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At a glance Assassin's Creed Odyssey looks a lot like last year Assassin's Creed Origins. Despite the exchange of Egyptian pyramids against Greek temples, the similarities at the surface level are numerous. There are, however, many subtle differences.
(Note: this article is based on the 14 hours that I spent with the game, as well as on the 75 hours of our reviews and on some checks done with the development team via Ubisoft PR.)
Let's start with the basics.
What is not different
Both The origins and Odyssey are third-person adventures taking place in vast reconstructions of iconic epochs. Both avoid many of the traps of the top 10 Assassin's Creed games that preceded them. You can not kill targets in one hit by default, and there is no mini-map to guide players. There is little reference to the killers who fight the Templars, because the two games precede this core of the conflict and show instead some of their roots.
These are games focused on mathematics and very heavy loot, with more evidence Diablo or destiny influence. They distribute weapons and wardrobe options with a scarcity of color code and increasing statistical skill, and feature a skill tree that players can climb.
The old stories of The origins and Odyssey Layla Hassan, a researcher of the modern era, is experimenting with the use of an Animus device to make the past expire. And both have so much to do that they can make players work 80 hours before even launching a downloadable content season.
They also both do this thing where you have a pet eagle that works like a surveillance drone.
The obvious differences
The origins Bayek, a proto-assassin, used a hidden blade and crossed ancient Egypt to fight the forces of Ptolemy and, later, Julius Caesar. On rare occasions, you could also play the role of Bayek's wife, Aya, often in naval missions that resembled those of large-scale naval combat. Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag. While the game explored the origins of the Assassin's Order, it did not contribute much to the modern tradition of the series, except to introduce Layla Hassan. It was even less about the First Civilization, a precursor race that in previous games had influenced human development.
Odyssey The player's choice is Alexios or Kassandra, a Spartan who uses the seemingly magical spear of Leonidas, herself an artifact of the First Civilization. The adventure takes place in ancient Greece at the time of the Peloponnesian War, four hundred years ago. The origins. According to my colleague Heather Alexandra, who reviewed the game and played it more than me, it goes deep into the legend of the Civic Premier in extended and optional sections late in the game, although in the beginning it avoids most of the elaborate games in the meta-narrative series.
The originsThe creation was led by Ubisoft Montreal and a creative leadership that had worked on Black flag. Odyssey's was primarily managed by Ubisoft Quebec, including previous AC was 2015 Assassin's Creed Syndicate.
While The origins began to lean Assassin's Creed in the field of role plays like The witcher, putting more emphasis on sophisticated collection of side quests and equipment, Odyssey goes all-in with the addition of dialogue options and even the ability to sleep with many secondary characters.
Odyssey also restores naval exploration and combat in a comprehensive offer, with options for recruiting crew members and upgrading your ship. It adds an elaborate territorial control system that allows players to switch dozens of game regions, from Athenian control to Spartan control, or vice versa. Players do this through new large-scale battles involving dozens of warriors fighting around your hero as well as through a Assassin's Creed– as an additional weakening system of control of a regional leader before you can murder him.
Other differences are more subtle, but still significant
Odyssey offers a better way to explore. The origins was often too easy, in part because it suppressed the detective work of searching for quest items and targets. Upon receiving a new quest, the game will display a yellow icon or circle on the map indicating where the player is going to go. You will go there, then you will be invited to pass to the control of your eagle Senu. The meaning of Senu's bird would highlight the target of loot or assassination, or whatever you were looking for. After this simple extra step, you should start following a waypoint on your HUD again.
Odyssey puts some creative twists about it. Those who liked The origins'Heavily Assisted Navigation may choose to keep it via a game option called Guided Mode. However, the game recommends players to try the top-level exploration mode, which does not score the card when players get a new quest. Instead, players must rely on textual clues to know where to go. They may be looking for a target in a forest to the west of a given area, for example, but there will not be a large yellow circle indicating their location.
Exploration mode is a much more satisfying way to play, although Odyssey always displays a prompt to move to your eagle when you are finally near your goal. You can not disable this option, a Ubisoft representative told me, because players testing the game sometimes lost track of their goal. Still, the Exploration mode is worth at least trying. I greatly prefer it.
The ability specializations allow you to play the role of a sneaky assassin. The origins'Combat was oriented towards players who were interested in wearing swords. There were remote movements and stealthy movements, but Bayek's hidden blade was sometimes not a one-shot kill, which was a break from the older games in the series. The guards could quickly detect Bayek and spoil any furtive approach. More often than not, what started with an infiltration would end in a total fight.
Odyssey still allows you to play barbarically, but its stealth system is more accommodating for those who wish to slip into the shadows (and stay it). From the beginning, players can start to increase the power of stealth attacks using the Leonidas spear, which is the version of this hidden blade game. They can also learn to chain assassinations and perform extra-powerful assassinations that require a long push of a button, but inflict double damage. There are still enemies who can not be stabbed out, but Odyssey is much more permissive of players trying to control their character as they were classics AC Altair hero or Ezio.
Odyssey gives players a load of possible melee moves, but only allows you to map four of them at a time to the controller buttons. This encourages you to choose your favorite moves and will probably encourage players to adopt and stick to certain aggressive or unobtrusive play styles. You can deactivate active movements on the fly by pausing, if you wish.
