Assassin's Creed Odyssey (2018) by Ubisoft

Judging whether or not you’ll want to play this game is most easily done by comparing it to its direct predecessor, Assassin’s Creed Origins, with which Odyssey shares a lot of its DNA.

I played nearly 100 hours of Origins but was surprised it received nearly universal praise. Origins is more polished than a typical AC game due to its extra year of development time, and the setting of Ancient Egypt is wonderful, but I found there to be severe flaws in the foundation of what that game does regarding stealth, combat, and story. Typically with an Assassin’s Creed game I expect a great core experience that often lacks polish in terms of stability due to the grueling yearly release schedule from Ubisoft that doesn’t allow adequate QA time to fix such things. With Origins, it was the opposite—The core experience was lesser than Syndicate’s, but the game was very polished. It ran okay and looked gorgeous.

The universal praise Origins received was only skin-deep, full of people raving about its wonderful setting and graphics while neglecting the deeper issues the game had at its core. Odyssey, then, reminds me a lot of what Syndicate was to Unity; an improvement of the core mechanics and the smoothing out of the previous game's rough edges.

If you liked Origins and want more of something similar, then you’ll probably love Odyssey. It’s just Origins with added light roleplaying, MUCH better combat, more practical skill trees, and some key new features to provide enough new territory that it doesn’t simply feel like Origins in a new setting.

The most hyped aspect of the game is its expanded RPG elements. Since Unity, which introduced customizable gear, there have been growing light RPG elements to the Assassin’s Creed series, including the introduction of skill trees in Syndicate. Continuing this trend, Odyssey has become a full-blown action RPG rather than just an open world game with some RPG elements. It’s clear the team was playing a lot of Witcher 3 during development as, superficially, roleplaying and story are more developed. However, a lot of this comes to naught, because most of the side quests are still boring, filler fetch quests, and a lot of the "decisions" you have to make are little more than window-dressing: the illusion of choice rather than actual choice. I reloaded saves only to realize that the same thing happens in most instances no matter which choice you make. While it's nice to have the option to select dialogue this time around, story and roleplaying still clearly need more work put into them to deliver on the promise of better story and writing.

Combat in Origins was one of my chief complaints. The animations felt stilted and artificial, and the combat itself was difficult to judge due to the unrealistic speed at which animations played. The game felt like it was aping Dark Souls without understanding what makes its combat great. Combat in Odyssey, however, has several more layers of polish. Animations seem more natural, dodging takes place over a judgeable distance, easy countering is back. Adding depth are Adrenaline Skills, which basically act the way the single Overpower skill did in Origins. There are a number of different Adrenaline skills to unlock within the skill tree, with each providing a different facet than the other.

The skill tree is greatly improved from Origins, which had few useful skills and a lot of what felt like unexciting padding that didn’t change gameplay greatly. Many of the abilities that were locked to gear in Origins have been instead relocated to the skill tree (different bow styles from Origins are now tied to skill unlocks), which gives you far greater freedom in customizing the way your character looks via gear. It’s a very good decision as the skill tree from Origins felt like something that was tacked-on because somebody on the team decided “we should have skill trees in this game”. The skill tree in Odyssey feels more natural and has a huge impact on gameplay.

A lot of the new abilities feel inspired by WB’s Shadow of Mordor series. Chiefly among this inspiration, though, is a fantastic port of what was obviously inspired by Shadow of Mordor’s Nemesis system. Odyssey takes place during the Peloponnesian War in 431 BC, and this war has a number of the different city states of Greece going at one-another; chiefly Athens and Sparta. Odyssey’s modified version of the Nemesis system depicts what feels like a living, breathing war going on around you. Athens and Sparta change territory through the story and your actions, with each city’s forces being easily identifiable, and each occupying different fortresses as they move. They have leaders, cities you can disrupt, money and materiel you can steal and destroy. There are various war leaders and mercenaries that function as the actual Nemeses from the Shadow games, and somehow the team has made this system feel more natural in an Assassin’s Creed game than the Lord of the Rings games which inspired it. It’s the main draw of Odyssey, and it’s a huge one. It all works smoothly, indicative of significant polish, and the game is worth playing just to experience it even if you were burnt out on Origins.

There are a number of more minor new features which fixed complaints I had about Origins. Number one of which is a dedicated (though limited to the open world) Quicksave feature for the first time in the Assassin’s Creed series. As a hardcore stealth fan I despise any game that features stealth without quicksaving and makes me rely on checkpoints. It’s too easy to experience a bug (especially in AC games) and have your entire stealth run of a fort become ruined. This alleviates it, and it’s a fantastic quality-of-life addition. There are also now non-lethal takedowns and enemy recruiting, deepening stealth gameplay.

History blurbs are also back! This eliminates one of my chief personal complaints about Origins: Ripping out these history blurbs and putting them in a separate gameplay mode from the main game. As a fan of historical fiction I want to learn about these settings as I play, and Origins taking that away really damaged the experience for me. They are now back as a map feature, allowing you to hover over map markers for a brief paragraph of background.

I do have some complaints, though. The balance of the game is off, requiring a bit too much grinding if you’re not clearing every map marker like I am. The leveling system is also far too rigid, turning enemies one level higher than you into health sponges. This should be addressed in a future balance patch. It didn’t affect me much because I’m always overleveled, but I could see how someone focused only on the main story would become frustrated.

The game also removed shields from combat, which is puzzling in a game about Greek combat—A style of combat based almost wholly on the use of a heavy bronze shield. I loved the shields in Origins and am puzzled and disappointed to see them go.

The game also runs questionably—my 1080 couldn’t hold 60 fps on ultra settings at 1080p. It needs a performance patch.

In the end, much of Odyssey looks the same as Origins: The user interface is nearly identical. You have a pet bird to scout with. The running and climbing animations are the same. The buildings look similar. The graphics are of the same quality.

But these similarities--like the critical praise for Origins--are only surface-deep.

Odyssey fixes Origins’ faults and adds solid new features. If you liked Origins or you’re a fan of the series then you’ll love Odyssey. It's the culmination of what the past 3-4 Assassin’s Creed games have been introducing, and it’s become one of my favorites in the series.

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