By now, I’ve played about three hours of Assassin’s Creed: Origins, and its shape has come into sharp relief. After a year off of the annual Assassin’s Creed release train, Origins is by now known as a refresh for the series, focusing on story and player progression over busying the world map with checklist activities and mission types. There’s plenty of that stuff in there too, but spread over an entire country instead of a city or two. The scale is incredible, even if what you do in the world doesn’t feel very new to the series. 

But with a focus on telling personal stories against a dramatic historical backdrop, Origins could be the most gripping AC yet. It could also be a lot more of what we’re used to, just on a much bigger map. Another hour with a new chunk of the game wasn’t enough to be conclusive, but it was enough to learn a few things. Here’s what stood out.

It’s a historical best-of from the era, starring Caesar, Cleopatra, and Ptolemy the Boy King 

First of all, as a man who was once a boy, who still is a boy in many respects, it would have been nice if public schools taught me anything about my former king, the Boy King. In Origins, he’s the pharaoh, but the puppet of a more powerful offscreen villain. Caesar and Cleopatra both want him gone, and the only reason they’re working together is because the Boy King screwed up by executing a Roman Caesar was after. Ptolemy thought he was doing the guy a favor. It’s a soap opera dramatization of history, giving renown figures Hollywood voice actors and side quests to hand out. Assassin’s Creed has always done this, but seeing Rome and Egypt on stage is particularly exciting.

New character Aya, married to Bayek, could be what holds the story together 

Allied with Cleopatra against Ptolemy the Boy King, Aya impresses immediately, and the relationship between the two is made clear and present in every scene they inhabit together—so far. Holding hands, expressing concern at the slightest risk, Bayek and Aya know and love each other deeply, but I wonder what kind of presence they’ll have in the scope of the entire game. Against a backdrop of historical heroes and villains, I hope their relationship takes center stage, reflecting social and political upheaval on an intimate scale. 

In the demo mission, Aya made it abundantly clear that supporting Cleopatra is important to her, so what if Bayek is pulled towards a conflicting allegiance later on? How will they filter their politics through love? If Origins is truly doubling down on storytelling, the stories must be more human than in the past. I’m all for murdering one cartoon villain after another, but this could be the first time I care to remember why they deserved to die in the first place. 

The map is bigger than you think 

So, I’m not allowed to show the final map size, but I can say it’s going to make every other Assassin’s Creed look puny by comparison. The Great City of Memphis region, which I’ll touch on in a minute, is already the size of a city from any other mainline Assassin’s Creed game, and then some if you include the surrounding desert regions, dotted with pyramids, temples, and farmland. Zoomed out, the whole map looks to be about 10 times the size of this region, but that's a rough estimate. I think one reason Origins doesn’t demo so well—it’s just very much Assassin’s Creed in a new setting and with some loot at first glance—is because its scope can’t come across until we can trek across the entirety of Egypt for ourselves.

While spaces between cities in previous games felt transitory, I get the feeling that the quieter, wilder spaces in Origins could be where I have the most fun. Side quests have an opportunity to characterize entire regions or tell strange, personal stories that wouldn’t make sense in the drama hubs (cities). Tombs and caves, wildlife and one-off NPC encounters—Origins could be the Red Dead Redemption, the Witcher 3 of Africa, and more than killing dudes in cool ways, I’m excited to see how Ubisoft treats such a large space. With the same dull melodrama as every Assassin’s Creed or with some newfound levity and breadth?

The Great City of Memphis sure is great 

It’s hard to understate how alive Origins’ locations feel. I keep making the comparison, but it’s fair, I think: The Witcher 3’s open world is one of my favorites, not because it’s brimming with stuff to do, but because it’s built to portray a real place. The landscapes don’t look like Level Design, they look real landscapes. It’s some of the most elaborate table setting a game can manage, and Origins’ Egypt is on track to do exactly that. Memphis is a great example. Not every inch of it is a hoot to climb around, but the architecture, the busy streets full of people at work, the irrigation canals with green reeds at the borders stretching out into farmland before terminating in the white hot sands of the desert—it all looks natural, and quite pretty. 

I love most of the settings in the series, and Egypt is the most lush so far, which makes it extra tragic anytime the garish UI gets in the way of my admiration. Anytime I run by a guard, and there are a ton, a big red health bar and “Assassinate” button prompt appear above their head. Similarly, when icons marking objectives appear on top of the world no matter where they are, it’s an eyesore, like someone slapped a jpeg on top of everything and won’t let me look away. I really hope I can turn that stuff off, even if it compromises how quickly and easily I can navigate the world. 

