What is the Smallest Assassin‘s Creed Map? An Exploration of How AC‘s Game Worlds Have Ballooned
As an avid Assassin‘s Creed gamer who has played every release since the original 2007 title, I‘ve loved watching Ubisoft‘s incredible attention to crafting immersive historical sandbox worlds. But looking back, it‘s wild realizing just how massive the maps have gotten compared to AC1‘s modest initial scope focused on a single medieval Middle Eastern city. For this analysis, we‘ll highlight how small that inaugural Damascus sandbox was, under half a square mile!
The Quaint Urban Traverses of Assassin‘s Creed (2007)
The very first AC game exclusively centered its action around Damascus in the year 1191, placing you in the robes of master assassin Altaïr Ibn-La‘Ahad. The full explorable sandbox world measured just 0.13 square kilometers according to dedicated players‘ calculations and analysis. For reference, that‘s barely a tenth the size of Los Santos in GTA V!
Within these compact city confines, Ubisoft packed the winding alleys and bustling souks with throngs of citizens, guard patrols, and white-knuckle parkour traversal across mosques and towers. As a fan revisiting AC1 lately, I appreciate how densely filled it feels while retaining an intimate sense of place. You swiftly move across every district from the Poor Quarter slums to the inner Citadel gates learning the web of side streets.
Beyond tailing targets or avoiding guards, simply running across Damascus‘s rooftops and mapping out climbable surfaces becomes second nature. This makes the diminutive world feel richer than its size suggests – one perfect for the series‘ initial stealth-driven concept. Ubisoft clearly aimed to recreate compact urban playgrounds analogous to the sandbox murder arenas of Hitman.
The Vast Countryside Adventures of Odyssey and Valhalla
But then came the radical shift towards fully leaning into open worlds with Black Flag‘s Caribbean seas, before Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla ballooned the maps into national or even continental scales!
Examining the actual square mileage figures of recent games shows a leap far beyond AC1‘s fraction of a city:
- Assassin‘s Creed Odyssey (2018): 90.7 square miles
- Assassin‘s Creed Valhalla (2020): Over 100 square miles
These absolutely dwarf poor Damascus at one-three hundredth the playable space! Exploring the sprawling lands of Ancient Greece and England/Norway transforms the entire gameplay approach. With vastly wider terrain between settlements, horse riding and ship travel become necessary, while imposing mountain ranges, forest hunting zones, and diverse biomes create a sense of true adventure across countries.
Focus shifts from intimate hit-and-run assassinations to managing a settlement home base. Epic saga quests have players influencing the fates of cities between battling mercenaries and mythical beasts. It‘s easy to forget you‘re playing an Assassin‘s Creed game! The move to RPG mechanics paired with the exponentially larger worlds brings open exploration to the forefront.
Will Mirage Signal a Return to Focus?
Based on reports so far, the next series entry Mirage in 2024 plans to downsize back to another densely populated single city sandbox akin to AC1. Its setting in Baghdad during the Islamic Golden Age harkens to the original‘s Middle East locale and time period. Given the nostalgic throwback setup and word of a 15-20 hour tighter narrative scope, early signs point towards Mirage distilling the series blueprint without the recent excesses of hundred-plus hour RPG odysseys.
We‘ll have to await final details, but this could allow Ubisoft to refocus on urban stealth action refined to a polish – reminding fans why we loved Altaïr stalking targets across Damascus to begin with! Yet I‘ll still have blast exploring the ridiculously massive worlds of Greece and England as a globe-trotting assassin tourist. Here‘s hoping Mirage balances that classic immersive density with some quality-over-quantity restraint.
