Assassin's Creed Valhalla broke players and AC Mirage aims to fix them

Assassin's Creed Valhalla was the straw that broke the camels back for many fans of Ubisoft's open-world series. However, with AC Mirage releasing in 2023, the developers are looking to fix issues some played had with Valhalla.

If you have earned all those Assassin's Creed Valhalla trophies, then you know that 100 hours is the bare minimum it takes to get the platinum trophy. With an unbelievable quantity of content in a staggeringly big open world, Valhalla destroyed a fair few players' relationships with the series as quality didn't always meet the level of quantity. However, with Assassin's Creed Mirage, Ubisoft is looking to return to the original Assassin's Creed series entries' roots and fix those Valhalla issues.

Assassin's Creed Valhalla broke players, but AC Mirage will restore them.

Assassin's Creed Mirage is looking to fix the mistakes of Valhalla

If you have read our guide to the best Assassin's Creed games, then you know that size is our core issue with this entry. However, while speaking to GamesRadar, Ubisoft Bordeaux's creative director Stéphane Boudon confirmed that this kind of critique from the core Assassin's Creed community helped shape the vision for Mirage.

"Origins, Odyssey, Valhalla are all great games with the promise to live an epic journey in a strong fantasy," Boudon said. "Their scopes have been calibrated to fulfil those ambitions as they all embrace the RPG mechanics. But amongst our fans, we started hearing the desire for a character-driven story, focused on the core pillars of the first ACs in a more intimate scale. It resonates with us as well as developers and this was the starting point of the project.

Assassin's Creed Mirage is taking us to Baghdad

"The increased hardware power and the extended expertise we developed also allow us to have a richer and denser map compared to the first ACs. It means for us more gameplay opportunities, more interactions between systems, more depth. It also means incredible and immersive details to treat Baghdad as one of the main characters of Mirage."

Are you a stealth fan? We suspect you are if you played the older AC games. Boudon also updated everyone on that, too. "In AC 2 you could see the pattern of NPCs grouping in their lane, it was incredible at that time, but it was a bit artificial," Boudon said. "With the chaos and the vibrancy of Baghdad we wanted, a system like that couldn’t fit at all, so we aim for a more organic one a bit like in Unity where you blend automatically as soon you have three people in your vicinity, it’s more difficult to master and less predictable but way more immersive.

Assassin's Creed Mirage is going stealthier, too.

"We also reworked the stealth tools and their evolutions some of them are legacy tools (the smoke bomb, the throwing knives) you already know well, but the team worked on specific upgrades that will allow you to reinvent them to fit perfectly with your playstyle."

These are all the kinds of things that some Assassin's Creed fans have been craving since Odyssey's vast RPG expansion of the series after Origins had a more measured approach in scaling it up. For our two cents, it sounds like this could be the fresh lick of paint everyone needs from the series. The mention of Unity — a game that has begun to become the rising star of the older style of games — will help prick up ears, too. Well, let us know what you think of what Boudon said here!! Happy? Nervous? Let us know in the comments!

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Written by Kes Eylers-Stephenson

Editor Kes is our resident expert in PlayStation and Sony news. He writes about PS5 games like LEGO Horizon Adventures, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Kingdom Come Deliverance II, Concord, and Death Stranding 2 using experience from years of PlayStation gaming. He also covers PS Plus news, as well as his favorite games — The Witcher 3, God of War, and The Last of Us — before an evening swim.