assassin’s Creed was based on an animation-based combat system, in which every precision strike – usually a counterattack – equaled a kill. The goal was to prioritize the cinematic aspect over player skill and timing. Mirage aims to blend the two, using hitboxes and small scaled-over-time damage for normal attacks, while retaining a certain amount of power with a series of very flashy finishing moves.

“Fluency, precision, efficiency” —

“We’ve created our own pillars within animation,” says Fox. “The fluidity, precision and efficiency of the moves: we didn’t want to dwell too much. You can switch from one attack to another very quickly. As for the fighting style, the question is quite large. We obviously used other Assassin’s Creeds as benchmarks, but we also looked at other things. We looked at the samurai, we looked at the Jedi for the way they wield swords and lightsabers.”

“Our animation team did live sword training to understand how to handle weapons efficiently and naturally. In general, we just wanted nice arcs and shapes, flowing movement, to speed things up from Valhalla and to give Basim a flavor all about him.”

Another difference from Valhalla, besides speed, is that Basim doesn’t dismember people or cut heads. The team decided early on that the fighting here would be based on cutting and drilling, and that they wouldn’t be ridding the poor wretches of their body parts.

Like the samurai —

“We gave Basim these wacky sword moves,” Fox explains. “There’s an element of arrogance to his fighting moves. He looks down on the people he just killed. We always wanted to create that samurai moment as well, where he pushes his way through people and you can stand there and slowly, one by one, people fall around him.” Assassin’s Creed Mirage will be available from October 12 for PlayStation, Xbox and PC.

Written by Kirk McKeand for GLHF