‘Is it me, or is no one talking aboutAssassin’s Creed Mirage?’ I thought to myself as I plicked away at my votes for DualShockers’ myriad GOTY categories (buckle up, folks. There’s gonna be a ton of them). The game reviewed reasonably well, with a decent 77 on Metacritic (though notably lower than the previous three iterations), and there seemed to be a vocal contingent of people celebrating the return to ‘old-school Assassin’s Creed’ in the leadup to release.
Then the game launched, then the reviews came out, then… nothing. Well, apart from Ubisoft,who came out with a Tweetsome six days after launch celebrating the game’s success, but really all they gave was a bunch of vague statements (how its sales six days after launch were “in line” with the likes of Origins and Odyssey (the superior-selling Valhalla was omitted from the statement), accompanied by pretty arbitrary statistics, like 60 million Leaps of Faith, 1.2 million street cats pet, and (most obscure of all),479 collective years spent parkouring the rooftops of Baghdad. Yep, try convertingthatinto any meaningful statistic.
Behind the Mirage
But in trying to gauge what’s going on with the game, I did find some meaningful data about the game’s popularity relative to its predecessors. By doinga bit of crunching on Google Trends, I found that not only has Mirage already been overtaken by Valhalla in terms of overall interest (i.e. search queries relating to the game), but that interest in Mirage when it was at its absolute peak in October is dwarfed by how much interest there was in all three of the preceding Assassin’s Creed games in the months of their launch.
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Bringing together Assassin’s Creed Origins, Odyssey, Valhalla, and Mirage, Valhalla around launch marked the high-point in interest with a score of 100. Relative to that, interest in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey at launch was 44, interest in Origins was 27, while interest in Mirage was just 18. Those are some pretty serious number disparities, which tell us a lot more about Ubisoft’s Mirage experiment than how many times people stroke cats, or collective years spent parkouring.
Obviously, there’s some abstraction to Trends too, and for now we don’t have concrete sales numbers for Mirage, but it does suggest that the allure of ‘old-school’ can’t hold a candle up to the allure of ‘vast open-world epics’ like the previous three games in the series were. Vocal ‘old-school’ contingent aside, Mirage simply hasn’t grabbed the world’s imagination.
We already know that Mirage was never going to signal the future direction of the series, but rather that it was always intended as a side-dish; a far smaller (and smaller-budgeted) adventure, built out of what was originally going to be a DLC for Valhalla, to tide players over before the next big open-world epic, which is probably going to be the game currently codenamed Assassin’s Creed Red, set in feudal Japan.
So the question was never really ‘what does this mean for the series,’ but it does reveal some sobering home truths about the overwhelming popularity of games in the ‘open-world epic’ bracket, and how that can suffocate attempts to branch out and try something different. Yes, there are successful linear games out there, but put it this way: if The Last of Us Part III was announced tomorrow as an open-world game, it’d have its detractors, sure, but would make an absolute killing sales-wise.
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One-way street
If, on the other hand,GTA 6turned out to be a ‘smaller game with a tighter focus,’ because Rockstar wants to try something a little different (not that they would), then it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect that to cut a little bit into the sales figures. In the realm of triple-A single-player games, open-worlds are king, and it’s hard to see developers who are already on that side of the fence—Bethesda, Rockstar, Ubisoft etc—deviating much from that pattern.
Mirage’s lack of momentum reflectsour own Kyle Knight’s sentimentin the leadup to the game’s launch: once people have tasted that open-world freedom in a series, it’s hard to go back. I, on the other hand, think it’d be great to see Insomniac’s upcoming Wolverine game tonotfollow the Spider-Man template (in fact, with Wolverine being such a fundamentally different character, there’s a strong case that it shouldn’t); I think it’d be great for Bethesda to challenge themselves and make a smaller-scope game in the Elder Scrolls or Fallout universes while we wait for the next big ones (which could teach them lessons that’d inform their subsequent open-world epics); I’d like Ubisoft to build on the solid if not groundbreaking Mirage, and try to refine that sneaky, stealthy formula they’ve only just returned to. It’s just hard to see it happening when the interest for them is mainly from a vocal minority.
