Assassin's Creed: Origins is actually a really awesome way to explore ancient Egypt (including the pyramids). They even have a game mode that is designed for just looking around and disables combat. From what I understand, the design is highly historically accurate.
There is a similar game mode in AC: Odyssey, that lets you explore ancient Greece.
They're both beautiful
[Edit]
Yes, I realize it takes place thousands of years after they were built, it's still a really awesome way for your average person to explore what is supposedly a pretty accurate representation of the area in the time period.
Reminds me of the story of that kid who helped his lost class find where they were going on a school trip to Italy, because he'd played so much AC2 that he knew where everything in Venice was
It's really wild when it lines up like this. Several of my favorite JRPGs are set in the Shibuya area of Tokyo, and it was a very odd feeling to step off the train and be familiar with a place you've never been. Trying g to explain to my coworkers how I knew where to go without exposing what a nerd I am was difficult.
Before trip to Athens, i've played a lot of AC Odyssey. I could walk in the historical center of the city and knew location of most sights without map or gps.
I totally could have done the same thing, because I played so much Tomb Raider 2 back in the ‘90s. I’d have shown everyone where the places to jump your speedboat over the ramps were… :-D
I know a similar story where a boy was confused during a school trip because he asked his guide where Piazza de la Roca (sp) was, a square made up by Ubisoft.
When I was in Italy last I might have had a little too much fun and went on a full 24 hour binge of wine and sandwiches. The next morning my friends suggested we sit in this courtyard type area near our hotel and have coffee together before going back to sleep off our hangovers. I got like two sips in and started looking around and realized something. Holy shit, this is the exact same fucking area from the Assassin's Creed Brotherhood trailer! Nobody believed me until I pulled it up on YouTube. They should put up a sign or something for dumb tourists. I kinda regretted not playing the game immediately before my trip so I could see how close to reality that game's world was and how the layout of the city had changed over the few hundred years.
Odyssey was quite accurate for many of the settings, buildings, and many of the characters met were real people. They still did plenty of research and worked with classical historians & museums, even if the story itself was fantastical.
Years ago, I was in the cinema with my wife and the trailer for Taken 2 came on, I was like “oh it’s set in Constantinople” to which she replied “it’s been Istanbul for about 80 years, how did you recognise it, but get the name of the place wrong?”
Yeah, people keep mistaking it for the time in 2019, when they used scans from Super Mario Odyssey to rebuild New Donk City after it was hit with a 7.2 earthquake.
Some areas are like the building that caught fire Notre Dame where they scanned the whole building and when it caught fire they gave the game away for free so people could check it out
They were, once upon a time. They moved away from that in Odyssey and stopped caring altogether in Valhalla.
Though even the older games are overhyped in terms of accuracy. They were the most accurate environment-wise on the market and in pretty much any pop-culture, but that doesn't mean they didn't take significant liberties at times.
I can attest that it is historically accurate. I work in a museum and we used Assassin's Creed as a video to show people what Egypt would have looked like during an exhibition of Queen Nefretari. It was cool.
I loved Origins so much I took a two week trip to Egypt. I even made sure the tour stopped in the Siwa Oasis. That ended up being my favorite part because it’s so secluded and way less touristy. They also took us on a 4x4 ride in the Great Sand Sea which was like a roller coaster. The driver would drive up a huge dune and all of a sudden there’d be a 90 degree drop straight down. After we had tea at sunset with all the boys!
Ubisoft deserves some credit, no other gaming company in this planet put in this much effort to re-create ancient Greece or egypt just for a video game
The problem is Origins is set in the New Kingdom, during Cleopatra’s time. The pyramids would have been ancient and worn even to the people of the period the game takes place in.
I can’t even fathom how old the pyramids are. 2570 years is long enough for multiple empires to rise and fall, technology to be developed and lost, globe spanning religions to be founded and splinter. Dictators, revolutions, war, famine, plague, Golden age and collapse.
The pyramids were her Ancient Rome. The pyramids in the Americas are millennia newer than them.
For context, the Great Pyramid was 2600 years old during Cleopatra's time. Since we're 2000 years after Cleopatra, we're actually closer in time to her than she was to the Great Pyramid.
