It was already pretty easy to assume that Assassin’s Creed Mirage, Ubisoft’s return to its mammoth franchise’s roots with a renewed focus on a condensed map and stealth gameplay, would be a significantly shorter experience than the recent trilogy of Assassin’s Creed entries with their ballooning runtimes, but now we have an even better idea thanks to an interview with Ubisoft lead producer Fabian Salomon.
Uploaded by French YouTuber Julien Chièze and shared by PCGN, the interview reveals that – at least during internal player testing – Assassin’s Creed Mirage will take most players around 20-25 hours to complete, with a “completionist” playthrough running closer to 30 hours. That puts Mirage at one of the lowest overall playthrough times in the entire mainline series (according to HowLongToBeat) with the majority of pre-Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag entries being shorter for a “rushed” playthrough but just about every game polling a longer “completionist” playtime than what Ubisoft is estimating here.
You can see the interview (it’s in French, mind) just below:
It’ll no doubt come as a relief to those burnt out on the enormous, 100-plus-hour runtimes of the last few games, which have no doubt resulted in many players never finishing the games at all. Mirage, on the other hand, sounds like a brisk, self-contained experience (there will reportedly be no expansion DLC either) that players could knock over amongst all of the other huge releases in the back half of 2023 without breaking too much of a sweat.
Ubisoft also recently revealed that the game’s Baghdad map will be around the same size as Assassin’s Creed Unity’s Paris, and include a bunch of interesting insights into the city’s history through real-world historical items and knowledge.
Assassin’s Creed Mirage launches on October 12th for PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One and PC. Amazon has pre-orders for only $64 including free shipping.
