Original Assassin

Ubisoft Is Taking Assassin’S Creed Back To Its Roots After A Two-Year Break, But Can Rpg Elements Help Origins Birth A New Kind Of Ac Game, or is The Series Having An Identity Crisis? 

Simply put, no game can do what Assassin’s Creed does. It plunges you into history, and you bathe in it, floating in a sea of culture, architecture and famous historical figures. Every now and then you get soap in your eye, which in this odd metaphor is probably because of glitchy parkour physics. Your fingers start to get a bit wrinkly after you complete the same mission styles repeatedly, but you come out feeling refreshed. So, after two years without a mainline Assassin’s Creed title, you’re probably starting to smell a bit. You need a good wash, and the fresh water of Origins is here to help (we’re really starting to regret our metaphor choice now). This time around, though, it might actually be doing something to mix up the formula, because this Creed is an RPG.

Of course, there have been RPG elements in previous ACs, most notably in 2015’s Syndicate, which added a skills tree and basic levelling for each character. It was okay, but it felt like a half-arsed effort to appease fans without really committing. With Origins, it seems that Ubisoft is finally going all-out.

“There were changes we wanted to make to combat, to stealth, to the action-RPG elements of the game,” says executive producer of Origins, Ashraf Ismail. “We wanted boss fights – there were a lot of intentions early on that just demanded that we give time to this project. By the time we ship it’ll have been [in development for] four years, and it’s allowed us to meet those intentions of reinventing the series.”