everything a little better than Assassin's Creed Origins

- best OW
- best infiltration phases
- more balanced, more accomplished weapons
- more variable difficulty
- but like Origin, the bosses really don't have a good feeling, like they are slow or not interesting, we expect mythological crazy things, we have HP bags

Jogo bem bonito, ótimas mecânicas, ambientação maravilhosa e dublagem colossal, padrão de qualidade Ubisoft, que sempre capricha nesses quesitos, mas quis caprichar tanto no bolo que acabou exagerando no recheio ao ponto de deixar bastante enjoativo. Este jogo é extremamente grande, com um mapa imenso e com muita coisa pra se fazer, mas muita coisa mesmo, e não é no bom sentido, sem contar o grinding que já dá sono só de ver que pra acessar certo canto do mapa você precisa estar pelo menos no nível 40, e isso inclui missões, que vão ficar lá na sua lista de objetivos até você as cumprir, e que vai levar um bom tempo pra você ter tal oportunidade, visto que algumas delas requerem uns 20 níveis acima do seu nível atual. Gostei do jogo, como dito, é ótimo em sua gameplay, design etc, o problema mesmo é o tamanho. Creio que continuarei o jogando gradativamente, e um dia termino.

Foram 60 horas de gameplay. No começo, estava gostando, mas do meio para o final achei muito desgastante fazer as missões. A realidade é que esse jogo tem uma boa mecânica, mas falta alma na história. Parece que passei 60 horas jogando apenas uma engine, sem o jogo estar totalmente desenvolvido.

Sinceramente, achei o protagonista terrível, sem personalidade alguma, como se estivesse controlando um bloco de pedra. E os secundários são ainda piores, parecem estar ali apenas porque é necessário a existência de NPCs.

Enfim, é uma boa ideia de jogo, mas a execução é péssima e sem nenhum carisma.

Assassin's Creed Odyssey is the latest entry into the Assassin's Creed universe and definitely the largest and with the most to do. It's a continuation from the RPG of Origins with even more mechanics and more things to do.

It's the same ability tree leveling system with the ability to spec out your character with certain powers to use in combat, and they're all super great to use, and you basocally have to use them to survive most encounters. THe overall story is a basic revenge for your family plot, but with several twists and the ability to make choices that impact the rest of the game. As a bonus, you can romance anyone with no consequences. Sailing makes a return from Black Flag, and it's still super fun, even without cannons and whatnot. Ship boarding is way more streamlined and no nonsense. The game also looks and feels incredible. Each location feels unique copmared to other regions on the map and I was sitting at a buttery smooth 60+ FPS the whole time. Also, the modern day sections are minimal, which is nice.

With the introduction of choices, the dialogue kind of feels super bipolar with a lot of characters. In the middle of a conversation, I can choose certain responses that makes the NPC love you, then choose another response and they hate me all the sudden. It's just a little awkward and not near Witcher 3 levels of polish in terms of choices and dialogue. Also, it's a pretty skimpy tie-in to the Assassin's Creed universe, it really just feels like a spin off in the same universe.

Odyssey is a great new entry into the Assassin's Creed franchise, even when there are no Assassin's or Templars. It brings back and combined all of the favored mechanics and weaves together a decent story to make choices through. It's expansive with lots of quests and tasks to do, so it's definitely worth sinking time into.

After playing through Legacy of the First Blade, Odyssey definitely ties into the Assassin universe, especially if you're familiar with Assassin lore. I'm excited for future episodes that delve into that lore a little bit more.

After the thrilling success of Assassin's Creed Origins that started a new period of development for Ubisoft that means different styles of games for us, Assassin's Creed Odyssey is more of everything we already got in Origins: More missions, more map, more story, more gameplay, more time difference to any other Assassin's Creed, more weapons, more enemies, more choices.

More good? We'll see...

The first new difference to any previous Assassin's Creed game (including Origins) is that we can choose our gender at the beginning of the game - we either play as Alexios or as Kassandra. The sad thing about this: The developers initially wanted to have this game be played as Kassandra, which would make Assassin's Creed the first (well not entirely - but the first main) title in the series that lets you play a female Assassin. However, some forces in Ubisoft deemd this a bad idea and were scared this could harm sales. So instead, they decided to take the intended villain - Alexios - and turn him into the main character and make Kassandra the villain. This was revealed only much later - the marketing material featured Alexios prominently, but when comparing both character dialogues and game-play situations, Kassandra feels more organic and better to play than Alexios. There is also the possibility to let the game choose for you, and while it suggest that this is done by chance, this "mechanic" will always choose Kassandra. So, please - play this as Kassandra. And shame on you, Ubisoft, to cower away from a female lead role. Aveline was great, Evie was great - I am a male player and loved them both and had great fun with them as characters, and I don't know any gamer that would base his decision to play a game solely on the gender of the character you play. Really, shame on you.

