Assassin's Creed Origins

It would be remiss to claim that there were not more than a few quality Assassin’s Creed games during its exhaustive seven year run beginning in 2009. The series has always prided itself on its adventurous historical diversity, mixing up its hopelessly convoluted conflict between the Assassins and Templars with real world figures, events, and locations. There’s really nothing else that captures a moment in time quite like Assassin’s Creed, and even when the series is at its worst there is some serious joy to be had in simply existing in its worlds and marveling at the craftsmanship that brings them to life.

Yet Assassin’s Creed has also been just as unwilling to break out of its own mold. One needs only to look at the continued existence of its modern day story, which lost control of itself somewhere around Assassin’s Creed III and has still not picked up the pieces from its bewildering implosion. Or how the games, completely against the nature of the very concept of stealth, did not have a dedicated crouch button until Assassin’s Creed Unity, the seventh main entry. This is a series that has been a truly dazzling spectacle more often than not, yet the narrative and mechanical hitches have always persisted as typical Assassin’s Creed peculiarities.

It was only fitting that Ubisoft take an extra year to develop its next title after such a lengthy run of annual releases. Assassin’s Creed Origins is the result. It is a delightful open world journey that is utterly spectacular in its beauty and scale, its gameplay changes meaningful and refreshing. Simply calling Assassin’s Creed Origins a departure for the series would be to equate its significance with that of Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, and that would be a disservice to how differently this game plays. Origins is not a brief sidestep, a meander in an unexpected direction. Rather, it is a refinement, a proper evolution that has learned from other games of its ilk.

This is most immediately apparent in the structure of Origins, which has far more in common with Far Cry or The Witcher 3 than any other Assassin’s Creed game. Its enormous open world, dotted with various encampments, forts, villages, animal lairs, and tombs, allows for the near total freedom of movement. Origins smartly ditches the minimap that so often undermines a game’s environmental design in favor of a Skyrim-esque compass, drawing you off the beaten path in chase of mysterious question marks indicating proximity to something interesting.

This makes for a satisfying gameplay loop of uncovering these locations and clearing their icons off the map. And while the exploration is fun on its own, the overhauled combat and stealth systems actually make direct combat exciting, somewhat of a rarity for the series. With an emphasis on weapon hitboxes, blocking with a shield, and—if you can figure out the timing—parrying attacks, Origins’ combat feels both tactile and versatile. It’s a blessing to say that even when the stealth route fails, fighting it out rarely feels like a frustrating hassle.

Along the way, the game’s new loot system will throw a constant supply of weapons and shields your way, and it can get pretty overwhelming. Higher tier gear has some interesting effects, such as poisoning an enemy on hits or health recovery. Some items stack these bonuses to become particularly overpowered, such as a sickle sword I found that bled and poisoned enemies while also dealing more damage with each successive hit.

The loot system highlights the variety of weapons in Origins in a way that encourages experimentation. Much like Dark Souls, Origins’ weapon’s have unique animations, attack speeds, and range. Some are well-suited for crowd engagements, while others are better for taking on foes individually. The bows are similarly designed and actually fall into some standard firearm archetypes. The predator bow is the sniper rifle, the warrior bow a shotgun, the light bow a submachine gun, and the hunter bow a middle-of-the-road single shot weapon. Once you unlock the required abilities, you’ll be able to equip two melee weapons and two bows and switch between them on the fly. This becomes a terrific way to try out new weapons in live combat while still having your proven, trusted blade or bow on backup.

Origins is the first Assassin’s Creed game to feature an entire country as its setting. Its rendition of Egypt circa 48 BCE is certainly compact, but it showcases the region’s stunning geological diversity. Verdant trees and thick vegetation line the Nile River to the east while rocky cliffs hinder travel in the mountainous mid-west. Elsewhere, the pyramids of Giza emerge against glistening sand dunes, while in Memphis, one of the game’s urban areas, citizens brave crocodiles as they wade across flooded pathways. Expect fewer rooftop hustles and alley crawls, as Origins has far more open space than Assassin’s Creed typically deals in.

