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Assassin’s Creed Origins won’t have insta-fail stealth or eavesdrop missions

Assassin's Creed Origins combat

Assassin’s Creed Origins won’t have you instantly fail missions if you’re detected or if you leave a particular zone.

Assassin’s Creed Origins features all of ancient Egypt – get the lay of the land with the game’s map.

That’s according to game director Ash Ismail in a new video courtesy of IGN First, which is focusing on Origins this month.

At 03:40 in the video, Ismail says:

“Because we’re going with a quest structure, because we have a world that’s really alive and big, we wanted to make sure that all the frictions of ‘you’ve left the zone’ or ‘you’ve been detected’ – these are not conditions that fail quests or missions.”

The first of these means no more instant-fail eavesdropping missions, while the second means no more instant-fail sneaking. Both mission types have been a nuisance in this series ever since the first Assassin’s Creed, and were present and incorrect right up to Black Flag. Unity and Syndicate dialed them back a little, sometimes causing you to fail secondary objectives rather than the mission itself, but didn’t purge them entirely. Perhaps Origins will finally do so?

Discussion on the Assassin’s Creed subreddithas mostly welcomed the change, though some diehard fans are concerned that Origins will let players take a ‘guns blazing’ approach – you’re meant to be an assassin, after all.

I get that, but personally, lazy insta-fail missions were one of my biggest frustrations with Black Flag and a reason I haven’t bought an Assassin’s Creed game since. Hopefully Origins can come up with a more elegant way to incentivise stealthy play.