Ever since Ubisoft unveiled Assassin’s Creed Mirage in September 2022, the company hasn’t shied away from how the game is a spiritual successor to the series’ very first entry.
In particular, Mirage lead developer Ubisoft Bordeaux aimed to create a smaller, stealth-focused sandbox set in the Middle East, taking cues from the 1191 Holy Land setting of 2007’s Assassin’s Creed. Enter 9th-century Baghdad starring Basim, a returning character from 2020’s Viking-era Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
To help ensure Mirage‘s Baghdad was authentic to the time period, Ubisoft Bordeaux — in partnership with 12 other global studios, including Ubisoft Montreal — worked with a team of historians to offer consultation. One of those historians, Montreal’s Raphaël Weyland, was brought on due to his expertise in Islamic history.
At a Mirage launch at Ubisoft Montreal, MobileSyrup sat down with Weyland to learn more about the development of the game. He discussed what surprised him about video game development, the rich history of Baghdad and the power of gaming as a great educational tool.
Question: You mentioned during the introductory panel that you ended up working with Ubisoft Montreal because you were looking for various paid historian gigs. I’m curious: what was your previous background or familiarity with games and what surprised you the most about game dev once you got involved?
Raphaël Weyland: I would say that I was a gamer. I thought I was a heavy gamer but then I came into Ubisoft and I discovered people were really heavy gamers who know far more than I do. And so I discovered that I was actually more of a casual gamer. But I tend to play a lot of historical games, including the Assassin’s Creed games, and others, too. And yeah, it has been part of my life since I was a child. But making video games is quite different from playing them; I’ve had to learn a lot. I have been amazed by the professionalism of the people.
It’s a fun environment, there are plenty of jokes, and it’s a good atmosphere, but at the same time, there is a lot of work to create a video game, and a lot of people with really specialized skills to be able to create it so it would look nice, that it would move nicely, that the sound will be perfect and all of that — it’s so many different special individuals that altogether make a game. And I think I never realized that before — how many people, yes, but also the different kinds of talents. Doing Mirage, for instance, the first time I went and saw a mocap shoot, I went, “This is incredible.” The mocap actors are incredible people. I would tell them some stuff, the words coming out of my mouth, and they would become that thing. And that is wonderful, like magic. So yeah, it’s a great experience.
Q: You said you were surrounded by stories of Middle Eastern settings. When you wanted to pursue post-secondary education, what was it about the Middle East, specifically, that made you want to study it?
Weyland: I’ve wanted to be a historian since I was a teenager. Of course, many people asked me, ‘Don’t you want to make money or something? Don’t you want to have a real job?” [laughs] Like many people have been told in their life. And I never thought about that; I pursued what interested me. And I always had fun and was interested in that region. What really draws me to it is the fact that it is a hub geographically.
Today we have the continents of the Americas and Australia and all of that. But in the Middle Ages, the people that lived from Europe to Asia didn’t know there were Americas or something else. So if you wanted to go from France to China, let’s say, or anywhere in between, you had to go through the Middle East. And so this was a place where many different people had to go, and this was a place where things were happening. This is where the richest cities were, this is where the greatest artists and the greatest scientists were. For that reason, because it brings together people, it has always interested me. And I guess is something there from my childhood, too.
Q: I think people probably have a very loose idea of what a historian such as yourself would do on a project like this. You were on this project for years, right?
Weyland: Yeah, about two years.
Q: So what did that look like for you on a day-to-day basis? Especially since you’re based in Montreal and this is a game that is primarily developed by Ubisoft Bordeaux in France; it’s a global effort. How does that collaboration work when it comes to your role in the game?
Weyland: It would be bi-directional. I had two calls a week with people from Bordeaux, especially with Jean-Luc Sala, the art director. I would talk to him for an hour every Wednesday morning, one of the best hours of my week. He’s a wonderful individual. And he would ask me some questions — some were really quirky, like “We need an anecdote about soap, or we need the names of horses, or we need the precise colour? Look, I have these pictures, tell me which one is the best.”
So sometimes it’s questions coming from the production, but more often than not, it’s something coming from the historian that I would try to give some background. “This is how the army worked. This is how the education system worked.” So if someone wants to put NPCs doing something in the background, if you want to put some teacher teaching children, you’d know how it would work. “Here is something about seafaring or about the Silk Road” — that would inform multiple people. So it’s not only answering one question that’s coming, it’s trying to anticipate the questions.
