I don’t have anything terribly exciting to talk about this morning. I spent my evening as I have spent a lot of evenings recently exploring ancient Greece. There is a kind of game that has rapidly become my favorite things to play, which is in the lineage of Witcher 3. Essentially I love wandering around these big sprawling worlds with lots of pockets of detail for me to navigate and explore. I like that they live in this duality of both being quest driven when I want to have structure, and completely open ended when I just want to run amok and take out a camp of soldiers. It feels like I am inhabiting the world and after a very “on rails” experience like Guardians of the Galaxy, it is refreshing to be able to get off the beaten path.
The thing is… there is an awful lot to see in these game worlds. While it is absolutely certain there is a lot of sameness, especially when it comes to set decoration… there is just enough variety to keep things feeling fresh for me. I especially love finding the vistas that serve as teleportation points in Assassin’s Creed games. They give you this big sweeping view of the world from the eyes of your bird and give you a better understanding of the lay of the land. Often times it is through these that I spot things off in the distance that I want to go explore later.
When I play a game like this I feel like I live in this constant tug of war. It creates this cycle of pushing forward the narrative of the main story quest, and then roaming around for awhile trying to make sure I have seen what there is to see in a specific area before pushing the narrative forward again. There is most definitely a feeling that you are at risk of missing something and that it is highly unlikely that you are going to make it back this way again as the story keeps moving you forward to new areas.
With Odyssey however I see this mix changing up a bit in ways that it did not in Origins. There was some online interaction between the game and the presence of other players. I remember there being targets that would spring up that you could kill to get revenge for another player. This time around there are player driven missions that have been created that you can explore, or you also have a series of daily and weekly bounties that you can partake in. This serves to further MMOize what was a largely single player experience. While there does not appear to be actual players roaming around the world with you, there is quite a bit of bleed over as the game resents you with screenshots that players have taken of specific areas.
If the discussion points that I have heard are to be believed, it sounds like maybe with Valhalla UbiSoft pushed this dynamic too far into the MMO direction. For now most of the things in Odyssey seem to have improved upon the things I liked from Origins. I am sure at some point I will make my way to Valhalla and it will be interesting to see how these dynamics have shifted again. Ultimately I am hoping to make Odyssey keep my attention for the next few weeks until Horizon Forbidden West rolls out. Greatly enjoying my evenings roaming around the ancient world.
I’ve felt similar with Fallen Order. All the slightly frantic fights are in contrast or even contention with the puzzles and the parkour exploration – I enjoy the latter but less so when respawning stormtroopers are shooting at you as you try and work something out or do a difficult jump sequence. Also having really tough boss battles blocking story progress is annoying as I’m not into intense Dark Souls solo fights – I’m too used to MMO land where boss battles are a group effort and the individual generally has less pressure on them…