The pyramids have puzzles in them 

After I finished up a main story mission, I did what I do in every open world game: find something interesting on the horizon, and go there. Egypt has pyramids on its horizon, and as someone that grew up watching every dull Discovery Channel documentary that planned on finally revealing what’s inside those things, I had to see for myself. Physics puzzles, turns out!

To be fair, the secret bits just weren’t there yet. Everything was under construction in the inside, although it looked like things hadn’t progressed for a while. Using a torch, I climbed in almost total darkness, lit braziers, and weighed down platforms with heavy bundles of cords to make a route to the center of the pyramid. After a few rooms, I find some treasure chests full of loot (I got a powerful new axe), and read a plaque that instantly rewarded me a skill point. Neat, but I was hoping for something more surprising and unique. A light puzzle-platforming challenge leading to systemic rewards will be helpful in the long term, but I didn’t learn anything new about the state of the world or Bayek from one of Origins most curious landmarks. 

There are Witcher-3-esque investigation scenes 

OK, so they’re in every game now, and I know The Witcher 3 didn't create them, but it seems some of Origin's quests are roping in Witcher-like environmental investigation scenes, which I’m all for. I like it when action games take time to simmer, letting you closely observe a scene and, if you’re paying attention, piece together the plot just before it’s explained to you. In one, I had to find out the source of a sacred cow’s sickness by talking to a bystander and inspecting the cow’s fancy bedroom. In another, I attempted to solve a troubling case of arson. After finding oil at the scene, I bashed a rude, standoffish oil salesman standing conspicuously nearby with my cool new pyramid axe to get him talking. They’re the kind of scenes many players would totally gloss over, but I dig the slow study of a detailed scene, accompanied by an intriguing mystery. Hopefully the writing keeps up.

It has bugs 

Granted, this was still an in-progress build, but within an hour, I got stuck on the geometry several times and witnessed some horrifying physics glitches. In one instance, I swung my axe down on some poor guy to finish him off, but he was falling into some water while the animation kicked off. His bodied defied space, teleporting around and twisting into horrible shapes. 

None of the glitches compromised what I was doing at the time, but I can imagine a scenario where I’m chasing a guy (as you do in Assassin’s Creed) and becoming infuriated when the invisible boundary between a ledge and attached grass roof stops me in my tracks. But given how varied the terrain and geometry of Egypt’s cities are, combined with the massive scale, there’s a good chance this will be the Skyrim of AC—a bigger, technologically impressive machine, but possibly one with more points of failure.

Here's a new Assassin's Creed: Origins video, showcasing the game's setting and mood to the tune of Leonard Cohen's You Want It Darker. As you'll have gathered by now, this installment is set in Ancient Egypt, and while Ubisoft has rejigged the series' format quite dramatically by all reports, you can be safely assured that much stabbing and killing will still take place.

The trailer was aired during the Xbox / Microsoft Gamescom press conference earlier today. Assassin's Creed: Origins will release this October, and according to James Davenport it'll be well worth the wait. After playing the game at E3, he highlighted some of the major changes over here.

Assassin's Creed: Origins game director Ashraf Ismail spoke last month about the game's cities, Memphis and Alexandria, saying that the studio put in a hefty amount of research about ancient Egyptian society so it could properly "bring Egypt to life." More recently, he told GamesRadar that the game's factions will be a big part of that liveliness too, not because of their richness and diversity, but because they really like to fight. 

"There are quite a few different factions in the world, and keep in mind that these factions are really living in the world,” Ismail explained. “We don’t have anything that is a spawned event, you know, ‘because you’re 50 metres away we’re going to spawn this fight here for you.’ These are NPCs that have a schedule, that have an agenda, that criss-cross paths, and if they happen to be enemies they’ll fight, if they happen to be allies they’ll hug each other. So this is really the world living.”   

Those factions will include the Ptolemies, revealed in June as a Greek dynasty that's occupied and ruled Egypt for ages; the rebels, who original Assassin Bayek sometimes works with; and bandits, a bunch of generally cutthroat jerks who are in it solely for themselves. And when they throw down, you can jump in and help out whichever side you like—or you can let them work it out for themselves, and then move in afterwards to take advantage of the aftermath. 

