Assassin’s Creed Origins is the most open world Assassin’s Creed game Ubisoft has ever created. It stretches and pushes the boundaries of a historical sandbox, fundamentally restructures the way missions are delivered and played, and places an almost singular focus on exploration and discovery.
Origins may be the beginning of the series from a chronological and story standpoint, but from what I’ve seen behind the scenes, its emphasis on open exploration and freedom is creating the future of the franchise.
The first and most prominent change coming to Origins is its fast and loose quest system. In previous Assassin’s Creed games you would have main missions, which in their function were an icon on the map that would trigger a unique encounter with exclusion zones, out of bound areas, and failure conditions that you could only get out of by backing out to the menu.
In Assassin’s Creed Origins, you can start or stop any main or side quest at any time.
In short, once you opted into a mission, you are going to do that mission, until it’s done, or you fail, or desynchronize because you get caught on a fence and your target gets too far away. In Origins, that’s all gone.
In Assassin’s Creed Origins, the developers have moved away from the strict missions into a quest-based system. You can start or stop any main or side quest at any time. You can be working toward a quest, run into a character in the world that asks for your help, and go off on that new adventure while your original assignment will wait for you to come back to it. This means the notion of exclusivity is gone, allowing you to jump unlocked between whatever you want to do.
That also allows for interesting interplay when it comes to completing objectives. For example, if you’re on a quest to kill a warlord, while you’ve been given another quest to tame a crocodile and kill an enemy with it, siccing your pet crocodile on your target warlord effectively kills two birds with one stone. Or two quests with one very fat crocodile, in this particular case.
Ubisoft Montreal has stressed that it’s blurring the lines between main missions and side objectives. While there does exist a distinction between the main and side quests, the studio is dedicated to making sure that someone who does both shouldn’t feel a categorical difference in production value, experience, surprise, or interesting things. Some quests are very simple, or appear very simple, but lead to all sorts of interesting twists and turns.
“We want the player to think, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to see, but there’s value to doing them,’” said Jean Guesdon, creative director on Assassin’s Creed Origins.
Now narrative characters can reference other characters tied to quests and links can be created that way, forging a chain of interaction that sends you all over.
“This is very important for us,” Guesdon said. “It will allow us to meet hundreds of characters that depict Egypt. Recreating Egypt, we feel the need to meet all these characters to show the diversity of the world.”
And those characters, and the quests they open for Bayek, are leaning into a more mature tone. While missions of a lighter tone are still very much present throughout the game – as evident by the 18-minute “What’s Yours Is Mine” side quest gameplay we posted earlier this month – many of them underscore the overall more mature theme of the world and the story, reflecting the brutality of the time period.
Though Bayek may be the protagonist of the game – who you can learn more about in our Bayek and Senu deep dive – Egypt is the central figure of Origins. After two days spent listening to the development team leads explain the painstaking efforts that went into the creation of Egypt – from historical research to the photography and documentation of rocks, dirt, and sand – every element of the varied country is seemingly created with authentic purpose in mind.
When I got the opportunity to go hands-on with open-world portions of the game, all those pieces clicked. And balancing Bayek ever so carefully on the tip of a massive pyramid, surveying the burnt, golden sands of the Giza Plateau in every direction, it’s hard to imagine a more realized version of this place at this time.
The image of rippling dunes of sand and white stone monuments are likely what most of us think when we picture Egypt in antiquity. But as I learned there’s so much more to Egypt than the postcard imagery of The Great Pyramids or the deformed face of the Great Sphinx.
Assassin’s Creed Origins’ artistic rendition is still very much based on the varied regions of the country. Ubisoft Montreal created a dynamic place that houses white-sand deserts, lush oases, blackened badlands, soggy river deltas, canyon-carved rocky regions, and lakes teeming with predatory life, all supporting the day-night cycle and emergent weather that quickly shifts the mood and atmosphere of each place.
“We wanted to show Egypt is a varied playground. Not just deserts,” said Raphael Lacoste, brand art director on Assassin’s Creed. “We studied the geography and the nature coming from different biomes. And with this varied world comes varied fauna: leopards, rhinos, baboons, lions, hippos, crocodiles, horses, camels, rabbits, cats...” etcetera.
