Post by WickedCrustacean on Apr 26, 2019 15:27:38 GMT -5
After the success of its predecessor, Assasin's Creed: Origins, Ubisoft, presumably reusing a lot of assets, quickly released this game only a year later. Like Origins, Odyssey abandons much of what defined the earlier games in the series, and focuses on creating a massive open world game in the vein of Witcher 3 or Skyrim. In Odyssey, you play the role of a mercenary from a special bloodline, descending from the likes of Leonidas of Sparta. You can play as Alexios (male) or Kassandra (female), but other than that, everything is pretty much the same. Without giving too much away, you tried to save your younger sibling as a child, disobeying the orders of an oracle, and for that, you lose your family and end up being a wandering mercenary on the other side of the Greek world. Then, you realize it's actually more complicated, and begin to search for answers, while at the same time, tring to thwart a nefarious organization's aims.
As you do this, you get to travel around an absolutely gorgeously recreated model of the ancient Greek world. This is one of the most beautiful worlds ever made for a video game, and its size and detail are unbelievable. You can roam from Macedonia in the north to the island of Crete in the south, from Kephalonia on one side to Lakonia on the other, and along the way, run across pretty much everything that you have ever read about regarding the ancient Greek civilization. Sail the beautiful Aegean in your trireme, ride on horseback from city to city, watch through the eyes of your eagle friend while he soars above the glory of Athens, it's all breathtaking. Cities are bustling with people engaged in realistic looking activities, the architecture is on point and really immersive. Many of the buildings that we know today as ruins (such as the Parthenon) stand in their heyday fully constructed and painted with vibrant colors (unlike the washed out white marble that we would see today). Statues of mythic heroes and gods are everywhere, and you just have to see an evening coastline lit up by fires.
The game takes place circa 430BC, right as the Pelopenissian War between Athens and Sparta has broken out. Most of the game provinces are being disputed by the forces of each, and you can take sides and help one of them out against the other, or be a true mercenary, and take on contracts from both as they come. You also get to meet a lot of famous people from history. In Athens, you get to talk to and do quests for Perikles, Aspasia, Alcibiadis, Socrates, Demosthenes, Eurepidis, Sophocles, and many more. In other places, you meet Hippokrates, Leonidas, and many others.
Being that you are a mercenary, the game is centered around combat, which is how you will solve most of the game quests. The combat system is quite fun, although some questionable decisions have been made. Odyssey re-uses the core system from Origins, but has changed a few things up. First, you can no longer use shields, because they wanted to encourage a more aggressive style of play (no more blocking). So now, your character will either wield a two-handed weapon, or if using a one-hander, your off hand will have a short spearhead from the Spear of Leonidas, your family relic. Spamming attacks will not work, because enemies will defend themselves by dodging, blocking with shield and other ways, and then hit you hard, especially on the harder difficulty settings. So you will have to defend their attacks first, and then counter. This can be done by parrying or by dodging. When an enemy attacks with a normal attack, their weapon will quickly flash a small white outline, so if you hit the parry key right then, you will parry their attack and put them into a staggered state for a few seconds, when you can safely attack them. The parry window is very generous compared to games like Dark Souls. However, sometimes enemies will attack with heavy attacks instead, where they will flash a red outline. Those cannot be parried, and must be dodged. If you dodge at the last moment, you get a few seconds of bullet-time, where you can attack the enemy without fear of reprisal.
I guess Ubisoft wanted to create a system where sometimes you parry and sometimes you dodge, depending on the circumstances, but in actuality, the easiest way to play is to simply dodge all the time, because if you parry, you might not realize in time that an unparryable attack is coming, and get hit hard. But dodging all the time feels really not fun, as you just keep spamming one button, and then your character zooms in bullet time back to the enemy to counter. So I do try to parry when I can, but some tougher enemies make it really hard. Overall, I definitely feel like the system in Origins was better in this regard, because there, you could parry every attack, but also had to observe the enemy, to understand when to parry, as different enemies had very different patterns. In Odyssey, it feels like it's been dumbed down, and you just watch for white/red flash cues to know when to press what.
Aside from regular defenses and attacks, you can also pick up new abilities as you level up. These include stuff like the now infamous Spartan Kick, Bull Rush, and Overpower. These add more options to combat, and are balanced decently where they don't make other stuff obsolete. You can fight with daggers, swords, spears, axes, staffs, and maces. That's if you are a warrior. You can also instead focus on the Assassination tree, and specialize in taking people out before they see you. This tree includes a lot of cool abilities, which besides increasing your stealth damage, also let you disappear in a cloud of smoke, or become somewhat invisible for a time. The third and final tree is archery, and lets you make your bow damage significantly higher, as well as get extra perks for it, such as shooting through shields, or multiple arrows at once.
