Assassin's Creed Mirage | What Leo K Noticed

Leave a Like if you know what the Black Ka'kari is ^__^

When it comes to animation reuse, you're correct. I thought that your Call of Duty comparison was a very interesting one, because I was previously a designer for the 2022 release of Modern Warfare II. One of the lead animators told me that the franchise follows the principles of just "adding animations," meaning that every new animation in the series is a contribution to the entirety of CoD. The fact that such sentiments are brought up in a setting outside of gamedev is pretty cool.

This is probably the best dissection of the trailer Ive seen. More people need to take into account the context in which a game is being produced. Great job. 👍

One second in and we’re already dropping truth bombs

If we get a gameplay walkthrough June 12th showing stealth detection, combat, citizens raising the alarm and the 3-4 level Notoriety System in action, i might cry 😢😂 Also stellar vid Leo K! Especially when you called attention to the world design

I have absolutely no interest in this game or the future of this franchise, but I'll be damned if I wont sit and listen to Leo talk eloquently about animation reuse. Videos of this nature are so useful for the people who still care about AC, they help legitimise these games as things that can be taken seriously, they don't have to be cheap and dumb fun as they've become in recent memory. I do hope Mirage ends up being a good game, even though I wont play it, because I imagine if it's mechanically complex enough, the videos you make will slap.

Yes the day the trailer got released I’ve been waiting for your video. I always appreciate you going in-depth about game design philosophies Majority of mirage videos rn are just surface level knowledge I can already pick up myself by watching the trailer but you actually have something meaningful to talk about

Something I want to add about parkour too which is, well, how I see it, is that AC1-ACRevelations without a doubt had the freest parkour as in the parkour mechanics itself were the most free as there wasn't restriction in what buttons we wanted to play. Unity on the other hand is such a situational parkour system yet the map was designed to account for every situation. Granted, it's better on PC with the button mapping but I never felt locked by Unity's parkour since there was just an abundance of ledges and other parkour scaling paraphernalia.

This trailer has made me cautiously optimistic! It might not be perfect, but it'll be a heck of a lot better than what we've got in the last few years. Thanks for making the last few years of the AC community bearable with your videos.

I have a feeling we won't be getting the manual jump back. All the jumps or vaults we see in the trailer are done from distances where Basim is inches away from the edge, or the vaultable object, before doing the action. They don't show him jumping at an object on the ground, like a crate for example, from a distance that suggests a manual jump was made. In the games with manual jumping you could keep the speed and momentum of your run towards an object on the ground, so that when you jumped at it and landed on top of it, the fluidity wasn't interrupted, which allowed you to then manually jump off that object back to the ground, or from one object on the ground to another if there were multiple objects, all without interrupting the speed, fluidity, and momentum of the entire sequence of jumps.

I'm glad to hear a nuanced take on animation reuse for once. For all the problems I have with RPG Creed's mechanics, the animations haven't been at fault, simply how the games use those animations. Although I do still remain skeptical about whether or not they'd add deeper tech into the parkour. I imagine that if the player could manually wall eject, the time to benefit ratio would be too good for the trailer editor to pass up. Just adding in a 1 second clip of Basim doing a wall eject or similarly well-known advanced move would tell us so much about the direction of the game. Still, the city design seems like it'll be good enough to at least challenge us to make the most out of whatever mechanics we get. Also, I've heard the comparisons between Assassin Focus and Fear Takedowns from Arkham or Rush Assassinations from Odyssey. What I haven't heard is comparison to Ash's Bladestorm from Warframe. I think it's the energy effect, the way he appears and the use of hidden blades during the ability that set off the comparison in my mind.

Regarding animation evolution with story progression, there is a tiny bit of it in AC2, in particular Ezio's walk and sprint animations. The Florentine Nobleman that he was in Sequence 1 shares animations with Desmond, while the Assassin Robes skin changes them to Altair's (the badass walk, hand-wavy sprint). So who knows.

I very much hope that Mirage’s Black Boxes are closer to AC1 rather than Unity, where you can investigate and gain intel and are left with that intel to do with as you please, as opposed to being guided throughout the entire assassination. For parkour, the level design does look nice, but my cope for now remains that the team could add manual jumps and side ejects (that actually gain height) based on tapping the Parkour Button (and maybe classic Catch Ledge and Unity side dismounts based on the Crouch button), which would be a significant improvement and not a particularly difficult adjustment to implement either, considering those mechanics already exist. As for Assassin Focus, I just hope it isn’t too readily available to the player. I think it would be nice if it attracted attention so that Basim would have to be reposition himself using parkour (thus encouraging better parkour, hopefully), but this would imply that parkour is actually controllable and precise enough to be usable as a fast reposition or that you could optimize your movement to get out of the danger faster. Either way, we desperately need an actual uncut demo so we can see the game in action—hopefully a snippet of a black box assassination is in our future. I am also concerned that we saw no social stealth despite the comments the team has made in interviews discussing Mirage about Mirage’s new blending system, notoriety system, and crowd interactions. I hope this is because social stealth didn’t match the action-packed vibe of the trailer and not because there is nothing interesting to show about social stealth.

Man the game design things you call out are so fascinating. Makes one way more attentive to almost anything that's going on when playing any game. And this is applicable to any video of yours, where you either mention it or focus on it as a topic of discussion. Even though I was mostly here for your creed stuff, this really pulls me in for more things you have to offer.

Don't super care for the game still but here to support the Leo Kommunity

You are honestly the best AC person ive seen on youtube. The experience you have and the amount of the detail you bring into these videos make my low attention-span brain sit there and listen. Cheers

Great work! The way you break everything down in the beginning brought up some perspectives even I haven’t thought of like the animation reuse.

Im just happy we will be playing as a assassin/hidden one. Its been 6 years since we played as one and it was just by the end of the game and in the dlc, so just for that im happy. Great vídeo man! I alway like your ac video, may it be tips and tricks or your imput on the games themself!! Have a great day!

Excited to hear you weigh in… what i saw made me nervous and highly skeptical so I’m curious what you think.

Great analysis Leo, I was suprised myself about all the parkour starters and the return of the floating platforms when I went through the trailer again frame by frame. I didn't catch the puzzle like view points tho so that's very interesting. It also seems like we'll finally get lifts with a counter weight again so we should be able to kill people MaceoniK style again. I'm especially looking forward to see more of the Assassin Focus ability. I enjoyed our discussion in the Sneaky Server yesterday but wish you'd have stayed a bit longer because Luka actually brought up some interesting points to back up his more nuanced perspective on killchains. Anyway, you did a good job summarising everything we know up until now and I hope we'll finally get to see raw gameplay in 2 weeks.