One of the major revelations at this year's E3 was the new Assassin's Creed, Assassin's Creed Origins. While not exactly a well kept secret, the reveal still blew us away, and it was clear just how much the core team from Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag had expanded on the concept of the previous games in the series.
We caught up with game director Ashraf Ismail to learn more about the overall vision of the game:
"We took all those learnings from Black Flag and we tried to explode them," explains Ismail. "This is where we got into the action-RPG element, in terms of naval from Black Flag there was a very deep RPG element to it that was hidden in terms of the numbers, but that what it was. We took that and we said we want to explode that, we want the experience to revolve a lot more deeply around that so now all of a sudden levels mean something. If you're a level 5 going against a level 20 enemy you're not going to assassinate them, you can do stealth damage to them. If you want to assassinate enemies and do a lot of stealth damage, okay, then go and craft your hidden blades, make them tougher, make them do more damage. If you want to play that way. If you don't care about stealth, you just want to be a warrior, okay, there's abilities for you, there's a progression path for you. We want players to be able to craft their playstyle the way they want."
It is clear that the choice of Egypt is very close to the heart of Ismail and he became very passionate when we asked him about the role the Nile plays.
"The Nile is very important and you'll see that the world is massive," says Ismail. "In the north you have the Mediterranean and Alexandria, the wonderful city of Alexandria, and then we have the lush Nile delta. So it's very fertile, it's very rich, there's a lot of wildlife, it's dangerous. But it's also where [Egyptian] agriculture comes from and we play with that, and you'll have a lot of quests that deal with that. We use the quest structure to actually invoke and show the players a lot of these stories and it's almost we're educating players through a really cool narrative, through cool stories, that they need to play. "
"There's deep gameplay in it, but we're kind of subtly showing the story of Egypt and teaching how did agriculture within the Nile delta work, the black soil of the Nile delta. What did it mean to Egyptians? How did this link to their beliefs? The Nile was deeply linked to the religion and the Gods. The daily life of an Egyptian, the value of it comes deeply in line with the way they're able to farm and do all this stuff and it's linked to the Gods. So for sure [the Nile] plays a very important role in the world, we expose it as much as we can through quests and through the characters that Bayek will meet. So it's the Nile delta, but it's also the ancient city of Memphis, it's the Giza plateau, what did the Giza plateu mean to people, the Great Pyramids, the Sphinx. What did it mean to the people at this time, we play with all of it. That's why the setting is amazing. It's been a personal love to do this setting, because it's so rich and wonderful and I'm so happy we're the game to do it."
Assassin's Creed Origins is due out on PC, PS4, and Xbox One late October and for more on the game we recommend you read our hands-on impressions from E3 2017.