What makes the combat fun is the sheer variety of enemies and the way they are coordinated to make it a challenging by manageable experience. You will face off against entire camps of soldiers, bosses, wild animals, mercenaries, and all kinds of other enemies. Some fights will be one on one (and can still be quite challenging), while most will be against multiple enemies. The enemies are slyly made to attack you mostly one at a time, but sometimes can come two or more at once. This generally makes these fights manageable, but still makes you watch for any extra attackers. So while you are switching between parries and dodges, depending on the type of enemy attacks, and watching who to defend against next, but also managing your health and adrenaline (kind of like mana for your special abilities), the entire experience is very fun. The only downside is that on Nightmare difficulty, which I am playing, enemies have too much hitpoints, so it takes a while to take Elites and Bosses out.
Aside from land combat, you can also engage in ship combat on the seas. You get to maneuver your trireme around against pirate ships, or those of Athenians, Spartans, and other nations. Then, you can tell them when to shoot arrows, throw javelins, or use the fire versions of the previous weapons agains tthe enemy ship. You also have to aim the attacks manually. Likewise, in a ship version of parry, you can tell your sailors to raise their shields on the side of the ship, to defend against enemy projectiles. You can also accelerate and position your ship to ram the other vessels. Eventually, once you lower the enemy ship's hitpoint bar to zero, it gets dead on the water, and you have two options. You can ram it, and then it will sink and you get to collect some wood and iron from it. This is the safe but rewardless option. The more dangerous option is to board the ship then, which will initiate a battle aboard the enemy ship. You can jump there, and fight the enemy sailors/bosses. The larger the ship, the tougher those guys will be. Once you defeat them, you can loot 1-3 chests (depending on ship size) on that ship, and get some nice gear. Then, it will sink.
The writing and dialogue in Odyssey is fairly lackluster. I feel like they were shooting for Witcher 3 with lots of cutscenes, dialogues, and colorful characters. But the talent is just not there. The main quests are the best of the bunch, but even those feel pretty budget level. Your character sounds like an oaf, and you just want to get through them as quickly as possible and get back to the combat or something. To give an example, there are several dialogues with Socrates, and this is the guy who pretty much founded the western tradition of philosophy, but in the game he just sounds like a complete retard who talks too much, and everyone treats him that way. More generally, everyone talks in the "video game" way, meaning they say so much stuff that means almost nothing, and everyone sounds so fake. Side quests are far worse. Something like 50% of their dialogue goes like this (slightly exaggerated):
"Hey mercenary, I need those 10 soldiers killed"
"Ah, you want those 10 soldiers killed?"
"Exactly, killing those 10 soldiers would be ideal"
"Ok, I will do it."
I realize there is a ridiculous amount of such quests in this game, but that's still not an excuse. If you cannot provide quality content, maybe it's better to make a smaller world. Odyssey was also supposed to be more of an RPG, with the player having choices in dialogue. Well, you definitely do, but honestly, I am not sure how much it adds to the game, because the choices are pretty much always so black and white, that they are not fun at all.
Exploration is also not very good, despite such a huge and beautiful world, because it is almost completely handicapped by the meta-gaming overlay. No one tells you to travel south on the road in front of you, then turn left at the fort, and follow the river to the sculpture of Athena. No, that would be fun, and actually cause you to explore, but instead, most quests come with a quest compass/map marker, and if that wasn't enough for the modern generation, you also have you eagle buddy (that is the feathered cheat mode). At any time, you can look through his eyes as he is soaring above, and he has an ability to pinpoint any quest or point of interest destination and put it on your HUD as a quest marker. There are some minor exceptions, as some quests will give you some general directions if you play on Exploration mode, or there are some notes you find that give you directions for treasure, but mostly it's follow the icon on the screen.
Another thing that hurts exploration is how unfun it is to get around the world. You have the ability to "parkour" around, climbing walls, mountains, jumping across chasms, and so on. But it is so completely mindless and uninvolving that it's really just a more flavorful version of running. This is another example of how dumbing down gameplay takes all the fun out of it. To run, you just hold W down. Well, to use parkour in Odyssey, you just hold W down, and anytime there is a vertical obstacle in the way, just press Shift as well. There is no stamina system, nothing to manage and no skill involved, so it quickly just becomes a hassle. Moreover, because of the terrain and topography, there are hills and walls everywhere, making it impossible to ride a horse for long periods of time, so it becomes quite annoying.
