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Kotaku's game diaryDaily thoughts of a Kotaku staff member about a game we play. The other day, Assassin's Creed Odyssey I've hit with a real slobberknocker: he told me that a family I had decided to save from an impending slaughter earlier in the game was carrying a disease that eventually spread to an entire island . My character, Kassandra, was immediately distraught. "We can come back whenever you want," said another character on my ship in a conciliatory tone. So I came back. Nothing has happened.
Do not get me wrong – things were different on the island, but very slightly. There was a handful of sick people hanging around, and a distinctly pesky fog stung parts of the place. I felt bad, so I went in search of new quests that would allow me to mop my clutter, to reverse a little misery, or at least to catch the plague myself. But I did not find anything. Just to make sure I do not miss anything, I looked in Google, then the Assassin's Creed Odyssey subreddit. A person who claimed to have played for more than 50 hours stated that he saw no new quest appear, and others agreed.
Let me dig a little deeper why it's a problem.
In most other circumstances, this would be an interesting consequence for a player's actions. During the early quest that led to this moment, the guy who was about to cut that innocent family to innocent ribbons told me explicitly that killing them was the only way to contain a plague . I would probably have let it go if a) the family had not been a close friend with an orphan whom Kassandra had befriended, and b) the guy did not seem like a fool. In the grand scheme of things, however, I guess I shittled: I made a short-sighted decision that may have sunk an entire island. I'm glad the game did not give me a glorified "Cancel" button after that.
But here's the thing: this island was the first of the game. Kassandra's house. The people she probably cared about more than everyone else lived here. Markos, the intrepid hangman who adopted a young Kassandra after his father left him for dead. Phoibe, the orphan girl that Kassandra directed, is the first character you meet after the start of the game. Back to the starting area, I could not talk to any of them or to the other characters I had met during my research around the island at the beginning of the game.
Most other games have learned that, if a key character said, "Hey, something of an almost apocalyptic significance has occurred in the starting area, and you can go back at any time, "there will be important things to do there. Assassin's Creed Odyssey I gave a stalemate. At that moment, I could only note that Kassandra did not care to know where she came from. She was not the proto-assassin with a golden heart, I took her for her.
It was not the first time that I felt a bit of uncertainty about my conception of Kassandra. I felt more each time OdysseyThe narrative stumbled upon a tangled and entangled mass of open world systems. The most memorable is that the game has introduced its system of mercenaries, who populate the world with itinerant mercenaries, like Kassandra. A Spartan ally had hired Kassandra to determine who had sent a Spartan caravan and stole her supplies, which had led her into a cave filled with displaced Athenian civilians who claimed that a mercenary had done the dirty work and their then indicated where to find food. . This mercenary therefore worked for the enemy, but he had what seemed to him to be a noble series.
OdysseyThe mercenary system is quite blatantly inspired by Middle-earth: Shadow of MordorThe Nemesis system, which generates orcs with strengths, weaknesses, quirks and personalities that evolve in response to your victories and defeats (and when you drop hives). I thought that my meeting with this first mercenary would produce a moment like this, especially since he obviously possessed at least a hint of virtue.
So I approached him and cut him gently about half of his health bar. At this point, I had a decision to make: I could finish it or knock it out. I accidentally made the first one. Distraught, I took refuge in the reassuring arms of my old friend Google to see if something had missed me. Nope. It turned out that this character was not even important. Beyond the quest and the little description in two sentences that he had on the mercenary menu, he was nobody.
I've reloaded my token and tried to knock him out to be certain. All that has changed is that after putting it to use, I could "recruit" him to join my ship's crew instead of killing him. This madeI must admit that I calmed my guilty conscience a little, but it was not profitable for all this configuration. The mercenary system thus resembles the Nemesis system if its personality was fully unveiled and barely shown – it was only a list of foreseeable strengths and weaknesses and a justification for Enforced enemies to occasionally try to track you down. They spice things up, of course, but they do not pay attention to me. And again, given the progress of this quest, I have to ask myself if Kassandra is really interested or not.
The kill-or-KO dichotomy is the cherry at the top of this half-melted sundae. Most quests sent to Kassandra involve killing in one way or another. Usually, they involve killing people. Guards, bandits, Athenians, Spartans, that does not matter, given the interchangeability of the factions of the game.
Technically, Kassandra can KO anyone against whom she is fighting or sneaking, but the game does not recognize it in any way that reflects Kassandra as a character. If you knock out enemies, you simply get another resource: potential ship lieutenants. They offer different statistics, but are otherwise interchangeable. So, you can also play the role of an unrepentant murderer, which you will do absolutely if you choose to fight your way through the 70 hours or more of the game. There is so people to kill – it's only been 15 hours since I've probably killed at least 400 people – and in many cases, Kassandra happily returns to the quest givers as she just bought her some milk at the same time. Grocery store and helped a puppy with a sprained ankle cross the street along the way.
This resulted in an experience that seemed almost unbearably dissonant. Either I accept that this game world does not react to many things it should react to, or I consider Kassandra as a kind of remote and cold-blooded psychopath who pretends to care sometimes – which I do not do not think that's what the creators of the game were looking for. However, in a world where constant but interchangeable factions control everything and decide whether people become corpses or a currency, it is extremely plausible.
It is not difficult to see, at least in part, the origin of this dissonance. Odyssey is a dissonant game, its DNA composed in part of RPG systems based on history as The witcher 3 and partially from Assassin's Creed legacy of action and stealth of the series, with game ideas like Shadow of Mordor sprinkled on top for good measure. It's so close to being a role-playing game that it creates role-playing expectations, but it's never quite able to go all the way. It's trying to do a whole bunch, but it must be a Assassin's Creed game first of all, even if – as KotakuHeather Alexandra emphasized in her review of OdysseyIt has become less important than before.
Given the absurd magnitude of Assassin's Creed Odyssey and the staggering pile of open world systems that his narrative has to endure, I do not think there has been a realistic way to create a game as responsive as I want it to be. My problem is that this magnitude of such magnitude has harmful consequences and that even the largest and most detailed worlds may seem hollow. Moment after moment, I enjoyed my time with Odyssey a lot, but I'm not attached to it at all. I imagine that I will be bored and quit in the near future. When I do, I doubt that I will come back.
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