Assassin's Creed: Origins is slated for release on October 27. Read about how Ubisoft is simplifying its murderous moves, but also making them cooler and more fun, right here.

A new Game Informer podcast has a rundown of "lingering questions" about Assassin's Creed: Origins, with answers provided by game director Ashraf Ismail. Among them are a little bit of insight into the cities of Memphis and Alexandria, discussion of the cover system and navigation, details about the eagle Senu, and confirmation that you will get to visit the interior of the Great Pyramids.

Once Ubisoft had established its ability to handle the technical side of the game to its satisfaction, it took steps to ensure that it could properly "bring Egypt to life," Ismail explains in the video. "Yes, there is the physical landscape and its diversity, but we needed the fauna that was there, the people who lived in Egypt represented well, the culture, the religion, the beliefs," he says. "And so there was a lot of effort done to bring in historians, to do the research—we spent years doing research and asking ourselves, 'How do we bring this world to life?' It was a concern for us that we wanted to do it respect and do it justice, because it's a wonderful culture. There's a lot of amazing influences that have lasted to this day." 

He said it's hard to compare the cities of Memphis and Alexandria in Origins to those of previous Assassin's Creed games, but he did enthusiastically extol the virtues of both. "Memphis is super-organic. The monuments are incredible, they're huge, they're super-unique. It's as Egyptian as you get. It's a fairly large city. I think Alexandria is slightly bigger, but slightly," he explained. 

As for a specific comparison, he said he wasn't certain of the numbers, but estimated that Alexandria is at least twice as large as Havana in Assassin's Creed: Black Flag. "Having said that, I don't think that the size of the city is what matters," he continued. "It's really the content, the experience that you have inside of it—how alive that it is. And so we filled these locations with quests, actually making each city feel unique to itself." 

The full video runs for 47 minutes and is available below. Those of you who prefer to read and/or argue can get the quick rundown of what's what on Reddit. 

If you were expecting Assassin's Creed: Origins to boast cooperative play or any other kind of online multiplayer, then it's time to drop that hope. Assassin's Creed: Origins will be a single-player experience, the game's director Ashraf Ismail confirmed during an E3 panel (via VG 24/7).

And yet, it will feature some online functionality, though the nature of that functionality has yet to be announced. These will simply be enhancements, apparently, and are thus unlikely to resemble Watch Dogs 2's random PvP hackings or anything more conventional. Something along the lines of leaderboards seems more likely.

Online multiplayer has never been a huge component of Assassin's Creed games anyway: the multiplayer stuff in Assassin's Creed 3 and Black Flag was decent enough, but it's unlikely anyone is baying for its return.

In other new Ass Creed developments, the new instalment will be (mercifully?) free of those intimidatingly crowded mini-maps, opting instead for a horizontal guider similar to that found in Skyrim.

The panel – embedded below – also featured some new gameplay, though prepare to squint at offscreen footage. Or you could read James' impressions here.

When I watched the first—the very first—Assassin’s Creed trailer over 10 years ago, I drooled at the fantasy of a historical setting I'd never seen before in a game, propped up to be a deep assassination sandbox. I’d dance along the rooftops and sneak through bustling marketplaces, taking out my targets in plain sight, then disappear into the crowd.

And then I played the damn thing. The controls were only a suggestion to Altair. He’d jump where he wanted, often to his death. Worse, the sandbox was shallow, a series of bench-sittings and frustrating chase scenes. Subsequent Assassin’s Creed games never quite steered back to the creative assassination fantasy, piling up systems on systems to compensate. More mission variety made them more fun, but they never lived up to my imagination.

After playing Assassin's Creed: Origins at E3, I don’t get the impression it’s a perfect knife-in-the-dark simulation, but after a much needed year off, Assassin’s Creed is finally getting back to the point: killing jerks in cool ways. Here’s how:

You can fast forward through time

Just press a button and the camera zooms out to frame the landscape in a nice panorama, and hours pass in seconds. Clouds fly by, light spills out and fades with the sun—it’s an amazing tool. If I prefer the low light of night for stealthy infiltration, I can just speed up to nighttime and get to knifing. If I prefer to hide in plain sight among the busy crowds of a marketplace, I can fast forward to the busiest time of day just like that. It's a great way to play with, and within, the simulation.

