Assassin's Creed Mirage's Map is the Best of Both Worlds

Summary

The Assassin's Creed franchise is known for its open-world settings, which have varied throughout the series, from multiple hubs to larger maps.
Assassin's Creed Mirage strikes a balance between the smaller-scale, original formula and the larger open-world areas seen in recent RPG entries.
The game's map includes a central city, Baghdad, as well as its outskirts, offering players the opportunity to explore and find collectibles and rewards.

The Assassin's Creed franchise is one of many different faces. While the overarching series could be described as action-adventure, Assassin's Creed is often much more than that, encompassing an array of different genres and gameplay types, ranging from historical fiction to fantasy, and from linear adventure to full-blown RPG. But while stealth and parkour are Assassin's Creed's most defining traits, there's one other feature that runs consistently throughout the series, from 2007's Assassin's Creed right up until Assassin's Creed Mirage, and that's an open-world setting.

The Assassin's Creed series has featured a ton of different varying types of open worlds over the last 15 years. This variety of settings not only includes different historical periods, but also different forms of open-world gameplay. And in an attempt to bridge the gap between them all, Assassin's Creed Mirage takes the best elements of each of these variations, delivering one of the series' most unique and rewarding open worlds.

Assassin's Creed Mirage's Open-World Strikes the Perfect Balance

The Assassin's Creed series has always been considered open-world, though it's gone through several different iterations of that over the years. In the very first Assassin's Creed game in 2007, players could travel between five different open-world hubs, with a loading screen coming between each one. This essentially set the precedent for the next few games in the series, with Assassin's Creed 2, Brotherhood, Revelations, and Assassin's Creed 3 all having a handful of city hub areas that players could freely explore.

Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag was the first mainline entry to expand on this open-world premise. While Assassin's Creed 4's map was still divided into multiple hub-like towns and cities, players could now freely move between each one in real time, finding various lootable islands and collectibles along the way. This new fully open-world formula would then go on to be used in subsequent entries, with games like Assassin's Creed Unity and Syndicate revolving around just one city each, but having that city essentially be the same size as all of the previous games' areas combined.

While the Assassin's Creed franchise would undergo some pretty big changes with the release of Origins in 2017, this approach to open-world design was only further expanded upon, with Assassin's Creed Origins having three huge open-world areas. Assassin's Creed Odyssey doubled down on this approach even more, introducing even larger maps that required players to sail across large bodies of water to reach new cities. Assassin's Creed Valhalla just continued the trend once again, delivering an eye-watering total of 10 massive open-world areas including the game's DLC.

Assassin's Creed Mirage, however, tries to strike the perfect balance between all of these open-world approaches. Attempting to be a smaller-scale adventure that hearkens back to the series' original formula, Assassin's Creed Mirage revolves around just one city, Baghdad, which is split into several districts. While this one-city approach is similar to the original Assassin's Creed games, Mirage's map also includes the city's outskirts, which players can freely explore using mounts. Exploring these dunes will reward the players with various collectibles and trinkets, some of which are actually some of the best the game has to offer. With both a large central city to explore, and its wider outskirts, Assassin's Creed Mirage manages to be the best of both worlds, combining the original series' more streamlined approach to open-world design with the more recent RPG's focus on larger open-world areas.