Assassin’s Creed Mirage is, reportedly, much shorter than any recent game in the series.
“...The latest playtimes we’ve received average at around 20-23 hours," Ubisoft lead producer Fabian Salomon told YouTuber Julien Chièze, remarks that were translated from French by PCGamesN. "That can go up to 25-30 hours for the completionists, and we’ll say that those who will be rushing the game will be around 20 hours.”
As PCGamesN noted, this makes Mirage about five times shorter than Assassin’s Creed Valhalla for completionists, which takes 143 hours to 100 percent (per HowLongToBeat.com), and roughly three times shorter than an average Valhalla playthrough.
In a gaming culture that is obsessed with length, it’s bold for Ubisoft to talk about how short their big fall game is. The company is hedging its bets, to be sure. It’s set to follow Mirage up with a live-service AC platform that is designed to live forever and support multiple big-ass open-world games. Ubisoft’s future plans for the series notwithstanding, releasing Mirage is a gamble — especially when the company hasn’t launched a new Assassin’s Creed game in three years, the longest gap between releases in series history. It will be possible for players to finish Mirage in under a day, and that may piss off a subset of players.
On the other hand, the series is now 16 years old, and the teenagers who fell in love with the first game back in 2007 are in their late twenties and early thirties now. We have jobs that take up eight hours a day, and/or partners we need to devote time to outside of work, and/or kids who we need to parent, and/or a whole host of other responsibilities and hobbies. This age group is not the entire target audience, obviously, but we are a large portion of it, and we have less time than we used to. It's a positive for us if we can see everything a game has to offer without feeling like it fully consumed our lives or took us away from our loved ones.
But the main reason I'm rooting for Assassin's Creed Mirage is that, if it's successful, it may mean that more triple-A studios take a step back and ask whether it's worth it to chase ever-increasing map sizes and runtimes. If Mirage, at 20 hours and $49.99, sells a ton of copies, then the evidence will exist that gamers are eager to spend (near) full price on a game that won't take them the length of a college course to complete. And the upside of games being shorter will, hopefully, be developers spending less time on one project. I've said this many times before, but it bears repeating that I love Naughty Dog and Rockstar and would love for them to be able to put out games more frequently. Ubisoft is planting a flag for game length not having any correlation to quality, and I hope that Mirage is good enough that gamers finally take that lesson to heart.