Assassins Creed Odyssey - The Ultimate Critique

This is the complete review of Assassin's Creed Odyssey and all its DLC. This was a project that took more than a year to complete and I think the excessive length of this video is evidence of that effect. Now it was originally uploaded as three separate videos over months and months apart, but now that all three parts are finished I've frozen them into one giant mass that is this monstrosity that you're about to witness. I've done this so you can consume the entire review in the way it was originally intended. I'm still including timestamps below and invite you to jump to the discussions that interest you most or watch this video in parts or watch the entire video from start to finish, whatever you like best.

I won't judge to give you a generalized view. The idea of ​​what you're talking about with this video is divided into three parts, a discussion about the narrative, the gameplay and then a discussion about the DLC and there are sub-discussions throughout, needless to say I'm very verbose here, so if you're looking for something very light then this isn't the video for you, but you probably didn't click on this video unless you had an idea of ​​what a nearly three hour review on a single game would bring and by all means last, I repeated. in each of the three parts, but the spoiler warns that everything in the game and its DLC will be spoiled, so consider yourself warned, but with that, thank you all for your support throughout this effort and especially to all the sponsors that make these crazy projects possible, but with Everything I Love You, everyone enjoyed the video.

Assassin's Creed Odyssey was released on October 5, 2018 to critical acclaim, widely considered one of the best Assassin's Creed games of the modern generation. I was looking to do many things at the same time. I was building on the foundation. that Origins had established, but it's clear that this game is the one Ubisoft was thinking about when they were designing Origins in the first place. This is their masterpiece now because this game is very important to Assassin's Creed as a franchise as a whole. I decided I was going to cover it in a lot more detail than I normally cover games of this type.

Now the reason I decided to discuss narrative first is because everything else in Odyssey is designed around narrative, this is not always the case. This is the case with video games, but in this particular case the gameplay was framed around how the narrative is structured and not the other way around. Our goal is not to break down the main story and offer commentary, but rather to analyze the gameplay and design choices. that were made, this is mainly because if you had already played the game it would be of no use to you and if you are still undecided about whether or not you should play the game, we will end up spoiling everything for you and so we are going to toe the line between the two, However, I should still issue a spoiler warning because I'm going to describe the opening hours of the game in quite some detail, setting the stage for all the characters and then I'm also going to break down several side quests that are pretty pivotal now if you're still looking. broad recommendations on whether or not you should play Odyssey, what I will tell you is that this Assassin's Creed Odyssey is, in my opinion, the best the franchise has ever been now there are a lot of caveats attached to that statement;

However, in broad strokes as a video game, this is one of the most impressive games Ubisoft has ever released, and it was one of the most impressive games ever. came out this year, which is why it was nominated for game of the year against the likes of Spider-Man, God of War and Red Dead Redemption - this game is extraordinary and not one you should miss, that doesn't mean it's perfect. or that it hasn't had its fair share of controversy specifically within the Assassin's Creed fanbase, but don't worry, we'll talk about all that in this video simply if you haven't played Odyssey yet, play it, but with all that said, let's For me to explain how I played the game, that way you can have a proper understanding of how I approach the game and where I'm coming from when I give reviews.

I'm about to do my first game was with Alexios, however I came back. I walked through several sections with Cassandra to evaluate her plot. I also watched several selections of games where people played as Cassandra to see what she had to offer, as well as reading the wiki pages for this game to find out how his story differs from Alexey's. What I will say is that overall the characters are very similar, often sharing exact lines with pronouns swapped here and there, however there is a significant difference in terms of the emotions conveyed and the quality of the acting, in my opinion, after having played.

Approximately 70 hours with Alexios and another 10 or 15 with Cassandra. I already regret choosing to play as Alexios. My personal recommendation is to play as Cassandra, especially since now Ubisoft has confirmed that Cassandra is the Canon character. This doesn't mean that. Alexey OS's performance is poor, it's just to say that compared to Cassandra, his writing and the way he delivers his overall performance is much more relatable. unfriendly now, that could simply be because I'm a guy who watches a girl go through very difficult circumstances or it could be more generally that she just played the role better. I'm not completely sure, all I know is that when these emotional moments came that we'll discuss in a moment I felt a lot more sympathy for Cassandra compared to Alexios now, like I said.

I'm going to talk about the gameplay of Assassin's Creed Odyssey in the next video, again, subscribe if you want to see it when it comes out. However, I think it's important to communicate that over the course of both games I jump between multiple difficulty levels to try to evaluate how the leveling system works on these different difficulties; However, my general philosophy is that I should play the game the way most people will or with the money that people would consider normal. Difficulty settings because they tend to be more where the developer intended you to play. Difficulty settings above and below the normal setting tend to be for people looking for an extra challenge or just looking to beat the narrative they tend to be. people on the outside looking in, as opposed to the people who make up the majority of the player base, so for the sake of simplicity we're just going to say that I played most of the game normally, like I said a moment ago, I spent Approximately 75 hours playing as Alexios and spent another approximately 13 to 14 hours playing as Cassandra;

However, when you finish making this video, another five hours will probably be added to each of them as you recapture. Additional Footage I also went all the way to the end of the game with Alexios going through each of the three phases of the ending which I'll explain later, but with all that being said, let's get into Assassin's Creed Odyssey as a game. It came from a decision that Ubisoft made pretty early on and that was to transition and have this series land as close as possible to the Witcher 3 assembly that is drawn so often that I won't mention it anymore for the rest of this video.

Not because I think it's a poor simile, in fact there are interviews that the game director has given where he openly said that this is what they were trying to do, but I want to criticize and look at this game as a standalone product and not as a A direct competitor to one of the best games ever created, for some, this change in focus was a bad decision; However, I would say that is not the case. Assassin's Creed has had great worlds and overall world design dating back to Assassin's Creed 2. and with each consecutive release it seems that UV soft aims to broaden its horizons and make its games more titles based on the exploration of a open world instead of linear stealth titles and I think that's not even a controversial thing to say because when you compare it to any of the games that have been released in the last five years, that's the general trend that started with Assassin's Creed 3, slowly They started expanding the world, doubling down on creating hunting mechanics and the like, and then once they expanded into unity, they tried to go.

Going back to the stealth mechanics, that game had some issues and then the syndicate came out with the open world focusing once again on exploration, gang management, crafting, and all sorts of collectibles based on the timelines that they gave us, it seems that Ubisoft decided to make the transition. towards the direction of origins and Odyssey around the release of Assassin's Creed unity, which makes sense that the game has not been well received and therefore you would expect them to make a fairly significant change after, like I said, this change design frustrated many in the Assassin's Creed community, according to a recent survey I conducted, 38 percent of Assassin's Creed fans consider these new games not to be within the scope of Assassin's Creed as a franchise, but rather something Rather than arguing that Assassin's Creed is dead for some, this means that they won't be playing Assassin's Creed games in the future because they miss the linear or stealth-based adventures of Assassin's Creed 2 Brotherhood and the like;

However, for others, this is a welcome change because the old formula stagnated, but this is all beside the point for the broader narrative. In the design of Assassin's Creed Odyssey, the point is that this transition is already made, but we will return to this point towards the end of the video because I think it is very important now, because of this choice, to move away from linear scripted sequences and, Instead, focus on the broader RPG mechanics of a title based on open-world exploration. The game's story is quite elaborate. Now I will give you the complete setup of the main story of the game and then we will discuss it in more detail after I analyze it.

In the opening sequence, the game gives you the option to play as Cassandra or Alexios and, as I said before, my personal recommendation would be to play as Cassandra, although in the broad strokes of the narrative it doesn't make a big difference, the game begins. We go with a flashback to Leonidas and the battle at Thermopylae with the 300, which is eerily reminiscent of Unity's intro, for some reason, which happens to be one of my visually favorite game intros of all time. This section is very cinematic and is indicative of the style that the rest of the game will reflect, they are trying to tell stories based on real people, they are not going to duplicate the more cartoonish nature of the stories that have been presented in the series in the past and It works like this.

The moment is truly beautiful as Leonidas describes to one of his generals that he wishes he had taken his son fishing before leaving and now he faces his imminent death. It's a really solemn and beautiful moment and, frankly, I love it. Now through this section you can access Let's see roughly how the gameplay will work specifically with combat, but don't worry, we'll discuss that more in the next video, after that we can go ahead and see some of the current content right now in the The most recent Assassin's Creed games have been very minimal, so we're going to ignore it for now because clearly for Ubisoft these moments aren't as important as they used to be, the point is that it's the same girl we saw in the origins.

She still searches for artifacts and apparently has a partner. Now after this they make you choose which character you want to play as and then introduce you to the player character in a pretty underwhelming way, which is actually pretty interesting compared to how origins introduced the player. Biock is surely intentional when he is introduced to Biock, the player saw him chasing one of his son's murderers and you see him screaming and shouting very gutturally to the point where he decides to kill this man in a very gruesome way. It's very, very interesting. and violent and draws the attention of the players, while in Odyssey the player character was introduced to a pleasantly gliding and peaceful journey through the rural landscape on the island of Vilonia, at which point the camera swoops in on the character of the player you have selected when you see them humming and singing while sitting on a roof, it is very calm and sets the stage for what will be the first five hours or so of the game.

Now to me it seems like they introduce your character to you this way so that you feel the same thing that they do, this is known as an empathic setup, they basically want you to feel as pigeonholed on this little island as the person on screen and works. You just saw Leonidas fight a group of Persians in a very gruesome way. battle and now you are sitting on a rooftop humming to yourself, the only thing the player can think about is when they will be able to do the same thing that Leonidas was doing and that is exactly what the player character is also thinking, it works very, very good because it makes you want to go and do what the player character wants to go and doing it is simple but effective now you are a mercenaryand you tend to serve as raw muscle for those in need on the island of Catalonia.

This also explains the physicality very well and justifies everything you do, from running around freely to fighting massive hordes, now your backstory is pretty intense too and these are things you slowly learn over the course of the first four hours or so of the game. through quick flashbacks that happen as you progress. Your family's main questline is to send it from a long line of great warriors, so you were given the Spear of Leonidas, which is an artifact of his or the first civilization artifact, meaning that later in the game will explain many of the most supernatural abilities you will have when using it.

You were born into a family consisting of a father, a loving mother and a younger brother who is a baby when everything I am about to describe happens as expected if you choose to play as Cassandra Cassandra is the older sister and Alexios is the baby and the same thing happens. On the contrary, if you choose to play as Alexios Nikolaos, who is your father and a Spartan general, they train you in the proper ways of survival and combat and you see it in a couple of scenes that are beautifully rendered and animated and very, very sensitive and delicate and establish this feeling that the characters you're watching actually care about each other, it's a nice change from games like Syndicate, which is the last title this particular team worked on, where you feel like Jacob and Evie Frye have feelings for each other, but it's a risky relationship that's much more rivalry than we are. to see any backstory or have any real motivation to justify why they care about each other, you have to take it on blind faith, basically, life is good for this young family and, just when everything seems to be fine and excellent, the Oracle of Apollo.

Also known as the Oracle of Delphi, it says that the younger brother, whoever he is, will lead to the fall of Sparta and therefore the leadership of the Spartan regime feels that this child should be eliminated because, after all, the Oracle is the Oracle and so they determined that the reasonable reaction to this news would be to kill your younger brother by throwing him from the top of a mountain, but it is important to emphasize that the parents were not happy with Nikolaos doing it, but they had to do it or else . He and his entire family will be considered traitors who are apparently complicit in allowing the fall of Sparta because the Oracle stated that the child would lead to the eventual fall, so if you stopped the destruction of the child then you would in turn be complicit in the destruction. of Sparta, therefore, being a traitor to your mother is not amused and yells at them to stop while it happens.

It's pretty intense and I'll just let it play. The article has talked about avoiding sparks, since the child must fall first. This happens please. you know he helped us, he'll need those shitty solids on paper, his disgrace for the life she snuffed out in your blood is tainted, get rid of your poison, and that's why your character tries to stop the priest from turning your brother into mush. of potatoes, which At that moment, you knock them both off the top of the mountain and therefore they immediately consider you a traitor and this means that your father Nicholas must also throw you off the cliff because if he doesn't, it means that he will be complicit in the destruction of Sparta and in the death of a priest, which is obviously not right and why it unnerves you while your mother screams in the background.

It's what they call a classic lose-lose situation, but somehow you survive, escape to sea and get into a boat and sail away, at which point your boat capsizes and you wash up in Kefalonia, which is where you meet Marcos and it is the same island where you will eventually meet your adult character and so in this moment where we are first exposed to our Player Character, what has been happening is that since we arrived on shore we have We've been working for this gentleman, Marcos, who runs a bunch of different businesses, lends money and is basically a bastard and we're his hired muscle, we do all his dirty work, but we've recently pissed off a guy named Cyclops who basically owns Kefalonia, is very rich and very powerful.

It turns out that Marcos owes you money for some of the things you've done for him all over the island, but instead of paying you back, he borrowed more money from the Cyclops and then bought a vineyard, turns out this is pretty funny because Marcos , when introduced to him, he basically makes it clear to everyone that he has no idea what he's doing and just likes the idea of ​​buying a vineyard, so he asked to borrow it. a lot of money and then I bought it. I'm sure we all have friends who behave that way. Heck, I could be one of those people too.

We can already see that the focus of this game is taking over. They are making sure that every character you interact with. He has a strict personality and is an individual who they want to make sure that when you talk about the game with your friends you can reference Marcos. Oh, who is Marcos? Remember he's the stupid guy who bought a vineyard and wanted to come in July and even though he had no idea how to do it, oh yeah I remember, that's what they're looking for in this game and that's how you know you have a living world that breathes when people are real people and so far so good, and that's what Marco says. that he can pay what he owes you if you do a few things for him so he can get his money back, one of which includes stealing the Cyclops' fake eye which is made of obsidian and which they could sell, so you steal it at which point Markos reveals to you that you couldn't actually sell it because everyone on the island knows that the eye is the property of the Cyclops and therefore the only way to sell it is if you somehow got off the island.