Choosing Kassandra as our main protagonist, we first get to experience the modern-day story where Layla - our former Abstergo researcher who now turned Assassin and her team consisting of Victoria Bibeau, Kiyoshi Takakura and Alannah Ryan try to find another Isu artifact: "The Staff of Hermes Trismegistus". This search leads her to Kassandra, a anciant Spartan mercenary and descendant of Leonidas, who in the Peloponnesian War finds out that both here parents as well as her persumed dead brother still live. Her brother, however, is a pivotal part of a strange cult, named Cult of Kosmos, and an member of that cult hires Kassandra to kill her own father (who left her to die as a child). Wanting only to drink and offer her fighting services to the highest bidder in the Peloponnesian war, Kassandra soon learns that the Cult was conspiring against her family for a while and soon finds herself trying to regain her family and destroy the Cult.

Kassandra is no Assassin (how could she be? We learned that Bayek founded the Hidden Ones which are the prototype Assassins in 40 BC and is also the inventor of the hidden blade, and now we are 400 years in the past - Origin of the Origin?) and here goals are not aligned in any way with those of the Assassins. Instead she's only out for her personal gain and in that sense has more in common with Edward Kenway. And that's not the only thing she shares with him (more on that later). She is therefore a hard to get and hard to understand character; which makes this game even more difficult to play, as Odyssey is also more role playing. You learn this right on the get go, and probably the hard way. One of the missions make you choose: Kill a sick girl who is hunted by strange and shady guys? Or let her live and kill the attackers? You'll probably do the same that I did - and then learn that your decisions have consequences, when a plague strikes your island and spreads even beyond it into the Greek world. Had you killed the girl, you would have spared the people of the Plague. Wow. That's heavy. And there are loads of these decisions to make. You finally find your target and it turns out that it's your father - you have a hard talk with him, you are angry and you can decide: Kill him? Or spare his life but make him run away? This will actually influence the ending you get - there are 9 different ones, and only one of those is a true happy ending. And there are a multitude of decisions that will influence the ending. Wow. I was lucky to get all the decisions right it seems - my girlfriend had a really unsatisfying ending. After finding this out, I had two choices: Either try to guess what the game will probably redeem as good actions, or go into full role-playing mode and decide the way I thought a person like Kassandra would. So who is Kassandra and how should we play her? Well, it's complicated. On the one hand she's the tough warrior that kills without mercy. On the other hand, though - she has a little girl, Phoebe, who she looks out for. She is a proud Spartan of noble decent. Then again she sells her sword for the highest bidder - be it Spartan or Athenian. She speaks of honor, but lives with thieves and swindlers. I found her really weird and really needed to find my way into her. But once I had a feeling for this weird character (that was nothing that I expected), she was fun to play and the further you progress in the story the more you get invested with her story. And I probably played her reasonable enough that I got to enjoy the best of the endings. Pew :D

Being set in Greece, there is probably equal amount of Land as there is Water, so we need (and have) a ship. That's the other similarity to Kenway - we commander a ship; but its a Greek trireme. And unfortunately naval fighting was dumbed down from Black Flag to the extend that it didn't really feel enjoyable to get into long battles. Also there wasn't really much to explore on the water, so the huge water masses where more of an annoyance, that you needed to cross in order to get to the next area; and as soon as you reach it: find a synchronization spot to fast travel... well. Remember how they where placed evenly in former games, so you could easily fast travel around the map. Here they aren't. There might be a couple of synchronization spots close by, and then none where you would have wanted one to not having to do sea travel.... pew. This does not seem thought through at all. I mean, why do I need these Sync points if not to reveal the map and fast travel? And map revealing isn't done by sync points anymore, so it's just fast travel. Then how does one island have four of them so close by that you actually stumble upon them, and another island does not get any, so you always need to go there by boat if you need to?

