Assassin's Creed: Mirage's PC specs are here, and I think my ancient laptop can run it
Seeing things
Prior to joining RPS and coming into a possession of an Actual Contemporary Gaming PC, I did all my gaming on a plucky Erazer laptop from circa 2014. The old warhorse has certainly had some adventures, to the point that it isn't really a laptop anymore but a hovering debris cloud of plastic and metal, constellated by strips of sellotape, from which a moving picture may be hesitantly conjured by means of screamed insults and the careful deployment of desk fans.
Among the sicker jokes I've played on various editors as a freelancer is to review triple-A games on this sorrowing technological Igor, which - I swear to you - physically flinches and begins to whimper frantically when presented with any game more demanding than Far Cry 2. Thing is, I'm pretty sure I can run Ubisoft's forthcoming Assassin's Creed: Mirage on this hapless relic. The publisher have released minimum and recommended system specs for their latest historical throat-slitter, and they're pretty dang reasonable.
Mirage fills up 40GB of hard drive space, which is around a third of Starfield's immensity, and you can supposedly run it at 1080p/30 FPS on an Nvidia GeForce 1060 with 8GB RAM. Here's an image breaking down the specs from Ubisoft. OK, so you probably won't be playing Mirage on a fridge anytime soon, but these are modest requirements by blockbuster game standards.
Mirage is one of the leaner, throwback Assassin's Creeds. It's set in Baghdad during the year 861, and is a crisp 20-30 hour slice of urban parkour with a greater emphasis on stealth and a smaller emphasis on RPG-style progression systems than the previous Valhalla and Odyssey. Katharine was quite enthused about her Assassin's Creed: Mirage hands-on time earlier this summer, commenting that "I'm well up for an AC game that reins its open world in a bit and goes back to the sort-of single city stab-athon the series used to be". She was decidedly whelmed by Mirage's combat, however, worrying that "that the lack of options available to you when you are inevitably drawn into a fight will be keenly felt by newer Creed players."
Personally, I'd love to play more games set in Baghdad, like Babylonian Twins, a historical platformer originally developed for the Commodore Amiga by two Iraqi developers during the aftermath of the first Gulf War.