We're back where you started and normally I'd be angry that the developers put me on this wild goose chase only to suddenly explain that it didn't really matter because the characters couldn't use what they stole or obtained, however, in this case it really it seems to work because Markos is fully aware that he couldn't sell this and sends you on this wild goose chase to buy time and when Cassandra finds out about this, she's just as frustrated as the player character. You can be a little harsh verbally with Markos, but the problem still remains. The Cyclops still has all the debt and will soon come to collect, so Markos tells you about a couple more projects you can do for him. try to weaken the cyclops so that you can eventually interact with him and one of these particular tasks is to investigate a group of individuals who have just sailed to the island in very fancy ships, which would imply that they are friends of the cyclops because they are clearly rich and you then go to the house where they have been staying and kill everyone involved, at which point a cutscene plays where you see a man named Eleanor come out of the house and offer you a quest, the quest basically involves sailing to a small island just off the coast of where you are currently to pick up a shroud and once you return with the shroud Alpen or he's going to pay you, you give him the shroud back and he pays you a bunch of money, turns out he doesn't.

I don't even want the shroud and that was Leigha's test, he tells you that he needs you to kill someone called the Wolf of Sparta on the mainland, however the problem is that you are still stuck on this small island and you don't have any way to leave and return to the mainland, you will need a ship which Cassandra cannot afford and in fact you can go and talk to one of the shipbuilders on the island, and he tells you that "You are going to need a hundred thousand drachmas if you want to buy the ship, something that is a lot of money even at the end of the game and therefore a frustrated Cassandra will return to Marco's house, at which point he will inform her that the cyclops seems to have just returned and that he is weak enough so you can eliminate him completely, you find him in the middle of a torture session with a sailor named Barnabas and then this happens, I swear to each one, what difference does it make?

I've never had so much God has spoken about one man all my days let it go no, said cyclops, did it hurt your feelings? I don't like it when people call me that you're so fat, I mean big and strong and you really only have one, give it to them. Give it to me and I won't kill Marcos for stealing it. Give it to me if you want it. I'll get it. Understandably, he gets angry because you take his obsidian eye and put it in the butt of a goat and then he starts fighting with you.

You kill him and his men. , which is the first major fight you will have in the game, at which point you saved Barnabas and then he tells you that he has a ship that he will allow you to command since you saved his life and guess what, now you have a way to get to the continent, woop woop, you say goodbye to Marcos and Phoebe, who is effectively your sister character, and then you walk away with Barnabas, at which point you start talking to them and tell them. He explains what you're doing and tells you that the Wolf of Sparta is a man named Niklaus, who turns out to be your father, and suddenly this is no longer just a contract killing for a quick buck, it becomes a family reunion and either the player or Cassandra or Alexios have a personal reason for hunting this man, you jump through some hoops, kill some people, destroy a couple of ships and finally reach the beach on dry land and you meet Nicholas's new son, Stentor, who you avoid from the time you encounter the Wolf of Sparta until you help him defeat some of the Athenians held inland, you do so and after one or two national battles that we'll talk about during the gameplay section in the video below you can meet with The Wolf one on one, once you start talking Nikolas finds out who you are and then explains his side of the story of why he had no choice and does a good job.

Honestly, I feel bad for the guy and At this point, the game gives you a choice. You are asked to kill him or free him and this is your first major choice in the game with long-term consequences. However, there are some side missions that will also have consequences that we will repeat. Getting back to this, to be honest, this really matters if you decide to kill Nikolas, which probably no one would blame you because even though he was forced to do it, he still threw his children off a cliff, which is hard to justify if you do. .

You will take the helmet from him and return to Eleanor. You will receive your paycheck and continue to fight and hunt the people he asks you to hunt. You are also required to kill stunts or if you do this, it means both. Some of these characters will no longer appear at the end of the game because they are well dead and will not be there when you search for the good family ending, which is the first phase of the endgame. Which, if it sounds vague and strange, I'll explain in more detail in a moment. However, if you forgive him, simply take the helmet from him and tell him to stay hidden and disappear for a moment and once you return to the stand, he will see. that you have this knight's helmet and assume he is dead, at which point he pays you and you can continue on your way even though you didn't actually kill the man you were hired to kill now, this is a technique they use several times in Over the course of Assassin's Creed Odyssey the ability to lie to other characters in the main story and it actually works quite well, some other games have tried to do this and done a pretty good job, but it tends to be pretty obvious that the character is lying. because it's almost like they want to make sure the player is aware that the character is lying or has a short memory and doesn't remember that he didn't kill the guy he said he just killed.

I understand why some people might be frustrated by having to start lying to people in order to get ahead, but I think it actually works pretty well and to be completely honest, I find out that my father spared his life even though I was paid to kill. him and then wanted to continue receiving my salary by returning my helmet. I'd probably lie about it so now it just makes sense to me when we talk about consequences in RPGs and narratives specifically, there are always degrees of consequences, there are small decisions that don't really have a long term impact and then there are consequences and decisions More important than shots that have overall consequences on the game world and the characters in it, killing or sparing Niklaus is a pretty big decision, but it'll only come up again towards the end. of the game when he reappears with you and your family, if you choose to kill him he just isn't there and that messes with the tension and the feeling of the ending, but since he's dead it's not directly mentioned other than a couple of lines that your mother is going to say when describing that he was a good man, blah blah blah, this is one of the things that Assassin's Creed Odyssey really relies on: the player assigns value to particular moments that they don't tend to wallow in. self-pity or showing characters on quiet walks thinking about life, they tend to let the player do that while exploring the world and then assign their own emotional value to certain instances and this can work very, very well when it works, but it also fails. miserablyWhen it doesn't and I'll discuss a couple of examples of that in just a few moments, regardless of what you choose to do with Niccolo's and Stentor, from here your journey takes off and you can start exploring the way you want. explore and so effectively that's the introduction, all that, this game is really huge and you'll have to set aside about 50-60 hours just to finish the main story and probably around 70-80 if you want to tackle most of the side content which doesn't even include if you want to replay, say, a New Game+ and play the other character you didn't choose, but from here on out the game mainly consists of chasing your mother over the course of In which you'll begin to infiltrate the cult that controlled the Oracle and made him say what caused your family to collapse.

You go to one of her meetings and then find out that your brother, the one who was thrown off the mountain as a baby, somehow survived and is now involved with the Cosmos cult. If you played Cassandra you'll see Alexios fully grown and vice versa which is cool and actually surprised me because I know they threw the baby off a cliff and apparently the adult priest didn't survive and neither did all the other babies but you know we'll discuss this in a minute. The game continues with you exploring the world fighting cultists and trying. to resolve your frustrations about your family collapsing and the ending comes in three phases which we will discuss in a moment, but before we get to the ending we must discuss all the things the game wants you to look at beyond the use.

Coincidentally, excessive violence that you're supposed to ignore and unlikely people or events within narratives are completely normal, especially in video games. There is actually a term that has been considered specifically around this that we will discuss in a moment as a ludonarrative dissonance, but the point is. The reason is that this has to be consistent around the world because there are often a lot of coincidences involved. in a lot of stories or a lot of excessive violence that you're supposed to ignore or certain things that are predictable or even plot twists. although it's incredibly unlikely that this happens all the time and the only time it becomes a problem is when the world doesn't seem to accept it either or if the player or reader or whatever medium it's presented in doesn't.

In fact, I think it's possible that an example would be the baby who survived the fall. In fact, I could rule it out because it is hinted at many times throughout the story and narrative that Alexios and Cassandra come from a line of almost superhuman individuals and that they were Chosen by the first civilization, these people are effectively special, so which might rule it out, especially when we look at the context of the story, it has to happen, but if we look at the excessive killings that occur, that's where it starts. It becomes a problem if we look back at Assassin's Creed 2, for example, it is always emphasized that when you take a life, you are taking a life.

I did a review of Assassin's Creed 2 where I broke this down in more detail if you want to see it. Be sure to check it out and the great thing about these early games in the franchise is that they always gave you stealth as an alternative to all of this. If you didn't want to kill hundreds of people, you could avoid it by sneaking around. and of course there were exceptions to that rule, as there are in any game or instance, but that was always the underlying theme: your life has value and you only take the lives you need to take here, that have been stripped and you can kill. 15 guys just have a brief conversation with one another to advance the plot and my question is are we supposed to ignore that, if not why not mention it?

It's a video game, but it's still an issue that other games have addressed this correctly. in my opinion, like in Red Dead Redemption: I won't reveal anything important, but there is a moment where Arthur is forced to look back on his life and judge whether he has been a good man or not and he looks back and draws in his honor. Basically, your morality can say that he has been a good man and that he has done a good job or that he has been a rotten man, at which point you can choose between redoubling your efforts to be a bad man or a good man or you can try to save .

Hence the name Red Dead Redemption in Odyssey, although there's never a moment more than a few improvised lines that I don't take seriously and apparently neither did the character or the writers where the character actually looks back and realizes that they could be doing more. It does more harm than good that they are responsible for killing thousands of people just to find their family or just to get some quick gear or upgrade these supposedly ignored things, which is where we get to ludonarrative dissonance as a major problem. Ludonarrative dissonance is effectively a phenomenon that happens when you have a character like Nathan Drake, for example, who is supposed to be a good guy who does everything right and fights bad guys, but at the same time kills hundreds and hundreds of innocent people. just to beat a particular level and Usually the way this is justified is that the writers will say that only things that happen during cutscenes are considered canon;

However, that's not necessarily the case when talking about a game like Uncharted or Assassin's Creed Odyssey because many of the scenes blend together perfectly. the game and you will have characters that will describe that you have to go and kill this guy to be able to get past this guard, to be able to get past that wall and to be able to get past XY and Z, and that doesn't quite work and unfortunately In Assassin's Creed Odyssey, just like with a lot of narrative based games it's just ignored and you're expected to ignore it and move on, don't think about it or dwell on it for long.

The games that appear recognize how many people there are. being killed and killed for some kind of selfish pursuit, those games work very very well, an example is Red Dead Redemption where there is an actively employed honor mechanic that has an impact on the ending you will get to drive healthy and reasonable behavior , so you're not just killing hundreds and hundreds or thousands and thousands of people and it's frustrating because stealth for the sake of the narrative is usually a very important element, the ability to be more pacifistic and complete missions without needing to kill . For anyone, it's a very important element of game design, especially when it's an intense narrative where we're supposed to empathize and feel sorry for our protagonists, but unfortunately in Odyssey it's almost completely ignored in favor of the fun new combat.

It's understandable, but it limits how much I can care about Cassandra and Alexios. This is especially true for Alexios because Alexios is a voice actor and tends to revel in violence as one would expect a young man to do, however, Cassandra tends to approach it more delicately. almost as if she didn't want to be violent or do these things, but she was forced to do it by her birth and by the circumstances surrounding her childhood, another example of things we are supposed to accept and ignore. All other implications would be the mythical creatures we encounter towards the end of Assassin's Creed Odyssey.

To many, this will seem a bit jarring. They made an active effort to anchor these creatures in the story of this particular game, but in the larger one. In the context of the franchise, it's a bit of a stretch, you basically meet Griffin, a Cyclops, a Minotaur and Medusa, and these are some of my favorite moments in the game in terms of graphics and gameplay, especially since you hear them talking about a Minotaur for so long. go to islands where they're still arguing about it, where it's their worship and the whole time you expect to see this thing and you never do until the end of the game when you can actually interact with it and fight it, it's absolutely amazing and included some one of my favorite boss moments I've had all year, even when games like God of War also came out.

Now there have always been supernatural forces at play in the Assassin's Creed games, it's always been there from the beginning. first title, but we hadn't seen the manifest in this way before, at least in the main game in the Assassin's Creed Origins DLC there were a lot of designs and supernatural moments and to be honest, I loved that DLC and it was one of my favorite downloadables . content packs for any game that came out in the last few years, but it's basically an excuse to have an epic boss battle that looks cool and is a bit nerdy, but that's basically it, it's form over substance, you shouldn't take it super.

Seriously, I don't think anyone is going to look at Assassin's Creed Odyssey seeing that there's a Minotaur Griffin, a Cyclops, and Medusa in the game and assume that the writers naturally stumbled upon those moments and encounters that occur quite clearly, the game's designers said. . Wouldn't it be great if we could have the player fight a Cyclops and then a Minotaur at the end of a maze? That would be cool, how can we justify that in the game world? That's clearly what happened here and if you're playing this. The game as a game first and as a story-driven narrative experience second is great, but if you approach it with the latter perspective at the forefront, it can be a bit jarring and frustrating, and this is where many Assassin's fans have become.

Believe for a long time. Disgusted with the franchise, Ubisoft has stopped pretending from the beginning that Assassin's Creed is realistic and has instead doubled down on the fun and magical things that happen. I understand why people don't like it, but this is clearly the way they wanted this to be their open-world fantasy action RPG, they've left behind the ground-based narrative attempts of years past, Ubisoft just doesn't. wants you to take Assassin's Creed very seriously, they want you to play it as a fun open-world exploration. Title based on some RPG mechanics, they don't want you to approach it as a narrative experience based on a current story focused on Abstergo the Templars and the idea that there is this new world order that is trying to eliminate free will in humanity and that It is still valid. at play, that's still a theme that happens in the background of the game, but that's not what the game itself is about, that's what the overarching narratives are about, but that's not the lens you should be viewing the game through Now, this is a video game, but I would say that all this realism still matters because this is an RPG.

RPGs need worlds that are committed to themselves and to Ubisoft. My only major criticism of them is that they are now afraid of commitment. The director of Assassin's Creed Odyssey is called Scott. In fact, Phillips has himself said that The Witcher 3, The Elder Scrolls and Fallout are among his favorite games, saying: "That's where we wanted to push Assassin's Creed as a franchise towards those games with more options for the player and citing that the The problem is if you want to." a truly grounded, interesting RPG, the whole world has to be on the same page in The Witcher 3 Elder Scrolls and weird things happen all the time, but everyone in the world is on the same page and everything that happens is believable in the world when The problem is when things happen that aren't based on the world they've created, like in Fallout 4 with the kid in the refrigerator, which at this point is a living, breathing meme.

Now our pajamas have a lot of moving parts, but for now, we'll look at the world's narrative themes specifically because we'll be discussing narrative consequences soon. All of this is very difficult to criticize because whether or not it works for you depends on how you approach the game now. to me it's fun and lighthearted and first of all it's a game and second of all it's a grounded story. I don't tend to take the narrative of my Assassin's Creed games very seriously, while some of you may not personally, so the game works quite well. as well as a fun and light-hearted RPG, but if you went into it expecting the depth of some of these other games we've discussed, you might be very disappointed because that's simply not Ubisoft's intention when they develop a game like this now. . something I can easily criticize is how the game tries to end itself and yes, I put it that way very intentionally because I feel like the game doesn't know how to end and maybe doesn't want to, but either way, the main game's story doesn't end even. even in a satisfying way now, as I mentioned earlier, the story has three phases to its end.

