While we’re all sitting here thinking about some of the most interesting upcoming Xbox games, and upcoming PS5 games, like Assassin’s Creed Mirage, a new interview with a developer has appeared online and now everyone’s talking about the Assassin’s Creed Mirage length and how long it will take to beat the game – again. Of course, any new information ahead of the Assassin’s Creed Mirage release date is welcome, but this isn’t new information. In fact, Assassin’s Creed Mirage has always been destined to be shorter than Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. So, can we just stop talking about it now? And even more importantly, can we stop pretending it’s such a bad thing?
As translated by our friends at PCGamesN, lead producer Fabian Salomon spoke to French content creator Julien Chièze recently and revealed that playtests indicate that it will take players anywhere between 20 and 30 hours to get through Assassin’s Creed Mirage. If you’re “rushing the game”, it will be closer to 20 hours. And, if you’re a completionist, you’re looking at this being closer to 30 hours. Sounds pretty reasonable, right?
Well, the shocking part about this (if you can call it a shocking revelation at all, at this stage) is that Ubisoft’s previous Assassin’s Creed game, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, can take anywhere between 60 hours to beat and up to 143 hours to complete (according to HLTB). So, as it stands, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is five times larger than Assassin’s Creed Mirage. Holy smokes!
If this is the first time you’re learning about all this, then it’s obviously quite a surprising change. However, this isn’t the first time we’re learning about this as a collective whole. In fact, this is one of the first things we were told about Assassin’s Creed Mirage – a complete game that reportedly spawned from content developed as an expansion for Assassin’s Creed Mirage.
We have all been made well-aware that Assassin’s Creed Mirage pays homage to the original Assassin’s Creed game in more ways than one – and it’s smaller scale and tighter narrative is one example of that. In fact, that’s one detail that Ubisoft has been quite transparent about throughout the build-up to this game’s release. Yet, for some reason, everyone is still talking about how long this game is – and everyone is acting like this is a shocking revelation. It really doesn’t make any sense given the fact that this is something we’ve seen reiterated time and time again in interviews with developers.
With no plans for DLC content post-launch, what you see is what you get in Assassin’s Creed Mirage. Whether you like smaller games or not, the crux of the issue at hand is whether this is going to help this game become one of the best Assassin’s Creed games we’ve ever played or not. That’s the only reason I can think of to explain why everyone is still talking about this. It’s also something I simply can’t comment on right now. However, from what we’ve all seen so far, I am hopeful of that.
Assassin’s Creed Mirage’s skills lend themselves to some rather cinematic escapes and the new History of Baghdad feature is the series’ most complex codex to date. When you couple that with the fact that Assassin’s Creed Mirage will offer players more than enough Baghdad to explore, this is still shaping up to be one of the best open world games we’ve played in a while. We all just need to move on from the fact that it’s that much shorter than Valhalla – there’s so much more to talk about when it comes to Assassin’s Creed Mirage.