Assassin’s Creed Origins Director Talks City Size and Modern Day

Beautifully recreated cities are a staple of the Assassin’s Creed series and arguably one of its most integral aspects. When a new title is announced, people are clamoring to know where it is set and how big the cities are. In a recent interview, Assassin’s Creed Origins Game Director Ashraf Ismail answered a question regarding just that.

As part of Game Informer’s month-long coverage of the game for its magazine, they spoke with Ismail at length and discussed a bunch of fan questions, notably one about the size of two cities in particular, Memphis and Alexandria.

“If I compare it to previous games in the past, I don’t actually know the exact numbers for sure, but I could say that it’s probably at least twice the size of Havana from Black Flag, at least,” said Ismail. “Having said that, I don’t think the size of the city is what matters. It’s really the content, the experience that you have inside of it. It’s how alive it is. So we filled these locations with quests, with actually making each city feel unique to itself.”

It should be noted that while Havana was a relatively small city compared to Paris or London in some of the newer Assassin’s Creed games, the entire map of Origins is incredibly vast, and the cities of Memphis and Alexandria (which are similar to each other in size) only make up smaller chunks of the region. Players will be able to travel to other villages and settlements scattered around Egypt as well as its enormous deserts, complete with dynamic sandstorms. During E3, a playable demo gave people access to Faiyum, a large area west of Memphis.

Ismail revealed other interesting tidbits of information including Senu’s ability to fly an unlimited distance and return to Bayek with a quick press of a button. This means that the entire world can be explored from a bird’s eye view, though it doesn’t unfog the map itself.

While Ismail offered a lot of insight into Assassin’s Creed Origins, he was unable to talk about the game’s modern day aspect in any detail. What he did say in regards to it is that the team knows it’s an important element in the series and they listened to fans’ feedback about the modern day, both positive and negative, and he believes people will be happy with it. He does not know when, or if, marketing will talk about it, but a part of Ismail wants people to be surprised and allured by the experience.

Assassin’s Creed Origins launches on October 27, 2017 for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC.

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