Videos I've seen show no sign of the little warning on top of enemies head allowing you to know when to counter.

They're not using the traditional Assassin's Creed combat system. It's more like a standard action-RPG now

You sneak up on people now and a big "assassinate" prompt shows up - something that was kind of a given in past AC games so who knows. It's different I'll give 'em that much.

They changed the combat system to be akin to most mainstream action RPGs now. As @humanity pointed out, promps appear for special actions, most actions however are akin to what Dark Souls and The Witcher 2 and 3 did.

Honestly, the new way gives way more room to make your own decisions rather than just storming and killing 50 guys. Also the world is "breathing" now, which means that at night time soldiers guarding something behave differently, making sneaking way more viable and intuitive. Before, clicking a button so the player character perform their action was the bread and butter in AC and the easiest approach, now you can quite literally choose how to approach something without a downside thats basically why they changed the entire thing.

Origins is supposed to have difficulty levels so maybe there will be some options to turn off/on some assists etc. I'm really loving everything I've seen, combat looks really awesome. I've been playing Syndicate (love it so far) and the combat already feels very different from previous installments. Origins seems to be like an entirely new AC, the amount of changes and additions they made makes Origins feel like a reboot in some ways. I really can't wait. Open worlds, sandboxes, rpgs are my drugs and I'm sure Origins is gonna be amazing for me.

I don't think there was a counter warning in the original games was there? I might be wrong though, but i think that was when it tried to be like batman.

@oursin_360 Wow, you're right, I've just watched a few videos of the AC 1 and 2 and there is no counter warning. Never really had a problem with countering (played all of them) and I've been playing Syndicate recently and there's totally a counter warning in there. My brain somehow thought it was always there but I forgot and it totally wasn't, they probably introduced it in the last few installments.. Again, countering never really was a problem because combat in the older games was easy, I'm curious how countering works in Origins, I haven't seen that much of the game to stay mostly blind.

I may be one of the few that likes the look of the new combat system. Looks like a interesting world to be in. First time I'm excited for an AC game since Brotherhood.