Your job might be stressful, but on the bright side, there (probably) isn’t an ancient order of assassins out for your blood. That would be very stressful. Sadly, for the some of the NPCs in Assassin’s Creed Origins, there is an ancient order of assassins out for their blood, and as a result, they can get very stressed out.
Check out our guide to all the new Assassin’s Creed Origins abilities.
In a video from Assassin’s Creed YouTuber Loomer, which you can watch above, the game’s director Ashraf Ismail gave a taste of the new emergent gameplay that Origins is bringing to the series. In his example, a rebel group attempt to storm a fortress, raising the alarm and waking up the commander, who’s one of the player’s targets. Once the rebels have given up their assault, the commander won’t simply go back to bed, because he’ll be too stressed out to just go back to sleep.
Ismail says “the idea is that [the commander] is carrying a lot of stress at this point. The AI carries stress. The idea is he cannot go back to sleep so he starts kind of roaming his own fort and he goes to one of the towers and it looks like he’s really doing a lookout.”
Ismail says that these interactions will allow players a new way to get to their targets, without directly impacting the world. The game’s new emergent gameplay will allow players opportunities to break the daily routines of their targets, which makes them more vulnerable to attack. But with the focus moving even further away from stealth kills, has Assassin’s Creed Origins forgotten what it means to be an assassin?