Every NPC has a schedule

Every visible character in the world has an agenda. They’ll eat, go to work, sleep, and so on. The Ubi reps wouldn’t confirm anything, but I asked if that meant we could trace the routine of a particular assassination target for a particularly opportune moment. I didn’t get a definite answer, but it seems like a no-brainer to me. Is Assassin’s Creed: Origins taking a page from Hitman? I hope so, because: yes.

A few hours in, the map opens up completely

After a three to five hour stint in a smaller part of the world, you’ll be able to explore Egypt at your leisure. Certain areas of the game will have high level opponents, so the potential for a great challenge and great reward is almost always going to be there. I like the idea of throwing myself at a tough fort early on to get a crazy piece or armor or weaponry and taking it with me through simpler areas of the game.

The demo was definitely from one of those simpler sections. I didn’t get spotted until I tried to, but I was using a character from 15 hours into the game. My favorite stealth game memories are from when I’m backed into a particularly treacherous corner and have to dig into my pockets and wit to find a way out. An open map with high level areas could be the perfect place to put myself in that position at will.

The mini-map is a bird

Removing the mini-map forces me to study my surroundings more closely, and taps into the same geographical curiosity as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The eagle still highlights points of interest with icons, which is something a very boring, nerd eagle would do. The eagle probably has a very shitty personality. I hope we can turn off icons completely and navigate the world via landmarks and curiosity.

Either way, Senu is a powerful tool, nearly cheating I’d wager, because they let you study a given enemy fort or camp from tip to toe before setting foot inside. That said, a good assassin should have that kind of knowledge. 

The controls and animations feel better than ever

Running, climbing, swimming, and contextual stealth kills feel smoother than ever, like playing out an elaborate animation is less of a priority. That isn’t to say it looks bad in motion, but actions feel more immediate than I remember from past Assassin's Creeds. There were no misplaced leaps in my hour with the game, which made stealth play a cinch. Everything I intended was executed perfectly on screen. I felt swift and smart, not at odds with the game itself. 

With fire propagation and beast taming, it's basically Far Cry now

God bless you, Far Cry 2. I touched an arrow to a flame then shot it at an oil jar, expecting it to flame up and fan out quickly. Half the fort I stood in caught fire. The guards were swallowed up in no time. Arson: it’s good. 

With enough skill points invested in the right places, you can tag wild animals with sleep darts and tame them. If it’s applied across the board, you bet I’m clearing that game with crocodiles only. Get at me speedrunners. Enemy encampments will have caged beasts hanging out on occasion too, so if you let those poor bubs loose, you can likely guess what happens.

(Far Cry happens.)

Make poisonous corpse traps with the new skill tree 

Taking a page from Bioshock Infinite and Dishonored, you can make corpses deadly. Kill a dude, poison the corpse, leave him in plain sight, and wait until a foolish guard gets curious. If he gets too close, it’s lights out.

The skill tree enables more than just poisonous corpse play too. It’s split into three specializations: combat, hunting, and special skills like poison corpse traps. Others skills let you tame animals, dual wield weapons, control the direction of special arrows in mid-air, hold your breath underwater for longer, and more.

Combat is a viable (and fun) option now

Swords and boards have been completely revamped and now combat is less of a responsive animation reflex test, and much more immediate. There’s a lock-on that lets you circle an enemy, a light and heavy attack, and a dodge. It only looks like Dark Souls, but with unlimited stamina, you can be as aggressive as you want. Get in, slash, and dodge to your heart’s content. The catch is that you’ll face a lot of enemies at once. Managing their positions while flicking between targets and dodging all the while gets hectic and takes some getting used to. Get enough consecutive hits in and a meter will fill up. Use it to unleash a special that instantly kills whatever poor guy you’re locked on to. 

The gear, baby!

First off, the inventory menu is right out of Destiny, circle cursor and everything. It’s an unwieldy menu interface for gamepad users, but it’ll feel right at home on PC, I’m sure. Loot is split into three rarities: common, rare, and legendary. Common equipment has one unique trait, Rare items have two, and Legendary items have three. I’m not sure what the breadth of those traits are, but with enough variety, I’m hoping we can make some super strange assassin builds. At the very least, it’s motive to specialize towards a more stealthy, tanky, or ranged build and makes me want to murder dudes in the ways that are most fun. Stealth will definitely be my thing, but when shit gets raw I’ll have whip out a massive axe. They’ll whisper tales about the big-ass axe in the night.

Also, horses are loot. Like, there are Legendary horses with unique traits, so even if the story does nothing for you, there’s your motive for taking out the bad guys.