Assassin's Creed Mirage is exactly what we need before the next generation of the series

gamesradar.com:

It might feel strange for a successful series to take a break from its latest evolution to return to its origins, but that's exactly what Ubisoft is doing with Assassin's Creed Mirage. And it's the right move. After Assassin's Creed Origins took the classic series' formula and applied it to a vast open-world scale and RPG mechanics back in 2017, we've had almost five years of huge Assassin's Creed titles. And that's even with the series taking a break in 2019 from its usual annualized release schedule.

Because after Origins, we had the 2018 Ancient Greece adventure that was the immense Assassin's Creed Odyssey, which was followed by Assassin's Creed Valhalla and its epic Viking tale in 2020. Each of those three vast open-world RPGs also had at least two major expansions too, turning each one into quests with the potential to last for hundreds of hours. And as someone who's clocked over 180 hours with Eivor in Valhalla, even I reached the point where I had finally had enough of Assassin's Creed Valhalla after Dawn of Ragnarok. 

At this point, Assassin's Creed as a series is at risk of developing open-world fatigue. Ubisoft promised that Valhalla would be shorter and smaller than Odyssey, but anyone who's stepped foot in its Dark Ages England will know that that's not exactly true. Each one of Ubisoft's takes on an open-world Assassin's Creed has been bigger and denser than the last, and although that's incredibly admirable, it's also not sustainable. 

Ubisoft titles are already regularly (rightly or wrongly) criticized for being too formulaic, and producing worlds of this magnitude every two years surely just risks that becoming more and more palpable. By switching to a project like Assassin's Creed Mirage, it allows the