Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey is the latest installment in the Assassin’s Creed franchise. Developed by Ubisoft Quebec, Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey allows you to create your own destiny and become a legendary Spartan hero.
For the first time ever in the AC franchise, you can pick your character and impact the world around you. Set in ancient Greece, about 400 years before the events of Assassin’s Creed: Origins, you play as one of two mercenaries (Kassandra or Alexios) during the Peloponnesian War.
Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey Gameplay Builds Off of Assassin’s Creed: Origins
Assassin’s Creed: Origins, the last iteration of the franchise, saw a soft reboot for the series. Origins used more RPG elements, including upgradable weapons and armor. The rumor going into Origins was that Ubisoft became enamored with Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls: Skyrim and hoped to adopt some of these elements into the Assassin’s Creed franchise.
Turns out, this decision worked and Assassin’s Creed: Origins brought a breath of fresh air into a series that was beginning to overstay its welcome.
Odyssey continues on where Origins left off with new gameplay additions such as dialogue and romance options for your protagonist. Like I mentioned before, your actions and decisions will affect the world around you.
Another addition to Odyssey is Exploration Mode. This gameplay mode forces the player to explore the world in order to discover quests, targets, and landmarks. This works using a “hint system”. NPCs will drop general hints to the player when giving out quests. Once you are in the general area of the objective, you can call in your eagle for assistance. This sounds similar to the system Far Cry 5 had in place, although it seems that Odyssey’s exploration is more refined.
For those of you who are uninterested in this new feature, don’t worry. There is Guided Mode, which is your traditional gameplay experience.
Skill-trees were a big part of Origins and Odyssey improves upon that as well. Origins featured a heavy amount of skills dedicated to out in the open fighting compared to stealth mechanics. Here, stealth upgrades are more important and more deadly than ever.
The melee combat doesn’t take a backseat in Odyssey despite this. Check out this excerpt from an article from Stephen Totilo of Kotaku where he explains some of the combat changes:
“Odyssey gives players a load of possible melee moves, but only allows you to map four of them to the controller’s face buttons at a time. That encourages you to pick a load-out of your favored moves, and will likely encourage players to adopt and stick to certain aggressive or low-key styles of play. You can switch out active moves on the fly just by pausing, if you want.”
Apparently, you can quickly swap between two presets so you technically have eight moves active at a time. Other additions to the series are a new weapon engraving system, more gear slots, and faster climbing.
Plot Details
Like I mentioned before, Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey takes place well before the events of Origins and before the Assassin’s Creed. Gamingbolt spoke to the game’s director Scott Phillips at E3 2018 (which is where the game was officially unveiled) and discussed how Odyssey connects to the AC story:
“We are not directly connected in terms of the story of Origins,”
“We are 400 years before Assassin’s Creed Origins. So the brotherhood hasn’t been created, which allows us to focus the story on choice. You’re not driven by the Assassin’s Creed, it’s your own internal creed that you created. And the world feeds that back to you if you’re killing people, or lying, or stealing. The world is going to send mercenaries against you so you’ll feel that those choices have an impact. And then your choices within the story as well will have a big impact. Do we have a present day? Yes, we do have a present day, and we’re continuing that sort of philosophical “order versus chaos,” structure that’s always been there in Assassin’s Creed. And there’s a lot of other stuff for fans. I think people that dig into the game and love Assassin’s Creed, will love Odyssey.”
As Phillips stated, the present-day sections, featuring former Abstergo employee Layla Hassan, will be making a return.
It seems that Ubisoft Quebec wanted to keep Kassandra/Alexios’ story separate from the Assassin’s Creed so we as the player can create our own adventure.
Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey will release October 5th, 2019 on Xbox One, PS4, and PC.
Are you excited for Odyssey? What are you hoping to see in the game? Let us know in the comments and be sure to follow us here at The Nerd Stash for all of your nerdy news and needs!
