Assassin's Creed Mirage

• 1. Introduction

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  Assassin's Creed Mirage, released in 2023, started life as an expansion pack for Assassin's Creed Valhalla. Plans changed, and it grew into a standalone game. It is the thirteenth major installment in its series, yet it is deliberately small. Its hero is a street thief named Basim Ibn Ishaq, and its stage is a single historic city. Why would a giant franchise choose to shrink on purpose? What secret does a young thief carry that even he cannot see? And how does a stealth game end up carrying museum photographs? The answers start with the studio that built it.

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• 2. Stealth First

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  Ubisoft Bordeaux had only ever supported other studios before Mirage made it the lead developer. Its brief was to pull the series back toward its earliest style. Stealth, parkour and assassinations would come first, and the heavy role-playing systems of recent games would shrink. The result is far smaller than its predecessors. It mixes ideas those games introduced with habits from much older entries. The team also treated it as a birthday present. The game marked the series' 15th anniversary, and the developers reused the technology built for Valhalla to pay tribute to the very first Assassin's Creed. The main campaign runs roughly 15-20 hours, much like older games in the franchise.

  Assassination missions in Mirage follow the Black Box design first seen in Assassin's Creed Unity and Assassin's Creed Syndicate. Players explore a target's surroundings and choose their own route to reach and eliminate that person. Parkour, close-quarters combat and stealth remain the core. The game is open-world, but it is more linear and more story-focused than recent installments.

  Basim Ibn Ishaq is the only playable character, so the gender choice offered in Valhalla is gone. He carries the signature Hidden Blade, along with smoke bombs, throwing knives and poison darts. A skill tree lets players upgrade weapons and tools with different effects.

  Enkidu, named for a character from Mesopotamian mythology, is an eastern imperial eagle that scouts ahead for Basim. Unlike the birds in earlier games, Enkidu can be spotted and shot by enemy marksmen. Players must remove those marksmen before sending the eagle out again. Eagle Vision also returns.

  A new ability called Assassin Focus stops time. The player marks up to five enemies, and Basim then kills them one after another in quick succession. Stealth assassinations recharge it. Poles scattered around Baghdad let him cross wide gaps. The animations for moving and running were refined for fluidity, and the team named its inspirations as "samurai, ninja, and even Jedi to a certain point."

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• 3. Baghdad Under Strain

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  The Anarchy at Samarra gives Mirage its backdrop. It was a period of extreme internal instability under the Abbasid Caliphate, during the Islamic Golden Age. The story takes place a decade before the events of Valhalla.

  Baghdad is the main stage, and it is divided into four districts. They are the Round City, Karkh, Harbiyah, and Abassiyah, which holds the House of Wisdom. Smaller towns such as Anbar and Jarjaraya sit on the outskirts. The city is compact. It is closer in size to the Paris of Unity and the Constantinople of Revelations than to the vast maps of recent games.

  Alamut, the fortress headquarters of the Hidden Ones, appears in several missions. Players can only visit it when the story sends them there.

  Real people fill out the cast. The Banū Mūsā brothers are a trio of scholars and inventors. Muhammad ibn Abdallah ibn Tahir was the last Tahirid governor of Khurasan and Baghdad. The Caliph al-Mu'tazz appears alongside his mother, Qabiha. Al-Jahiz, al-Farghani, Hunayn ibn Ishaq, Arib al-Ma'muniyya and Wasif al-Turki round out the list of historical figures. One more character is based on the leader of the Zanj Rebellion, an uprising against slavery in the Abbasid Caliphate.

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• 4. A Thief's Secret

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  The story is told as a borrowed memory. After the events of Assassin's Creed Valhalla: The Last Chapter, modern-day Assassins use a blood sample from Basim to relive his life under the Abbasid Caliphate.

  In 861 CE, Basim is a young thief in Anbar, living beside his childhood friend Nehal. All his life he has been haunted by visions of a monstrous jinni, and Nehal helps him cope. Basim longs to join the Hidden Ones, but Roshan, the senior Hidden One in Anbar, flatly rejects him. To prove himself, he sneaks into the Caliph's palace and takes a chest that both the Hidden Ones and the Order of the Ancients want. Inside is a disk-shaped artifact that plays a holographic message. Caliph al-Mutawakkil catches him, and Nehal kills the Caliph to save him.