The family ending will be what I'll consider. The end of Atlantis, which is found and achieved by defeating those mythical creatures we just discussed. the path is the coolest ending and then the cultist ending which to be honest is pretty disappointing and is found by defeating all the cultists in the game. Now for me it just doesn't work. You reach the familiar ending about 40 hours later. the game, but then to get to the end of Atlantis you have to spend another 10-15 hours doing side quests to level up to the point where you can defeat the creaturesmythical creatures and once you defeat the mythical creatures you will get a couple of scenes ending. everything is done and you feel like that's the end of the game, but you still remember that there are a bunch of cultists you need to defeat, so you spend another 10 to 15 hours completing side quests leveling up to defeat these cultists and then you basically get a cutscene that tries to sum it all up and that's it and you're back in the game and everything continues as before, leaving the player constantly thinking that there will be one more thing at the end of the rainbow. which is good, I guess, because it means it pushes you to keep playing, but when it pushes you to keep playing and do things that you're not particularly excited to do, it doesn't really work, for example, if we're driving the narrative. wanting us to resolve the frustration that my family has fallen apart since I was a child, you would think the end of the family would be the concrete once that end happens you can put the controller down and move on with your life.

However, that's not the case once the end of the family occurs, they basically just join you on your ship and head out to you as you go and explore the rest of the world, hunting all sorts of creatures and expects you to continue and it's kind of anticlimactic because there doesn't seem to be a real resolution, they just jump on your ship and that's it, as for the ending of Atlantis, this one is actually pretty cool and quite satisfying because we get the reveal that any character whoever you choose to play is effectively the guardian of Atlantis to this day, which is where we get the Layla sequence in the present day, which feels like it's the quote-unquote true ending of the game is that ending that you must see and you must leave the game in the final scene which reflects this because you will see your character arguing with Barnabas and a couple of other people depending on the decisions you have made, what they are going to do now, what they are supposed to do now that everything seems have come to an end and to be completely honest I think this is because Ubisoft didn't want to have a Fallout New Vegas or Fallout 3 situation on their hands where you have to stop playing once you resolve the main story and the main quest line, which is perfectly understandable and reasonable.

They want to give you a reason to continue playing the character I've spent 50 60 70 80 hours developing and they don't want any satisfaction and full resolution because that would kill the drive to continue playing, especially since it looks like there won't be an Assassin's Creed game in 2019, Which means Odyssey is going to be there long-term as a cash cow through DLC for the next year, which means they don't want to kill off player involvement by having a truly conclusive main story. They want to leave the door open. Understandable, but especially for a narrative-based RPG. game or at least a game that tries to be so frustrating now, as for satisfaction in general, in the strict sense, we can see the consequences in general for me and, in my opinion, satisfaction in RPGs tends to arise Honestly, the game has a lot of these consequences to varying degrees, as we discussed above, and even some surprises, like finding out your brother is a member of the cult, make sense in the grand scheme of things, especially If you consider that they would have had to hire voice actors so that they can also double their efforts and have them play multiple roles effectively, it just makes sense and to solve their family problems it is not a bad idea and luckily they took a lot of things into consideration to make sure that their elections were uniform.

It affects the lives of your immediate family members, so if you make certain decisions throughout the main story missions, you will eventually reach the top of the mountain where this all started and where you were both thrown in the early stages. of their lives and You have the option to save or try to save your brother or you can kill him because they have committed too many crimes against Sparta, against humanity, blah, blah, blah, and for this I am very grateful that they did not chicken out and Force everyone to get along or chicken out and force you to kill them to avenge your father or whatever.

It is very, very nice and handles delicately. There are other surprises they pull out from time to time, like revealing that Nicholas isn't actually one. your father, but he is actually your stepfather and that your real father is somewhere in the world only to find him much later in the game. Probably the clearest example, however, I could draw from the consequences that motivate the story and vice versa, would be Phoebe's death in Athens Phoebe, as I said, is the sister character that you see in the early stages of the game and she keeps showing up, eventually. finds her way to the mainland, which is surprising because your character had to kill a lot of people to get to the mainland, but coincidentally she gets to the mainland and finds you, but regardless of what we talk about, coincidences happen for the sake of the narrative delivery, but as you talk to her and progress through the rest of the main story in Athens, specifically everything. shit starts to fall, the plague comes to war, it comes to earth and eventually Phoebe gets caught in the middle of it and as far as I know there's no way to save Phoebe, she's going to die no matter what, as long as this is not so.

A direct consequence of the player's choice is that she cannot be stopped; It is a reflection of the consequence in the story and the overall narrative, so it still affects the player as a consequence of his actions, even if the player could not have done anything to prevent it. Change it up and this story beat is pretty well designed and I think it works pretty well. I just wish they had focused on it a little more and extended it a little more. There are later mentions to ensure that she was buried properly, which is a nice touch, no doubt, but there isn't as much of a character change as you might expect, at least in terms of line delivery and overall performances - sure enough, Phoebe dies and then there are about ten minutes of scripted scenes and dialogue. sequences after that and then everything goes back to normal and it's fine, there's no mention of it while you're on horseback, there are no introspective moments with the player character fresh out into the world, it just happens and you're expected to just move.

Once again, as we said above, most of the emotional weight of these moments should be carried by the player. You have to assign emotional weight to instances like these, otherwise they just won't affect you at all and there are many more. I could cite examples of emotional moments that occur in moments of surprise or as a result of your actions, whether direct or indirect, but the overall pacing of these moments tends to be what's wrong, which, to be honest, is expected. from a team that has not done so. Making an open world RPG like this before writing these narrative beats is pretty easy, if you hire a halfway decent writer he can do it;

However, making sure the game's pacing is right is actually very difficult, some games do it very well. and others struggle immensely with it, but to be completely honest, I think they could have reflected this if they had taken some of the steps you reference now, this brings us to the discussion of consequences within an RPG in general and the ian assassin's

creed

,

odyssey

. There are many consequences that reflect your actions. One of the first and simplest examples I was able to draw occurs on Kefalonia, the island where you start the game and is usually tackled in the first few hours of the game and is a quest called Blood Rush.

This search is quite simple. Phoebe tells you to go investigate this family, which is the family of a friend of hers. You go there and realize that everyone is sick, all the buildings have been burned and something strange has happened. You talk to the guards. who are apparently holding this family hostage and discover that this family is also infected, so if you want to save the island from whatever plague they are infected with, you must turn a blind eye while the guards draw their swords and kill the family. , including the children, to save the island or if you stop the guards from doing this you will probably condemn the rest of the island to the same disease that took over the rest of this small part of the village, it is an easy and difficult decision. at the same time, the fact that they add the kids in there really drives home the point and makes it hard to decide what to do because on the one hand you don't know how sick this family really is, but on the other hand you know it's a plague and we are on a remote island and if the plague takes over everything could collapse and the fact that this mission happened so early in the game is almost cruel from the developer's perspective because the player doesn't know to what extent the consequences will be present within the game, so you're probably thinking, well, it couldn't be that bad, maybe like another house was going to die and get burned down, whatever it was, even that would be cool, I'm sure not.

It's going to be long, but as I can inform you here now, there are drastic consequences based on your decision right now, if you choose to save the family and kill the guards that are going to kill the family, what is going to happen is that you will get out. of the island in your boat thinking that everything is going smoothly and then Barnabas will tell you that a disease has invaded Kefalonia and that you should not return there for fear of getting infected too if you return. In Catalonia, what you will see is that there are lots and lots of bodies that are being burned because that family infected other people who infected other people and the whole plague has spread, so by saving four people you ended up probably killing dozens and dozens. if not hundreds more and the most impressive thing about this is that most people probably won't encounter this at all, they will hear Barnabas say something as they sail across the sea, they will ignore it or tune it out and just move on.

We're not going to connect that his decision to save that family to make Phoebe happy had lasting repercussions on the lives of those who live on that island. It's a really nice touch and it's something that reflects very, very well the direction Ubisoft is taking. If they're trying to approach this as an RPG with real consequences on the world they've built, on the other hand, if you choose to walk away and not interfere, the island is fine. Phoebe gets mad at you at first saying you should have saved. them and that that's their friend and that by not saving them you're a bad person, all these things, but if you return to the island hours and hours later, everything will be fine and everyone will be healthy and happy and that's just a little side mission that It takes probably three or four minutes to complete in total from the moment you accept it, it's small but there are huge consequences as a result of your actions, it's really cool, as I mentioned before, the death of Niklaus if you choose to do it. killing him instead of sparing him on top of that mountain, there are big consequences that arise as a result of the national battles that you may encounter.

It's a great idea and we'll discuss it in more detail in the game review coming soon. soon, but they tend to focus more on the overall theme that impacts the consequences, it doesn't tend to affect the characters you're seeing almost at all, but from this I would draw my main criticism about where Odyssey falls short in regards to its RPG . mechanics and the fact is that few consequences feel like they permanently affect the player character. What I mean is, in the same vein as Phoebe's death, something that should permanently change an individual's perspective on his life and everything he does, but when you're playing.

Throughout the game, as Alexios, you feel like it's just another day at work. Sure they changed a couple of scenes and say a couple of lines that make him sound sad, but it's not a big event in his life; there are later references to it and moments where he asks them to make sure he gives him a proper burial and things like that, but that doesn't change his worldview like you'd expect or maybe it would reflect it and force him to change his stance on violence. and from that he points out that there is a morality meter where he is forced to play a much more pacifist action that could be really interesting and would be a reflection on the game played to impose an emotional response that the character is actually having, but a Again, that would require some courage and bravado on Ubisoft's part to force the player to go through the game in a certain way to reflect an emotional change in the character as a result of a particular consequence that happened within the world, that's not something What you can be gentle with. is known for and I doubt it's something they'll become known for, it's just not their forte right now as far as side quest fallout goes, as I pointed out with the blood fever side quest example, some of these are really good , a lot of these quests are downright fun and offer some really interesting and surprising twists to the story, like the supa do side quests I mentioned inthe video.

Assassin's Creed Odyssey demonstrates something incredible. The links are in the description, but I have some issues with where and when these side quests are designated. the overall design is fine and overall their approach to making sure each side quest has a story associated with it is great and I love that design decision and think it works very very well, however there are some more mechanical issues and Game oriented We'll discuss it in the next video, but for now we'll discuss the pros and cons of the narrative, basically there are a ton of these side quests and when I say a ton I mean a ton in the origins, one of my main criticism of that game. was that there were so many side quests but you had to do them all if you wanted to level up properly without having to pay for an XP boost and Odyssey there are so many side quests that I honestly think most people are going to get through the game, even if they are 100 percent the main story, they might skip 30-40% of the side quests.

There are many, some of these side quests are purely dynamic and just to work through if you want. However, most of them are completely different theme changes depending on the region you are in, like if you are on a coast or on top of a mountain, the missions given will be different and will reflect the train in the area you are in. If you are in an Athenian area, the quest will reflect that type of stuck-up person that you would expect to find in an Athenian area, while if they are in a Spartan area they will also reflect that particular type of person and as I said a moment ago, these All Non-dynamic side quests have a story attached to them, something we discovered back in 2015 that was going to be the intention of Assassin's Creed's quest designers from then on, and as we can now see, they weren't kidding the only time.

When this is not true is when the quest is a list-based quest and includes retrieving a bunch of stuff to qualify for the next phase of the character's story per se, an example is the Daughters of Artemis quest, for example , we have to kill. a ton of legendary beasts to qualify and basically buy your way into her circle and what I will say is that the side quests that land really land and are phenomenal. Some of the side quests I went through in this game I won't forget because it's been a long time and I think the designers at Ubisoft are responsible for that and to be honest this game as an RPG has a lot to offer and I don't think it's giving it credit because it has a sprawling open world with many factions and choices has ethical and moral consequences for your actions and these choices has a lot of side content a literal metric but a lot of content character driven side quests and a story However, making sure that all the characters you encounter are unique individuals with personalities is frustrating because Ubisoft is afraid to commit to important narrative moments and changes, even if it is only for 20 or 30 minutes, where they change the way the content is presented. delivered to focus on narrative pacing, it's unfortunate that they don't do this and I hope they can learn to have more faith in the narrative moments they create in the future and lastly, let's look at the biggest issue most people face.

I have with this game and that is that some people say that Assassin's Creed Odyssey and its origins are not real Assassin's Creed games. Now the first thing I will say is that this estimate is perfectly fine and you are entitled to your opinion. It's not a substitute for actively criticizing the game because if you want to do that you need to criticize the game itself, not only can you criticize the fact that it bucked the trend of games that are 3-10 years old which doesn't mean it's inherently bad. In fact, many of those games that bucked the trend were considered the worst in the series, so yes, what I will also say is that the series has been moving away from stealth, which is what most people like. from the people. frustration with Assassin's Creed Odyssey and its origins since Assassin's Creed 2 and the few times they tried to make stealth more important or in some cases even the focal point, like Assassin's Creed's unity, they tended to fail miserably and yes, I know that Unity had a host of other issues, but the point still stands because the actual gameplay mechanics and the design choice behind it is what was criticized at the time and not just the game as a whole and , anyway, managers will look back and not care what the problem is.

Whatever the minutiae were or what the individual instances were, all they know is that Unity focused more on stealth than the previous titles and the titles that came after and they turned out to do worse, so they don't really care and To be completely honest, Ubisoft and people in general seem to prefer open world exploration over stealth. I'm not saying this is better, but this has been the direction they've been going in for a long time. This is the game they wanted. make from Assassin's Creed 2 a huge, sprawling open world with branching narratives, decisions that have consequences for them, combat that is enjoyable and fun to play, voice acting and graphics that are almost unparalleled in the industry, plus, all of this is supports a lot in the series. major strengths that have long been world-building in historical settings, so it makes sense that there would be a lot of focus in this new direction, and so if you're an Assassin's Creed fan who doesn't like the way You address, that's perfectly fine and you have every right to your opinion and I completely respect that opinion and in many cases I agree with you.

