Assassin’s Creed Odyssey
Greeks are bearing gifts, but there’s nothing to beware
UBISOFT QUEBEC DESERVES extra turkey this holiday season, for releasing something so accomplished just a year after Origins began a series revamp that made it a must-play.
Odyssey moves the series back in time to ancient Greece, and opens during the battle of Thermopylae, which you may remember from the comic book and movie
300. King Leonidas thankfully keeps his armor on, but the game has shed some of the layers that keep out curious players.
There’s a choice of heroes, for one thing. There’s not a huge difference—either is a refugee Spartan living in Kefalonia, making a living as a mercenary, with the same dialog options—but there are bigger changes afoot. Exploration mode is new, and billed as the expected way to play. It dispenses with map markers, giving you clues in dialog as to where you need to go next, recapping them on the map screen. It gives you more incentive to follow roads, rather than set off across country in a straight line, saving a lot of climbing and scrambling for when you get to your destination. The old way of doing things is still available, but Exploration mode brings a freshness to the game.
Elsewhere, things are much the same. You climb on things, stab people, get new gear, ride a horse, sail a boat, track down a hierarchy of local bad guys, and stab them after climbing on things, getting new gear in the process. Origins’ RPGstyle progression is back, but a new addition are the Bounty Hunters, other local mercenaries who try to take you out. The one chasing you is usually a few levels above, so must be avoided until you’re powerful enough to take him on.
This system presented a problem when a bounty hunter just one level above trapped us in a cave, walking in and out as though he knew we were there, but never leaving so we could escape, and hand in the quest that would have probably leveled us up. He was practically unkillable with the gear we had, and every time we reloaded, he was back in that darn cave. Eventually, we stealthed as much as we could before running like hell —a perfectly acceptable course of action, it turned out. It could have been a bug, as we were playing before the big dayone patch that improved a lot of things, including loading times. They’re still long, and the game itself is resource-hungry. Comparing this to Assassin’sCreed
Syndicate shows how much Ubi Quebec and the game have progressed. AC games are now free-roaming RPGs, with huge worlds, rounded characters, and intelligent combat. When they look this good, gaming is better off for the series making changes.