Another questionable decision is character development. As you level up to at least level 50 (maybe more with dlcs), there is a lot of busywork. The levels themselves are good, and as I mentioned before, you get to obtain cool new abilities. There is also an insane amount of gear to find in the world, from weapons to different pieces of armor, to even gear for your ship (which you can also upgrade in many, many ways). But every time you level, you have to run to the blacksmiths, and upgrade your gear too, which has its own levels. This costs a lot of resources, and becomes a hassle when you have to do it every level. If you don't, on the other hand, you quickly fall behind in damage and performance. The world is also severaly gated by levels. Enemies even 2 levels above you will be almost impossible to kill, and you can't use next level gear until you reach its level. It's this kind of thing, in combination with Ubisoft's Game Store that led people to believe Ubisoft made Odyssey grindy on purpose, to encourage casual players to buy boosts from the store to let them level/upgrade quicker. I certainly wouldn't put it past them. Overall though, I wouldn't say it has been a huge obstacle, I haven't bought anything from the Store, and still managed to level just fine.
What makes Odyssey stand out though, despite all the issues I mentioned above, is the sheer amount of content and things to do at any given time. This is a game where you never stop to think about what you should be doing next, but rather every moment you are thinking which of the 40000 things in front of me I should do next. There are the many quests in the main plot. Then, there is a ton of side-quests. Some of them are custom and involving, but many are of the MMO variety, go and kill 10 of this, or bring me 5 of that. Many quests send you off to Forts or sometimes you come across them in your travels, and these are massive constructions with many powerful enemies. You can take them on and fight them, which is very difficult but fun, or you can stealth your way in and take them out quietly. Then, there is also a mercenary system in play, where if you kill or steal a lot, people start putting a bounty on your head, and tons of different mercenaries start coming after you. I've had so many cases where I would be fighting with enemies at a fort or a bandit camp, and 1 or 2 mercenaries suddenly show up, sometimes with pets too, and they are pretty powerful enemies, so the whole thing just becomes a chaotic battle. You can also search for treasure, swim underwater, fight ship battles, track down cultists, collect special gear, run the equivalent of daily quests from MMos to get special currency to buy extra special gear, and engage in a ton of other things.
More than anything, Odyssey reminds me of a single-player MMO, if that makes any sense. It's a truly giant game (I am almost at 100 hours on Steam, and haven't even visited most provinces in the world) with too much to do for any one person, filled to the brim with content of various quality levels. It's too beautiful to put down but too empty to really love. Ultimately, you will spend a lot of time playing around with its content, but have a nagging feeling at the back of your head that it was not time well spent.
As you do this, you get to travel around an absolutely gorgeously recreated model of the ancient Greek world. This is one of the most beautiful worlds ever made for a video game, and its size and detail are unbelievable. You can roam from Macedonia in the north to the island of Crete in the south, from Kephalonia on one side to Lakonia on the other, and along the way, run across pretty much everything that you have ever read about regarding the ancient Greek civilization. Sail the beautiful Aegean in your trireme, ride on horseback from city to city, watch through the eyes of your eagle friend while he soars above the glory of Athens, it's all breathtaking. Cities are bustling with people engaged in realistic looking activities, the architecture is on point and really immersive. Many of the buildings that we know today as ruins (such as the Parthenon) stand in their heyday fully constructed and painted with vibrant colors (unlike the washed out white marble that we would see today). Statues of mythic heroes and gods are everywhere, and you just have to see an evening coastline lit up by fires.
The game takes place circa 430BC, right as the Pelopenissian War between Athens and Sparta has broken out. Most of the game provinces are being disputed by the forces of each, and you can take sides and help one of them out against the other, or be a true mercenary, and take on contracts from both as they come. You also get to meet a lot of famous people from history. In Athens, you get to talk to and do quests for Perikles, Aspasia, Alcibiadis, Socrates, Demosthenes, Eurepidis, Sophocles, and many more. In other places, you meet Hippokrates, Leonidas, and many others.