I think stealth should be a bigger focus in these games in the future because I think narrative is an important tactic that they will be able to employ, however this is the direction they are going and will be the one they will continue to focus on in the future. upcoming titles, if any of these recent sales or interviews are to be believed, if you prefer the original. Assassin's Creed one and so-so stealth-based gameplay is fine, but understand that Ubisoft hasn't made stealth a primary focus in these games since Assassin's Creed 2. If you're one of those people, that's fine, but realize that you were never going to do it. like Odyssey or Origins because you're still stuck in a game from almost a decade ago.

I know that may sound harsh, but that's the truth as I see it, this is all a moot point, although they are moving in this direction anyway. so the question is how does it work as an open world fantasy RPG and I would say it works very very well as an Assassin's Creed game in the same vein as Unity and Syndicate not very well but to be honest it seems like Ubisoft forgot of those games and moving on completely might be frustrating for those of us who really enjoyed Unity and Syndicate for their respective reasons, but Ubisoft is moving on and leaving them in the dust.

In fact, I think there's a moment at the end of the game, once you finish the cultist ending that reflects this same idea that Ubisoft is leaving behind, basically, Pythagoras is going to come by and have a monologue where he describes generally what that humanity is doing and in the context of the game itself and the narrative makes sense and is describing what humanity is doing, but while describing this they also show clips of Assassin's Creed Unity and distribute the games that this team worked on for last time and to me it seems like Ubisoft is sending us some kind of delicate and subtle message that they are leaving their past behind.

I'll let this clip play and want you to think about what's being said in the context of Ubisoft, not just the narrative use of ilex, which was never supposed to be that way for decades. A group of people came together to defend a theory that they believed could control the universe, that the world functioned in equal parts in order and disorder, but some fell lovingly into the evil arms of chaos and the culture of the cosmos was born, they abused its power. the Greek world in eternal war, you were created to stop the destruction of the cult, you have done what I could not, you are a hero, but this imbalance has a price, my daughter, because without chaos there is a supreme order, a loss of progression and freedom, but there is still hope hope in you hope in the future you will bring we must fix the mistakes of the past use the staff repair the crack in the universe the world depends on you Alexios you need to be the hero again Ubisoft is trying to evolve the franchise and while it is a change and change can be scary and frustrating while it's happening, I think at the end of the day it's a good thing and we should welcome it with open arms, even if it means that the things we previously enjoyed are going to happen.

It's no mystery now that Ubisoft has been slowly changing its philosophy when it comes to open-world game design over the last few years. If we look at their games from early 2010 and early 2018, it's clear that Ubisoft used to approach these games in a unique way. You see, I'm joking because actually Ubisoft's open world style of gaming became synonymous with repetition and boredom, for example, let's look at a game like Watch Dogs. Watch Dogs is good at some. ways and it was certainly a unique idea initially, but it's no mystery to anyone who's played the game that many elements of its design were wildly wrong, my point is that when a game designer decides how to structure the overall experience it's important May each choice reinforce the experience you are trying to offer.

I know it sounds very simple and even obvious, but you would be surprised how often this obvious thing is completely ignored or simply cannot be achieved given the resources available. An example is if you are a mercenary style character who is trying to get revenge on some evil character who harmed someone within your family, you need to make sure that the overall experience, gameplay, narrative choices and morality locked within them reinforce the general idea. and the feeling and emotion that you are trying to convey to the audience now, if you are paying attention to my brief description from a moment ago, you will realize that this has been the plot for about at least as long as I can think of from Ubisoft.

In the latest open world RPGs, you play as a badass mercenary, which justifies all the gameplay your character has in the form of fighting, dodging, climbing, running, all these things that are not within the scope of possibilities for most people. You're also trying to get revenge on some evil force that justifies all your actions and gives you just enough justification to spend the rest of the game for the next 20 to 80 hours exploring the world trying to hunt. these quote unquote evil people who are evil because they know or work with the guy who did something bad, it's a simple recipe and for the most part it works very well, like I said we're not going to get into the narrative. super in-depth in this video, as I already did in the last video, rather I tell you this so that we can properly frame the general discussion about the game now all games have problems, watchdogs have had their problems and all Assassin's Creed The title has had its share of problems.

I'm not here to directly compare and contrast reviews of one game over the other because that's not what this video is about, rather we are tackling a specific game to try to tear it apart, the reason why I'm talking about watchdogs so we can discuss where Ubisoft was and how far they have come with watchdogs. You have a very rigid protagonist who is exploring a world that is quite boring, very, very monotonous, bland and uniform throughout the map and, more importantly, the game is fun initially with the gimmick of being able to hack all kinds of different things, from lights to steam engines, cars to security guard terminals.

All of these things can create very interesting situations for the player, but throughout the game. it started to weaken because it wasn't supported by the rest of the game it wasn't supported by the narrative or by the music or by the character's performance none of it reinforced the experience it was incredibly confusing and as a result players had this feeling of disconnection while playing, especially near the end. Now all of this brings us to the question of what exactly has Ubisoft changed over the course of the last few years, the latest entries in the Assassin's Creed series and other games like As the Division and Control Agencies 1 and 2, what have they done? to change that formula and improve it based on the criticisms we have imposed on them?

It seems pretty clear to me that the only major change they've made is that they're moving. away from a collectathon style of open world design towards a more interactive and dynamic open world style, what I mean by this is that previous gamesof Assassin's Creed, like even Assassin's Creed 2 in the past, they had collectibles, so you could go through and you have to collect all these feathers and do all these crazy, dark things to complete them. That was the main element of the game's content: hunting down these unique items that you could only get in certain places, moving all the until 2015 with the Assassin's Creed syndicate and this is still true, although they are different, they have learned to apply a new layer of paint, but you're still chasing floating pages in the air, you're still doing all these things that are very, very monotonous and tedious, but it has more content and consumes a lot of game time, so you should be happy with it.

Well, many gamers and I said no and Ubisoft apparently listened because with Assassin's Creed Origins and Assassin's Creed Odyssey both games revolutionized the formula. and I mostly discounted this now, I say mostly because it depends on how you define Collectathon whether or not these games completely remove the limitations and limits of the Collectathon game design because there are certainly still a variety of dynamic missions that could be said in some way. they serve as collector's materials, they are very superficial and they just repeat themselves and they are very monotonous, but they have more content, so you should be happy with that, certainly that is still here, but we also need to look at what has been added to the formula in In addition to all these things, for example, Assassin's Creed Odyssey and Origins rely heavily on side quests, for example, in 2017, when they were preparing to announce Assassin's Creed Origins, the game director, Ashraf Ismael, said many times that They wanted to approach side quests in a very similar way to Witcher 3, now don't worry, I'm not going to make a comparison or do anything stupid, rather I just want to point out that this philosophy has extended all the way to Assassin's Creed.

Odyssey specifically the design choice that every side quest should be story-driven and if you play Assassin's Creed Odyssey you'll notice this is the case almost immediately in many open world games, you're simply told to do something because the character wants you to do it. or they'll give you some silly explanation that, well, my mother NEEDS berries, so you should go pick them or Oh, a settlement needs our help, go and help them with things like that, which you could say is a story, but it is. You completely miss the point of what it means to inform a side quest with a story, and having a story to tell within that side quest means that, from beginning to end, there is a unique character in the world who lives his or her own life and is trying to expand. about his perspectives or perform some action on the world or other characters within it and they need your help to do it and in the course of the secondary missions you can participate in that experience to go from point A to point B with the characters. within the quest and this is part of what I and many viewers, maybe even like you, love so much about Assassin's Creed Origins and Odyssey specifically that every time you go up and participate in a side quest with another NPC, you will undoubtedly be exposed. to a unique story that catches your attention and makes you want to continue playing and exploring the world and if you are looking for specific examples don't worry, I have one but I already talked about it in another video specifically the example of Supa Deol and his parents .

I'm not going to spoil that side quest in this video if you want to watch it. I've linked that video in the description box below and so far in this video we've been doing a lot. from comparisons between Origins and Odyssey and Assassin's Creed 2 versus Watch Dogs, the Original and the Division, all of this has built up to the basic distinction between those games and Ubisoft's new guard of open-world games, whether you , me or someone else on this Whether the planet likes it or not, Ubisoft has fundamentally changed the way they design these games. Assassin's Creed Origins and Odyssey are nothing like Assassin's Creed Unity, Assassin's Creed 3 and 2, and Rogue, they are fundamentally different games for some people, which is a very good thing for others.

It's depressing because they miss those games, but what can't be argued is that games are fundamentally different now because of complete transparency. I'll tell you straight up that Assassin's Creed Odyssey and Origins specifically are games in the open world style that I really enjoy. Narrative exploration based RPGs that have tons of content that I can lose in four weeks or even months. Additionally, these are games set in historical settings that I find very interesting, which greatly increases the overall value of the experience in my mind, for example. I am a big fan of ancient Egyptian history to the point that even when I was 6, 7 and 8 years old I was reading books about how they mummified the dead in ancient Egypt.

Yes, I was that child. Now all of this is to say that I have no qualms with the games or I don't have my issues with the game design or some of the decisions they made in these games. Not at all. I have my problems with games and in no way are they problems. perfect, but rather I'm trying to be completely transparent and tell you that I enjoy the way these games are directed. Yes, I enjoyed the previous game, like Assassin's Creed Unity, Syndicate, and Rogue, but those were games for their time. It evolved just like the entire industry and it's time for Assassin's Creed to evolve with it.

Now, one of the common accusations leveled against Assassin's Creed Odyssey is that it is simply an origins remake and the people making this accusation, I would say, haven't played the game for a long time. over an extended period of time, although they initially seem similar and I'll grant you that initially when I was playing the games I thought the same thing, it seemed to me that this was simply a reskin after all of these games came out just a year apart so You know how different they could be, but what became clear to me over the course of playing this game for dozens and dozens of hours is that this game is evolution and, more than anything, this is where Origins was trying to go.

The original game was setting the stage for everything from the water boat and swimming mechanics to the combat systems, the armor systems, the way damage is calculated, and the way dodge animations play, everything has been leading up to this point, so with this, let's look at some details, the game world is something that it has been praised for and it is simply because it is huge and in this world water is used a lot to me, this seems a direct response to all the praise Black-Flag receives. received and if you played Black Flag you will see that the world design within Odyssey is actually very similar to the structure they established in 2013 with that game specifically the ocean envelops major islands or landmasses and those landmasses hold certain cities and separate the map in different.

I guess you could say biomes or areas of the world that feel distinctly different. Now, with Black Flag, it was a very rudimentary system and style of this type of map design, more specifically, you could navigate the ocean. seas and you could go across the water in your giant ship hunting whales and shooting down merchant ships and fighting other pirates and it was fun and exciting and cool, but if you wanted to get back to land you only had a few port cities that you could go to, you can't just land. on an island and then explore the entire island.

Now in Assassin's Creed Odyssey you can do that, it's completely open, basically, if you can see it and you want to go there, you can actually go there and I. I'll be honest, this degree of freedom is pretty crazy and very, very nice at the beginning of the game, when you unlock the ship for the first time, you will probably feel like you want to explore and unlock many other sections of the map where you are completely free. However, because this is an RPG with different leveling systems, you will need less to say that you will encounter all kinds of creatures or other humans that are much higher level than you, which will keep you out of those. areas forever.

Well, I shouldn't say it. Well, at least, until much later in the game, for example when I was playing Odyssey at the beginning, I found an island with level 42 lions, which I didn't think much about. I thought there were damn lions, this won't be difficult. not at all, but I got shot once again because the leveling system is exponential. You will end up in these cases where even just two or three levels make a big difference and therefore you will certainly face a level 42 lion when myself Level seven was not a great idea now, according to my estimates, the map can basically be divided into six individual parts, rural areas, urban areas, military posts, set pieces, as I call them, ruins and then the sea itself, and what I mean more specifically is within the rural. areas, for example, these are just generalized open areas of grass and tree forests and can generally be divided into three subcategories, such as Spartan rural areas, Athenian rural areas and then wild rural areas.

The best thing is that you can really tell the difference between them when you look. You are in a wild area, there are no people around, it is just you and nature and these are the times when you are normally hunting or just exploring interesting places. This is completely separate from the rest of the world and feels unique and on the other hand, the Spartan and Athenian rural areas are usually home to farmers and smaller huts of people from lower populations, but each one feels unique and they have put a lot of thought into it. attention to detail, even the jargon and jargon that people use in these.

Smaller villages will be different depending on where you are on the map. As a result, the quests you accept within these unique areas feel incredibly unique to that specific area and the people within it - for example, when you're in Athens, you'll tend to encounter requests from very stuck-up aristocrats who are very proud of themselves. , while in Sparta you will have to do more crude and rude side quests, it is a small detail but one that has an overall impact on the entire game and is something that many people I'm sure won't even actively or consciously realize when playing because it's done so subtly that they don't draw attention very directly, they just leave it there and for those of us who want to overanalyze.

I guess the game is there for us now, as for cities and military posts, these are always divided into Spartan or Athenian. The game doesn't prevent you from tackling either of these, you can tackle both or one over the other to affect the policies within the nation-state you're fighting for, but wait, we'll discuss that more in a moment, another category of areas on the map , as I said, were set pieces and these are what I would characterize as areas of the map that are built specifically for unique moments within the game's narrative or that you travel to specifically for some sort of visual component.

This could be the island where you will eventually find Medusa or for example Pefki and Masada in the southeast area of ​​the map which is where you will eventually find the Minotaur, each of these areas has a unique feel, but that unique feel is calibrated and designed specifically around a moment in the narrative where you go and experience, whether it's Medusa or the Minotaur, each of these has their own flavor and that flavor is painted all over the island where they are and beyond. This we have ruins that are self explanatory and are often designed in such a way that they inform the player if they are looking to be informed and if they just want to explore and run past them they can do so, so what I mean by this is that most of these ruins have been placed and there are notes around or other side quests that tell you stories of what happened in those ruins before they became ruins.

Will you find an area on the game map where ruins are present and there is no story associated with them? Once again, the attention to detail the developers put into this game is off the charts and I don't want that to be underestimated. It's ridiculous how much effort and attention to detail they put into this world, and lastly, the other element of the map is the sea, which is such a huge component of this game that you actually can't ignore it when we're talking about this world. open. We also need to discuss how you navigated the origins of Assassin's Creed.

