Assassin’s Creed games are obviously centered on action and adventure. But they are designed to be so much more than that. They are also deep dives into history and different regions of the world. These games take great care in order to recreate some of the most beautiful environments throughout history.
Assassin’s Creed Mirage is no different. The art, culture, and architecture of the ancient Islamic world are on full display in every aspect of the game. But even more than the man-made cities, the natural landscape of Baghdad is also a pleasant sight to behold. Here are some of the most beautiful locations in Assassin’s Creed Mirage.
10 Northern Oasis
The wilderness north of the city is vast and unforgiving. It’s about as much of a desert as anything seen in a previous Assassin’s Creed game. But a good story about the desert wouldn’t be complete without an oasis.
In the middle of nowhere, this oasis seems to been dropped from the sky, and it’s one of the most naturally beautiful areas in the game. It’s also very important as a precursor vault with special items is hidden underneath it. So players will have to visit it often in this big map.
9 Winter Palace
Palaces, castles, and fortresses are a staple of every Assassin’s Creed game. Infiltrating them for missions is practically a given. The Winter Palace is the first real challenge that players face while trying to be stealthy. It’s also quite a beautiful bit of architecture.
There are obviously bigger and more elaborate buildings in the game, but there’s something about the Winter Palace as a pivotal moment in the game’s story that makes it special. It’s the place where Basim’s journey to become a Hidden One truly begins.
8 Palm Grove
Sometimes a beautiful setting doesn’t have to be something spectacular. Even the mundane can be calm, peaceful, and relaxing. Palm Grove is located on the road to Jarjaraya. As the name implies, it’s just a grove filled with palm trees.
But in a location that’s so encompassed by desert, this area is a nice change of pace. It just goes to show that Assassin’s Creed tries its best to create a fully rounded environment not just in the city but in the surrounding landscape as well.
7 Jarjaraya
Assassin’s Creed does a good job not just building up the main urban centers that the game takes place in. It also creates smaller villages centered around the main city. This diversity makes the setting feel like a real region of history rather than an isolated play area.
Jarjaraya is a small village a short ride away from the Damascus gate. It’s not large by any means, but it still feels like a place that people live and work out of, which adds beauty to its simplicity.
6 House Of Wisdom
Assassin’s Creed doesn’t just put a big emphasis on fighting in combat. It also has its characters interacting with intellectuals and scholars. For Assassin’s Creed Mirage, the House of Wisdom takes this role.
It needs to be visited from time to time for missions and to return collectibles found around the great city of Baghdad. It’s not so much a building as it is an entire campus similar to a university. As with all important buildings in the city, its architecture is magnificent and worthy of the scholars who work there.
5 Wilderness
The wilderness isn’t really a location as it is just a designation for everything outside of the city limits. Like Assassin’s Creed Origins, Mirage has a huge open world and expansive area of desert. Many missions force players to traverse the desert in search of an objective.
In many respects, areas of the wilderness are brutal, rough, and unforgiving. But there’s a beauty to the untapped landscape. The game’s creators took great pains to make this unpopulated area as naturally serene as possible, and one of the most tranquil parts of the game is just riding through it on horseback.
4 The Bimaristan
The Bimaristan is an area tucked into the corner of the city that specializes in medicine. Similar to the House of Wisdom, it’s a place where medical professionals gather to study, research, and help heal the sick. It’s essentially the healthcare center of Baghdad, and the campus is beautiful.
It’s filled with a lot of greenery and plants. These gardens add a very calming atmosphere that has a much different sense of beauty to it than the House of Wisdom. But still, the architecture is magnificent on its own.
3 Palace Of The Green Dome
In every Assassin’s Creed game, there is essentially one place that’s the most heavily guarded and the center of power for the city. In Baghdad, it doesn’t take much to realize that this is the Palace of the Green Dome.
It’s quite literally in the center of the Round City, which is the most central district on the map. In a place with tons of different palaces and domes, this one stands above all the rest. There’s no surprise that there is a sync point located at the top.
2 Alamut
The Assassin’s Creed games have a longstanding tradition of creating a beautiful base of operations for the Brotherhood. This dates back all the way to the first Assassin’s Creed game, which the base in Mirage is very reminiscent of.
Alamut is inspired and named after the fortress from the book that inspired the first game. Although it’s similar in name only, it is still just as beautiful of a location. The assassins train hard in a serene valley that’s perfect for meditation and honing one’s warrior abilities.
1 Karkh Bazaar
Images of a bustling marketplace and bazaar immediately come to mind when the ancient Middle Eastern world is brought into the discussion. So it seemed obvious that Assassin’s Creed Mirage would include at least one in its world.
The Karkh Bazaar is a busy area of the city filled with merchants trying to unload their wares. A player doesn’t even have to be on a mission in order to walk through the bazaar and take in the sites that instantly transport the character back to the commercial culture of the Islamic World.