Continuing with Assassin’s Creed Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla’s introduction of the Discovery Tour, mode that allowed players to freely roam Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, and the Viking Age to learn more about their history and daily life, Ubisoft has introduced a similar new feature for the upcoming Assassin’s Creed Mirage called History of Baghdad. This feature adds historical context to the game’s simulation of the past. It will be part of the in-game codex that will also include tutorials and a database with lore and will deliver expertly curated information on the history, art, and culture of Baghdad and the Abbasid Caliphate circa the ninth century, accompanied by images provided by museum partners.
History of Baghdad will be integrated to the main game, keeping with the game’s goal of being a tribute to the early Assassin’s Creed games. It will function similarly to the database of earlier games and will be tied to player progression. An in-game reward will be available to Basim once completed. As Basim visits 66 historical sites throughout Baghdad, players will unlock research-driven articles that dig into information across five topics: Economy; Belief & Daily Life; Government; Art & Science; and Court Life.
“From the start we had an ambitious premise: to help the players better understand the world of ninth-century Baghdad, a world that is seldom represented in popular culture,” says Dr. Raphaël Weyland, a historian working at Ubisoft Montreal. “In the pursuit of this lofty goal, we were given the freedom to choose what topics we wanted to tackle. We just had to make sure that what we wanted to describe existed in the world of Assassin’s Creed Mirage.”
“We might not always know it, but there is a little of Baghdad in the animal tales we read to our children and the perfumes our lovers wear,” Weyland says. “This comes from the role of the city as a global hub attracting artists, scholars and traders from all over the world. By weaving together various traditions, they created research methods and artistic styles that are still important today. This cosmopolitan aspect, as well as the influence that Baghdad has on us, are at the heart of the story and the world-building of Assassin’s Creed Mirage.”
“I’m fascinated by the creativity, dynamism, and intellectual curiosity of this period of history,” says Dr. Glaire D. Anderson, founder of the University of Edinburgh’s Digital Lab for Islamic Visual Culture & Collections. “People across the caliphal lands were experimenting, debating, discussing, creating new works in every area of human activity, [which] built on the great traditions of the ancient past, but were at the same time new and distinct from what came before.”
Images for History of Baghdad were provided by partner museums, including The David Collection, museum in Copenhagen with one of the most comprehensive collections of Islamic art in the Western world; the Institut du monde arabe in Paris, which hosts a museum and a library entirely devoted to the arts and cultures of the Arab world; The Khalili Collections, assembled by Professor Sir Nasser D. Khalili and containing some 35,000 works of art; and the Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art, Culture & Design, center of the Doris Duke Foundation in Honolulu for exploring Islamic art and cultures. The museums provided illustrations and photos of a diverse selection of artifacts from the caliphal period – during which Assassin’s Creed Mirage is set – ranging from drinking vessels and sculptures to scientific equipment, such as astrolabes.