  The death of al-Mutawakkil brings swift revenge. Guards begin slaughtering thieves across Anbar, including many of Basim's friends. In anger, he blames Nehal, and the two part. Roshan helps him escape and takes him to the mountain fortress of Alamut. Over the following months he trains under her and is initiated. Their Mentor, Rayhan, then hears of the Order's growing influence in Baghdad. He sends a contingent of Hidden Ones to investigate, with Basim and Roshan in the lead.

  In Baghdad, Basim learns that five Order members have infiltrated the Caliphate's highest levels of power. They are using that power to excavate or rebuild ancient Isu artifacts. He hunts down four of them, assassinating them and their subordinates. Along the way he meets Nehal again. She distrusts the Hidden Ones and urges him to study the artifacts, believing that both of them are tied to those objects. Basim finally confronts the Order's leader, Qabiha, who was al-Mutawakkil's former concubine. She says his answers lie in an Isu temple beneath Alamut and tries to persuade him to come along. Roshan kills her and warns Basim to look no further.

  Basim disobeys and travels to Alamut with Nehal, only to find the fortress besieged by the Order's forces. He rescues many captured Hidden Ones and rallies them to fight back. Then he persuades Rayhan that the knowledge in the temple could defeat the Order. Roshan blocks his path, revealing that she knows his true nature and fears what the temple may awaken. Basim defeats her but spares her life.

  Inside the temple he finds more disk-shaped artifacts. He learns that the place was once a prison, where the Isu Loki was held. Nehal was never real. She and the jinni were both forms taken by his repressed memories as Loki. Basim chooses to embrace his nature as Loki's reincarnation, "fuses" with Nehal and regains Loki's memories. Afterward the Hidden Ones welcome him back, while Roshan resigns in protest. Basim muses that he has been reborn in a new world, and he looks forward to a "reunion" with those responsible for his imprisonment.

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• 5. Teaching Baghdad

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  A database of articles on the history of Baghdad opens up gradually as players progress through Mirage. Photographs of objects from the Khalili Collections, the David Collection, the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art and the Institut du Monde Arabe illustrate 9th-century Abbasid culture. Four academic experts in Islamic art helped create it. Grants from the UK's Economic and Social Research Council and the charity Barakat Trust supported the work.

  On the 4th of June 2023, Ubisoft announced that Mirage would be the first game in the series with an Arabic dub. Jordanian actor Eyad Nassar voices Basim in that version. In the other version, Lee Majdoub plays Basim, and Shohreh Aghdashloo plays his mentor Roshan.

  Discovery Tour: Medieval Baghdad arrived free on the 4th of September 2025. It is the fourth entry in the Discovery Tour series, which began with Assassin's Creed Origins. Earlier tours were educational modes inside their own games, but this one is a separate app for iOS and Android. It still teaches the history and culture of 9th-century Baghdad, and it pairs the lessons with a short narrative campaign set in the world of Mirage.

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• 6. Road To Release

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  Ubisoft announced the game at Ubisoft Forward on the 10th of September 2022. Before that, details had leaked under the codename Rift.

  A week before the reveal, a listing on the Xbox Store set off reports that the Entertainment Software Rating Board had given the game an Adults Only rating. Such a rating would have limited the outlets that could sell it in the United States, and one cited reason was "real gambling". Ubisoft later corrected both claims. It said the game had not been rated yet and that "no real gambling or lootboxes will be present in the game."

  The launch date moved up from the 12th of October 2023 to the 5th of October. The game arrived on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S, and Ubisoft+ subscribers could play from day one. Pre-orders came with an exclusive mission called The Forty Thieves. A Deluxe Edition added a Prince of Persia-inspired pack of weapons and cosmetic items, the soundtrack and a digital artbook. That pack is also sold separately. The iOS version, for iPhone 15 Pro and iPadOS on iPad models, followed on the 6th of June 2024.

