I really like what I've seen of Assassin's Creed Mirage so far. Though Assassin's Creed's shift into open-world action-RPGs has resulted in plenty of good ideas coming to the series, it's created a trilogy of games that oftentimes feel disconnected from what came before. I love Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla, but all three, to various extents, put the Assassin's Creed experience into too big of a setting or overshadow all the cool real-world history with a less-impressive supernatural flair.

In comparison, Mirage looks a lot more like the series' earlier games. You play as Basim Ibn Ishaq, a young street thief in Baghdad who is inducted into the Hidden Ones (the precursor to the Assassin Brotherhood) and is tasked with hunting down members of the Order of the Ancients (the precursor to the Templar Order). Unlike the more recent Assassin's Creed games, in Mirage you can't pick between two playable characters, and there aren't dialogue options throughout the story. There's no giant, branching skill tree of abilities to parse, and the scope of the game more closely resembles the medium-sized Assassin's Creed games.

"[Mirage] is going to be a condensed experience," Assassin's Creed Mirage art director Jean-Luc Sala told me. "It's a more focused game. The size of it is something like a Rogue or a Revelations, just to give you an idea of the scope."