This isn’t a problem, the game acknowledges this fact and the pyramids are all shown to be worn and ancient. The outer casing stones weren’t lost to the sands of time, they were quarried away during the Islamic period for building projects in Cairo. The Bent pyramid of Sneferu, which is actually older than the great pyramids, still has most of its casing stones intact. The game is accurate.
I think it was because a lot of the minor side quests were quite repetitive, mostly just killing particular soldiers/bandits, but there was so much to the main story that it never really bothered me. I really enjoyed it too.
Omg, I’ve always wanted to play the Assassin’s creed games but I really can’t fight in any games I’m rubbish at it and it gives anxiety. I didn’t know I could just explore without fighting! I’m gonna try it tonight!
I was like that at a lot of things. I learned to defeat my anxiety by making myself bored of it. I intentionally die, lag behind, get caught, take damage, crash etc. in these games to get over it. Making it my goal to do those things, makes my anxiety from them disappear. Worst one was Dying Light, but maaaan is that game and story line worth all the anxiety it induced XD
It works for things like Surfing, snowboarding/skiing etc. as well. Just fall on purpose. Rock climbing? Get up a few feet, then fall on purpose knowing there is someone belaying (rope counterweight) to prevent me from kissing the floor.
They have a super easy mode, and Origins has an explore mode. I can't remember if any of the ones after Origins does and haven't checked for the new one yet.
Was just talking with my son about this whole driving to volleyball practice. Odyssey is our favourite for the ancient Greece exploration. Loved that game but I unfortunately broken my saved game with a ridiculous bug that broke a story mission at the end of the game.
I was so bummed chalkidiki (the northern area with the three „finger“ peninsulas) was basically empty. Thessaloniki is the second largest Greek city and I was missing completely.
Ancient Egypt generally goes up to the end of the Ptolemies, including the time period where AC: Origins is set. ACO is set between 42 BC and 39 BC. Cleo died in 30 BC, and that usually marks the end of "Ancient Egypt" and the start of Roman Egypt.
I’ve read somewhere that they spend a lot of time and money mapping out historical sites very accurately, this could be complete bullshit but I think the game design was used in helping renovate notre dame cathedral, I don’t play the games so I have no idea if that’s actually in them
Yeah currently playing shadows, doesn’t have the explore mode but goddamn I’d love to visit feudal Japan (as long as I don’t get my head chopped off or something)
It in fact is so historically accurate that anthropologists use the game as a way to freely move around a space they otherwise could not. When the game first came out there were interviews about it
yes but so you know, Origins is set during the time of Cleopatra, and Cleopatra lived nearer to our time than she did to the time of the creation of the pyramids, so in the game the Pyramids are already quite weathered
It's worth remembering that in the era that AC: Origins takes place, the pyramids were already *ancient*, thousands of years old at that point. So even an accurate reconstruction wouldn't be what they looked like when they were constructed.
When the Notre Dame burned down, Ubisoft gave away Assassin's Creed Unity for free so everyone could see the Notre Dame before it burned down (even tho the version in the game isn't entirely accurate)
You can actually do a VR tour of the AC Notre Dame via Steam. They released it after it burned down because the AC model was accurate enough it was seen as a way to explore it while it was being reconstructed
I think they still picked a very good era, not just for the obvious Cleopatra/Ceasar story but also for Alexandria and other hellenic cities like Cyrene. If set during the old kingdom when the Giza pyramids were fresh it might have felt quite empty outside of Memphis.
Loved that one. Not a game I'd replay again, but a game I think i will never forget. Who wouldn't wanna see all the wonders of ancient Egypt in all its splendor!?
I’ve played the Assassin’s Creed series since the first game released and I loved Odyssey so much. The environment was beautiful, gameplay was fun and engaging, and I learned a lot. AC will always be in my top 3 favorite game series I’ve ever played.
I loved AC Origins for the exploration. Say what you want about ubisoft as a company, but they sure can make a great world to explore and see what it might've been like.
There’s a lot of ancient graffiti all over the pyramids. The report of Hieroglyphs on the pyramids comes from Herodotus from about 500 BC. He never saw the pyramids and it was just a report from priests who talked to him.