Being that you are a mercenary, the game is centered around combat, which is how you will solve most of the game quests. The combat system is quite fun, although some questionable decisions have been made. Odyssey re-uses the core system from Origins, but has changed a few things up. First, you can no longer use shields, because they wanted to encourage a more aggressive style of play (no more blocking). So now, your character will either wield a two-handed weapon, or if using a one-hander, your off hand will have a short spearhead from the Spear of Leonidas, your family relic. Spamming attacks will not work, because enemies will defend themselves by dodging, blocking with shield and other ways, and then hit you hard, especially on the harder difficulty settings. So you will have to defend their attacks first, and then counter. This can be done by parrying or by dodging. When an enemy attacks with a normal attack, their weapon will quickly flash a small white outline, so if you hit the parry key right then, you will parry their attack and put them into a staggered state for a few seconds, when you can safely attack them. The parry window is very generous compared to games like Dark Souls. However, sometimes enemies will attack with heavy attacks instead, where they will flash a red outline. Those cannot be parried, and must be dodged. If you dodge at the last moment, you get a few seconds of bullet-time, where you can attack the enemy without fear of reprisal.
I guess Ubisoft wanted to create a system where sometimes you parry and sometimes you dodge, depending on the circumstances, but in actuality, the easiest way to play is to simply dodge all the time, because if you parry, you might not realize in time that an unparryable attack is coming, and get hit hard. But dodging all the time feels really not fun, as you just keep spamming one button, and then your character zooms in bullet time back to the enemy to counter. So I do try to parry when I can, but some tougher enemies make it really hard. Overall, I definitely feel like the system in Origins was better in this regard, because there, you could parry every attack, but also had to observe the enemy, to understand when to parry, as different enemies had very different patterns. In Odyssey, it feels like it's been dumbed down, and you just watch for white/red flash cues to know when to press what.
Aside from regular defenses and attacks, you can also pick up new abilities as you level up. These include stuff like the now infamous Spartan Kick, Bull Rush, and Overpower. These add more options to combat, and are balanced decently where they don't make other stuff obsolete. You can fight with daggers, swords, spears, axes, staffs, and maces. That's if you are a warrior. You can also instead focus on the Assassination tree, and specialize in taking people out before they see you. This tree includes a lot of cool abilities, which besides increasing your stealth damage, also let you disappear in a cloud of smoke, or become somewhat invisible for a time. The third and final tree is archery, and lets you make your bow damage significantly higher, as well as get extra perks for it, such as shooting through shields, or multiple arrows at once.
What makes the combat fun is the sheer variety of enemies and the way they are coordinated to make it a challenging by manageable experience. You will face off against entire camps of soldiers, bosses, wild animals, mercenaries, and all kinds of other enemies. Some fights will be one on one (and can still be quite challenging), while most will be against multiple enemies. The enemies are slyly made to attack you mostly one at a time, but sometimes can come two or more at once. This generally makes these fights manageable, but still makes you watch for any extra attackers. So while you are switching between parries and dodges, depending on the type of enemy attacks, and watching who to defend against next, but also managing your health and adrenaline (kind of like mana for your special abilities), the entire experience is very fun. The only downside is that on Nightmare difficulty, which I am playing, enemies have too much hitpoints, so it takes a while to take Elites and Bosses out.
Aside from land combat, you can also engage in ship combat on the seas. You get to maneuver your trireme around against pirate ships, or those of Athenians, Spartans, and other nations. Then, you can tell them when to shoot arrows, throw javelins, or use the fire versions of the previous weapons agains tthe enemy ship. You also have to aim the attacks manually. Likewise, in a ship version of parry, you can tell your sailors to raise their shields on the side of the ship, to defend against enemy projectiles. You can also accelerate and position your ship to ram the other vessels. Eventually, once you lower the enemy ship's hitpoint bar to zero, it gets dead on the water, and you have two options. You can ram it, and then it will sink and you get to collect some wood and iron from it. This is the safe but rewardless option. The more dangerous option is to board the ship then, which will initiate a battle aboard the enemy ship. You can jump there, and fight the enemy sailors/bosses. The larger the ship, the tougher those guys will be. Once you defeat them, you can loot 1-3 chests (depending on ship size) on that ship, and get some nice gear. Then, it will sink.
The writing and dialogue in Odyssey is fairly lackluster. I feel like they were shooting for Witcher 3 with lots of cutscenes, dialogues, and colorful characters. But the talent is just not there. The main quests are the best of the bunch, but even those feel pretty budget level. Your character sounds like an oaf, and you just want to get through them as quickly as possible and get back to the combat or something. To give an example, there are several dialogues with Socrates, and this is the guy who pretty much founded the western tradition of philosophy, but in the game he just sounds like a complete retard who talks too much, and everyone treats him that way. More generally, everyone talks in the "video game" way, meaning they say so much stuff that means almost nothing, and everyone sounds so fake. Side quests are far worse. Something like 50% of their dialogue goes like this (slightly exaggerated):
"Hey mercenary, I need those 10 soldiers killed"
"Ah, you want those 10 soldiers killed?"