We studied the geography and the nature coming from different biomes. And with this varied world comes varied fauna: leopards, rhinos, baboons, lions, hippos, crocodiles, horses, camels, rabbits, cats...
And historically speaking the people of Egypt in Assassin’s Creed Origins are as distinct as the terrain that makes up the country. The story of Bayek is set around 50 BC during the Ptolemaic period. At this time an influx of cultures from outside Egypt – most notably the Greeks – are merging with the native tradition. The game is intentionally set in this period, as the culture clash and the strong economy of the region allow for more potential than had it been set during the first phases of the Egyptian empire.
"At the point Origins takes place,” said brand historian Maxime Durand, “Egypt was almost 3000 years old. So a lot of locations were already forgotten. This was perfect for us to push discovery and exploration. If we would have set the game during the building of the periods we would have limited the potential of the experience.”
When talking about big cities, the newest and grandest in Egypt is Alexandria – founded after Alexander the Great conquered Egypt. Its cut-stone and perfectly angular construction is, like its culture, in stark contrast to the existing remnants of the country and culture. Memphis, the first capital city of a unified Egypt was established 2500 years before Origins, and remains the other larger city in Origins. It’s more mud huts and buildings with massive iconic gates, obelisks, and temples dedicated to Egyptian gods and practices.
Bayek himself is from a remote oasis village called Siwa near the Egyptian-Libyan border. It’s far more rural than the grandiose buildings of either city, but has its own unique activity. And all of these places can and will be explored in a seamless experience.
“This world is not only big but we wanted it to be living: animals, factions, and civilians all interacting with each other,” said Lacoste. “And you can travel from the northern mediterranean border to the south desert without any loading.”
The most interesting shift in Origins is its heavy lean into its unabashed open-world sensibilities. Ubisoft Montreal has seemingly taken to heart what makes a wide open world intriguing: mystery, exploration, and unintended emergent interaction with the world.
“We needed to revisit the pillars of how we let players enjoy this big world,” said producer Julien Laferriere. “We really wanted to play on the natural elements of the map. One of the first decisions we made was to get rid of the minimap. We have a compass now. The goal is really to immerse the player in the world – that’s why we introduced the question marks.”
The question marks are the new icons in Assassin’s Creed. The idea is that areas of interest are marked for you (either by traveling near them, spotting them while flying above as Senu, or reaching a high vantage point that uncovers a portion of the area.) The places of interest become question marks to tell you something is there, but then must be further explored. It pushes the urge to uncover the secrets of Egypt, and during my hands-on experience, I had trouble staying on task thanks to the nagging question marks that hung above unexplored landmarks.
There’s no location you can’t access at any given time.
"We want players to see those in the world and want to go take a look,” Laferriere said. “The way we shape the world also influences exploration. Verticality is very important. If you can’t see past that dune, or hill, or those trees, you want to get there and see what’s past those points.
“We really wanted to have players explore based on natural curiosity or the need or want to progress. There’s no location you can’t access at any given time. Some regions are more difficult than others, but if you launch the game and you want to go East, you just head East and explore.”
That’s actually incredibly true from my playtime as well. While I wasn’t given free roam in any direction I chose, Origins’ depiction of Egypt is packed with possible stories to uncover, hidden treasure to find, and sporadic objectives that appear when you’re just galloping around on your horse, or camel, or cruising in a chariot. Regularly I’d wander into places I wasn’t prepared for, and would quickly pay for it by a militant squad, an ambush of bandits, or a rampaging hippo.
“You always have objectives. Even if you get into a place in the open world where there are no quests to do, there are objectives to complete,” said Laferriere. “We wanted to have small chunks of contact that you use to hop from one chunk to another to explore the world.”
“We expect players to have really long play sessions and not just do a single quest. That comes from our exploration. That’s one of the things we learned in Black Flag and wanted to carry it over.”
We'll have much more on Assassin's Creed Origins all month long, but to see everything we've done so far, cruise over to the Assassin's Creed Origins IGN First hub to check it out.
Brandin Tyrrel is an Editor at IGN. You can talk to him on Twitter at @BrandinTyrrel.
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