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so hopefully Mirage will take stuff back to the older games.
In atmosphere, absolutely. In mechanics, well, stealth is probably the best in the series (stop laughing, MGS fans) and the missions are designed to reward stealth and severely punish "charge in and kill everybody". Parkour purists weren't so happy - there's a limit to how much a small studio could change the Valhalla codebase - but the city design is the best since Unity's Paris, which makes up for that. And you're an assassin again, with many shout outs to AC 1 and a few to other games in the series.
The OG fans who were most disappointed were the ones who actually loved the way that old-style AC combat was so trival that you could slaughter whole armies with a few button presses as they lined up to be killed one by one. You die quickly and often if you try that in Mirage. Combat is possible but most survivable if you use stealth and traps/bombs to mix things up and to isolate and confuse the soldiers.
Another way it'sdifferent from Valhalla is that you can speed run it in under 15 hours, if that's your thing. I finished it in just under 40, mixing in all the side missions and most of the collectables just to explore Baghdad as much as I could. Might have spend half an hour or so paying street musicians so I could listen to them play.
Where they go from here is hard to say. After 8 years of nothing but huge (and popular) ARPGs, they now have a fragmented player base with widely different (and mostly incompatible) expectations.
itsbruce-
Looks like shadows is doing both stealth and head smashing, just depending on the character you choose for each mission. Seems like a pretty good compromise to me!
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That sounds good to me then. I do enjoy the older press a button to counter an enemy and then press another button to take out the next enemy mechanic of the earlier games just because it was so ridiculous but perfectly happy for that to not exist for a return of good stealth. Also much more interested in a shorter game. As I say Valhalla started to drag and so did RDR2 when I played that over winter, just want something with a bit of character but is also succinct.
slippers
ric_a5
Yeah really enjoying it all so far. Very satisfying.
That's what I'd felt with AC, kept forgetting who was who and what importance they had. Also read that they'd actively made more effort to make stealth elements more of a thing again but it just felt like I was going into a camp, fighting everyone there and then picking up whatever was needed, especially with the raid feature where you have no choice but to do that in certain places, didn't realise that the first time so did sneak around and stealth it all only to be greeted by a chest that needed an ally to help open it. From what I've seen Mirage looks like it should be more up my street so I'll look forward to that coming to Game Pass in future or see if it gets cheaper in CeX. For me the Origins trilogy haven't been great within the series as a whole so hopefully Mirage will take stuff back to the older games.