Following a year off from releasing a new game in the series, Ubisoft released Assassin's Creed Origins on October 27, 2017 for PS4, Xbox One, and Windows.
Plot
Layla Hassan is working in Egypt at the behest of Abstergo to locate an artifact in the desert. Instead, Hassan finds the mummified remains of Bayek and Aya, two members of a precursor group to the Assassins known as the Hidden Ones. Despite not having clearance, Layla uses the DNA from the mummies to look into their lives with an Animus she modified herself.
In Ptolemaic Egypt, Bayek is the last Medjay, a person who was traditionally charged with the protection of the Pharaoh, but in Bayek's time had been extended to protecting all of Egypt. Bayek resides in Siwa, which houses a Precursor vault. Bayek and his son Khemu are abducted by masked men only known by animal names (The Heron, the Ibis, etc). The masked men want to get into the vault, but when Bayek tries to fight back, Khemu is killed.
A year later, Bayek has been hunting the five masked men, having first killed the one known as the Heron. He arrives back in Siwa and kills the Ibis, who had been torturing the residents of Siwa to get information on the Vault. He learns his wife, Aya, is in Alexandria hunting other masked men. Bayek learns she has killed the Vulture and the Ram, and she is currently tracking the Snake. She gives Bayek a Hidden Blade and sends him after the Snake.
Bayek discovers that the Snake is Ptolemy's royal scribe and ambushes him with the Hidden Blade. It costs Bayek his finger to use the blade, but the scribe is killed. The scribe indicates that there is more to the masked men besides the five that Bayek and Aya killed. Bayek seeks more information and gets into contact with Cleopatra, the sister of the current Pharaoh Ptolemy XIII. She tells Bayek that there are more masked men, who are known as the Order of Ancients. The scribe Bayek killed was not known as the Snake, but rather the Hippo.
She points Bayek in the direction of other masked men, which included the Scarab, the Hyena, the Crocodile, and the Lizard. Bayek assassinates all four of them while Aya works to secure help for Cleopatra from the Roman general Pompey. She sends a letter to Bayek to let him know there are two other members of the Order, the Jackal and the Scorpion.
Bayek finds that the Jackal is Lucius Septimius, a Roman stationed in Alexandria charged with protecting the royal family. Septimius kills Pompey before he can aid Cleopatra. Instead, Bayek and Aya sneak Cleopatra into the royal palace in Alexandria to get her into contact with another Roman, Julius Caesar. Caesar is impressed with Cleopatra and allies with her. Bayek kills the Scorpion but is stopped from killing Septimius by Caesar, who claims he will face Roman justice for Pompey's death. Ptolemy is killed trying to flee and Cleopatra becomes Pharaoh.
Cleopatra and Caesar break from Aya and Bayek, who find that both have been seduced by the Order. They find that the Order is showing interest in Alexander the Great's tomb in Alexandria and go to investigate. They find Aya's ally Apollodorus mortally wounded there, but he manages to tell them that Septimius and the leader of the Order, Flavius (the Lion) are headed to Siwa to open the Vault.
Bayek arrives to find the vault already opened and the town held in thrall by an Apple of Eden. Bayek kills Flavius, but Septimius had already gone to Rome. Aya and Bayek agree to separate for good, with Aya going to Rome to grow a brotherhood there while Bayek remains in Egypt. A few years later Aya tracks down Septimius and finally kills him, assassinates Caesar, and threatens Cleopatra.
In the present, Layla is ambushed by Abstergo mercenaries for not reporting in. She is able to defeat them all and continue exploring Bayek and Aya's past. After she is done, she wakes to find William Miles, who offers to let her join the Assassins. She agrees to go with him, but stops short of joining the Assassins.
Gameplay
Following Syndicate, Ubisoft decided to take a year off from the series to completely overhaul it. Where single cities served as the focus of previous games, with loading screen waits to travel between regions, the whole of Egypt serves as this game's map. A player could conceivably travel from one end of Egypt to the other without stopping, though it would take time due to the size of the map.
The major cities include Alexandria, Memphis, Siwa, and Cyrene, along with smaller towns. The map is focused on the west bank of the Nile and points further west, as Cyrene and Siwa are in Libya technically. The mini map of every other game in this series is gone, replaced by a compass bar that picks up locations and quests from a certain distance out.
Combat was overhauled as well, switching from the "locked in" format of past games and switching to a free for all combat format. The player can use knives, swords, spears, axes, and maces, all of which have their advantages and disadvantages. A bow serves as a ranged weapon and the player can use tools such as throwing fire bombs.
The player can upgrade their armor or attack stats with upgrades. Materials for the upgrades are gathered through hunting, which returns in this game, and attacking military transports. Levelling the player continues in this game and levelling up grants ability points that can be spent on increasing player skills, such as unlocking chain assassinations.
Locations have been overhauled in this game as well. Instead of clearing up towns district by district, picking up collectibles and completing side activities to take districts over, the whole map of Egypt is divided up by region, with each region having locations within it to explore, such as tombs and military camps.
Collectibles are tremendously cut down in this game. There are chests, ancient tablets in tombs, papyrus scrolls in temples, and that's all. Finding these will complete a location, along with killing officers in the military camps. These collectibles are most easily discovered with the revamped Eagle Vision of this game, which utilizes a literal eagle named Senu to scout out locations.
There are far more side quests than main mission quests, and most of them are related to Medjay duties in serving people and dispensing justice. Due to actions early in the game, special boss characters known as Phylakes hunt the player, and killing them all unlocks a reward. There are several elephants in the game as well and defeating an elephant will grant an ability point.
Thoughts
I am probably one of the few who thought the series was not getting stale after nine games of relatively similar gameplay, but I still appreciated the changes the series made for this one. Egypt is vast and I enjoyed exploring it, even the remoteness of the desert. The level of detail of Egypt's landscape is unreal and I easily felt the harshness of the scenery.
The new format of the game reminded me strongly of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, in that it was more of an RPG as opposed to an Assassin's Creed game. The vast number of side quests kind of buries the main storyline to the point where I don't recall much of the main story after the first playthrough. What I remembered most about my first playthrough is the great atmosphere this game built. It is not just the landscape, it's the political tension you can feel in the game as well.
At the time, Egypt is controlled by the Greeks as the remnants of Hellenic empires struggle to remain afloat. Everywhere you can see Egyptians losing status at the expense of the ruling Greeks, with no small outbreak of violence due to it, especially in the Faiyum region. Then, on top of all that, there is the looming threat of the Roman Republic, who's presence in the game steadily increases the further into the main story the player goes.
This game seemed much larger on the first playthrough simply because it was the biggest game that the series had released up to that point. On the second playthrough that I am going through now, it does not seem nearly as vast. That is because of the next game in the series took big to an entirely new level.
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