You're basically relegated to just your horse. You had to walk everywhere and if you wanted to get from one end of the map to the other you had to put your horse in the car. ride mode and then you would just sit back while you go and have a beer or, of course, we're supposed to be advertiser friendly, you go and have an apple juice and relax while your horse does all the work where the ads are advertised in Assassin's Creed Odyssey. much more active than that, the way I like to think of it is that when you're exploring on your horse, it's kind of a sitting exploration of the world, whichIt's okay and occasionally necessary, especially as you progress through the game and have I've seen most of the things you'll go through, but when you're at sea, it's often a leaning forward type experience rather than the relaxed experience because when you are leaning forward you are intensely focused on what is happening.

Especially as you explore the game world and there are other ships approaching and being aggressive towards you, you have to actively try to control your ship and defend yourself and you can't just mentally check which is a much more active style of play. Gameplay which I think is very good, it is subtle but it is important now that many improvements have been made to the general traversal mechanics, such as free running and horse riding, everything is much more responsive and smart this time. I rarely felt like the character was doing anything I didn't want them to do, which has been the old problem with these games is that they constantly feel like it's you against the controller, whereas in this game it feels like you're an extension. controller. or maybe vice versa, however, I still feel that exploration can often become monotonous, specifically because when you explore certain areas of the map and feel like you're bouncing all over the place, it's not as interesting as it could be, mainly because the game allows not be interesting, what I mean is that if the game forced you to actively go and explore yourself or run from place to place and if the missions and locations involved in them were designed with this in mind, it could be done in a much more more interesting instead of just saying run from this side of the map to the other, you can take your boat there or you can run there or you can ride a horse there or you can just fast travel there, they give you all these exits instead of specifically calibrating an experience to make sure it is interesting and intriguing.

Now the problem with this forecast is that inevitably someone in the comments section below will say that this is removing player agency from the equation and Yes, that's right, when you remove player agency it usually has to be for some purpose. specific, for example when you remove the ability to make choices in a narrative you are usually replacing that choice with a strict narrative that you control and that you can hopefully polish and refine into something better, all I'm saying is that navigation can work the same way if they can make exploring an island feel like it doesn't just feel like a wandering party, but more specifically feels like it's a guided, polished experience specifically calibrated for that island at that moment, then players will never feel like they're advancing in the same way. one end of the map to the other, but they will feel like they are walking from one end of the map to the other.

Although you are exploring a world that deserves to be explored now while we talk about navigation, it is important that we talk about fast travel and the way it works in Assassin's Creed Odyssey. These fast travel points are based on synchronization points that you find as you explore the world, you know, these are the points that have been in games for years and years, where you go to the top of a tall structure and then you tap e or Y and then the camera surrounds them while you play dramatic music. and it's supposed to increase synchronization with the Animus or something and then it also works as a fast travel point at least in this game.

Initially I didn't think I had a problem with this, however, as I explored the world more and more, I repeatedly had the experience of finding a new island, exploring it, looting it, doing something interesting and then going out of sync at that point because after a while you feel like you've synchronized so it just skips your mind and as you continue exploring the world and only later do you realize that you've been to that island but you didn't synchronize with it so yeah you need to get back there for some side quest, you need to navigate to the end instead of just tapping the fast travel button which I admit sounds like a contradiction to something I said earlier; let me address that, like I said earlier, when Ubisoft gives the player these outlets when it comes to traversal, it seems like it simplifies the experience or makes it simpler or easier and therefore more boring and monotonous and feels more as a grind when you spend most of your time going through loading screens to fast travel around the map instead of traveling there yourself, and yet that's still true. with this map because we are using fast travel points, there is no denying that the way those fast travel points were implemented caused some problems.

Now I have no doubt that they probably experimented with other forms of timing or fast travel points, for example on Most islands there are multiple areas that you explore as you move around the island from point to point. This is how the map changes from this type of illustrated view to the full satellite view. I wonder what would be wrong with just allowing fast travel to areas you've previously discovered and explored, it seems like it would be pretty simple, especially if you're going to encourage fast travel anyway with the way you're structuring your quests, why? Why not just accept it and allow people to fast travel anywhere? want well, I'm sure they felt this was too liberating and would make players feel like they were just exploring and never had any kind of interaction that unlocked the island or that specific location in any notable way, just running around effectively unlocked it. and of course, without seeing that alpha build, I can't definitively say if it works or not, or if this might improve the browsing experience or cause it to have more problems, but what I can say is that many other games don't even bother.

At some kind of notable moment where you unlock the ability to travel somewhere, whether it's Red Dead Redemption, or The Witcher 3, or even Skyrim, in these games you just explore and explore. In the world, you gain the ability to travel there. The most extreme example is Red Dead Redemption, where you don't even necessarily need to travel to a location to travel there due to its diligence mechanic. All I'm saying is that if you're soft and you're going to commit to one of these options, they have to commit to it, you can't have it both ways if you're going to try to encourage players to explore the map in a deep and intense way where They're going through the same style as Red Dead Redemption: traveling on foot and on horseback, you have to make sure that's the experience you're trying to force players to experience, and again, forcing players to have an experience not is inherently a It's bad, as long as the experience is good, and on the other hand, you need to make sure that if you give players complete freedom to quickly travel from place to place to complete quests, you make it as convenient as possible. , quick and easy as possible.

Do your best to not make it seem like you're spending most of your playtime on loading screens instead of actually playing, but I guess that's enough about traversal and navigation. I think that's what most people are interested in hearing. Combat is definitely right now, the combat system is built and defined primarily by the equipment you are using at any given time, this includes swords and armor and how you have decided to level up your character through the three basic branches. Skill Tree Now, one thing has certainly changed a lot since the origins of Assassin's Creed and that's how the gameplay systems handle elemental damage and many of the more RPG elements of weapon customization that you'd expect to find in a game like this. is that in the origins of Assassin's Creed, if you wanted to get a sword that had high firepower, all you had to do was find a sword with just that, it had a special advantage that allowed it to deal fire damage specifically and then maybe you could increase it. with some skills here and there or maybe certain pieces of armor but mostly, but that was the main component in Assassin's Creed Odyssey, it's changed a bit though, you certainly have weapons that give buffs and fire boosts, but if you want to have that.

Specifically on your weapon, you want to make sure to use what they now call engravings, which work in the same way as the Three Warlocks' rooms, where you can customize them and swap them out depending on what you're building at that exact moment. I personally like it, but it's an adjustment if you're coming from Origins. Origins does all that for you. Odyssey, you have to be a little more proactive in how you customize and build your character. I won't spoil the exact details. but in my experimentation it seemed like the fire output was very susceptible to spam and was very, very easy to break, especially later in the game against some of the game's final bosses.

In fact, I found myself wondering whether or not I had the difficulty on the right settings because the fights seemed to be too simple when you had high damage exploit enabled in your settings, it's a small detail and it's something that is actually very common in games. games, that elemental damage stacks feel like they're breaking you, this is true in the world of monster hunters. This is true and even in a game as simple as South Park, the stick of truth knows that all of this leads us to also discuss the leveling system, which is obviously very tied to combat because its leveling system seems to have a direct impact in the game. damage calculation and then of course also your overall health output, plus your defense against incoming attacks, basically your level is directly related to your survival in any type of physical confrontation, which makes sense, but it depends on how you implemented now in Assassin's Creed Odyssey and most Assassin's Creed games employ what's known as a dynamic difficulty slider which, if you've watched this channel, you probably know is one of my biggest pet peeves.

IMO I hate dynamic difficulty sliders in games if you are going to play the game on hard mode you have to commit to playing it on hard mode and you shouldn't have the option to slide it. The only reason they give you the option to swipe it is because they're worried the game won't work. be balanced at certain times and I fully recognize that it is a very foolish and perhaps inaccurate view. I just hate it, okay, I'm allowed to hate things, but this all ties back to a criticism I made while we were discussing navigation when you give players one in a difficult or frustrating situation, they will inevitably accept it, so, For example, if you choose to play on hard mode in the early sections of the game, and as you explore the world, it seems that hard is a good difficulty for you. but eventually you run into a boss which is actually very difficult and you feel like your bill just isn't right for them instead of giving the player the ability to properly read their character so they can properly take on this boss and feel like although they were kings and queens once they got past it, Ubisoft decided to simply give you the ability to lower the difficulty too easily, where the calculation would be such that your character would be completely overpowered in that particular fight, making it much easier to win.

So even if your character was built in a completely opposite way and everything you were doing had no effect on the boss you were fighting, you still had a way to get through it and to me that's very, very frustrating because if you go Al face a boss that has a high defense against blunt weapons, players should look at that and then alter their approach towards fighting that boss the moment you decide you're going to spoil a player for being underprepared or not take the necessary precautions. and the preparations to fight a boss, that's when the entire boss fighting system starts to fall apart because once a boss is no longer a boss and can be instantly weakened with the press of a couple of buttons, it loses all meaning and I know what you're thinking, why not?

Didn't you just not alter the difficulty and I certainly didn't alter the difficulty when facing those bosses? But it was clear that the game was designed in a way where they expected you to do that if you started having a tough time with a boss fight, they didn't give you the chance to go back and reconfigure your care. An example is that when you face most bosses in the main story, you will reach a checkpoint and once your character dies against that. boss because they are very difficult, you will just reload at that checkpoint and then go back.

You don't have time to go and redo your armor or start outside the shop or try to redo it. The only exception to that rule is in These big battles between nation-states that you can participate in, they are some of my favorite moments in the game because you can go up, board it, see if you can handle it, and if you can't, they spit you in thesame moment. starting before it happens and you can go and start from the starting point, while in the narrative, if you go after a boss and you are not leveled properly, you can load a much earlier save file and try to go back. through all the sections you just did with a higher level character after doing some work or you can go and just lower the difficulty, beat the boss and then alter your character, it's very clear that they had one of those in mind like the planned option.

Which makes this very irritating and seeing if you are playing the game on a harder difficulty, the level discrepancy in which you can experience the world is much smaller, so for example in my testing it seems that the difficulties easier could normally be obtained. through a quest, if it were for levels higher than you, you could still do it, it could be difficult, it could require some cutting and the bosses and characters could feel like damaged sponges, but you could still do it as you progress. to the normal settings and the hardest settings which drop from four to three or two and once you get to the hardest levels or even the hardest difficulty you feel like you absolutely have to be on the same level as the opponent with the one you're fighting or maybe even a level or two above the character you're fighting at any given time to have a chance now, again, that's it, leveling and balance and give the player the ability to adjust that, but it has many consequences.

Aside from these larger battles or narrative fights where you specifically engage in stealth, this being an Assassin's Creed game, you expect stealth to be a major component and certainly when you go through the games on the harder difficulties you often You tend to rely on Stealth, you progress further and further into the game trying to avoid confrontation because it's much harder instead of sneaking around doing what you have to do. However, because Ubisoft has invested so much in their new fighting system, they want you to have those interactions and those experiences where you start fighting hordes and hordes of enemies, so stealth has been destroyed to a certain extent, to the point that one shot kills and stealth kills with your hidden sword type are completely broken thanks to the leveling system and what I mean by that is that you can't do it with higher level opponents, you just can't you can, you jump off a roof, stab them in the head with your sword and they get up with half health remaining once again.

I guess I should say I understand why. This is the case and I don't blame them for designing it this way, but it seems very, very strange that there isn't some compromise between these two options because, on the one hand, stealth seems like you should be rewarded for participating. After all, it is an Assassin's Creed game, but on the other hand, if for example you allow it to be possible to shoot no matter what the boss is, even if you are 30 levels below him and you can still shoot him with your hidden sword. Which sounds like that would break the system very very quickly, you could start spamming and you may end up getting much higher level gear than you should be using from the start just by spamming that skill and again if The players can do something, they will do it and I believe that they already have the solution to this problem. they've already laid the foundation and they kind of dabble in it as you progress through the game and these are specific abilities for certain opponents and mercenaries for example that you can find as you progress through the game so for example , some are much more resistant to poison. others are much more resistant to fire others cannot deal with animal opponents and things of this nature.

This is similar to, for example, Shadow of Mordor which had this same system with an emesis system where you had unique characters that you fought against, they each had their own unique fears or abilities and immunities and you had to adapt your approach according to they. Sure, some people were easily spammed and you could get over them quickly, but others led to you dealing with them in a much more complex way where you had to figure it out. figure out how to combine their weaknesses into something that was useful, for example in Assassin's Creed Odyssey you could have moments in the game where large high level forts had soldiers and their helmets made them invulnerable to falls from above, so if you wanted to kill them you had to do it from a bush or maybe they were very vulnerable to poisoning inside a well or something but you couldn't go and stab them for whatever reason maybe they would just dodge it quickly and that's something they had trained.

Things like this that would create a much more variable and dynamic experience rather than just trying to stab someone in the face and only dealing half the damage once again. I think it makes more sense to create more complexity around these things rather than simplifying them. and then, just accepting the flaws, the game employs a cultist system that acts once again like the Nemesis system in the shadow of Mordor, where there is a large collection of different people, each with their own personality and doing their own thing, but you just unlock them by finding clues to their identity by killing other cultists or completing other quests and quests as you progress through the main story and it seems to work fine but once again leads to a disjointed ending in the game which I also talked about in In the previous part, honestly I wish I could talk more about the cultists, but to be completely honest, they just feel like they're basic Rhys NPCs that are surrounded by a bunch of guards, that's what most of them end up being a couple from them. appears in cool cutscenes that play but for the most part they're just normal people that run away from you once you find them it's not really that interesting it's just tedious now one mechanic that's new to the franchise that I found interesting was the Nation-state battle mechanic where you engage in all sorts of political espionage to affect the political outcome between Athens and Sparta and you will occasionally be asked to do things like this in the main story mainly for demonstration purposes, but when you're on your own account, it can actually lead to interesting rewards and can also affect your overall experience in certain areas of the map if, for example, you help Sparta.

The Athenians will become very, very hostile towards you or they will disappear completely and you will end up with a group of Spartan soldiers occupying the area while the Athenians are burned on pyres next to you or on the contrary it will change and you will end up with the Athenians dancing and singing while The Spartans are on the outskirts of the city planning revenge and their next move now. I expected to find myself doing this a lot and participating a lot in these systems and battles, but it inevitably becomes a way to collect higher level loot because when you encounter a more difficult battle specifically with the underdog group and help them win the battle, you get higher level loot and more than you'd get if you were just helping the normal guy, which is interesting and fun and whatever, but it never feels like that. you are motivated to help one side more than the other, and if you do, there will be significant consequences as a result of your actions; you feel like there is some benefit and maybe some interaction in certain areas, but you never feel like the consequences are real. at least for the player character and honestly I think this is mainly because they give you complete freedom to go whichever side you want, so if I want to fight Athens one day and Sparta the next, you can do that and they won't bother you.

