Ubisoft Announce Discovery Tour By Assassin’s Creed: Ancient Egypt Free DLC For AC Origins

I’d forgotten how big a deal 2017 is for the Assassin’s Creed franchise. Not only is it the return for the series after going on hiatus for a year to reinvent itself, but it’s also the tenth anniversary of the original game, which in many ways set Ubisoft on the path to becoming the kind of juggernaut publisher that it is today.

One thing that the team at Ubisoft observed over this time has been that Assassin’s Creed has often been used as an educational tool by teachers, who dip into the games’ historical archives as a way of trying to engage students with the actual history. Of course, while Ubisoft take liberties with the periods, the characters and the technologies of the time, they’ve put in an awful lot of research to ground their games in reality. Now they’re preparing to share that wealth of research in a more engaging fashion with Discovery Tour By Assassin’s Creed: Ancient Egypt.

This will be a free download for Assassin’s Creed Origins coming in early 2018 and constitutes and almost entirely separate mode in the game. All of the combat, questing and story is stripped away, leaving an all ages open world museum for you to explore or take guided tours in as Origins protagonist Bayek or a number of other characters. These tours take you from place to place, letting you engage with dioramas, explanations and historical information that Ubisoft have collected, with all of this having been validated by historians to make it a legitimate educational tool

The snippet we were shown concerned the embalming and preservation process that corpses of the rich would go through in Ancient Egypt. As an NPC shoved a spoon up a body’s nostril, a voice over explained that this was done to scoop out the brain through a handful of wonderfully grisly steps to emptying the skull before stuffing it with parchment. It’s what he would have wanted. It might not be Horrible Histories, but this looks like a great use of Ubisoft’s efforts in creating the game, and I’m looking forward to this becoming a regular feature of the series.

As for the game itself, come back next week when we’ll hands on impressions and gorgeous 4K video of it in action on Xbox One X.

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2 Comments

  1. If I’m reading this correctly I think this is a very clever idea.

    Hope more games do this. For example, I’d love an Uncharted museum with development info etc. Maybe even some work in progress cutscenes replacing in game story cues.

    A sort of gamey way of doing a documentary.

  2. That sounds quite cool and definitely on the side of what has been a big part of the appeal of the AC series for me – ie the history lessons. But it’d be a shame if i was buying it just for the DLC. Unless they added two more letters .. such as V.. and R..

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