The worst thing for any historian working on any game, not just Assassin’s Creed, is to come in too late. Because if they have done the assets, they have already decided what the buildings would look like, they’ve already done the outfits, they will not change it [at this point]. Or they will change it if it’s really bad, or if there are really big errors in it. But if not, while you’re there, you will tell them all “The colour’s not really good, I should have told you last week.” Well, tough luck. You had to be there last week or to be proactive. So this was also something to learn — to be more proactive, to try to anticipate their needs. And this means understanding the production of a video game. When does each actor need what? This was a big and steep learning curve.
Q: One challenge you cited was recreating a specific time and place — not Baghdad as it is now, but how it was hundreds of years ago. What were you trying to convey about this period through the game?
Weyland: There were two key elements for me. The first one was that this was a brilliant city — a city of artists and scientists. It’s not only a brilliant city — these people served bad people and had had to work tirelessly and sometimes die working to create this brilliance. But it was a brilliant city and this is not how we usually represent the Middle East in video games or movies or cultural productions as a centre of the world, the centre of science, and all of that. Because it was true that, at that time, it was this centre of knowledge and art. I really wanted to be able to convey that into the game.
I also wanted to show that this was the centre of the world in the sense that it was a place that drew people from all around — that it was a place in which you had 100 different languages and 100 people from different backgrounds. So this, for me, was really important and we worked hard on that to have, yes, Muslims and people speaking Arabic, but also people speaking Persian, people from Chinese backgrounds, and Christians and Jews, and to have a city that’s really multicultural and vibrant. I really wanted that and I think we achieved it, so I’m really proud of that.
Q: Something Ubisoft is doing as a whole, not just with Mirage but with previous Assassin’s Creed games and even Rabbids, is exploring the educational aspects of games. Since you have experience outside of games working in schools and other places of learning, what is it about games, specifically, that makes them such a powerful tool for education?
The ‘Discovery Tour’ educational mode in 2020’s Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Weyland: There are actually studies made on using Assassin’s Creed games and the Discovery Tours, which are the educative parts of some Assassin’s Creed games. There are studies on whether they are useful or not, and the result is that they help to get the attention of the students. If you show them on the screen, the Parthenon rather than have it in a notebook or something like that, it can bring them in.
But it is not enough; the teacher is still the most important part of them learning something. But it is a useful tool to have it. First, the children find it cool, so they’ll listen. Then it is a visual medium, so some students have a harder time reading or listening, but they will look and remember better. And also there is the fact that when you run around — or even if you watch the teacher running around the seats or something like that — there is an emotional connection that’s being made. You are living something, and you will remember that better than simply reading another page. And I’m saying that as someone who has read thousands of pages. I was a good student, of course, but there are people who learn differently. And I think this is a tool that can help them.
Now, once again, I’m not saying that this is better than teachers or something. But as one of the things that they can use? Absolutely. And this is actually something that’s being done in Québec and outside in France, in Germany — there are students who send us the videos of what they’re doing and the results, and it’s amazing to look at that. We’re really proud that it’s being used.
Q: You were saying a big part of what you wanted to convey about Baghdad at this time was multiculturalism and how multifaceted it was. I know it might be hard to narrow down, but is there a particular thing you’re most excited for people to see?
Weyland: The place I love the most in the city is the bazaar because it is so full of life, so full of colours, full of different people speaking different languages… You go around and there are people everywhere and you have to push them around, and you’re talking. Sometimes, people will not understand that it is Persian or Arabic — probably they will not, but I do, and maybe they will at some point.
Or they’ll simply see all of the colours and all these people. And when I was there in the bazaar, the first time I was in it [in the game] and it was more than the stick figures and grey buildings because it started like that… I had this feeling that it was like the bazaars I visited in the Middle East and today, I still have the same feeling. It’s not one-for-one, it’s not 100 percent, but conveying a feeling like that is quite an achievement. And I’m really, really happy that we managed to do that.
Q: This game can serve as an introduction for people to the Middle East and Baghdad, specifically. For people who play the game and want to continue to learn more, what would you recommend?
Weyland: The first thing that we did for people was we created an in-game encyclopedia, the Codex. So it’s 66 entries about pretty much everything from politics to table manners to the pillars of Islam to seafaring, so you have plenty in that. And then you can go and look at some books.
My best hope would be that the game is a starting point for someone and that in five or 10 years, they go to a class at the university where they open a book to learn some more. If you want the name of one book that I like as an introductory one, it’s The Age of the Caliphs. And it’s about Baghdad and this time pretty much at that period, so it’s a starting point. You need much more if you want to [recreate] Baghdad, but if people are interested and want to learn more, this is a really good starting point.
This interview has been edited for language and clarity.
MobileSyrup may earn a commission from purchases made via our links, which helps fund the journalism we provide free on our website. These links do not influence our editorial content. Support us here.