They're going to stop, they never seem to notice the fact that you're the guy or girl who keeps killing all their men in these battles, but anyway, now I guess we should talk briefly about boss fights and for bosses. fights I could talk about the ones in the main story, which are usually quite fun and have a unique gimmick, but more specifically I want to talk about the boss fight at the end of the game, specifically the mythical ones in Assassin's Creed Odyssey, you can encounter the Gryphon . Cyclops, a Minotaur, and Medusa herself, and these are some of my, if not our, favorite moments in the entire game.

Now I stayed away from pretty harsh spoilers before my exposure to these characters, of course I saw Medusa in the trailer and while she was exploring. In the main story I never found her, so I felt like I was still going to find her at some point on one of the higher level islands on the northeast side of the map. However, I didn't know what to expect. I did this especially. I didn't know I was going to encounter a Cyclops and a Minotaur and then also a Gryphon, but I was open to anything as I explored a temple with another character.

I started to feel like something was a little weird or out of place and I'll do it. let this section play for you because I want you to experience exactly what I experienced, even if you have seen this before, clear your mind and watch this and imagine my face when this happened. The house of the creator gods of the universe extends. your powerful hands and so it goes from zero to sixty almost immediately and although I have been fighting smelly Greeks for the last few hours of playing, I have suddenly faced a cyclops who is huge, imposing and very, very powerful and it feels like if I was playing some kind of God of War Assassin's Creed crossover and I love it.

I think what surprised me most of all is that this boss battle isn't that bad, the animations are good. fact, the hitboxes are good, the movement system is very very good, the tracking even gets to the point where if you shoot him in the eye with the bow he will cover it as he runs towards you, it's so well done that it's very It's very interesting that we only meet these characters once and to be honest I think that's why these moments are so special in my mind because they were so unique - you only fight the Minotaur once, you only fight Madhu, so once you only fight the Gryphon, only once. fight the cyclops so you only do these things once the developers didn't feel the need to copy and paste them all over the map.

After this moment, it is completely unique and that is what makes it so special: its recognition of the exceptionality of this event each. of these battles is unique in its own way with the cyclops, you have to run, go in, get your little stinker, do your thing with the Minotaur, a similar boss fight, but it's very dark and dank so I decided to take my PC and play with this boss. fight on my OLED and I highly recommend it if you have an OLED, even if you are playing on PC go play this boss fight on your wave.

It makes a big difference, the boss fight is unreal when you play on a screen. So as for the Gryphon, it's more of a question and trivia, okay, it's good, it's not whatever, but Medusa. I felt like this boss fight had the least amount of effort put into it, it was very, very superficial, it seemed to go overboard. quickly and I didn't have much difficulty with it even though I came in below the level now as always this is just one man's musings maybe you had a lot of difficulty with one that I found really easy and you got over a really easy one that I had many difficulties, again, it can be very unique and specific to your particular setup.

At the end of the game, my build was designed very specifically to deal fire damage with duel weapons and dual swords, so it could be just me, but I would do it. I'm also interested in hearing your experiences. Be sure to leave them in the comments section below. I would like to know how you experienced these fights. Now we will look at the two main DLC expansions of the Assassin's Creed Odyssey legacy of the first sword. and the fate of Atlantis, we'll go over them in enough detail to spoil almost everything important, so if you're interested in those DLCs, I recommend you stop this video and play them.

About 30 hours of content in total, this video will still be here when you're done, but if you're looking for a broad recommendation or warning to stay away, what I will say is that the DLC overall offers more of the same if you really liked the main campaign of Assassin's Creed Odyssey. You will love the legacy of the first sword. It gives you a lot more of the same to tackle, although it does have some pretty serious problems in terms of writing and story meta implications, but we'll get to it. get to that later and then the fate of Atlantis is like the curse of the pharaohs in the origins of Assassin's Creed for its DLC pack is where most of its effort went to most of its energy there is a very world design Expansive and impressive here overall is quantity over quality, so if you're interested in the novelty of going to Hades or exploring Atlantis, that's something you can do, but in terms of gameplay, the fate of Atlantis and the legacy of the The first Blade are some of the most repetitive DLC expansions I've ever played.

Seriously, for starters, it's okay to duplicate the gameplay loop and system you established in the main game; after all, it isIt's likely that the people who are playing your DLC probably liked the main game that the DLC is added to, so that makes sense and I don't have a problem with that, the problem comes when that's all you offer and it's more Likewise, much of the content in Destiny of Atlantis specifically is so dry and repetitive that there's a significant drop in quality in comparison. with the main body of the main game, the main game, their whole philosophy in the development process was to have a story attached to every mission you do, whether it's a Qwest side mission or a main story mission that's pretty much gone. out the window when As for the DLC packs for Odyssey, my honest recommendation would be that you don't bother getting any of these expansion packs unless you're a die-hard fan of the main game or unless you're getting it as part of a larger pack. big or at least. a big discount is a significant drop in quality it's very frustrating for me, especially knowing what Ubisoft is capable of based on what we saw in the main game, it's a little disappointing across the board, but let's get into all that . in the next sections of this video, which of course will also have timestamps below in the description box, in case you want to jump to different sections, so consider this your spoiler warning, let's get started, like I said, this whole season pass and everything.

The content in it leaves a very bad taste in my mouth and that should mean something because I'm a die-hard Ubisoft fan and, especially with Assassin's Creed, I think they're one of the most underrated developers in the industry. I think I pushed the technological boundaries more than most developers today. I generally love their stuff, but I'm NOT blind to some of the major shortcomings regarding their latest titles, we all know what I'm talking about and while the Ghost Recon breakpoint seems like it came out of nowhere when I look This DLC and all the episodes they released, I can see shadows and hints towards a corporate culture that seemed to be tolerant of shortcuts and laziness, repeated content, basically all the things that people hate about Ubisoft and it's very unfortunate because I felt that the main SAS ins Creed Odyssey game took away a lot of that stuff, it was a lot better than most people gave it credit for and like I said, every quest line had something original, it had a story attached to it, but with this DLC, They've leaned heavily on all the things that people don't like about big open world RPGs that go for quantity over quality and are just trying to rack up as many hours of gameplay as possible.

Now the structure of the Odysseys DLC directly. mirrors that of the Sanskrit origins season pass and of course they had the two main expansions, they were released in episodic formats and there are also the hidden ones and then the curse of the pharaohs. I reviewed both in a video similar to this one. have the link below now this simile is very very important because Origins was of course a reinvention by the same team that developed Black Flag and then Odyssey was developed by the team that went into syndication and that's how the Black Flag team. It's the same team that innovates on the formula, for example, right now they're the team that's working on whatever Assassin's Creed title next year is likely to be Norse.

I've also made videos about that before and then after the Black Flag team does that and innovates the formula in some way, this team syndicates and now Odyssey comes in and works with that formula that has been established by the other team that they They play.Little more than expanding it to make it much broader, looking for quantity compared to the initial innovation that the Black Flag team showed. Additionally, for Origins, the DLC was structured in such a way that the first expansion would focus on gameplay that had been established in the main body of the main game and then Curse of the Pharaohs was going to lean heavily on the kind of mythological magical spiritual realm much more fantastical than anything you've seen in the main body of the main game and the same has happened. happened here legacy of the first sword leans heavily on the gameplay of the main game and then the fate of atlantis just goes crazy with the spiritual and mythological fantasy that some people love and others hate, that's just a question personal preference, but it seems like this is the direction Ubisoft is leaning in with these games.

In total, there are probably around 35 hours of content here for most players in both expansion packs for Odyssey. I've done some testing with the XP boost that Ubisoft sells for a few dollars. and from what I can gather, it looks like there's probably around 28 hours of content if you're using the XP boost. I am referring to the fact that you can save more than hours of work by simply purchasing a product. I don't think that says a lot. There are a lot of very good things about the way the XP boost system is set up and built.

I am with all of you. I don't think XP boosts should exist because I think it generally encourages developers to drag out the work. We encourage you to purchase those XP boosts so you don't feel like you're just writing the same content over and over again, but with all of this I think it's important to ask ourselves why these DLCs are being released. they do and who they target because every product is aimed at some market, every marketing strategy is designed around some demographic and it seems like the way they structure it means they are trying to scratch the backs of two very different people. at the same time, on the one hand, you have someone who is not a fan of mystical things, does not care about the magical contents of the fantasy realm of the latest Assassin's Creed games and is only interested in being an assassin who traverses ancient settings and historical. meeting interesting people and exploring the world on the map, that's what Assassin's Creed is about for almost a decade since they made big changes to Assassin's Creed 3, so that's what you have on this side, on the other hand you have what Ubisoft Probably He considers it his new generation of fans of the Assassin's Creed franchise.

These are the people who are much more interested in open-world exploration-based titles that lean heavily on RPG mechanics and of course go for quantity and scale over a more linear story. now in the main game what you get is what you get, you just have to get over it and love it if you love it, hate it if you hate it, but with these DLCs it gives you the opportunity to give players more specifically what they like and like. They give a lot, the thing is that although the main game tries to make both parties happy at the same time, that's why they combine the two to create an Assassin's Creed experience that mixes both different ones. types of people's tastes together and creates a sort of hodgepodge of fantasy RPGs with some historical elements that can often make people just not connect with it, but after playing the main game and dealing with this strange mix, Ubisoft now offers you the DLC that gives you a much purer experience on both sides, either you get the pure type of classic Assassin's Creed stealth game experience or you get the open world fantasy RPG with crazy scenes in the which Ubisoft also seems to be trying to get in on.

It's very strange to me. and it seems like they are trying to make two very different groups of people happy with the same product and I'm not sure if that works for me, it means that with the origins DLC The Curse of the Pharaohs and the Hidden Ones I really liked The Curse of the pharaohs. I didn't really like the hidden sword. I thought it was a way to buy time for the development of Curse of the Pharaohs. I found it very attractive and then for the Odysseys season pass, I appreciate all the effort they put into it. with the fate of Atlantis, but I find myself connecting more with the legacy of the first sword, firstly because it is technically much more polished and there are far fewer technical problems which I encountered again, more on this in a minute, but also because the Fate of Atlantis really leans into the fantasy elements to the point where it doesn't feel like Assassin's Creed at all, it doesn't even feel like Assassin's Creed Odyssey.

Really the fate of Atlantis left me just confused in terms of tone, in terms of pacing, in terms. of the game design and yes, I know your light just went off, it's 10:13 p.m. At night when I'm recording this, it's his bedtime, but we have a video. She's a soldier, though she's used to this kind of thing, so she just goes to her cave and goes to sleep. She's adorable, but this is all very intellectual. and vague, so I want to get into the nitty-gritty and details: first we'll look at Legacy of the First Sword and then we'll get into the fate of Atlantis and discuss each episode as we go, as well as Legacy of the First Sword . has quite an interesting narrative concept from the beginning, as the DLC is described on the ubisoft website and the official product page, it says quote, find the legend who wielded the first hidden sword and changed the course of history , upgrade your Spartan hero and increase your legend with improved equipment. and new abilities battle relentless new enemies on land and sea as you travel through ancient Greece, explore the world, and uncover new revelations about the origins of the murderous Brotherhood.

Should I be a voice actor? Maybe it's true if everyone can do it. I can. Oh, that sounded like he was throwing shade at the young man. I don't love you, buddy, you're doing great things. I just know you do voice acting, so I'll move on. This expansion contains three episodes in total. Episodes can take anywhere from just a couple of hours to read each or they can take up to five hours each, depending on how slow you take it, what other things you're doing at the same time. I mean, again, this particular expansion takes place on the same map and world as the main body of Assassin's Creed Odyssey, so if there are other side quests that you get distracted with, you can do them intermittently with these lines of missions, everything just comes together, each of these episodes has a different one. theme and especially in terms of gameplay change what you are doing over the course of any quest line you are assigned now the quest line to start the legacy of the first sword is unlocked after chapter 7 in the main game or in other words After completing the main story quest lines on Naxos, in addition, it is also recommended that you start around level 30.

Now, at the beginning, you meet a character named Arias, who you discover was also an assassin and has a checkered history. and he's done some nasty things, but I told you everything. He decides to work with him and you destroy the evil people who are in charge of the area you are currently working in. Sounds familiar, well, it's because it's also what they were doing in the main body of Assassin's Creed Odyssey, I mean. Again, nothing has really changed here and this covers pretty much the entire expansion. They add some little things in terms of narrative that are really weird and strange, which I'll talk about in a second, but overall, this felt like a mini mission. line layout to summarize the main gameplay elements of the main game, all in a single quest line, so that, for example, the first episode focuses entirely on hand-to-hand combat, the second episode, when you finish, is entirely at sea and focuses entirely around naval combat which is pretty much all you're doing, you're fighting on your ship and then the third episode leans heavily on the stealth mechanics and gameplay systems that they used in the first game, giving you some broader levels and different things to try.

They also throw some new abilities at you, like what they call the veil of death, which basically means that if you kill some kind of enemy NPC while completely hidden, no one will see you, the body can disappear and evaporate almost immediately, which which means it's much easier to be stealthy. killing an entire camp is not realistic at all, which is why I have a problem with it, it just seems like a weird trick to make the game easier and I mean, again, every time you add a game system like this you have to ask, well What is your intention versus what is the actual effect of that change with this if you make it so that stealth kills make the body disappear immediately if you have this ability, what is that going to change in terms of level design?

It means that the developers will probably throw in a There are a lot more enemies there because the bodies will just disappear as long as they are near a bush when you kill them and sure enough, by the time you get to the end of episode 3, the levels will be full oftons of guards. where you're just expected to go from Bush to Bush murdering them, no one is smart enough to even realize what's going on. I mean, when I

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d Assassin's Creed Origins, one of the things I found most impressive about Origins was the fact that the AI ​​was so dynamic that they would recognize when one of their friends was lying dead or had been attacked or wasn't in his usual route, so maybe he was busy with you and then he would go look for him and if they found a body, he would.

