As a core part of the series design that's come under fire for its most recent games, parkour in Assassin's Creed Mirage will be under significant pressure to return to form just as Ubisoft keeps insisting throughout the game's marketing. From the series' beginning all the way through to AC Syndicate, each game has tried to refine, improve, and even expand Assassin's Creed's freerunning parkour. But when Assassin's Creed shifted towards a traditional RPG approach with AC Origins and beyond, players immediately noticed that the iconic parkour design had suffered as a result.
So when Assassin's Creed Mirage promotes itself as a return to the series' roots and promises the authentic Assassin's Creed experience from back in 2007, many players are cautiously anticipating what this might mean for the game's approach to parkour. While the trailers released so far provide a few glimpses of freerunning gameplay, these don't shed much light on how exactly parkour will work within AC Mirage. However, with the outright ambition of mirroring the classic style of Assassin's Creed, AC Mirage will need to hit the ground running with its parkour, or else it could struggle to find its feet and falls flat on its face.
Assassin's Creed Freerunning Has Become A Slow Crawl
Right from the start of the franchise, players were drawn to Assassin's Creed for its use of parkour, leading to each following game adding its own touch to enhance this area of gameplay, whether it was AC 2's hooked blade for a leaping grab or the introduction of zip-lines in AC Revelations. While it wasn't a completely perfect system, Assassin's Creed has succeeded with its freerunning since it effectively captures the freedom of freerunning. However, blending parkour into future Assassin's Creed games where the world was more expansive and subsequently less dense, as seen in AC 3 and AC Black Flag, began to pose a challenge.
This was the same issue that the most recent Assassin's Creed games have faced as the series moved towards RPG-style gameplay. Though these games have retained parkour, they lacked many of the innovations made throughout the series and scaled back even some of its most basic essentials like vaulting. So while players could still run, jump, and climb, it would be nowhere close to the original Assassin's Creed freerunning experience and, before AC Mirage's announcement, it left the series with the unfortunate possibility that such an iconic and well-liked staple of its game design was gone for good.
Assassin's Creed Mirage Needs To Commit To Classic Parkour
Since AC Mirage is being likened to classic Assassin's Creed games, it offers fans a glimmer of hope that classic parkour could make a resurgence with it. Though behind-the-scenes commentary from Ubisoft claims its striving for Ezio's level of parkour, it was revealed that AC Mirage would actually be pulling inspiration from AC Unity. Though this would mean AC Mirage's freerunning predates the series' RPG titles regardless, it poses new problems like one of AC Unity's many criticisms over trying to make its parkour more cinematic only to neglect the mechanics and playing experience behind it.
If AC Mirage is going to succeed with its parkour, then it will need to fine-tune the mechanics it currently has in the series' history, identify any areas where it might be lacking, and find ways of resolving these shortfalls. Some previous mechanics have already been seen and mentioned in AC Mirage's latest trailers, but this shouldn't prevent others from returning too, such as back ejects, controlled descents, and more. AC Mirage will also need to ensure that, unlike AC Unity, these mechanics feel satisfying to play and rewarding to master, and it shouldn't rely on the "just go forward" approach AC Origins or AC Valhalla left players with.
Assassin's Creed Mirage is set to release on October 12, 2023, for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
