Assassin’s Creed: Origins Boasts Largest World Of The Entire Franchise

It has been quite sometime since an Assassin’s Creed title (or any Ubisoft title to be honest) gave me any cause for excitement like Assassin’s Creed: Origins. According to Game Director Ashraf, Origins will receive a major overhaul and offer the biggest world in the series’ history.

While none of the primary games can plausibly be described as downright terrible, with the exception of maybe Assassin's Creed: Unity , a substantial bulk of them seem to coalise into one large mundane mass. The standouts in the series are demarcated by refinement. Ubisoft seems to fluctuate between periods of inspired innovation, (The massive improvement to story and characters in Assassin’s Creed 2, the addition of seafaring in Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag ) and periods of regrettable contentment (Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, Assassin’s Creed: Rogue ).

Thankfully, every bit of news about their newest venture, Assassin’s Creed: Origins , seems to suggest the former. After a year off leave since work on the previous release, Assassin's Creed: Syndicate , an underrated game that unfortunately fell victim to the mediocrity of the previous couple of entries in the series, the devs appear to be resolved to ensuring this game provides a faithful progression to all the element fans have come to love from the best of the franchise.

As expounded by Ashraf Ismail, the combat system has gone through a complete overhaul, abandoning the familiar paired animation system in service of a hitbox system. The game is also reported to jettison a lot of the core action adventure elements in favor of more of an RPG feel, complete with augmentations to questing and open world exploration.

Assassin’s Creed: Origins boasts the biggest world ever to be rendered in the franchise. Here’s what Ashraf Ismail had to say about it in the latest bit of promotional footage released by Ubisoft:

“When we started by doing ancient Egypt, it was gonna be a country. Ancient Egypt meant many things for us. It meant, yes, cities, but also all the wilderness areas and we wanted to show the diversity of this wilderness and something people, as they play the game, get into hours and hours of it. They’re constantly seeing new stuff from the world and the environment.

“In terms of the granularity of the details, the experiences you can have, the things you can tun into, the NPCs, the animals, the fauna – it’s much-much more dense.”

Ubisoft production coordinator and historian Maxime Durand emphasized the adherence to Egypt’s actual geography that went to designing the game, which further lends itself to the immersive sense of scale Assassin’s Creed: Origins appears to thrive on.

The massive breadth of the game is littered with tombs and caves to explore, NPCs to interact with and puzzles, left by the ancient people, to solve. Taking place during the reign of Cleopatra, the latest cinematic trailer for Assassin’s Creed: Origins implies a genuinely, unique and gripping plot will be accompanying the prodigious world promised by the developers.

Assassin’s Creed: Origins will be coming to Xbox, Ps4 and PC, on Oct. 27.