He would get angry, he would look for you and when he couldn't find you, if he didn't, he would pick up the body and then take them to a field to bury them. This is something you can try yourself, it was little touches like that. that made the characters, NPCs and enemies feel like real people, it made you question whether you should kill them all or not back in the days when Assassin's Creed used to pride itself on the fact that you couldn't just kill NPCs unnecessarily. You had to maintain a certain aura of I guess you could say professionalism within Assassin's Creed.

You couldn't just go crazy, but in this game it's a complete game, now listen if Assassin's Creed wants to become a Sandbox where you can do anything, okay, games have to change and develop and franchises have to do that too, but you have to realize that it's in complete conflict with the entire Animus story, the fact that this whole thing is supposed to be built from genetic memories. that are passed down from generation to generation, so in theory you shouldn't be able to kill anyone and do whatever you want, and besides, that's one of the reasons why people have been upset by the change to a system RPG, because when you have branching dialogues and choices where each player will have a different experience that raises real questions about what is established and what is really happening in this world if everything is built from genetic memories.

Are you saying that people still choose within genetics? memories or is it kind of a chicken and egg thing where your choices are actually what happened and you're just walking around and that line of choice wasn't established until you made those choices, it gets very complicated and obviously you can say what does it matter, does it matter? Does any of this really matter? Well, yes and no, I think it matters to the extent that the narrative has to make sense within the world they've established. I'm fine if a world is written for a narrative piece of some kind, whether it's a game movie novel, whatever, I'm fine if that world is weird, strange, impossible, that's fine, my only request, my The only demand is that the people within that world, the rules within that world are established and consistent, an example, of course, being death stranding a

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that I am working on right now I recommend that you subscribe if you want to see a treatment similar to this given to death stranding in death stranding the world is strange and there are a lot of crazy things happening if you watch In a trailer you can see quite clearly that there are some strange things happening, but once you play the whole game you realize that that world, as strange as it is, is governed by rules and those rules are consistent throughout my problem with Assassin's Creed as of the last few years is that it seems that they are changing this world and it is getting weirder but no They are determined about what rules there are that guide and govern that universe that they are building specifically in the origins there were supernatural things. is happening, but it's heavily implied that they're part hallucinations and then they're also part visions of the problem and these supernatural powers being a little vague and making it strange enough that they can find different ways around it. but in Assassin's Creed Odyssey they just throw that to the wind, they have a cyclops and a minotaur, they have all these things in the main body of the game, they just completely accept the fact that they are throwing away the realistic elements of the franchise and they lean very hard. on the supernatural elements and of course I'm not the only person who mentions this.

Almost everyone who is a fan of Assassin's Creed and has played the latest games knows that this is a debate that is currently taking place among fans of the franchise and probably among the developers as well. I have spoken to a couple of them, many of them. Developers working on the Assassin's Creed franchise watch my videos and have seen reviews of Mine in the games. I'm very flattered by that and I don't mean any of this personally. All I'm saying is that there has to be some kind of clear and concise set of rules established for the world in which these characters operate. it just becomes absurd, it's weird, and it makes it seem like the writers and developers don't take the world seriously, and if the people creating it don't take the world seriously, why would the work or the people participating in it ?

The world doesn't take it seriously either and taking things seriously brings me to the next topic, which is one of the strangest moments in Legacy of the First Blade that you see as you progress through the main story of the first episode you're in working with Darius. hunting down some people is more of the same in the second episode, you meet someone else and you start talking to them, you start flirting a little and you start to realize that the developers and writers really want you to find this. attractive person and wants you to enter into some type of romantic relationship with them.

This isn't new to Assassin's Creed Odyssey, of course, in the main game you can do all sorts of things. I made a famous video about IDEO soup and its questline. which is a direct reflection of the story of Oedipus. I made a full video and it worked great again. Links below, so romance options are nothing new and I don't really have a problem with that within the Assassin's Creed franchise and how they've been developed. He built Odyssey in the beginning, but the thing is that in Episode Two you can't avoid this romance. The main plot points of Episode Three and even sections of the fate of Atlantis refer to this moment, to this relationship that Alexios or Cassandra has with the player. has no choice here if you reject and push away the love interest, you're just forced to do it anyway, now I understand that for the Assassin's Creed story to work, you have to have some kind of heterosexual relationship where you have a baby and it goes on with your genetic line, that makes sense, it's just the way this world and this narrative plot works, it has to happen at some point, but what they've done before is just not show it, so you can leave it to your imagination. how they had children or how they passed on their lineage and all of this is where Ubisoft surprisingly got into a lot of trouble when episode 2 was released.

This is an excerpt from an article written about this scandal shortly after the episode was released, they quote. The creative director of Assassin's Creed Odyssey has apologized for a story choice in the game's latest expansion that forces the main character into a heterosexual relationship, undoing promises of same-sex romance options in the main game and reversing the personal stories that some players may have constructed. quotes Alexios and Cassandra, realizing their own mortality and the sacrifice that Leonidas Emma, ​​their grandfather and mother, made before them to keep their legacy alive, felt the desire and duty to preserve their important lineage, but the game director reasoned and went on and said that our goal was to allow players to choose between a utilitarian view of ensuring your bloodline stays alive and forming a romantic relationship.

Now let me clarify this. I'm not one of those people who are super angry that the writers put two characters in a heterosexual relationship and didn't have more inclusion. relationship options available I think, especially in this world, you have to pass on your lineage somehow, otherwise the game doesn't make any sense, the lineage wouldn't have been passed on, so you wouldn't even be able to experience ancient Greece from this way. so it has to happen at some point. I have no problem with them setting it up. My problem is that they give you the aura of choice.

Make it seem like it's your choice to get into this relationship when in reality it is. t and do ma even addresses this directly, saying that they needed this to happen, so they gave the player the option of letting players choose between a utilitarian view of ensuring their bloodline stays alive or forming a romantic relationship. basically if it were a role. Playing as a gay character, you were faced with the choice of becoming straight or just sucking it up, making your penis stink, and having a baby so your bloodline would be passed on this way. It's a strange choice to offer players and I think my biggest problem. with this narrative plot point is that it just didn't need to be in the game at all, it's really not worth it if you want to do something like this, you just can't have given players the ability to write their own narrative. do their thing to establish their characters traits like they did and then rip them off and pretend like okay, yeah you've made all those decisions and played the role a certain way in the main game, yeah, forget what we want. have some kind of emotional appeal in episode two, so we had to do this overall, it seems really vague that they felt like they couldn't establish a broader personal connection between Cassandra or Alexios and Darius unless they had some kind of intermediary. and the baby involved, I just don't think you really need to do that, if we're ever going to do this, they just shouldn't have had romance options in the main game and they should have moved on from it, it was just a mistake, I don't know how else to say it and again all of this just reaffirms the idea that Ubisoft is in conflict with itself about what it wants to be, whether it wants to lean into narrative stories, linear things or not.

I don't want to give players complete and utter freedom of choice, you can do either, but when you try to combine the two, you end up with something like this where no one is happy because on the one hand, the players who were already roleplaying were someone straight who you know, have babies with who they want to have babies with, you end up pissing them off because they didn't have any influence on the decision anyway and then you have players who were acting gay or just weren't interested in this romance. option that was presented to them during the DLC you end up making them angry because they were once again forced to make a decision they didn't want to make when it was already established that players had agency in these types of romantic choices, it's just lazy, but to be completely honest, I don't have much to say about the legacy of the first sword, it's just more of the same and apart from this strange scandal of forcing you to have a baby and then taking it away from you. by Darius so you can start over at the end of the deal look there's not much here I mean you play the game you go through the motions and there are some emotional appeals where of course you have a child and then also your love interest who is forced.

When you get killed and it's very sad and then Darius takes the child, but the problem is, when you get into those emotional stories, you know that this is just a DLC expansion and there will be another one after you get out of this DLC expansion. We'll be back to the normal gameplay loop, which probably means that Cassandra or Alexios won't just be a dedicated mom or dad, they'll probably wipe the slate clean, like at the end of a sitcom, so that the next episode can start over and You can happily move on, but with all that said, I want to move on to the fate of Atlantis now that it's selling for full price.

Fate of Atlantis costs $25 here in the United States if you want to buy the full season pass, it will cost you $40, so more than half of the full season pass is wrapped up in Fate of Atlantis, so clearly the bar is pretty high, especially when you consider that $25 is no small amount. of money, especially in the gaming industry, when you talk about many double A titles that will cost less than or equal to that amount, it goes without saying that my expectations were high and Ubisoft talked a lot about this expansion, just as they did with Curse . of the pharaohs and I enjoyed the curse of the pharaohs so I was willing to blow my mind and I traveled to all these mythical lands and I fought all kinds of mythical beasts so I booted it up and oh boy where do I start?

This is like remember how I said that what I liked most about the main body of Assassin's Creed Odyssey was that each mission had a story that doesn't exist here. Forget it, so episode 1 places the player in Elysium, which is basically paradise for a group of very special people who were carefully selected by the Greek gods and it really is beautiful and also leans heavily on the arc of theisus story that was set in the visions of Adam and Eve in the garden of Assassin's Creed 2 and honestly, this combination works very, very well. Fusing e-soo's story and characters with Greek royalty and the hierarchy of God works very well and so in terms of tone design, again, world design, everything like that, this is a really interesting way to do it now in terms of structure of the way that What we've set up everything is that you have these big raised areas that you can climb up the side or you can teleport to the top using these little stations.

I was trying to figure out why they felt the need to do this and I think it was just to give the map a better appearance of verticality, although in reality if you just flattened all the peaks, all these big plateaus down to ground level, the map would have about the same size and at first it seemed like that. It was really cool because you get to this incredibly high vantage point, you can look at the map and see a huge distance and then you see that you're basically in the fishbowl of this waterfall ocean cave, Seriously, I don't even know what to do. call it I guess it's a crater, maybe what they would call this thing the city is in, but as I played more through the Elysium section in Chapter One I started to see that this would probably just increase the travel times because if the map were flat it would be very easy to traverse from one place to another, something you will be asked to do many times, as if everything were elevated.

Yes, you can just walk up the side of the cliff, which takes about a minute. 90 seconds to get from the bottom to the top depending on where you start or you can run to a specific point on the map around this elevated area to teleport to the top, at which point you still have to climb a bit, but I can skip the worst part now because it's me and I make everything more complicated than necessary. In fact, I took out my phone and calculated the average difference in trying to climb to the top of one of these plateaus five times. every five times I just went up the side by free climbing with my hands and then the other five times I started at random places and ran towards the teleportation pillar and shot myself to the top, what I found out was that it's actually about five to ten seconds for any of these give or take options, so you're not actually saving time by running towards this specific teleportation pillar, you can actually save more time by just going up the side of the cliff depending on where you start, so those things are more or less Also, it's useless and made me realize that it probably only exists to lengthen the amount of time it takes to get from the bottom of the map to the top section where most of the quest lines in these higher levels will be set. large ones built on top of these cliffs. and this was the first DLC expansion really in this hole I saw because it made it seem like Ubisoft was just trying to increase the hours of play by making things more tedious and good.

God Almighty was right, so for example, they have plenty. of the mission surrounding breaking statues, this is about as repetitive as it gets because the statue is literally exactly the same and the area it's in and the enemies are literally copy and pasted all over the map. You also have the usual checklist of things you have to do in certain enemy bases, so you have to destroy certain containers, destroy this many cargo holds of some kind of political power and then you have to go and shoot these towers with an arrow and then you have to run. and killing three captains and then killing the one guy who's everyone's boss again leans into everything that frustrates most people when it comes to Ubisoft titles.

You know the idea that everything is there to fill hours of play and make things more tedious. Going for quantity over quality, another example will be something I didn't realize until I got to the Atlantis DLC destination specifically, it's something I think is true in the main game but I didn't realize until now, this was my great understanding. in the middle of chapter 1, every time your character levels up, Karissa's perception increases. I can tell you that every time you level up, it's written in text right at the bottom of the screen and I never really thought about what that meant, but rather what it actually means.

What it means is that Chris' perception of different elements, enemies, mission objectives, whatever, increases so that he can see further, he can see through walls and buildings and things like that. I never thought about why this was done, why they felt the need to increase awareness. Wouldn't they just have it set to a static level? Well, it's because they start spreading things around and relying on you to use Icarus to figure out where you need to go. For example, one of the things I liked most about Assassin's Creed Odyssey was the opening. hours is the fact that the characters would give you a mission and tell and describe where you were on the map.

Not only would some landmarks appear in the middle of nowhere somewhere you've never exploited before, but instead they'd tell you the island, they'd tell you some kind of landmark you had to go find, and then they'd tell you. They told you south that it made it feel much more believable and realistic and in the first few hours of the chorus the perception was low enough that you had to get where you were going before Icarus could see or find that. landmark for you, if anything, was kind of an afterthought, it would help you once you got to the mission area he was assigning you to try to get you to go there.

Chris will appear and show you precisely within that smaller area. where you were supposed to go, but with the DLC by the time you're playing here, your level will probably be well above 4550 and Chris's perception will be off the charts to the point where they'll be hundreds and hundreds of meters away, Chris is. able to see your Waypoint and the game leans into this by basically demanding that instead of just exploring an area you just take it out, grow it, look around and point out where everything is because, again, most of these missions involve searching , destroy or kill. a certain number of people with things, whatever they are, so you end up checking all the boxes.

Ikaros sees everything and then you go and mark each one of them one by one and this Elysium chapter also features one thing I hate so much. in video games and that's reducing your control in this area quest line, it's basically a perpetual thing that remains until you've done something vague, like reduce control of an enemy or some kind of control of the main character in an area and it's gone. does ticking through various tedious activities that also assign you in sub-quest subsections below the main quest, it becomes tedious again, it's a developer's way of saying, listen, we know you're progressing through the main story, but we spent all this time developing side quests. that you haven't been playing, so do a bunch of them and then we'll let you continue with the main story.

Ideally, your side quests should be interesting. They must have stories that drive them. They should be fun enough for the player to want to participate. them for the sake of interacting with them, not just because they have to get a certain amount of XP points, not just because the main quest is hard to lock behind a reduced control boundary again, this shouldn't need to exist and, if it exists, in your game I think it's a bad sign of the rest of the quest structure and probably the smallest and simplest example of this tedium that epitomizes the entire fate of Atlantis for me is this specific area.

