Assassin’s Creed Origins has gone full action RPG according to the September issue of the Official PlayStation Magazine. The expanse of ancient Egypt along with the nile will expand as far as the eye can see with new quests to follow in each direction Bayek faces, and it all comes with a wide range of quests, abilities, loot and leveling.
“We’ve done a lot of research, we’ve gad historians and Egyptologists embedded in the team, and we found a lot of really amazing stories of little events, people that did great things and we asked ourselves ‘how can we put these stories in here?’” explains creative director Ashraf Ismail. “ It’s one reason the we wanted a quest structure – we felt like quests are a wonderful way of telling little stories that are encapsulated, and a way to meet out characters.”
This is a new way to explore the world of ancient Egypt and Bayek’s Bonelli eagle, Senu, as she takes the bird’s eye perspective and maps out the land below for Bayek. Senu isn’t just a way to explore the beautiful scenery, as she can use her own eagle vision (just her standard vision) to identify objectives, enemies and targets, in a similar manner to the drone in Watch Dogs 2. However, Senu can fly away as far from Bayek as the player desires, with no limits.
Despite the fact that Senu replaces the traditional viewpoints in Assassin’s Creed games, there are still viewpoints scattered here and there across Egypt and while they can help train Senu, improving her skills and left her see further, which explains the presence of an Eagle at the top of every viewpoint across the series. Apparently, we’ve been unknowingly training with them this whole time.
When it comes to combat and weaponry, Origins encourages players to be able to choose the tools that fit their plastid rather than sticking to the weapon with the best stats the entire game, and that’s the main purpose off the good old-fashioned loot. In addition, chests now matter more than ever in Origins, giving Bayek the chance to pick legendary gear and excited new tools and steed. Ashraf Ismail confirmed that there are tons of weapons and rarity levels, some that can be found looting in the world while others kept in specific locations. He also stated that there are really super cool treasure hunts and items that they haven’t talked about yet.
In addition, the gladiator arena will feature the most vicious foes. While gladiator arena can be ignored after beating a certain enemy, Bayek can also go back to the spinning-spikes gladiator arena and fight numerous bosses and hordes of enemies.
As the Codex stated back in June after experiencing the E3 demo, Origins no longer lets players win by holding a button or two, as the combat has evolved to allow players to be skillful and to strategically plan their attacks and make their combinations of defense, parrying, countering and attacking to take out enemies.
Lead Director, Ashraf Ismail also confirmed that there will be a plethora of styles of tombs to encounter with puzzles to solve. A lot of them are built based on actual tombs that they’ve researched, as they used historians to ensure the authenticity of puzzles that they were crafted to both of historically accurate and also push the gameplay and navigation challenge to a new level in a way that the player would truly feel how Egyptians built their tombs and they’ve also ventured to innovate with the secret chambers that are yet to be explored.
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In a Q&A with lead director, Ashraf Ismail, he shed light on the tree skill system which the Codex previously detailed before and it’s three main classes, which encourage players to tailor their experience and invade the world of the game as they see fit, whether it’s in a stealthy manner, or a one-man-army style, and gradually craft the style that they prefer.
Ashraf also shed light on Taming Animals, which the Codex also reported back in July. Players can tame crocodiles, lions, hyenas and leopard, and each of them has their own pace. Crocodiles can be slow to catch up with Bayek, while the others can keep up. You might lose your crocodile somewhere but suddenly it might emerge and take out a few enemies on your behalf, which makes taming animals a lot of fun.
As for the Giant Snake in the announcement trailer, Ash stated that while they have their own fictional or sci-fi elements in Assassin’s Creed games, such as the First Civilization and the Pieces of Eden, they don’t plan on going on a full mythical approach and that there will be a convincing answer to the presence of the giant snack which will be explained in the game. So it isn’t a fantasy element.
