Thoughts on AC odyssey?

[TheMightyWyvern]

I love the game, its one of my favorite games of all tiime, and itts the best ac game

[reegs]

Fair point, the best part about the ship battles in the AC franchise was in Black Flag, in my opinion. But if it's similar then I guess I'll pass.

[Aidy]

Having played Origins, and not completing it I am still on the fence on Odyssey. Is it any different? All of the "hits" just felt like the same. Don't get me wrong it was PRETTY, but looks only go so far.

If you gave up on Origins you'll probably give up on this. Very similar games, different skill trees and abilities, a few new game mechanics so more to do (mercenaries, cult extermination, ship battles and upgrades as you now have the ship permanently) There is more to do, but it's still very similar at its core.

[reegs]

Having played Origins, and not completing it I am still on the fence on Odyssey. Is it any different? All of the "hits" just felt like the same. Don't get me wrong it was PRETTY, but looks only go so far.

[Aidy]

I checked this out tonight, looks like you can now have the enemies 4 levels below you rather than the default of two. It's kind of like a different way of reducing the difficulty, not sure what purpose it serves.

[TheMightyWyvern]

The recently added a feature that lets you adjest the level scaling so you can keep enemies a few levels lower than you or a few levels higher than you

[PriestTroit]

Haven't played an Assassin's Creed game since Revelations, so dunno where the series is at plot-wise. Dunno if I'll pick this one up if there's no stealth features beyond hiding in grass. Half the fun of the older titles was blending into the crowds before you taken someone down.

Hopefully the combat is updated because it wasn't good the way I remember it.

[Aidy]

Even though I dislike some of the changes I still think it's better than Origins. It's certainly better value. In Origins I cleared each area before moving on, and I started doing that with Odyssey then gave up lol There is just too much to do. One thing I do like is that it errs from reality more than Origins. In Origins I was a bit disappointed that everything was "too realistic", I was wondering if late on in the game I'd start to fight mummies, or whatever. Trying not to give away spoilers but Odyssey is better in that respect, it strays into fantasy more than Origins did.

[isturbo1984]

Originally posted by isturbo1984 View Post

A lot of stealth and gameplay mechanics have been dumbed down or completely removed sin Odyssey, which is really bizarre. Gone are intractable objects and different ways to hide and conceal yourself or dead bodies. Now it is literally tall grass or nothing. No baskets, wells, dressers or cabinets. No crowds, stacks of hey or piles of leaves. It's all gone!

In addition to that they've removed the "tools" so no more sleep darts. Also the "wanted" system makes it harder to just get your sword out when stealth fails, as now if you go on a murder spree it's more likely one or more mercenaries will turn up to pee in your Cheerios.

Yeah, it's a good game. Better imo than Origins overall. But it is so strange that the game is a huge step back in a lot of ways. 2 steps forward, one step back I suppose... but I was expecting everything Origins was with this title, but more. Odyssey could have been so much better.

[Aidy]

A lot of stealth and gameplay mechanics have been dumbed down or completely removed sin Odyssey, which is really bizarre. Gone are intractable objects and different ways to hide and conceal yourself or dead bodies. Now it is literally tall grass or nothing. No baskets, wells, dressers or cabinets. No crowds, stacks of hey or piles of leaves. It's all gone!

In addition to that they've removed the "tools" so no more sleep darts. Also the "wanted" system makes it harder to just get your sword out when stealth fails, as now if you go on a murder spree it's more likely one or more mercenaries will turn up to pee in your Cheerios.

[SnowyJess]

I've only played assassin's creed 3 since it came bundled with my ps3 and it was a rather frustrating experience. Overall the series just doesn't interest me, it feels like a generic hollywood blockbuster to me, all shiny, flashy visuals with little substance to back it up. I could probably say the same for most AAA games though.

