ASSASSIN ’ S CREED ODYSSEY
Ubisoft’s latest invokes a titan of Western literature
How might this year’s Assassin’s Creed play if it wasn’t just named after Homer’s Odyssey, but modelled on it? For starters, it would probably forgo the open world genre’s usual rhythms of acquisition and conquest. The Odyssey is, after all, the account of a refugee, returning by sea in the aftermath of a ruinous war. Rather than letting you climb every mountain you see, a game based on this story might make a virtue of impotence, asking you to endure the whims of spiteful gods, beg shelter from wary rulers and use cunning rather than force to overcome monstrous creatures. It would trade the average open world’s glut of navigational aids for a meditation on alienation and forgetfulness: when Odysseus finally arrives at his home island he no longer recognises it, and can only wander the shoreline in despair.
With its bustling map screen, abundance of gear categories, unlockable supermoves and many prizefights with gorgons and chimeras,
Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey is not this game and nor does it pretend to be. But as narrative director Mel MacCoubrey explains, the developer’s readings of Homer alongside other ancient Greek authors have shaped Odyssey’s world, as the 20th Assassin’s Creed continues its predecessor’s push into the roleplaying genre. “We did a lot of research into Oedipus Rex, the Odyssey, crazy stuff like Lysistrata – all of these amazing Greek texts,” she recalls. “We looked at which of them would be structurally sound for an open world, and how we could mix the structure of an ancient epic and a Greek tragedy into one, and that very much influenced who the protagonists then became – they’re brought from tragedy into this big world experience, and you see it all through their eyes for the first time.”
Like Odysseus, you begin the story separated from your family. Playing as either Alexios or Kassandra, you are thrown from a cliff by your father, the Spartan king Leonidas, to avert a prophecy about Sparta’s downfall. Skip forward 17 years, and you have become a mercenary captain with your very own customisable trireme, plying your trade across the Greek archipelago while investigating yet another hydra-headed global conspiracy. The game takes place during an ongoing conflict, the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta. The front is part of the world, and you can shift it on your voyages by doing favours for city-states and convincing them to pick a side. “You get a lot of social commentary between the Athenians and Spartans, because they have very different ideologies,” MacCoubrey explains, drawing a parallel with the cross-section of north African cultures visible in the architecture, apparel and infrastructure of Assassin’s Creed Origins.
“It’s very much a world of contrasts – emerging science versus older beliefs in the
gods,” she adds. That latter contrast is essentially the difference between the game’s primary and secondary quests. The main campaign skews toward historical realism, with figures from Greek mythology – welded, in this case, to Assassin’s Creed’s own core mythology of an advanced pre-human ‘First Civilisation’ – filling out the optional missions and endgame. “The Hero’s Journey is fairly serious, but once we got to work on quests or characters outside it on the islands, places the Hero’s Journey doesn’t really hit, we got to have more fun.” The archipelago setting has allowed for more pronounced shifts of atmosphere and biome than in previous games, MacCoubrey adds, with some islands designed more obviously around certain yarns. “We looked at what those places were famous for – what themes would fit, so that we could make them stand out, so that when you’re exploring you’re thinking, ‘Ooh, what am I going to run into?’”
One such location is Lesbos, home in the game to Medusa, the snake-haired Gorgon whose glance turns flesh to stone. She skulks around in a temple within a petrified forest reminiscent of Dark Souls III’s finale, and serves (once you’ve tracked down the key) as a tough lategame boss, summoning golems to harass you as you hide from her gaze. The mission is fairly gloomy, a desperate romance that ends in disaster; MacCoubrey says that other side stories will strike a jollier note. “A lot of triple-A games take themselves very seriously, and it’s the same grimdark tone throughout.” Brighter moments include the chance to flirt with and seduce people as in the Mass Effect series, though this might cause a stink if that character is already spoken for.
Like Origins, Odyssey’s difficulty curve is governed by its levelling system, with some regions nigh-impassable till you’ve done the requisite grinding. As with Origins, this may annoy if you just want to roam without any interference, but game director Scott Phillips says the levelling is more artfully alloyed to the expanding terrain in Odyssey, with islands helping to compartmentalise the challenge. “We have a flow for the main path, a hub-andspoke effect where initially you’ll start on one island, then you’ll move off and into a big playground area that’s all at your level. And you continue with that, and you get bigger and bigger playgrounds, so more of the world is accessible or at your level or near your level.” Enemies in cleared areas will remain within two levels of you, to ensure a degree of pushback even when retracing your steps. There will, however, still be the odd brick wall here or there. “We want you to have the feeling that you can’t just blow through everything. There will be certain points of interest that are several levels above you, and you’ll want to come back several levels later to take that challenge on.” Many of these points of interest are mobile. The game’s world is populated by other mercenaries, who serve as both targets of opportunity and a tacit police force – kill people and you’ll fill a heat bar which raises the odds of being waylaid. Some mercenary bands are generated from a pool of gear, pets such as wolves and abilities, while others are hand-crafted with backstories. The most formidable of the lot are equipped with powerful rare weapons, so sparking their wrath could be profitable if you fancy your chances.
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey perhaps shares less with its namesake than Homer’s other great work, the Iliad, in which gods and their pawns clash on the walls of Troy. There will be battles featuring as many as 300 AI participants, and if Alexios and Kassandra begin the game far from home they seem relatively untroubled by this so far – happy to wander endlessly while there are gear pieces to collect, ability points to spend and evil-doers to collar. This is, of course, an over-familiar mindset where open-world games are concerned, and if the new setting is a feast of sights and opportunities, it’s too much a continuation of Origins’ experiments with roleplaying structures to excite. Still, there are flashes of something more profound in MacCoubrey’s account of the blurring of an epic’s stateliness with the intensity of a tragedy. “It’s stretched out, but you have these huge moments of emotion, of euphoria and depression.”
“We want you to have the feeling that you can’t just blow through everything”