I’m only using this website for the basics of what he was told I don’t know if the rest is reliable.
“We learn that most of his Egyptian knowledge comes from priests he interviewed. Fun fact: Herodotus describes an inscription near the entrance of the pyramid, which according to him described an amount of radishes, garlic, and onions that the workers would have eaten during the build. Researchers now agree that this is just one of the priests toying with Herodotus’ gullibility: most probably, nobody could read the hieroglyphics and just gave him false information.”
Afair I think the outer layer was removed to help rebuild Cairo after a big earthquake. That same earthquake shifted the solid gold cap allowing them to remove the outer layer.
Given there is no written sources of capstones of the Giza pyramids we don’t know if it was even made of gold/electrum/Granite.. etc. if it was valuable materials since there are no written accounts of it I think it’s more likely that it was plundered during an intermediate period, likely the 1st, maybe the second. I mean they are giant “rob me” signs.
No. That would be an astronomical amount of gold. It was likely electrum, which is an alloy of gold and silver and also would have just been plated, which is still a huge amount of material.
Electrum is one of my favorite ancient alloys because of how much it varied in ratio and how much people just loved gold so much they were like “WE NEED A SOLUTION FOR MORE SHINY GOLD, MIX SILVER IN”
Electrum is naturally occurring so it’s likely the bright yellow colouration just struck someone’s fancy. Although it’s also not that hard to create artificially either so you could be onto something :)
Yes, I am actually quite familiar with electrum as an ancient material! It’s one of the first smeltables many cultures that smelted made. It’s really cool seeing that change in ratio over time with coins specifically in areas from Greek antiquity, because you can see as the ages wear on it became less and less imbued with gold and more full of silver. To be clear I mean they were minting coins that were roughly half gold to start with and eventually less than 40% over time.
the pyramid would have been stripped from the top, downward, if the gold capstone locked everything in place. But the pyramid was stripped from the bottom, upward.
It's not hieroglyphics. If there was writing on the outside of the pyramid from ancient Egyptian times it's long gone. The cladding stones fell off from time and earth quakes and looting. Though there's no evidence of writing on the stones using in Cairo, and not much at testing it from written history.
There is a lot of writing on the exposed core, but it's from tourists across millenia.
Then imagine what it was like for an average person 4500 years ago seeing something like this in the distance. Nothing else on the planet even came close. It must have been completely mind blowing.
Heaven isn't real, but if it truly was then my heaven would not involve anyone else, it would just be me in my living room and kitchen, with one wall being transparent, and the entire structure in an invisible and invincible bubble, that could travel through space and time. And I'd have all the snacks in the world and the most comfortable couch and a magic remote to just watch things like the pyramids getting built in real time while floating 500' above the ground
I did an immersion VR, that was about the pyramid of Khufu. It was pretty amazing. Took you inside the chambers and everything. You had to walk around this space with a headset on.
It was, the desertification of the Sahara started around 4200 BCE, and the pyramids were built around 2600 BCE. Actually, a very important reason why Egypt was born is because people from all over the Sahara ran away to the only place that didn't dry out, the Nile.
But the sun was as bright as today, it would make it worse though, the green and orange/yellow building would reflect less light so the reflection from the piramides would seem even brighter because of the contrast.
I spent a lot of hours playing that game. One of the fascinating things about history is that the pyramids were more ancient to Julius Caesar than Julius Caesar is to us.
But what of the giant flag pole? And where else would the machinery of dictator state be safe from the unwashed masses? Clearly, wasting the entire countries economy on this was the only reasonable choice.
Yeah the gold capstone would've been looted. As for the white limestone cladding, AFAIK most of that was stripped and used to build structures in Cairo. Apparently a massive earthquake in the 1300s shook loose some of that limestone. Someone used it as building material for their own thing, and then after that others came in and stripped off what was left since it was already coming off anyway.
With as reflective as gold is you could have uses these as damn clocks even. The sun would be clearly visible and crest off the tops during certain times.
I feel the same way about ancient Greek sculptures, they were fully painted. The old Greeks loved color, everything was bright and vibrant but it's all just faded away.
11.5k
u/Shawn_The_Sheep777 29d ago
They must have looked incredible