Ubisoft is celebrating 15 years of Assassin’s Creed by revealing a brand new game in the franchise: Assassin’s Creed Mirage. Assassin’s Creed Mirage is set to release in 2023.
The cinematic announcement trailer takes us back to ninth century CE and Baghdad at a point when this was a real heartland for science, art, innovation and commerce. You’ll play as Basim, a street thief with terrifying visions who’s drawn into the Assassin’s order – The Hidden Ones – and mentored by Roshan (played by the wonderful, distinctively voiced Shohreh Aghdashloo) as he discovers and learns his craft.
It’s a narrative driven adventure and one that feed into the open world stealth action adventure that the series was originally built upon.
Ubisoft also released a developer trailer breakdown to peel back more of what the game is going to be.
A lot of this was leaked and corroborated with other reports prior to release. Assassin’s Creed Mirage was apparently planned as an expansion for Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, following the character Basim that featured as an NPC in that game, but it eventually grew into a standalone game last year. Finally, the expectation is that Assassin’s Creed Mirage will be released in spring 2023.
This will all be a significant change of pace from recent adventures in the Assassin’s Creed universe. Valhalla launched alongside the new generation consoles in late 2020, and was the culmination of three games that explored the open world RPG gameplay first seen in Origins. In our AC Valhalla review, Jim said:
“Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla effortlessly plants its banner as the best open world RPG available for the new consoles. This Viking epic flexes its gore-soaked, tattooed muscles when it comes to world-building, and medieval England wows with its enchanting untamed vistas. It’s also portioned out at a steady pace and, if not for the repetitive, limited combat, Valhalla could have ranked even higher among our favourite games in the series.”
This standalone game was far from the only thing that Ubisoft announced today. There’s an open world mobile game on the way that will take players to Ancient China, but there’s also two mainline Assassin’s Creed games in development at both Ubisoft Quebec and Ubisoft Montreal. Assassin’s Creed Codename Red will take players to feudal Japan at long last, while Codename Hexe is more mysterious – read more about those here.