  On the 22nd of September 2023, the American band OneRepublic released a song called "Mirage", featuring Mishaal Tamer. A music video mixed footage of the band with promotional footage of the game. Frontman Ryan Tedder said, "Having toured extensively in the Middle East, I wanted to capture the spirit of that region and reflect the location of the game sonically as much as possible." A promotional map for Mirage also appeared in the 2020 video game Trackmania. The game even works with a haptic vest from the gaming company Owo, a wireless skinsuit that registers movement from the upper body and arms.

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• 7. Life After Launch

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  In July 2023, game director Stéphane Boudon confirmed that Ubisoft had no plans for post-launch downloadable expansions. In August 2023, Ubisoft confirmed cosmetic microtransactions, sold as bundles directly on first-party stores at launch.

  A free update on the 12th of December 2023 added a New Game Plus mode. It also brought a legacy outfit inspired by Bayek's robes from Assassin's Creed Origins, plus bug fixes and gameplay improvements, including better parkour. A second free update on the 20th of February 2024 added a permadeath mode called "Full Synchronization". Completing it rewards players with new outfits and dyes.

  On the 24th of January 2025, the French newspaper Les Echos reported that Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund had agreed to finance an expansion. The report followed a diplomatic delegation to Saudi Arabia that Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot attended. On the 23rd of August 2025, Ubisoft confirmed that new material centered on the ancient city of al-Ula would arrive later that year. A trailer on the 6th of October 2025 revealed Valley of Memory, which came out free on the 18th of November and is estimated at six hours. An accompanying update added extra difficulties, weapon upgrades, new parkour mechanics and the ability to replay completed missions for challenges and rewards.

  Valley of Memory takes place during the main story, sometime before Basim confronts Qabiha. His friend Dervis tells him about a painting by Basim's estranged father, Is'haq ibn Khalid, which suggests the man is in al-Ula. Basim has not seen his father since he was mysteriously exiled from Samarra years earlier. The two travel there together. A gang of robbers is terrorizing the locals, and its leader, 'Abis, captures and imprisons Basim. After escaping and killing 'Abis, Basim discovers that the robbers have kidnapped Is'haq.

  A trail of clues leads to the gang's true leader, a local merchant named Nimlot. He wants revenge for his father, one of the Order members Basim assassinated in Baghdad. Basim infiltrates his stronghold, kills him and saves Is'haq. He is saddened to find that his father has dementia and believes he is still in Samarra. At a nearby tomb, Is'haq recounts memories of Basim and of Basim's late mother, revealing how much he loves them both. Basim chooses not to reveal his identity. He parts ways with Is'haq and returns to Dervis with a sense of closure.

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• 8. Reception And Reach

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  According to the review aggregator Metacritic, Assassin's Creed Mirage received "generally favorable" reviews. GamesRadar+ praised how dense Baghdad feels compared with recent entries, writing, "Markets bustle with shoppers and traders speaking multiple languages, streets see people meander in clusters." IGN called the back-to-basics approach a successful first step toward the stealthy style. It found Basim dull, however, writing, "He's a pretty milquetoast, golden retriever of a man, largely agreeable and affable when it comes to his interpersonal relationships."

  Game Informer singled out the parkour: "The opportunity for engaging parkour traversal is always present, and moving along rooftops, sliding down zip lines, and diving into hiding spots is great fun." GameSpot praised the social stealth, the world design and the investigations. It criticized the storyline's reliance on previous entries and the uninteresting supporting characters.

  Famitsu estimated that the PlayStation 5 version sold 20,407 physical units in its first week in Japan. That made it the third best-selling retail game on the chart. According to Tom Henderson of Insider Gaming, the game had gathered 5 million players and an estimated $250 million in revenue by January 2024.

  Assassin's Creed Shadows, the successor to Mirage, was released in March 2025. It is set in Japan during the Sengoku period and returns to the role-playing style of earlier installments. In November 2025, Ubisoft reported that Mirage itself had reached 10 million players.

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