ass ass in screed: mirage

I recently made a second attempt at playing Assassin’s Creed: Mirage, having disliked it the first time, but they have patched it in interesting ways and this time it got its hooks in. You would think from the multiple posts I’ve done about this franchise that I was a bigtime fan, and that’s never been true, but it’s getting true. I had such a good time with this one. It has made my Top Three, and is first-best for best-lookin’, but the shame of it all, the real tragedy, is that I played this on my new OLED monitor, and there is simply no way to express the colossal difference that makes. I am mainly making this post to post screenshots of it.

I have a ton of screenshots of this game that are incredibly beautiful on my OLED and when I drag them over to my also-excellent properly-calibrated high-end IPS LCD display, they lose it all. They look like shit. If you’re on an LCD and you think this looks good, you know nothing. If you think it looks bad, you also know nothing. You just have to go buy an OLED. Yeah I know it’s expensive. It was irresponsible of me to buy it! Anyway, I’m going to post a lot of screenshots in here.

I have expressed before more than one beef, many beeves, with Ass Creed as a franchise, kicking off with strong uncompromising Immersive Sim aspirations and then bottling it at the last second and then rarely coming back to those ideas. Ass Mirage was presented as a return to the series’ roots, but I didn’t think they meant these roots. I just thought they meant parkour, the whole point of the series, which they had idiotically thrown out for the last few games, or maybe the middle-eastern setting.

It does more than that, though! It comes back to the idea of tracking down a target, investigating a situation, and having to take several investigative paths in order to figure out who the right person to kill even is. That’s the core, most-important, most-discarded idea of the Asses Creed! It’s not as reactive as I’d like, hardly anything is, but it’s by far the least dictatorial in its approach of any of these.

The parkour, I guess, was bad when this came out. I’m not totally across why, but it’s what everyone says and I do remember having thought that. Now they’ve patched in two major changes: let you jump whenever you want (onto whatever you want), and let you eject from a wall even if the game hasn’t passively detected something safe for you to grab onto out of that jump. There’s also a whole new control scheme. You have to turn all this stuff on, but when you start a new game it does ask if you want it. These are sort of major changes for a game to patch in post-release, especially a Ubisoft one, so I sort of suspect this was another eleventh-hour top-down fuckup that they were able to partially roll back. Either way, it’s good now.

It’s also the most competent of these as a straight-up stealth game. It feels almost Splinter Cellular at times. It’s hard to balance stealth, and they do great; getting detected while you’re sneaking around almost never feels like bullshit, and that’s maybe the part that’s most amazing in the whole thing: getting detected in Ass Creed is always bullshit. These games have always been frustrating in the bad way. Occasionally the stealth is mostly good, in Revelations or Black Flag or Unity, but it’s never great. Until now!! It’s so full of nice little touches. Like, if you’re in cover, which is not sticky cover, if you assassinate somebody, your guy automatically drags the victim back into the cover to hide them. That’s so good! Here, I clipped it.

The city is my second-favourite besides Constantinople, which it’s much larger than, and the only thing I wish is that it wasn’t so flat, but the level design is great. Not always in an Ass Creed does it feel like level design is even actively happening, but it does here. The vibe of the place is great. I love hearing the call to prayer, and there’s an option to shut off all other music during that, which of course I do (though that other music is also excellent). The detail in NPC dialogue and behaviour is great, and even if you don’t switch the dialogue to Arabic (which I did for a few hours) you still hear a lot of it as you run around. It’s cool too, if you’re into Ass Creed, to be so far back in time that these people don’t even use the word Assassin yet or seem to have a fully solidified Creed, and Masyaf is still being built.

The story’s not astonishing but is certainly one of the best of this franchise, and the ending is excellent, with a twist that landed for me. The DLC (separate, smaller city and story-chunk) is a little bit of a tearjerker, and there’s even loving references to Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. I feel precision-targeted.

The only thing is, after I finished it, I gave it a google and discovered the central character here actually appears in other (non-parkour) Ass Creeds, and their stories make this story worse. This is great as a stand-alone thing, which is what I thought it was. I recommend playing it before you play Valhalla, and also never playing Valhalla.

On top of everything else it’s just very, very beautiful. Part of it is definitely the OLED, but all the way through I was routinely just blown away by how lovely it looked. I’ll probably replay it just to look at it more. I want to go live in Baghdad of whatever era this is.

Technically it’s sort of interesting, too – it looks great all maxxed out on an OLED, sure, but the main thing really selling it is the dynamic global illumination, something basically impossible to do at this scale until fairly recently, and without which the game would simply look bad instead of good. It’s not that this game’s implementation is above average or anything, it’s clearly imprecise with a lot of light leak, but it’s not noisy, and it’s just a great showcase of the fact that bounced light is the single most impactful thing you can do graphically in a game.

I’m also sort of impressed by their AA: even though it’s temporal AA and they’re dither-masking a lot of their “translucency”, there’s minimal ghosting or noise; the worst you see even looking through multiple layers of it is a little shimmery aliasing. Most games would fall apart way more here. I don’t know that there’s any genius trick here, maybe it was just important to somebody to do a good job tweaking it, but nobody normally bothers.