Assassin’s Creed Odyssey

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.

Traditionally I had never really been a fan of the Assassin’s Creed franchise, but that changed in 2017 when the entire thing pivoted hard. I feel like the modern incarnation of the series is very much UbiSoft attempting to capture the magic of The Witcher 3 and duplicate it. So if you too had bounced off early titles, but also love big open world adventures… then maybe AC is a series you should check out again. It took me awhile to really attach fully to Origins, but when I finally did I loved the game and greatly enjoyed playing as Bayak of Siwa. Then the sequel released and brought us to Ancient Greece and while I picked it up… I never actually got around to playing it.

Since I seem to be rolling through a series of single player games and after coming off Guardians of the Galaxy, I decided to remedy never getting around to this game. I had started the game but never really got very far into it, so I picked up from the original save and kept going. I had heard from many people that Kassandra is the far better option as far as the game goes, and is a more interesting character. I’m already a big fan and I am looking forward to see how this character evolves over the course of the game. I had some “free” outfits waiting on me, so I have dressed my Kassandra is Norse outfits that I am guessing I got around the launch of the next title in the AC series.

I am not super far into the game but have essentially completed most of “tutorial island”. There are a lot of things about the game that feel like they have improved since the previous outing. There are quality life life improvements like the ability to just crank up your walk speed to where you are running all of the time. Essentially in an open world game like this… I don’t love using horses. I am not sure what it is about horses, but I always just end up running around everywhere and my pinky finger gets tired mashing the shift key. I think part of it is that I feel like I miss a lot while mounted, because I live for random combat encounters as I move from point A to point B. Additionally it allows me to pick up all of the random iron and wood that I happen across along the path.

When I stopped playing for the night I was finally out on the open waters with my ship and crew. I learned how to do me some open water piracy and such. This series has always done a better than average job of ocean combat, and I greatly appreciate how they have improved a lot of aspects of it. For example you can just hit a hotkey to board the ship, and it will align the ship so you can jump across and do some deck to deck combat. Similarly you can just hit a hotkey to “dock” the boat when you get close to land. Things things were always somewhat fiddly in Origins and I am always on board for improvements.

This is a pretty huge game, so I fully expect to be engaged in this one for awhile. Maybe even long enough for Horizon Forbidden West to come out next month.