Thoughts on Assassin’s Creed: Origins (Patreon)

I recently finished Assassin’s Creed: Origins. This is the one set in Egypt, it’s a prequel to the rest of the games, and it’s made by the same team as Black Flag (aka The Best One).

My thoughts on the game are pretty mixed. I consider lots of things in the game to be pretty underdeveloped and uninteresting - but also found myself hooked on the game for many hours at a time!

To try and make sense of it all, I’m going to talk about some stuff I did and did not like about this game.

The world’s amazing

Okay, lemme get this out of the way immediately. Every Assassin’s Creed game is an absolute tour de force in terms of world design. These teams do an incredible job of recreating places like Victorian London, Renaissance Florence, and now Ancient Egypt.

It’s a thrill to immerse yourself in these places. To walk the streets of Memphis, to ride a camel past the pyramids of Giza, or to climb the Pharos lighthouse in Alexandria. The level of detail is staggering.

And this plays into the always-fun photo mode, where you can spend more time than is advisable just setting up moon-lit shots of statues and underwater photographs of angry hippos.

Unfortunately, as is always the case with Assassin’s Creed games, the actual design asks you to filter all this stuff out in favour of waypoints, a compass that points out points of interest (I know it’s a point of interest! It’s a freakin’ pyramid!), and so on.

Far Cry’s camps are always fun

Have you ever noticed how many games feature those camps that were introduced in Far Cry 3 (i.e. a small enemy encampment that exists in an open world, where you are treated as a hostile if you step inside, and are given a reward if you “liberate” the camp in some way).

Metal Gear Solid V had them, Zelda’s got them, Arkham Knight’s got ‘em, and now Assassin’s Creed’s got them too. Forts, camps, fortified ships. You’ve got to get in and kill the captain and loot the treasure to mark that camp as finished.

But this was, ultimately, my favourite thing about the game! It was when the game ditched the clumsy scripted missions, and just embraced its pure mechanics and systems.

Sneaking through the camp, taking out or tip-toeing past guards is fun. Shooting an arrow into a cage to let loose a locked-up lion (an idea lifted entirely from Far Cry) or setting fire to a wooden hut, lets you unleash chaos and disorder on the game’s AI enemies. Boobytrapping an alarm and then purposefully letting yourself get seen so a guard blows themselves up is hilarious.

When most missions in Assassin’s Creed come down to “follow this slow moving character” or “go somewhere and then come back” or “just fight a bunch of dudes”, it was refreshing to blow all that nonsense off and just play with this fun sandbox of different toys and tools. 

Except…

Too much information!

Man, Assassin’s Creed Origins can be a fun stealth game, but it’s easy to tip the balance and become some all-knowing, all-seeing ninja.

Here's the thing - stealth games are all about gathering information. You know, learning the space, looking for safe paths and good escape routes, watching guards as you figure out their patterns, looking for ways to exploit their weaknesses.

More modern stealth games encourage verticality, letting you get a bird’s eye view of the area. Maybe climbing up a mountain in MGS V or Far Cry 4 before using a scope to tag enemies. Or hiding up in the rafters in Dishonored. And in games like Batman, guards are told to never look up (in normal circumstances) to let you look over the level with complete safety.

But Assassins Creed takes that whole “bird’s eye view” thing very literally, by giving you an eagle that can fly over the entire area and slowly tag every enemy (plus treasure, alarms, crossbow turrets, and more). 

It reminds me of the UAV in Ghost Recon Wildlands, but that thing had a poor range and ran out of battery quickly, to stop it becoming too useful. 

In Origins, your eagle can see through walls, tag as many people as you want, fly as far as you want for as long as you want, and enemies can’t detect it. From then on, you can see tagged enemies infinitely, as well as their exact position and direction.

This removes a lot of the tension of the game. When you know where everyone is, you just don’t feel under much stress when sneaking. 

So, letting the player gain information about the space and its actors in a stealth game, through tagging, can work quite well. 

But Origins really shows why these systems need some drawbacks (can only tag 3 people, can’t see tagged guard’s direction, can’t fly over the entire area with a gosh darn eagle) to not make the player feel completely overpowered 

Poor parkour

Assassin’s Creed has an awkward history with its parkour system.

Every game has largely automated the process (simply hold a couple buttons and then run at things to automatically jump, climb, spin, and dive), but different games have given you a bit more control over things.

I really like the grab move from Assassin’s Creed 2, which let Ezio lunge out and grab for a wall. With right timing, it can let you snatch onto the side of a building to get across a huge gap - with poor timing, it can turn a successful jump into an awkward stumble. 

Origins ditches all that. It’s probably the most automated system yet: there’s one button for parkour and it takes care of everything. The only real control you have is steering Bayek around, as he magnetically pings between platforms, horizontal bars, handholds, and sphinxes. 

And while this system (generally) does the job, it’s not terrifically fun.

