Contracts Are Optional In Assassin’s Creed Mirage But I’m Not Skipping Them

My hands-on experience during my Ubisoft Bordeaux trip in France was mainly spent on Baghdad contracts and exploration. The former was good fun – Baghdad feels almost like a 2023 spiritual reimagining of Jerusalem in 2007’s Assassin’s Creed, with plenty of rooftops and parkour paths to hit from objective to objective. My favorite part of the experience was actually the second. 

I completed three contracts during my hands-on time, each at different levels of progression for protagonist Basim Ibn Is’haq. The contracts are mini-missions where you have to eliminate a specific target, obtain an item or do something such as move a boat. You must scout an area out, find your target, determine the path of least resistance to them or it – Basim is all about stealth and speed, of course – and kill or obtain your mark. The first one I did, early in Basim’s journey, took no more than 10 minutes. It took almost half an hour to complete the one in late game. They feel like miniature assassination vignettes, almost like a smaller version of a level from IO Interactive’s World of Assassination Hitman trilogy. 

To complete a contract, you simply pick it up from a Hidden Ones bureau’s contract board and you’re off. The contracts are linked to different Baghdad groups, and you must complete them to improve your relationships with those groups. 

“Those factions will help you to gain rewards and also favors,” Mirage creative director Stephane Boudon tells me, noting you also gain special tokens used to bribe city speakers called Munadi, entertainers that can distract guards, and more. “Tokens are used as a sub-economic way to buy services and these services can also be very helpful inside your main quest and mission, so it’s a way to fill up new kinds of progression. But it’s totally optional.”

He says you’re not obliged to complete them, but that doing so might feel essential once you realize what’s on offer. It doesn’t hurt that they’re good fun, too, giving Basim more to do as an Assassin-in-training outside of the main story. 

It’s great that you can pick up all the contracts at once. I asked about this because I’m the kind of player who would like to have them all so that if I’m near one in my exploration and main story journey, I can take a step off the main path to knock it out. 

“As soon as you have your board, you can collect them all and then do them when you’re ready,” world and quest director Simon Arseneault says. Some of the contracts are continuations from other contracts. It is possible to do several contracts at once, or all of them in parallel. [and] it’s a good way to explore a little bit more and give you more [things] to do.” 

Arseneault says if you grab them all at once, you’ll probably have four to five at a time. 

Because each contract is tied to a larger faction narrative happening throughout Baghdad – for example, I was collecting trinkets and special goods for merchant Dervis – you can complete a contract line. Arseneault explains that you will get the most rewards and goods for Dervis if you complete the contract lines. 

While the team iterated to me that contracts are completely optional, with how much fun I had completing them and the rewards and favors I earned for doing so, they won’t be optional in my playthrough. Considering Mirage developer Ubisoft Bordeaux is the team that brought back contracts in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla’s Wrath of the Druids DLC, which this studio led development of and did so with great success, I look forward to seeing what other contracts await me in the final release when Assassin’s Creed Mirage hits PlayStation, Xbox, and PC on October 5.

To learn more about Assassin’s Creed Mirage, click the banner below to visit Game Informer.