Assassin’s Creed Mirageincludes a flavor line that alludes to a time when soap was made to look like cake and cake was made to look like soap. It sounds reminiscent of the recent viral trend on TikTok and other social media where videos were made depicting things, such as a human knee, being cut into, just to find out it was cake. It’s not something manyAssassin’s Creed Mirageplayers would perhaps expect to have a role, however minor, in theUbisoft game, but it is the weird little details about history that help bring its setting of Baghdad to life.
Indeed, recreating the people, languages, and history ofBaghdad inAssassin’s Creed Mirageis quite the feat, given how little Ubisoft had to work with. While someAssassin’s Creedgames still have recognizable landmarks today, allowing historians and Ubisoft devs to perhaps more easily recreate it, Baghdad was destroyed and rebuilt time and again alongside other major changes, with little but texts and educated guesses left to create landmarks like the House of Wisdom. Recently, Game Rant had the chance to speak with Ubisoft historian Raphael Weyland aboutthe history ofAssassin’s Creed Mirage, including the little things like soap and cake.
During a presentation, Weyland had mentioned that Ubisoft devs, in their pursuit of creating Baghdad, had sometimes odd questions that he’d never been asked before. This obviously resulted in a lot of research and some educated guesses. One question was how folks of this time would sweep in front of their house, and another was if he had anything for flavor lines related to a soap market.
Hygiene and soap are obviously important things, but not something many folks necessarily think of when it comes to history. That doesn’t mean the answer and an associated flavor line inAssassin’s Creed Miragearen’t a lot of fun. In his research, Weyland found…
“…an anecdote that soap merchants sometimes made their soap into bars that look a bit like cakes. They would sometimes tell travelers and foreigners, ‘Hey, this is a cake.’ It actually went so far that people also took up on that and started to make cakes that looked like a soap bar. Imagine you’ve just started trying to wash yourself, but it’s actually a cake. You’ll find a line related to that in the game, but this is just like a morning in my life, reading through texts and finding that.”
The result of this research is just a simple flavor line, but this took hours for Weyland to find. And it’s odd history like this that makesAssassin’s Creed Mirageand its settingall the better. Of course, there are bigger details that require a lot more research, but the historical authenticity of the game rings through, even when liberties must be taken.
The result isAssassin’s Creed Mirage, and while there are things some players and critics like more or less than others, the depiction of Baghdad has been strongly praised. That is the result of years of research and history being poured into making Baghdad as authentic as it could be.
Assassin’s Creed Mirageis available now on Luna, PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
