The new Assassin’s Creed is bound to be officially announced soon, and while there’s been no announcements by Ubisoft yet other than the one that confirmed its existence (which didn’t need announcing, to be honest), we do still know a great deal about the game, thanks to a number of leaks. The one thing we hope it does away with more than most, though, is also incidentally the one thing that has been a constant fixture in most modern Ubisoft games- especially Assassin’s Creed. And that is incredibly cluttered maps.
Sure, side quests and collectible quests and other similar quests do add a great deal of replay value and value for money to a lot of games, but in Assassin’s Creed, they seem to go a bit overboard. Maps in Assassin’s Creed games are cluttered with literally hundreds of icons for all manners of side quests- so much so that often it almost looks intimidating, or just plain annoying. Look at a game like The Witcher 3, which had a great deal of side content on offer, but was never aggressive in promoting it- it was always on the back burner, and fans could tackle it at whatever pace they were comfortable with. And best of all, it all tied into the main narrative of the game excellently.
We’re not asking for something exactly like that, but Assassin’s Creed Origins does need to do away with a lot of that clutter, most of which probably arises from the typical Ubisoft map towers gameplay structure (which we won’t get into right now- that’s an entirely more detailed topic/issue). Thankfully, it does seem like Ubisoft are taking this criticism to heart. First and foremost, there have been a lot of details the the game’s map is going to take cues from titles such as Skyrim and The Witcher 3, while other reports state that towers will not be making a return in the game.
What’s more, Ashraf Ismail, who was the director of Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag and is also probably working in the same capacity on Origins (or whatever it is going to be called), recently liked a post on Twitter that seemed to suggest that Assassin’s Creed needs to do away with its trademark map clutter (you can take a look at the tweet at the bottom of this post).
All things seem to point toward the fact that this will no longer be a problem for the series going forward. We can only hope that that turns out to be true.