Assassin’s Creed Mirage is looking like an exciting throwback to the series’ earlier days, with the game said to be a smaller and much more focused experience as opposed to the likes of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. Parkour and stealth are being emphasized greatly in Mirage, as per Ubisoft (with Assassin’s Creed Unity apparently having been an inspiration), and in an interview with Game Rant, creative director Stephane Boudon explained how stealth systems in particular are being improved for the game.
According to Boudon, Assassin’s Creed Mirage features a new and revamped detection system that sees enemies going through multiple stages in stealth phases, while AI interaction has also been improved. Boudon says players will be able to “play with” the game’s improved stealth systems.
“For us, when we started to work on Assassin’s Creed Mirage, it was very important to have a reliable system of detection, so we added more behavior to the AI. You will be able to play with them a little bit,” he said.
“We have now three distinctive states. You have a warning state at first when the player can still evade pretty easily, and it’s just a warning phase for the player. We have the search state which leads NPCs to look for you and try to investigate you. And at the end, we have the last stage that will be the fight and conflict. All these steps are clearly showcased to the player, and you can play with that. We also put a lot of effort into the interactions between AI, so the detection will spread between AI, and we have also created a lot of different archetypes that will play with all those stage behaviors. So for instance, some archetypes are able to use their horn to call reinforcements.”
Ubisoft has, of course, made it abundantly clear that Assassin’s Creed Mirage is being developed as “a commemoration” of the series’ older entries, so it’s no surprise to see it returning to its stealth roots. Whether it’ll be able to do justice to its promising premise remains to be seen, but the developers are certainly saying all the right things so far.
Assassin’s Creed Mirage launches sometime next year for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, Xbox One, and PC.