Assassin's Tips: Creed Odyssey: 8 Things I'd Like to Know Before Playing

While this is yet another entry into Ubisoft's nearly-annual series, Assassin's Creed Odyssey has enough new systems and other elements to confuse new players and veterans. The big open world is open enough for me to accidentally wander in a few situations before the game explains how to handle them. To help you avoid the same problem, here are eight general tips regarding Assassin's Creed Odyssey that I would have liked to know since the beginning of my odyssey.

1 Choose the exploration mode instead of the guided mode

In Origins, the flow of ugly and overlapping card icons had been drastically reduced, and in Odyssey, that had completely disappeared. Instead, the game offers you a choice from the beginning: do you want to play in "Explore" mode or "Guided" mode? The guided mode matches Assassin's Creed cards as you've always known them, while Exploration removes almost all icons, leaving a beautiful, clear map suitable for famous map activities such as navigation. Instead, the map icons are replaced by instructions: the bandit camp is located on the east coast of Kephallonia; the spartan fortress is north of Mount Geranaia.

To be honest, it's not difficult to unravel these clues. Sometimes there is only one unknown place with a question mark on the east coast. This mystery is not exactly murder on the Orient Express, that's what I say. Nevertheless, when icons appear on a rotating compass in a game, I tend to have a tunnel vision and spend more time looking at the compass than the gorgeous hand-crafted world that m? surrounded. All I needed was an excuse to keep my brain connected to the physical world so I could really lose it.

That said, the world of ancient Greece is big, really big. Each transport mode has an auto-run feature that is very useful. On horseback or on foot, pressing Z will move your character so that you can take your hands off the keyboard, while the spacebar does the same for the boats. Horses in particular are good for this: hold Z for a moment, then press E. Your horse will automatically follow the roads to navigate directly to a map marker.

Although I do not recommend leaving the game unattended when I'm on foot, driving the horse or boarding for an island a few miles away gives you a break long enough to take a ride. coffee.

2 Upgrade your favorite weapons and armor

Weapons and armor play an important role in the character's growth in Odyssey. There are a large number of different types of weapons – including swords, axes, sticks, spears and daggers – and they all treat a little differently and have different special attacks. Fortunately, I found that I was pretty much free to choose what seemed cool to me, as all the weapons seem to have the same efficiency. The heavy masses are huge and slow, for example, but they kill Athenians as dead as a dagger.

In fact, one of the truly liberating aspects of Odyssey is that it is almost absurdly customizable and scalable. I remember very well having equipped the monstrosity of a polka dot jester in Witcher 3 simply because he had the best armor statistics that I could afford to have. time. Odyssey avoids this shame by offering unlimited (albeit costly gameplay) ability to upgrade any equipment at the current player level. You have a favorite sword that you use from level 10, but it just can not cut it (har har) now that you're level 15? Pay a blacksmith and a boom, your favorite sword is now a level 15 sword.

One thing to keep in mind is that when collecting legendary armor sets, the entire set automatically goes to the level of the last piece you have collected. For example, I first collected four out of five pieces in the Snake series located between levels 15 to 25, but the last piece I collected was at level 27. This automatically improved the whole of the Snake series at level 27, which has allowed me to keep my precious something else.

The equipment is not purely aesthetic, however. Odyssey has a huge engraving system that adds upgrades and bonuses to your equipment: + 10% Warrior damage, + 5% damage for Spartans, etc. Common objects may only contain a few engravings, but rare or legendary loot may contain many more. The legendary booty is certainly the best thing to use, but I'm grateful that I will never have to give up my legendary equipment after a few levels. Just upgrade it!

3 Use Sparta Kick to repel high level enemies

Unlike Origins, Odyssey's world is mostly at the level of the current player. With a few exceptions, every wolf, bandit and archer I kill is at my level, plus or minus one or two. This makes the difficulty curve a bit flat. Sometimes, however, an enemy will have an Elite modifier, a poisoned ax or something that will make it really difficult to kill them. I will cut them and stab all I want, but my individual attacks do not do much damage. The best thing to do here: kick off a cliff.

One of the first abilities that I unlocked was the Sparta Kick, a "legendary kick" that returns the enemies back. More importantly, the Sparta Kick is incredibly satisfying to use. It's like a cry of Fus Ro Dah from Skyrim, except applied with a boot on the face. Once, I was in a pitched battle in a marble quarry when a top Spartan elite commander fell on me. Desperate, I climbed onto the workers' scaffolding, trembling dangerously over the pit gulf of the open pit. When the commander came up to kill me, I fired him. Sword: 300 damage. Kick: 600 points of damage. Falling several hundred meters from death: 20,000 damage.

No matter how good your enemy is, you can still manage to get at least a lucky kick. Make a fort and head to a cliff.

4 Commit crimes to get a bonus, then go up in the ranks of mercenaries

The main character is a misthios, a class of mercenaries widely employed across Greece. Whenever someone commits a crime (and let's be honest here, this "someone" is usually you), a cash bonus may be paid on your head and a mercenary sent to recover it. Being hunted by a trader is exciting, and some of them have a real talent for penetrating the heart of your business while you are trying to be sneaky.

