The publisher had a rough 2024, with Star Wars Outlaws failing to meet sales expectations and word of XDefiant's demise coming around six months after the tactical shooter debuted. Skull and Bones finally arrived too, but it was a bit of a damp squib. Amid rumors of the company being sold or spinning out some of its assets into a joint venture with Tencent, Ubisoft really needs a win. It's not going to have a better chance to do that anytime soon than with Assassin's Creed Shadows. After a couple of delays, the latest entry in the company's flagship series is set to arrive on March 20.

Editor's note: This article contains mild spoilers for Assassin's Creed Mirage. The deeper I got into Assassin's Creed Mirage, the more a sense of warm nostalgia washed over me. It felt like a cozy hug from an old friend. The latest entry in Ubisoft's long-running open-world adventure franchise takes the series back to its roots. Mirage mostly forgoes the RPG approach Ubisoft adopted in the last three main games: Assassin's Creed Origins, Odyssey and Valhalla.

Most canals that cut through ninth-century Baghdad are a muddy brown, thick with the silt churned up by the poles of passing punts. But there's one inlet in the city where the water is stained red, a persistent crimson cloud that doesn't shift with the stream's eddies. Follow the red-running gutters through the sidestreets shouldered by clay-brick houses, and you'll find not an abattoir but a dye factory. Between lines of fabrics hung up to dry, workers sweat as they stir cloth in great pots of coloured water, occasionally stopping to mop their brows. After a palace burglary goes wrong, you are forced to flee your village and join the Hidden Ones, taking up their fight against the Order, a secretive club who are worming their way into Baghdad's upper echelons of power.

Assassin's Creed Mirage is a dream for stealth kings. People who loved Sam Fisher in Splinter Cell or simply the old Assassin's Creeds will have a tremendous fun in beautiful 9th century Baghdad, our recent hands-on with the game revealed. We throw coins, briefly distract a guard, dart around corners. In that game, we are a bear of a man, with arms like tree trunks as we swing the axe and make the English army tremble. Valhalla also had its moments, but in Mirage there is much more of a hand-built feel.

I waved goodbye to Assassin's Creed Valhalla after 12 hours. I took my time to do everything I could in the opening area, then spent a couple of hours in the main part of the game. After yet another side objective that Ubisoft jammed into this bloated game, it dawned on me -- nope, I can't go any further. I could tell early on that the world was too big with too much to do. I had a similar problem with Far Cry 6, another recent open-world Ubisoft game I endured for around the same length of time.

If you've been waiting for a game that takes the Assassin's Creed franchise back to its roots, you won't have to wait long: The May PlayStation Showcase just revealed that Assassin's Creed Mirage will release on October 12. Set two decades before Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Mirage will put players in the robes of Basim Ibn in the city of Baghdad, 861 CE, and will have a stronger focus on stealth mechanics and parkour-based movement than its predecessor. That makes it look a lot like older games in the series from the trailers we've seen so far, but it hasn't completely abandoned Valhalla's innovations: Basim's pet eagle can scout ahead to spot threats and targets, just like the bird companions in the previous game. Naturally, the PlayStation Showcase highlighted the game's release for PS4 and PS5 consoles, but Assassin's Creed Mirage will also be available on Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Amazon Luna and PC when it launches later this year.

Assassin's Creed Mirage, the next entry in Ubisoft's long-running action-adventure series, will arrive in 2023. The publisher announced the release date today during its Ubisoft Forward event. Set two decades before the events of Assassin's Creed Valhalla, the game will reunite fans with a Basim Ibn Ishaq and return the series to its stealth roots. In a briefing held before today's presentation, Ubisoft Bordeaux, the studio leading development on the project, described Basim as the most agile assassin in franchise history. He'll have new abilities to assist him in avoiding detection, some of which you can see on display in the cinematic trailer Ubisoft shared today.

After plenty of leaks, Ubisoft has confirmed that Assassin's Creed Mirage is the next entry in its long-running series. More details are expected to drop during the Ubisoft Forward event September 10th, but for now we can gleam some tidbits from the announcement image. It shows Basim Ibn Ishaq, a character from the recent Assassin's Creed Valhalla, leaping with his hidden blade in front of the Palace of the Golden Gate in Baghdad (via Polygon). That lines up with previous leaks around the game's setting, which also indicated that Mirage would be a return to stealth gameplay for the series. The new title was originally intended to be DLC for Valhalla, but Bloomberg reports that it was later transformed into a standalone experience to fill out Ubisoft's release schedule. No matter its conception, it's nice to see the series return to its Middle Eastern roots.

As babies, we babble and imitate our way to learning languages. We don't start off reading raw text, which requires fundamental knowledge and understanding about the world, as well as the advanced ability to interpret and infer descriptions and relationships. Rather, humans begin our language journey slowly, by pointing and interacting with our environment, basing our words and perceiving their meaning through the context of the physical and social world. Eventually, we can craft full sentences to communicate complex ideas. Similarly, when humans begin learning and translating into another language, the incorporation of other sensory information, like multimedia, paired with the new and unfamiliar words, like flashcards with images, improves language acquisition and retention. Then, with enough practice, humans can accurately translate new, unseen sentences in context without the accompanying media; however, imagining a picture based on the original text helps.

As babies, we babble and imitate our way to learning languages. We don't start off reading raw text, which requires fundamental knowledge and understanding about the world, as well as the advanced ability to interpret and infer descriptions and relationships. Rather, humans begin our language journey slowly, by pointing and interacting with our environment, basing our words and perceiving their meaning through the context of the physical and social world. Eventually, we can craft full sentences to communicate complex ideas. Similarly, when humans begin learning and translating into another language, the incorporation of other sensory information, like multimedia, paired with the new and unfamiliar words, like flashcards with images, improves language acquisition and retention. Then, with enough practice, humans can accurately translate new, unseen sentences in context without the accompanying media; however, imagining a picture based on the original text helps.