Assassin's Creed Odyssey is quite an interesting title to me. I've been an Assassin's Creed fan pretty much since the beginning of the series, and I've always loved it. Odyssey was interesting to me, since it was pretty much the very first AC game I didn't buy at launch. It's not because I wasn't interested; I was most certainly interested, especially considering the glowing praise the game had received, both here and at large. Unfortunately, I could not purchase it at launch just due to how crowded that time of year was in games, and having to split my time both between RDR2 and Odyssey would have just been unfeasible. However, come the start of February where I have finished both KH3 and RE2, I decided it was finally time to give this game a go, and I was expecting greatness. I'm still in the middle of playing, about 10 hours in and on Phokis, but I'd thought it'd be nice to add my thoughts to the thread as I go along.
STORY
Odyssey, unlike any other AC game, is one which focuses on the player and allows them to forge their own 'Odyssey', if you will. The player has the choice between two characters: Alexios and Kassandra. I chose Kassandra. I'm not that far in just yet, but the story is already pretty compelling, and it's aided quite drastically by a fantastic performance and motion capture from Kassandra. As a mercenary, it's quite fitting to have such a charismatic personality, and this is where her performance really really helps keep me invested. It helps to sell relationships with the characters throughout her journey so far, and it makes it more believable than some of the previous games have been.
I will continually update this segment of the thread as I progress, but thus far, I have only began to discover the Cult of Cosmos and their intentions and how they are grasping on to power over Greece. If you know what mission I mean, it is a high tension mission which really rivalled The Witcher 3 is cutscene quality and mission design. It was really impressive.
Now, this is where one of my favourite aspects of the game comes in. Some of the previous entries into the Assassin's Creed series have been rather absent in their delivery of music, namely in ambient music. I think one of the most critical elements to delivering an amazing open-world game with incredible and believable atmospheres is having a great soundtrack accompanying it. It's surprising that Ubisoft managed to pull one of my favourite artists for ambient music this generation: The Flight. Obviously given my avatar, you can guess where I'm going with this, but the guys did the soundtrack for Horizon and it's exploration music, and it's simply incredible here too. Personally, I think for every year that an Assassin's Creed game releases, it's soundtracks are largely snubbed or rather underrated. It is something that has been consistently phenomenal across the series and Odyssey continues that same consistency.
While the ambient music isn't playing 100% of the time, the game does offer the option to toggle it so that it is playing most of the time. I would like future AC games to replicate the same as the likes of AC1, AC2, ACB and ACR in having a continuous background loop for ambient tracks. As I mentioned, I think this is what really helps to sell an open-world's atmosphere and keep me interested in playing and searching new areas.
COMBAT
Assassin's Creed Odyssey's combat makes a marked improvement on the newly introduced system from Odyssey. It plays more smoothly and allows for a lot more player freedom in movement between enemies. It is very engaging and encourages exploration from the player in the massive open-world to find better equipment to take on stronger enemies. The combat in Odyssey allows for a number of ways to take down enemies, whether that be a standard hack and slash approach, using newly added abilities to disable opponents. I think this new system is a step in the right direction and it's nice to see Ubisoft taking an approach to making combat more difficult. However, I would like to address some of my concerns with the combat. As I mentioned, the game offers more player freedom in movement during combat. However, this comes at the sacrifice of some smoothness in animation and can often ruin the believability of a combat engagement. I guess this ultimately comes down to player preferences, but seeing the older AC games having smoother combat animations made it more believable, even if it was much much easier. I have good faith that Ubisoft can make improvements to the combat system in future titles, while also accounting more for player levels and making some enemies not absolute meat shields that tank 40+ hits. :P
Also, add more finishers to the middle of combat! Origins did this! Don't remove combat finishers and leave them only open to the last enemy killed!
I think it goes without saying that Ubisoft are really really good at this. Their worlds are some of the most believable worlds in video games and you can tell how much effort and care has been put into them, and to just appreciate how much effort they put in, consider the scale of these worlds as well. Odyssey is the series' largest map and yet there is still so much detail and different architectures spread across the map. I think this is one of the franchises undersold aspects, and it's a true shame given how well crafted they are. It is quite simply beautiful .
I'll also be adding more gifs as I playthrough, both here and here: https://twitter.com/Much118x
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