[Garrett]

After playing the original "Assassin's" Creed, I never thought I'd see a worse assassination game. Then I played Hitman: Absolution and couldn't imagine that anything could get worse. How little did I know. I just never thought anyone could be so brazen about doing it so wrong. Having to grind your stabby power level so that your assassination targets actually die when you sneak up on them and slit their throats, that is as low as it can go. Please Ubisoft, don't prove me wrong. I don't want to live in that world. You don't either, but then it will be too late. Your suicide won't succeed because you don't have enough XP.

[Thucydides]

I have mixed feelings about AC Odyssey. As you can already see in my chosen handle here, I'm a Philhellene, or just a straight up ancient Greece nerd. I was obviously very excited when it was announced, especially after sneak peaks into the environments and the worlds. It wasn't very often to see games where ancient Greece was presented in a historically accurate manner (painted statues!), but unfortunately, it was just the world and environments which were very accurate. A lot of the game wasn't.

And it became very plain in the first 15 minutes playing as King Leonidas. My suspension of disbelief completely died when I saw the character perform wushu moves with the spear. Yeah, I was cool with gods and mythical creatures showing up, because those concepts and ideas were very real to people of the period, but watching that segment of core gameplay on my screen made me sour on the game. Then there's the issue with Kassandra. Yes, Kassandra's voice acting, lines and character model were hands-down better than Alexios. After playing through the game twice over as Alexios and Kassandra, I'm convinced that playing as Kassandra offered the overall better experience. But without going too much into it, it was difficult to reconcile the claim of historical accuracy with the Hellenic theme, and Kassandra's treatment throughout the game. It eroded my immersion in the game, and I began to treat it as yet another action RPG instead of being sucked into ancient Greece. That was unfortunate.

As for the rest of the game, I'll go with quick bullet points.

• [+] Writing and dialogue. It was obvious the writing team were having tons of fun with the script. Lots of funny and punny quest names and content, a metric shitton of hilarity (that first boss fight with the guy named 'The Cyclops' was a hoot) and characters were decently fleshed out. As a story for a game, it was 10/10. For historical accuracy? Depressing to an ancient Greece nerd like me.
• [+] Story and dialogue choices. Comparisons to The Witcher 3 were apt, because it was clearly trying to reproduce and emulate TW3's success. I can understand why Ubisoft went down this path. EA decided to forsake the SRPG market and left a wide hole in its wake, and Ubisoft was more than happy to try to snatch that niche to claim for their own.
• [-] Combat. Rated this as negative not because of the wushu spear moves, but because it's too simple. After a while, the whole thing becomes extremely repetitive with spamming Sparta Kick and executing the same old combos over and over again. There's no complexity to it, and especially when it's too strict with player and item levels. There's no point attempting content that outlevels the player by just a little because chances are, the player will get crushed. Ocean combat was also too simplistic.
• [-] Progression. Too much fucking busywork. It was a bald-faced attempt to artificially lengthen the number of hours it takes to complete the game in order to tick the box of "this game gave me x hours of entertainment". Ugh. Even more egregious when microtransactions offered a permanent exp boost which made leveling a lot faster, and made progression feel as if it was done just right. Depressing to see that the natural pace of progression was lengthened in order to sell that particular microtransaction.

Overall, I enjoyed AC Odyssey only for the writing and story. I couldn't care less about the core gameplay loop, which is a Greek tragedy in itself: in the pursuit of appealing to as broad an audience as possible, the core gameplay loop is so awfully watered down, it becomes a chore to play through instead of something a player could look forward to getting into. As a result, the player realizes it was one big chore all along, and the world AC Odyssey tried to immerse the player within crumbles around him.

[AlexKidd]

Haven't played it, but i'm not really a big fan of the AC series. Every year it's the same stuff and now there's microtransactions in it as well. Don't really have the desire to play it. Maybe when it's like 15 euro, i'll pick it up.

[Spect3r]

The game is decent, just too bad it goes against almost everything set up by AC before that