My Notes on Assassin’s Creed: Origins — Part One

I totally fought a bird and then took his things

PS5 screenshot taken by the author.

Ubisoft is kind of a mess of a company right now. They were once brilliant at putting out large games in a timely fashion, but between the many scandals over bad working conditions, firings of high-profile creatives over inappropriate behavior (including one of the leads on the very game I’m covering here), and countless large title delays, it’s not looking so good.

I’m excited about the future of the Assassin’s Creed series as it’s one of my favorite franchises in all of gaming, but Mirage still doesn’t have a firm release date and everything else is off in the ether of “coming someday.” I thought that Prince of Persia: Sands of Time remake looked fun, but that too fell off Ubisoft’s calendar and into the horrifying pit of vague continued development.

So, to tide myself over I’ve gone back to Assassin’s Creed: Origins, which received a bespoke “next gen” patch a while back to bring its framerate up to 60FPS on current consoles. I’ve been enjoying the game again on PS5. I never quite finished this around its original release, both because it’s comically huge and because I got distracted with other games. It was so long ago that I had no idea what I was doing, so I started the game over again on nightmare difficulty just to shake…