"Exactly, killing those 10 soldiers would be ideal"
"Ok, I will do it."
I realize there is a ridiculous amount of such quests in this game, but that's still not an excuse. If you cannot provide quality content, maybe it's better to make a smaller world. Odyssey was also supposed to be more of an RPG, with the player having choices in dialogue. Well, you definitely do, but honestly, I am not sure how much it adds to the game, because the choices are pretty much always so black and white, that they are not fun at all.
Exploration is also not very good, despite such a huge and beautiful world, because it is almost completely handicapped by the meta-gaming overlay. No one tells you to travel south on the road in front of you, then turn left at the fort, and follow the river to the sculpture of Athena. No, that would be fun, and actually cause you to explore, but instead, most quests come with a quest compass/map marker, and if that wasn't enough for the modern generation, you also have you eagle buddy (that is the feathered cheat mode). At any time, you can look through his eyes as he is soaring above, and he has an ability to pinpoint any quest or point of interest destination and put it on your HUD as a quest marker. There are some minor exceptions, as some quests will give you some general directions if you play on Exploration mode, or there are some notes you find that give you directions for treasure, but mostly it's follow the icon on the screen.
Another thing that hurts exploration is how unfun it is to get around the world. You have the ability to "parkour" around, climbing walls, mountains, jumping across chasms, and so on. But it is so completely mindless and uninvolving that it's really just a more flavorful version of running. This is another example of how dumbing down gameplay takes all the fun out of it. To run, you just hold W down. Well, to use parkour in Odyssey, you just hold W down, and anytime there is a vertical obstacle in the way, just press Shift as well. There is no stamina system, nothing to manage and no skill involved, so it quickly just becomes a hassle. Moreover, because of the terrain and topography, there are hills and walls everywhere, making it impossible to ride a horse for long periods of time, so it becomes quite annoying.
Another questionable decision is character development. As you level up to at least level 50 (maybe more with dlcs), there is a lot of busywork. The levels themselves are good, and as I mentioned before, you get to obtain cool new abilities. There is also an insane amount of gear to find in the world, from weapons to different pieces of armor, to even gear for your ship (which you can also upgrade in many, many ways). But every time you level, you have to run to the blacksmiths, and upgrade your gear too, which has its own levels. This costs a lot of resources, and becomes a hassle when you have to do it every level. If you don't, on the other hand, you quickly fall behind in damage and performance. The world is also severaly gated by levels. Enemies even 2 levels above you will be almost impossible to kill, and you can't use next level gear until you reach its level. It's this kind of thing, in combination with Ubisoft's Game Store that led people to believe Ubisoft made Odyssey grindy on purpose, to encourage casual players to buy boosts from the store to let them level/upgrade quicker. I certainly wouldn't put it past them. Overall though, I wouldn't say it has been a huge obstacle, I haven't bought anything from the Store, and still managed to level just fine.
What makes Odyssey stand out though, despite all the issues I mentioned above, is the sheer amount of content and things to do at any given time. This is a game where you never stop to think about what you should be doing next, but rather every moment you are thinking which of the 40000 things in front of me I should do next. There are the many quests in the main plot. Then, there is a ton of side-quests. Some of them are custom and involving, but many are of the MMO variety, go and kill 10 of this, or bring me 5 of that. Many quests send you off to Forts or sometimes you come across them in your travels, and these are massive constructions with many powerful enemies. You can take them on and fight them, which is very difficult but fun, or you can stealth your way in and take them out quietly. Then, there is also a mercenary system in play, where if you kill or steal a lot, people start putting a bounty on your head, and tons of different mercenaries start coming after you. I've had so many cases where I would be fighting with enemies at a fort or a bandit camp, and 1 or 2 mercenaries suddenly show up, sometimes with pets too, and they are pretty powerful enemies, so the whole thing just becomes a chaotic battle. You can also search for treasure, swim underwater, fight ship battles, track down cultists, collect special gear, run the equivalent of daily quests from MMos to get special currency to buy extra special gear, and engage in a ton of other things.
More than anything, Odyssey reminds me of a single-player MMO, if that makes any sense. It's a truly giant game (I am almost at 100 hours on Steam, and haven't even visited most provinces in the world) with too much to do for any one person, filled to the brim with content of various quality levels. It's too beautiful to put down but too empty to really love. Ultimately, you will spend a lot of time playing around with its content, but have a nagging feeling at the back of your head that it was not time well spent.
