Assassin's Creed Mirage gameplay trailer delivers pole vaulting, finger-blades, and an October release date

At the PlayStation Showcase on Wednesday we got another look at the next Assassin's Creed game, along with a big bonus: a release date. Assassin's Creed Mirage will release on October 12.

The Assassin's Creed Mirage gameplay trailer above shows off a lot of familiar-looking action set pieces, like the classic dive from a roof onto a soft landing spot, discovering vantage points perched high above the city, a winged animal companion, and a whole lot of neck-stabbing.

But there's some fun new stuff to gawk at, too. Our protagonist Basim Ibn Ishaq doesn't have the familiar wrist-blade but instead a finger-blade. It's a bit weird, but it looks like he's lost his ring finger (and possibly his pinkie) and they've been replaced with a knife. Pretty hardcore!

He also has a few tricks I haven't seen in an Assassin's Creed game before. There's a pole-vaulting ability to enhance his already fearsome parkour skills as he traverses the city. Basim also has a focus ability which allows him to mark multiple enemies at once—while leaping from a roof in the trailer, time slows down and he pre-plans his moves to land on one enemy and then quickly dash to kill two others. That's thinking ahead. 

The setting of 9th century Baghdad, where Mirage takes place, looks just as highly-detailed as you'd expect from the series, too. You might not need to spend a few hundred hours there, either. As we learned earlier this year, Assassin's Creed won't be quite as large and sprawling as some of the more recent games in the series like Odyssey and Valhalla. 

"Amongst our fans, we started hearing the desire for a character-driven story, focused on the core pillars of the first ACs on a more intimate scale. It resonates with us as well as developers and this was the starting point of the project," said creative director Stéphane Boudon in January.