Assassin's Creed Origins launches tourist Discovery Mode today, also as a standalone
All of the history, none of the murdering
Lace up your walking boots and fill your canteen, as today Assassin's Creed Origins wanders into a world of tourism. Today the game receives its new Discovery Mode in a free update, letting players freely and peacefully explore Ancient Egypt and enjoy guided tours written with historians. Ubisoft also sell this mode as a separate standalone game, cheaper and without any of that murdering. I've not played AssCreed Oranges yet because I have so many open-world murder simulators already half-finished, but I am tempted by wandering.
If you own AssCreed Oranges, you'll get Discovery Mode for free in today's update. Along with peaceful exploring of the game's world, it'll offer guided tours through specific landmarks. These 75 tours suggest a walking line to move through a space, telling relevant information at stations along the way. They have narrators and all. And Discovery Mode will let people explore with different avatars, so you can dress up as, say, royalty rather than Ian Stabman.
The standalone Discovery Tour By Assassin's Creed: Ancient Egypt, as its called, costs £16/€20/$20 through Steam and Ubisoft's own Uplay. The ridiculous name would suggest that Ubisoft are considering doing this with other AssCreeds, which would be nice.
Ubisoft will have you believe this is something teachers have wanted and students will enjoy.
"We've been in touch with teachers from the very first instalment of Assassin's Creed games. Many of them already used the games during their History classes but soon came to realise that what they needed was an easily accessible educative tool based in our historical reconstructions," Ubisoft Montreal's in-house historian, Maxime Durand, said in the launch announcement. "With the Discovery Tour by Assassin's Creed: Ancient Egypt, you can visualise and understand thousands of things from Egyptian history in their actual context. As both a game and a learning tool, it is quite a unique asset for teachers to integrate as part of their history classes."
I say there's nothing wrong with the way my generation learned about history: by finding mildew-ridden history mags in the woods. We don't need computers to hasten learning, just the adrenaline that comes from the fear that you might be caught hunched over a profile of Jacob Bronowski.
