Usually when I think of Memphis as a place of worship I picture jumpsuited Elvis fans singing Love Me Tender outside of his Graceland estate in Tennessee, but just over two thousand years ago the city of Memphis, Egypt was home to god worship of a decidedly more ancient variety. It’s in this lush setting on the west bank of the Nile river that I take my first steps into Assassin’s Creed Origins during an hour long hands-on demo at Gamescom 2017.
“For us, Memphis was like touching true ancient Egypt,” explains game director, Ashraf Ismail. “This city is 3000 years old [at the time of the game’s setting]. So for us it was an opportunity to show a location with a lot of [residents] who still believe in the old religions and the old gods.”
Memphis’ Temple of Ptah, the god of craftsmen, is the single biggest temple in the game, and there are also notable places of worship for the Apis bull, considered at the time to be the living manifestation of Ptah. Surrounding these shrines is a sprawling hodgepodge of shacks, markets, narrow streets and canals, all rendered with eye-popping levels of detail and a winding, labyrinthian structure that’s begging to be explored.
I took even greater satisfaction from just exploring the setting aimlessly and interacting with the world purely to see what the outcome would be.
“From an architecture standpoint Memphis represented a much more chaotic, tighter navigation opportunity,” continues Ismail. “So yes it’s a beautiful city and it’s very dense, but from a navigation standpoint it feels very different from other cities. Alexandria for example is much more cosmopolitan, it’s much more organised and clean in terms of architecture. Whereas Memphis is much more disorganised, and that disorganisation brings its own sense of variety and flavour.”
Disorganised is an apt description for my time spent with the game, because despite the fact I enjoyed the two quests unlocked for the demo (each consisting of some investigation work, some scouting for targets and a whole bunch of stabbing), I took even greater satisfaction from just exploring the setting aimlessly and interacting with the world purely to see what the outcome would be. The game is set within the deserts of Egypt, it only makes sense that all of that sand would make for one heck of a sandbox to play in.
Certainly what seemed clear was just how wonderfully Assassin’s Creed Origins both teases and rewards your sense of curiosity. While using Bayek’s pet eagle Senu to get a lay of the land from from the air during my first moments in Memphis, I spied some broken scaffolding partially obscuring a hole in the ground nearby. After boldly diving headfirst through the gap, I splashed down into a subterranean spring with water clouded by blood and a single helmet floating on its surface. It seemed at first glance like a nice bit of environmental detail, but sure enough when I dived down to the bottom I found the helmet’s recently deceased owner, and I returned to the surface the proud new owner of the poor fella’s sword.
Having secrets that feel organic in the world rather than the typical floating-in-midair collectibles of previous games has been a definite focus for the team at Ubisoft Montreal.
The puzzles I tackled were all physics based, using combinations of weights in order to balance platforms connected via pulley ropes for example, but each pyramid in the game will be centred around a unique style of puzzle design.
“In Black Flag, which was our last game, [we felt that we had] a really strong feeling of exploration but our feeling of discovery was not as good,” explains Ismail. “What that means is, yes I can explore a lot of different spaces but am I discovering something that has meaning to me or that surprises me? And this was one of the first things we were thinking of in terms of exploring and having a big world; can we have a much deeper sense of discovery so that you’re going to find gameplay rewards, you’re going to find narrative rewards, that you’ll be surprised by the environment itself? We put a lot of a value into this. A lot.”
Other surprises in my hands-on ranged from the small, such as discovering I could crouch down to pat the stray street cat that sat itself at my feet at one point, to the considerably larger: after taking a short camel ride west of Memphis to one of the pyramids that looms large over the city, I was delighted to find a series of puzzle rooms in the dark depths of its inner chamber. The puzzles I tackled were all physics based, using combinations of weights in order to balance platforms connected via pulley ropes for example, but each pyramid in the game will be centred around a unique style of puzzle design, again ensuring that the player will never know what to expect as they enter each tomb (indeed a second pyramid in the Memphis required some puzzle solving to even enter it in the first place).
“We wanted people to be in awe of Egypt,” says Ismail. “Egypt is sort of one of the game’s stars and so we wanted to make it shine. So we urge the player to get lost in the world, to go keep hunting for stuff in the world because you’re going to find some surprises.”
Another aspect of Assassin’s Creed Origins that still remains a surprise for the time being is the identities of the game’s additional player characters alongside Bayek. However, one of them could well be Bayek’s wife Aya, who shows up in Memphis after the Apis bull is mysteriously poisoned. Aya has strong ties to Cleopatra in the game, and while Ismail wouldn’t confirm or deny whether she will be playable in the final game, he did stress the important role she plays in the game’s story.
“We wanted to show two very powerful characters who are going for the same goal but have slightly different perspectives on how to achieve that, and part of that at some point becomes about their political views,” explains Ismail. “So Aya really believes in Cleopatra at a certain point, Bayek does as well but not to the same extent, and he will eventually disagree with some aspects or some details of the way they’re progressing.”
Fractious as it may be, the union of Bayek and Aya ultimately gives birth to the Brotherhood of Assassins, thus making their marriage critical to Ubisoft’s long running franchise as a whole. Whether Assassin’s Creed Origins itself can serve as somewhat of a rebirth for the series remains to be seen, but its clear emphasis on placing the player in a world they’re encouraged to live in and be consumed by, rather than merely pass through, is certainly a positive step in the right direction.
Tristan is the Video Producer at IGN's Sydney office. You can find him on Twitter @tristanogilvie.
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