See, there are these little items you can collect called enigma. da Austria and I know I'm probably pronouncing it wrong, you see he's sitting on top of these pillars and it looks like you should be able to climb this after all these characters capable of climbing the pantheon capable of climbing the cliffs of the lighthouses. sides, if anything this should be a walk in the park, but no, this whole thing is designed very carefully so that the player can't just climb it to get to this collectible item, you literally have to go down and cross to the other mountain , climb it and then cross a rope.

This element is designed and placed in such a way that the player, while exploring, will discover it. See it. You tried for a couple of minutes to get up, racking your brain about how they suddenly forgot. free climbing and then realizing that to get there you have to go down, cross to the other mountain, climb it and then cross a single rope, is not fun, it is not a fun, engaging and rewarding exploratory experience, it is just tedious and mind-numbing and not , it's not a puzzle and I get that, it's an item that you're supposed to like to search for and find, it's not supposed to be easy to find, but it's not a puzzle, it doesn't require any kind of thought into it.

On the player's part, any kind of creative solution or anything. This is just a vacuum of time. Another thing that started happening during Chapter 1 of Fate of Atlantis that caused me a lot of concern was the fact that the game kept crashing. I was playing on PC with a controller the same way I play almost all of my Assassin's Creed games and I've never had issues like this before. I had no problems in the main game, but specifically when I played the Destiny of Atlantis chapter. 1 DLC chapter 2 and chapter 3, all episodes of Destiny of Atlantis. I had constant crashes that caused not only the game to freeze, but also caused my entire computer to crash to the point where I had to shut everything down.

I was actually talking. to a friend of mine who provides technical support after several hard drives failed to erase most of the images from chapter 2 in chapter 3 of the fate of Atlantis and he actually told me that these failures are very likely based on the error codes they were. spitting caused instability in the hard drive they were storing, which could also have affected the stability of the drive as a whole, causing it to eventually fail. I don't know if that's true, but it's pretty bad if that's the case. that your DLC is so broken that you are causing hard drives to become unstable like that, that is bad, but I will give you the benefit of the doubt after all because I don't know if this is true, what I was describing was way is above my understanding when it comes to hardware, technology and computer stuff, so I'll leave it to him.

There are other things that show a real lack of polish throughout the DLC, for example there are many cases like this throughout the DLC that I just show a constant lack of polish, but this is again where the technical problems arose because I had a lot of problems when trying to record the footage for this review, trying to play it with game glitches and everything as normal. I would go through something like this two. or three times before doing the review, however, I've had so many problems with this, if I did that it would probably mean this review wouldn't come out for another six months or so at the rate it was going. going, but all in all in my research it seems like there are choices that do have an impact, but again we know how this story has to end because we've already seen where Alexios or Cassandra ends up, depending on who you choose, at the end of the main game you know how It has to end, you know how it's set up at the end, so the choices don't really have much impact at the end of the day, but I want to talk a little bit about episode 2. and episode 3 now, like I said, I lost most of my footage for these sections, especially episode 3, but I have a couple of things I want to say about them.

Episode 2 takes you to Hades where you can actually explore Hades, which is cool and overall a very interesting visual presentation, however in terms of gameplay it leaves a lot to be desired, just like in episode 1, the episode 2 leans heavily toward repetitive tasks, asking you to go through a list of enemies just to fill hours of serious gameplay. If you were to cut out most of the tedium and just leave it to the basics and learn about the big boss fights and interesting set pieces, this DLC would probably be 1/4 the length while you're in Hades, you encounter various characters. of the main story specifically around the family and it's really cool to see that these characters ended up dying as a result of your actions, whether by your hand or just indirectly by something you did or a decision you made to actually see them. in Hades is great, in fact episode 2 also has some of the most interesting boss fights I've seen in an Assassin's Creed title and that's not saying much, but these things are actually pretty well polished and established and, of course, In fact, I like how they work quite well, they're flashy, they have individualized move sets, they're difficult, require precise timing, and require some effort, and it got me thinking that maybe this is where Ubisoft is at.starting to change the franchise, maybe they will. try to merge something like Star Wars Jedi Falled Order and a broader exploration based title along with RPG mechanics, sort of like mixing Sakhi Row with an Assassin's Creed title, it looks interesting and the combat system has a long way to go before to get to that point. and they had to cut out a lot of the bloat here to get something simple enough to actually be usable and held in high regard, but it still looks interesting and if a company that has as much manpower at its disposal as Ubisoft is going to enter these types of games.

I think it could be really interesting to expand the scope of these types of titles. It could be interesting to see how it plays out, and given the huge success of something like Star Wars Jedi, it should be in good order with gameplay. system similar to that, I think it shows good things so, I don't know if you could call it a full genre of game, but certainly a subset of the Minnie Jean genre of the broader action RPG genre that Dark Souls, based on blood, ensures that it tends to operate within and lastly in Episode Two you get to deal with some very emotional moments with characters from the main game, like I said a lot of people from the main story return and you get some resolution with characters who you probably established with a nice meaningful emotional relationship that I'm actually a fan of now it's been a while since I went through the main Assassin's Creed Odyssey game so I don't have a lot of this stuff fresh in my mind again, it seems like a lot of these appeals Emotions depend largely on whether you've played recently, whether you've recently seen these characters, and whether you've had these emotional moments, so it didn't hit me as hard as I think it will hit some people, but it was still great and this.

It's a much better tactic and emotional appeal than forcing someone to have a baby that they will inevitably lose, this is simply better and in episode three you arrive at Atlantis itself and as expected it is a very beautiful representation of the city mythology known as Atlantis and if episode one focused on exploration, the episode also focused on hand-to-hand combat. Episode three really leans into the diplomacy, the branching narratives, the dialogue options, in fact there are probably more scenes and conversations in episode three than in the other two episodes combined. no, i actually agree with this specifically because they've been leaning heavily on hand-to-hand combat for hours and hours and hours at this point, trips ode 1 and episode 2, believe it or not, can start to feel a little stagnant and so we play. in a mechanism that isn't used much in the DLC and certainly isn't used much even at the end of Assassin's Creed Odyssey's main story.

In fact, I'm really rooting for it to see how much pressure Ubisoft can apply. bend, transform and shape the story and experience around this mechanism, being the dialogue system, the narrative choice system and the idea that the player can set their own directives, but unfortunately by the time you get to the end I'm not going to spoil many details. the decisions you have to make in case you've gotten to this point and you're thinking, oh, maybe this is worth a try, it's really disappointing the decisions you're faced with and, more specifically, the impact of the decisions you're faced with. they throw I call this Titanic syndrome because you know how it's going to end, so the stakes are apparently very low because there is no mystery, the mystical risk does not exist here because you know how it will resolve itself, you know that Atlantis only ends one way, you know where.

Alexios or Cassandra has to finish at the end of this story, at the end of this arc, you know how everything has to resolve itself, so the stakes are high and also a lot of the dialogue written at Ubisoft for episode 3 specifically They are quite pretty. bad, I mean, even in episode 1, at the end of the episode, there are modern sequences that are downright embarrassing like this, and the thing is that episode 3 relies heavily on the quality of the dialogue because it focuses mainly on choices . what you're doing within these dialogue sections to have anything less than stellar writing really lets the player down, really undermines the experience, ruins everything, makes it very difficult to take the story seriously when the writing is pretty black and, again , none. "This is a personal thing, but it's just a matter of conciseness, cutting things down and I know it's ironic for me to talk about cutting things down and making them concise.

I get it, I'm not strong in that department, but at least." I'm aware of this and actively keep things down to try to make them as concise and clean as possible. There are moments in episode three where it seems like Ubisoft just isn't trying anymore, they're just letting the line out. As far as they can go, they just let the flow gate drift off into the sunset where it will never be seen again just because they don't care about trimming things, the dialogue goes on and on and the monologues float by for minutes on end. minutes and then at the end they give you some sort of dialogue option and you've zoned out to the point where we have no idea what you're actually responding to and Ubisoft is in a weird position because they tend to cater to Western gamers who play Ubisoft titles and the thing is that Ubisoft has a demographic that tends to be much younger and their attention span tends to be much shorter.

I'm not making this up, I've actually done player surveys and surveys in addition to testing. Statistically, several gamers who play Ubisoft titles I know spaced out the moments where they drifted and lost focus on certain dialogue sequences. In fact, I can back it up statistically, and the thing is, when your audience has a shorter attention span, it's not like there's anything inherently wrong with it. which just means you're much more active. Psychologically speaking, the onus is on the developer to make sure the story can keep up with that pace of processing, moving, and thinking about different things at the same time.

You have to serve your audience. A game like Death Stranding can take a long time. with your dialogues and scenes and everything at the end of the game because the only people who will have reached that moment are the people with the longest attention span, know your audience and serve that audience, but the question is whether you are going to develop all of these DLC expansions to try to cater to the Ubisoft player, whatever that may be, usually people who are just fans of a lot of box-ticking content, have a much shorter attention span compared to someone who plays like Death Stranding, for example. , with 20 ten-minute scenes, if you go to attend to them and then transition and try to stretch things into five ten-minute scenes where the dialogue goes on and on, you're going to run into some problems because whether you like it or not you condition the player to as it interacts with your content, and at this point, by the time you get to episode three, you're probably 70, 80, 90 hours into Assassin's Creed Odyssey and everything it has to offer, and at that point you've already been conditioned to a certain dialogue pace. and in episode three that goes out the window and they start writing little novels for each and every scene you enter, it's strange, but at this point I want to talk about all the DLC on a much more meta scale because As I said at the top there are some very concerning things within this DLC that worry me about the future of the franchise, as I said there are some really strange decisions that were made throughout the legacy of the first Blade and of course the fate of Atlantis, but to put it succinctly, it seems like Ubisoft is actively conflicted as to what they want Assassin's Creed to be as a franchise, whether they want it to be a wide open world exploration RPG or they want it to be a game more linear stealth game: do you want it to have all these magical, mythical things or do you want to take it more seriously historically speaking, as long as all of these things together create a strange hodgepodge that leaves many players feeling like Ubisoft isn't committed to a single one? idea and at that point the player will not commit to that one idea or any kind of narrative universe concept of the game's story world, whatever it may be, because it seems like the developer hasn't even taken the time or effort of putting yourself in that position to take it seriously, say what you want about the early games about Assassin's Creed one, two, even three, the reveal of the Brotherhood, all of those games took their story in their world very, very seriously. even the origins took their world and their story very seriously.

Assassin's Creed Odyssey started manipulating him and taking him for granted and playing with him a lot, which was a lot of fun, but then the fate of Atlantis and the legacy of the first plate just ruins everything. He throws himself out the window and shows me a real identity crisis. Now many things come into play. I don't think it happened in a vacuum. I don't think this kind of thing can happen out of nowhere. It seems to me that this DLC and Odyssey in general were a result of and a reflection of the corporate attitudes of management within Ubisoft at the time.

This is, of course, the same management that led to the eventual release of Ghost Recon Break Point and several other Ubisoft releases that were met with less critical praise and, from what has been said publicly, Ubisoft CEO Yves Geumja, who is also a co-founder and game developer, seems like they are aware of all these issues of lack of concise identity of the strange and strange lack of quality in some of these recent releases, the rush to copy and paste in nature, basically just the lazy development strategies that it seems as if some senior management level is employing Yves chemo has said that they are going to take action To correct this, they will actively look for ways to avoid this type of lazy development style and improve it, so they delayed almost all games in twenty ten until 2020 and apparently I've heard some rumors.

I've delayed some games that were supposed to be released next spring until fall or even 2021, they're really getting serious and taking a lot longer so we can roast Ubisoft all we want to speed things up or doing things wrong and there's this problem and that problem but honestly this is the kind of response we would expect they take it seriously they know this is a problem and they are taking active steps to correct the mistake at least that's what we get They've said, that's what I've heard from people within the company, it seems to be true and as I've said in the past, I will criticize a company to hell and back when they do something incredibly stupid, borderline. badly as I have done many times with Bethesda, but that is with the strict caveat that I will congratulate and praise companies that praise them excessively when they do something good because if I don't do that, what good are my criticisms?

I'm just the guy who criticizes everything constantly, my criticisms don't mean much and every time I say something like that people think I'm shading other YouTubers. I'm not doing it, I'm just calling out something I see in the industry. a lot, it's that we just like to be recreationally outraged and I think that's stupid, people deserve a second chance, people deserve a chance to correct their mistakes, including big companies that are developing something and working on things that people like you and me, fans of these. we love franchises so much we should all want these companies, these artists, these developers to improve their craft to make improvements and correct their mistakes, that is what we should all support and that requires second chances, third chances, that requires giving them grace, praising them when they do it. a good thing, but it also means holding them accountable when something is done wrong, which I feel like the DLC for Assassin's Creed Odyssey was done wrong, it's a shame because I was really looking forward to the DLC when I heard they were going to Atlantis.

I was especially intrigued when they started talking about some of the new boss fights they wanted and a lot of these things were done quite well and I can tell that there were very passionate people and talented artists working on this project, but the direction of the writing. On the board, it seems like this was rushed, wasn't given the time and attention it deserved or needed, and leaned on a lot of old habits that I thought Ubisoft had abandoned after Origins, but apparently they're back to their old ways. customs, so we'll have to wait and see if Ubisoft and Assassin's Creed move on, if the origins really were just a fluke or if they really are aware that they fell back into the old ways and are going to take active steps to become revolutionary again and try something new and different in 2020, but those are just my thoughts, let me know all yours in the comments section below, thanks for watching honestly and truly.

I'm sorry this tookso long to be posted and I appreciate that you endured all the hardships regarding missing footage and strange artifacts, it's just that this video has been the hardest to put together and finally release of any video in the last year and a half that I've probably made. So I appreciate your patience. I'm glad we got all of this figured out and done and I'm ready to move on to the full Death Stranding review again. Be sure to subscribe if you want to be notified when it's published. I also have a lot of other really cool projects coming out and I'm really excited to be working with some really cool sponsors who are helping me take this channel to the next level in terms of quality, content, style and efficiency. of my work is truly remarkable and I feel incredibly blessed to have amazing sponsors and amazing viewers like you, it really means a lot to me, but that's all from me, Khaleesi and I, thank you so much for watching and sticking with us through all of this. time means the world I love you very much and I will see you in the next video may you have peace