It was hard not to compare this game to Mario Odyssey, where navigating a space is an engaging problem-solving activity of chaining all the right moves together. You have to speed-read the environment as you assess distances and heights, and look for things that can help you climb like walls to bounce off, railings to jump from, and prongs to fling from. 

And maybe that’s not a wholly fair comparison, but Assassin’s Creed did come from Prince of Persia - a series with great, fluid, and engaging parkour controls. So it’s sad to see this part of the game get so thoroughly stripped back.

Plus: Creed used to have platforming bits, like the fun assassin’s tombs in Brotherhood, but they’re gone. Ubisoft decided to make the pyramid interiors rather historically accurate, instead of goofy Tomb Raider-style obstacle courses. A shame, if you ask me.

Slow progress

Here’s something weird about Assassin’s Creed: Origins - a stealth takedown is no longer a guaranteed kill. 

The reason why is twofold. One is the crafting system, where you can pump crocodile skins and chunks of iron into your hidden blade to make it more effective. Two is the new levelling system, where enemies have a level and if they’re much higher than you, a sneak attack will only chip away at their health bar. 

The levelling system also plays into the main progression of the game. Origins only has about, I dunno, 15 main story missions but each one recommends you to be higher and higher in level before taking it on. 

And I’d listen to that recommendation: higher level enemies will just eat you for breakfast. 

So between those missions you’ll need to get more XP. You get this stuff for exploring, hunting, and clearing out those Far Cry camps. But the bulk of it comes from side missions which - to be honest - get a bit samey and repetitive. 

(Some people say that the stories and NPC dialogue told through these side missions is quite good, but I must confess that I started skipping all these cutscenes after the first 5 or so didn’t interest me).

This starts to really drag in the second half of the game. Just when you may wish to barrel through the rest of the game to see how the story wraps up, Ubisoft pumps. the. brakes, by ramping up the gap between your current level and the level suggested for the main missions.

In the end, i found myself dropping the difficulty to easy so I could do later missions at a lower level than recommended. 

This did lead to a cool moment in one of the last missions, where I was so underpowered that the game tagged every enemy in a compound as - essentially - impossible to kill. This forced me to sneak past everyone, instead of my usual strategy of doing sneak attacks and headshots, which was quite thrilling. So, that was a positive outcome of this system.

But I was left wondering, why was this levelling system introduced? My first thought was because of microtransactions and lootboxes - make the game really slow and then charge people to speed it up. But you can’t buy experience points, so there’s no immediate and obvious way to improve the game’s slow pace with real world money.

The other option would be to make the game longer (it took me 30 hours to finish the game, even though I was purposefully trying to rush a lot of the end game) - maybe to stop you trading the game in, or to give you more opportunities to spend money. I dunno. Maybe I’m just being cynical…

Skill trees are kinda fun!

I liked the skill trees. I’m always a bit iffy on skill trees, but I actually quite liked them in this game.

The game splits its skill tree into three branches. 

Warrior is for basic melee combat. So, the skills unlock charge attacks, special finishing moves, and regenerating health. 

Hunter is for bow and arrow. Skills give you slow-mo and aerial shots, as well as the ability to mind control your arrows in mid-air.

And then Seer gives you new tools, like smokebombs, poison arrows, and even the ability to tame animals or brainwash enemy guards.

I liked this because I felt like I was building a more personalised character. By ignoring warrior, and going all in on hunter and seer, I was making a more stealthy and cunning Bayek, and picked skills that would help me when sneaking through camps.

That did fall apart whenever a quest sprung a hand-to-hand battle on me, and I’d either by woefully underpowered or would need to spend the entire fight backpeddling and shooting arrows.

But, anyway, it also allowed the game to become more fun and mechanically interesting as the game went on. Early camps were solved through simple sneak-n-stab routines, while later camps needed me to lace dead bodies with poison and use smoke bombs to create distractions.

There was an addictive feedback loop of clearing out a few camps, getting a new ability point, and spending on that on a tool to make the camps more fun. Rinse and repeat and, well, that's where most of my weekend went.

Overall

Assassin’s Creed games are always a mixed bag, ultimately.

The games are so big, bloated, and all-encompassing, that it would be very difficult to make every part of the game feel enjoyable, to make every mission a winner, and to get the pacing and progression curve perfect for everyone.

But ultimately I was left wishing that AC could do one or two things well, instead of a million things with average results. If the game focused on being more of a stealth game, or more of a parkour game, or more about exploration, or just more of a sword fighting game if you really wanted, I think the game would be more enjoyable.

Instead it's trying to be Prince of Persia and Splinter Cell and Far Cry and The Witcher 3, all at the same time.

But I won’t deny that I had fun with it at times. Taking photos of Egypt, liberating camps, and building Bayek’s skills to fit my preferred play-style was worth it for me. And I’ve also got lots of new material for videos going forward. So, win win!