A new weapons burning system also rewards the way you play. Maybe by a mistake, Odyssey Regularly displays alerts about what you are doing in the game. Oh, you've just killed another predatory animal or another enemy with a sword. These and other actions like these count for purposes that unlock new prints that a blacksmith can burn into your weapon. These engravings are essentially weapons advantages and they correspond to the type of actions that unlock them. Killing animals, for example, allows you to get an engraving that makes your weapons even more effective at killing animals, which would make hunting and fighting the legendary beasts of the game easier. Or, if you do a lot of killings stealthy, you will unlock engravings that will make your weapons even more powerful when used for assassinations. Likewise if you are concentrating on remote combat or open scrum.
The loading screens are different. In The origins, faithful to long time Assassin's Creed Traditionally, you could pass Bayak through an endless digital horizon. In OdysseyAll you get is a non-interactive screen of a fire and a glowing artifact. Advantage The origins!
There are more slot machines. You do not collect one outfit at a time in Odyssey because you were in The origins. Instead, you collect helmets, torso pieces, lower armor, gloves, and shoes, which is great news for booty lovers or bad news for people who do not want to. do not buy Assassin's Creed games to spend a lot of their time managing inventory.
Odyssey offers more types of quests. The origins gave players major quests, side quests, and a handful of timed events, consisting mainly of fighting a rotation of a few gods. All this represented more than 180 quests, including downloadable extensions, many of which were fun to do.
Odyssey divides things differently, with a structure that looks more like a nuance destiny or other games designed to give players reasons to activate the game regularly. There are Odyssey main quests, then major side quests classified as "world" or "character" missions. Then there are many bonuses, which are timed and generally involve having about a day to hunt down a target. And there are contracts, which involve doing things like running an X number of boats or fighting a Y number of enemies. Players collect bonuses and contracts on bulletin boards in the cities of the game. They seem to rebuild frequently. There are also daily and weekly quests that distribute a special motto that can be used to obtain rare items or looted boxes containing random items, similar to the Nomad Bazaar in The origins.
Among the range of ancillary activities in Odyssey These are the large-scale battles mentioned above, as well as a series of "Impact Quest Diver" quests that a Ubisoft representative has clarified, which are based on the decisions you made in the thu.
The quests make it possible to obtain somewhat malleable results. In my experience with the game, Odyssey recognized when I missed what was supposed to be a stealth mission. One day, a quest giver asked me to keep a silent mission, but I made a mistake and alerted several guards. When I came back for my reward, I found my quest giver besieged by enemies. Once I fought them, I was criticized for making too much noise and for bringing the enemy back to them.
Quests level up while playing. When launching Origins, it was easy to lose the game and outclass all the early quests that you had skipped and then tried out later. Enemies in the starting regions of the game would be weak and the game could often seem too easy. A patch allowed players to evolve their enemies in difficulty as they had done. Odyssey makes this type of leveling mandatory, even if it manages it differently depending on whether you play in normal or difficult difficulty.
Each region on OdysseyThe card has two numbers associated with it. These numbers indicate, in part, how much you need to be leveled to explore the area without being crushed. If you are in a region and begin to take the next level, the quests of this region will upgrade with you. Enter a level six zone at level six, then go to seven. The level six quests you have entered in this region become level seven quests, completed by harder enemies. If you reach the maximum level for the region and play with normal difficulty, the quests will continue to stabilize, but will lag behind and will remain two levels behind your character, regardless of your height, according to Ubisoft. If you play in difficult or nightmarish conditions, the quests will remain at most one or zero levels behind you.
The Mercenary system is a game in itself. Black flag had a search system along the lines of Grand Theft AutoWho would send hunting ships after you, the more you would have chaos on the high seas. The origins has placed a high-level enemy called Phylake in many of his areas, forcing you to flee for your life if the usual patrol routes approach him, although you may eventually get a sufficient level to fight them, kill them and activate a quest in the course of all that.
Odyssey combines what these previous games have done and mixes into a touch of the Nemesis system of Shadow of Mordor for an elaborate secondary challenge involving mercenaries. Powerful mercenaries populate the game world. A special break menu interface displays more than nine levels of mercenaries, as well as your status among them. Most of these menus are initially masked in silhouette. Mercenaries vary in power, strength and weakness. Players can collect information about them and track them down. A wanted system that detects the excessive violence of the player-character will also induce mercenaries to hunt them down. Inevitably, mercenaries will confront you, barking like them. And even if you kill mercenaries and climb the ladder, new mercenaries will emerge. At any time, players can pay or murder characters that seemingly put bonuses in your head, which will cool things down for a while.
As with the regional control system, the mercenary system is surprisingly involved, perhaps even superfluous, engaging in a distracting manner and is another multilevel means of acquiring exotic loot.
A more customizable HUD. While Origins allows players to switch between a few preset options for your HUD, Odyssey allows you to select 20 options. I immediately turned off the amount of damage. Closing my game would not save the options I had selected, and the game would not remember my HDR settings either, but Ubisoft says these are bugs that should be fixed after the release.
The crossing is slightly faster. I thought Kassandra was feeling faster than Bayek. Not enough. According to a representative of Ubisoft, the climb is not "significantly faster", but the climb of steep slopes has improved and the jump is faster. Getting up and down is a little faster than in the previous game, although it is obviously not as fast as simply using a grappling hook in Ubisoft Quebec's latest game. AC Thu, Union.
There are a host of other similarities and differences between Odyssey and The origins, including some that spoil the new game. These are, however, some of the biggest and the easiest to miss. Many subtle differences help Odyssey feel like an improvement over the already impressive The originsand help the new game to stand out as more of the same old thing.
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