“It’s finally over.” This was the only thought in my head when the last DLC main story quest was done. I didn’t hate it, I didn’t like it either. I was simply tired. Because Assassin’s Creed Odyssey is just too damn long for its own good, even without factoring 2 episodic DLCs in.
Less than a year ago I decided to take a dive into Assassin’s Creed Origins and liked it a lot. It wasn’t just one of the best games in the series, but it was also one of the most engaging and exciting examples of big open world design in games. So much so that even I, who tend to get bored of huge open worlds rather quickly, went and completed most of the things you could do in the game and still feel interested in getting back to it and finishing whatever I had left unfinished. Yet, knowing how Ubisoft usually approaches their franchises, I fully expected the series to take a nose dive quite soon after Origins and didn’t expect Odyssey to be all that good. On one hand, I was at least partially wrong and more pessimistic than I should’ve been. On the other… yeah, Odyssey has all the traits of “Ubificated Live Service” you can think of.
What’s really curious about the game is that Ubisoft decided to implement more concepts usually found in RPG titles into the game, now not touching only upon mechanics, but the narrative as well. Dialogues have choices in them and some of your actions lead to different outcomes, including several distinct ending possibilities. Now, vast majority of said choice is genuinely pointless and you seem to have way too many “okay, but let’s have sex” options for no reason apart from a clear desire to appeal to horny teens. But quite a few choices and actions do lead to meaningful consequences in ways that you don’t expect from the series. It does create issues down the line, like discrepancies between what player might want and what the character might want, but it’s more due to how poorly written and defined a lot of characters and plot points are.
And yes, we’re back to wacky history and terrible writing again after far more serious and atmospheric tales from ancient Egypt. It’s not that this story doesn’t have good character moments or genuinely fantastic scenes or episodes, it’s just that in the general volume of utter crap they get lost. Very few characters are memorable, including some key ones that may appear and die without any emotional impact they clearly try to create. The concept of dividing several key storylines into more independent branches is nice, yet it also leads to the overall feel that there’s simply no end to the story at all, the game just goes on. And on. And on…
It’s so fucking long. For the first time in the series, I think, I didn’t even complete all the quests that have stories to them and I was still way over 70 hours and none of that felt like it was worth it story-wise. I even completely ignored all of the randomly spawning crap that the game showers you with – essentially randomly generated quests that have basic narrative and exist just to keep you playing for longer and faking the feeling of progression. Game has lots of that – it’s a “live service” after all. And it’s all dumb and boring and yet… I’m sure there are many who actually love this sort of time wasting stuff. But a lot of people, I fear, will simply stop playing. And won’t miss much because the game is designed to stop when you’re bored, not when you’re done.
But it plays really nice. All the fun ideas from Origins are here, combat was fixed to be less crap (it’s still boring, but at least it doesn’t feel sluggish) and some over the top skills and features are here to make the game flow really nicely. Hell, they even borrowed the idea of removing all height fall damage as a passive skill from those Middle-Earth: Shadows of X games. Also unlike Origins, quest items can often be found as you explore, so you don’t need to take the quest first and then explore the location. Oh and the game looks really cool. Not stylistically, I felt that Origins looked much more interesting on the visual side. But purely in terms of replicating real-life lighting and going for HDR – even without playing on an HDR monitor I was often impressed with the range in brightness and colour, so I can only imagine how much better it can look on an HDR 1000 screen.
So I did keep on exploring and doing things, occasionally pleasantly surprised with fun locations, a curious approach to adding traps and puzzles in tombs and constantly annoyed by the TES: Oblivion flashback-inducing level scaling that makes the sameness of the game hit even harder. I was liking the whole Cultist board where the concept found in the very first AC game was finally turned into a cool gameplay feature, even if it was rather primitive. Liked how the exploration aspect was expanded, so the game would often point you in the direction, instead of giving you a clear goal map marker from the start, even if it was rather pixel-hunting-ish due to how it still devolved into using the eagle in the end. But after a point, I just stopped caring with the main game being far from done.
And then there were the DLCs… Legacy of the First Blade is a curious beast as it tries to expand the main game map and create a more tangible connection from your main character in Odyssey to the rest of the series and the whole Assassins vs Templars thing. Its biggest flaw, however, is in how a lot of the emotional story bits feel like they could’ve worked if they were using more of the main game story and characters, but being a separate DLC they had to be separate. So you’re introduced to new characters that have as much personality as a plank of wood, yet you’re meant to care about them. And it doesn’t work. It has its moments, despite an overall bland feel to it.
The Fate of Atlantis, however, is just a confused mess. Its locations use the similar concept to the locations in the second DLC of Origins, but lack in creative direction. And its story is just terribly stupid. While Origins managed to handle both its own story and the meta-story surprisingly well, Odyssey did at least its own story good enough, this DLC just falls apart completely and reminds me of some of the worst, most confusing examples from the series past titles. Characters do weird things, stuff happens because of course it does, you get some cool items and lots of skill points. Then the game ends, again without any definitive ending to it all.
In the end, despite so many similarities Origins and Odyssey feel like two completely different projects. Origins felt like it was made by people passionate about the world and the stories in it, so most locations, characters and story bits felt like they were part of the same exciting and well-directed experience. Odyssey feels like a title made using a checklist and a random historic setting the team has chosen. A huge sandbox that has no mood of its own, no interesting stories, nothing to be excited about whatsoever. But pretty fun and good at “player retention” and all that “live service” bs. A title where everything is “just the minimum amount of right stuff” for it all to work, but there’s a lot of said stuff to keep you getting back for more until you get disinterested.
I don’t have any strong feelings about Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. I’m just glad I’m done with it, really. Unlike Origins, I can’t really recommend it, but at the same time, I can see lots of people picking it up and playing for a bit. And then getting bored, probably. But before you get bored, you will have some fun times with the game.