There is a hierarchical order ranking all the mercenaries of the world and this order of progression is accompanied by all sorts of interesting bonuses. Here's the trick: killing mercenaries ranked above you is the only way to climb the ladder, but the identity of these is a secret. To eliminate the merc-above from you, you must first find out who she is.

It would be too easy if you could commit a crime, then kill the bounty hunter who comes to your place, so that it does not work that way. Mercs who are looking for you after a bonus are usually ranked below you. That said, you find clues to identify haberdashery at random in the loot system, and I have had the most consistent success in finding clues when I killed lower-ranking mercenaries who came looking for me.

So: commit crimes, kill the bounty hunters and determine who is on top of you on the ladder. Then take them out. You are an assassin, after all, and this is your creed, or whatever.

5 Stay neutral during the war to get the best loot

Odyssey takes place during the Peloponnesian War, when Athens and Sparta were great, mad with anger against each other and were really very rude about it. The war is invading all over Greece and you can participate in this battle in every region you visit.

To start a battle, you must upset the balance of power by eliminating the national leader of the region. Doing this sounds a lot like the assassination of a warlord in Shadow of Mordor: the leader is heavily protected and very rich, and an end-to-end fight will be impossible. Instead, you have to soften it by killing his lieutenants, stealing his money and burning the food of his army. When you cause enough chaos, the invading faction, whether Sparta or Athens, will start a battle.

As my mother always told me, there are two sides to each fight and you are free to join the attacking camp or defender. The only difference is that the attackers will have a much harder battle and a better booty awarded for success. Regardless of which side you choose, even if you have murdered Athenians all day to cause trouble, you can offer the Athenians help in the battle you have helped to gain.

Everything burns. Odyssey uses a very aggressive firing system, and it is wise to add fire to your attacks. Not only does this add burning damage that cumulates over time, but it's also a good crowd control. Some enemies start running when they are hit by fire. Therefore, if you are in the middle of a big fight, lighting everyone up on fire can lighten up the crowd a bit.

Hitting someone with a flaming sword, though cool, will not automatically set it on fire. There is a fire accumulation statistic that differs from enemy to enemy and may even depend on the type of armor that they wear – I always test that hypothesis. It takes a few flames to really burn someone down. If you want to make the most of your inflamed attacks, look for prints or bonuses that increase "fire accumulation". The higher your fire accumulation level, the faster you will fire your targets.

This also applies to ship-to-ship combat. A volley of flaming arrows seems incredible (especially at night), but she will not catch a ship on fire right away. You will need to send a few shots of flaming arrows or javelins before the fire goes out. When this happens, a ship can not move or attack until the fire is extinguished. It is therefore a very effective weapon on the high seas. Again, look for bonuses on your ship's firing statistics if you want to be a pyromaniac pirate.

7 Use Ikaros to spot and spot enemies

Your household eagle in Odyssey is called Ikaros and his use as a scout will be familiar to anyone who has played Origins. Send Ikaros and look through his eyes to mark the enemies, locate the treasure chests, the alarm lights, the trapped animals, the prisoners, etc. Having a real-time map of a camp greatly facilitates its entry into the world. On the other hand, spotting the enemies in advance can tell you if any of them has any bonuses or abilities that could be helpful to your crew.

Recruiting for your crew is a traditional process – and by "traditional" I mean you block people and kidnap them, forcing them to work for you. (Aw, how much my ancestors were doing itYour ship can support up to four lieutenants, special leader characters who give you bonuses to your ship status and join you in combat during boarding. Use Ikaros to watch captains and enemy commanders. They will usually have some kind of command bonus applicable to your ship, and more importantly, they will likely be real bastards in a fight. If you spot a good candidate at Ikaros, you can plan to take it alive.

The locating of Ikaros is also useful in caves and underground tombs, but you can not use it underground. Instead, use it before entering the cave and fly it over the top of the mountain. He can still spot underground objects (it's an eagle) and map markers will help you find your way to stacks of loot in the confusing labyrinth.

8 Photo mode is better now

Photo mode is now an essential part of Assassin's Creed games, but Odyssey has refined the mode in many ways. Basically, you can take a photo anytime, anywhere: just press F3 and the action freezes. You can adjust, rotate, move, zoom, and tilt. You can also tinker with the photography details like saturation, exposure and add noise filters. It's all you need to fully Instagram your murderous summer spent back-to-back across Greece. The kids at school are going to be so jealous when you come back.

In addition to taking pictures, which is effortless, the photo mode is still a little opaque. What if, for example, you are a journalist working in the field of games and you write on time, and all your best screenshots were taken in photo mode? Maybe you're screaming, damn pictures? They are in the My Documents folder on your computer. Go to My Documents> Assassin's Creed Odyssey> Photos to find them.

You can also enjoy photos taken by other players by clicking on the photo icons on your map, even if it 's a mixed bag. Frankly, some people are terrible photographers and their photo strangely saturated from the back of someone's head is not really worth your time. Others could be so struck by the beauty of [spoiler redacted] that they take photos in photo mode, thus spoiling your surprise [spoiler redacted].

If you do not want to see pictures of other people, you can now disable them on your map. Press F3 on the map screen to toggle and see no photos, all photos, only your photos or only those of your friends.