There’s always something to see in Origins, and the astonishing level of detail means most of it is worth checking out. I grew especially fond of observing the citizens of Egypt as they go about their routines. This began with a mortuary I encountered during a side quest, where I observed priests preparing corpses for mummification. I later encountered a settlement to the west built around a natron deposit, a naturally occurring salt used to absorb moisture during the mummification process. I spent a lot of time strolling through this area, watching as some workers hit away at the rocks to collect natron, their forearms and shins plastered white, while others took to some pools of water to cool off from the heat. When night fell, the workers lay down their tools and retired, some of the them taking a seat with others along the pathways to chat.

Perhaps my favorite example was a group of men pulling an enormous stone block to be used in constructing a temple being built at the site. The twelve men, aided by a thirteenth pouring sand in front of the block to ease its transportation, struggled mightily to move such an incredible weight along the logs. When they reached the end of the path, they dropped the ropes and groaned in relief, many of them bending over. One of the workers collapsed to the ground in exhaustion and did not move for probably a minute. Eventually he returned to his feet and hobbled off site.

Moments like these, tiny vignettes of the lives of these citizens, do more to enrich the world of ancient Egypt than anything else in the game. The unfortunate truth is that Origins often only seems half as interested in its own setting as it should be. Throughout the game the writing suffers from a serious lack of attention and patience with its world building, and nowhere is this clearer than in the story’s opening moments.

Bayek is the protagonist of Origins, the last member of an order of ancient Egyptian police known as the Medjay that was done away with during the Ptolemaic years. Only you wouldn’t know any of this if you hadn’t looked up the information yourself. The game begins with a fight between Bayek and some men, none of whom are properly identified until later, and no context is given as to why the fight is happening. Just as quickly you are thrown into the open world, free to explore the game’s first area and clear out dozens of Greek soldiers without any understanding of why you should, or would even be able to.

Bayek is an incredibly capable protagonist, able to scale any building or cliff with ease, and his role as a Medjay gives him at least some narrative justification to help everyone with their problems. He’s also devout in a way no Assassin’s Creed protagonist I can think of has been, and his musings on the gods and how his actions are guided by his beliefs offer some fascinating insight into the polytheism of ancient Egypt. It’s strange, then, that Bayek is able to directly contradict his own beliefs in some noticeable ways. Perhaps there is some justification for his wanton destruction of entire military regiments, but I can’t think of any reason why Bayek, who at one point bemoans the desecration of a necropolis as an affront to the gods, can loot gold and weapons from tombs and homes without consequence. I ended up exploring the game’s tombs without taking anything, so as not to damn Bayek for eternity.

Origins’ story begins to hit its stride around the midway point, and there is a pretty spectacular sequence of events at its conclusion. Unfortunately, the game introduces and dispatches its villains so quickly that it robs the story of much of its weight. Bayek’s personal quest for vengeance—not to mention the fact that he’s just a terrifically affable character—and how it intertwines with the larger narrative of shadowy orchestrators of chaos is compelling enough, but its characters are critically underdeveloped throughout. Real life individuals like Cleopatra and Apollodorus are easily the most interesting, but the game also lacks the database of previous games that provides details about its characters and locations. I found myself searching through Wikipedia for historical information more often than I’d like.

Most of the game’s side quests suffer from the same shortcomings. The best ones take advantage of the unique setting, dealing with relevant issues involving taxation, cultural differences between Romans, Egyptians, and Greeks, religion, and so forth. Unfortunately, the vast majority of them contain simple objectives and forgettable characters, who gab at Bayek with awkward stiffness and some outrageously animated voice acting. And if you’ve already finished all of the locations in an area, you might be a bit frustrated when a farmer sends you back into a fort you just cleared a moment ago to rescue her husband or recover an heirloom.

It’s disappointing that Origins’ story and its commitment to its world could have been so much more, but everything else about the experience stands in their stead. I spent 60 hours exploring every corner of Egypt, stalking and knocking out enemy camps, climbing pyramids, sailing down the Nile, and observing the lives of its people, and almost started a new game when I had exhausted nearly all of its content. If that’s not the best possible outcome for a game as lengthy as Origins, then I’m not sure what is.

Originally published July 4, 2018