The map is also full of items - so many that it could rival some of the newer Diablo titles; most of your loot will be junk and unusable, and in the End you're be trying to collect set items anyways, so what started as a seemingly good idea in Origins got totally convoluted and no fun at all in Odyssey - you get the Set items by eliminating certain end boss enemies, so looting anything else soon feels like a waste of time - you'll do it anyways to strip them for parts and materials that you can use to upgrade the items you really need. There is also a huge engraving system to further personalize your items and you can even transfer certain effects from one weapon to another - but these effects are limited and repetitive, so in the end, you'll end up choosing the one set that meets you needs the best an engrave it with something that further compliments your play style. I actually had more fun with the period one games, where new weapons where sparse but once you found a new weapon it was most definitely something you would be happy about; here I hauled in massive amounts of weapons on each run only to have them destroyed for their resources (this probably took some hours of the entire time I invested in this game). I was also disappointed by one of my favorite new mechanic in Origins: The Bow and Arrows. They are nearly identical to the ones in Origins, only that this time around, Kassandra could basically craft them whenever she wanted - giving you possibly endless Arrows to begin with (of course you needed the crafting materials for it, but those where so cheap that you basically never ran out); this meant that every X shots you'd go into the menu, craft new arrows, and continue. This also meant, that working with the predator bow seemed overpowered, but therefore added the annoyance to pause your game every time you ran out of arrows. I opted to not use the Bow at all, because of this, and because it also wouldn't allow to explore what Kassandra brings to the table.

What she does bring to the table is a Spartan fighting style that is of course not sneaky and also not based on range attacks but mostly on brute force. She can wield two weapons, give out different screams, dash forward towards an enemy, jump high into the air to crush down on them, or simply kick them with the infamous "spartan kick". Playing here as a meele attacker feels the most intone both with her look and feel as well as the setting and the other warriors around here - making this the Assassin's Creed that is not only farthest away from the Assassins in time period but also in play style. For the first couple of upgrades these abilities look grate thoug. Later however, they become quite overpowered and look unrealistic. This can only be explained by accepting that Kassandra is possibly a demigod.

But given that Kassandra is now Assassin, it feels okey, even enjoyable as it is a deviation of the standard formula - something different to the ever so sneaky approach and a fresh perspective in the overall world of Assassin's Creed. It is still tied in to the world in a couple of ways; of course Alexios and Kassandra are - as their predecessor Leonidas - people with precursor DNA in them, that give them special abilities. And the ominous masked Cult of Kosmos is actually a branch or predecessor of the Cult of the Ancients. But Kassandra has a also a very special role - similar to the Sages that got introduced in the second half of the periode one games. And she is directly linked to Layla and also to Aya. So this really is a prequel in the sense a prequel should be: Something totally different, and not the same old story with other people.

My two main issues with the game are however the following:
First, her alignment. I get that she's a sell-sword that is just interested in making a fast buck. But it still feels weird that we can - with the blink of an eye switch our loyalties. We could be doing a spartan main mission and be "spartan aligned" but still weaken the Spartans and fight on the Athenian side of a battle, which has no effect what so ever on the mission. We could even destabilize a region under spartan control and still fight for the Spartans in the end. All the dialogues, all this talk about family, about honor, about being a pride descendant of Leonidas feels absurd when you can play like this and sometimes even have to. And why would an Athenian army even allow a Spartan aligned person in their ranks? Why would the Spartans open-armedly take her back once she betrayed them and helped the Athenians? This just felt so weird for me. There is also a whole (stupid and repetitive) series of kill-and-fetch series you do for a Spartan military leader; and then get the same missions mirrored for the Athenians. Wouldn't a real game that gives you choices but then has consequences make you choose one of them and make the other become your enemy? It was just weird and annoyed me the whole time. I tried to avoid battles all together as good as I could - but for leveling and fighting other Mercenaries they where good opportunities - and they also allowed you to reach some achievements (and, as stated, sometimes even where part of the missions).

And second issue was the unguided open world approach. Different to Origins this time you didn't get any pointers of what would make most sense next at all. You literally get thrown into the ocean and from there can try to go whatever way you want. However, there are Quests that depend on each other and that need to be done in a certain order, or that open and/or close quests once you do them in a different order. There are also quests on islands and territories that just feel wrong if you do them before doing something else first. And last but not least, you plan to explore an island, do all the quest there and then suddenly stumble upon something impossible to do at your current level, so you leave and need to return later, making the whole experience more fragmented and less fun to play and explore. And it might have been that this was just me - but I actually started googling this mid-game, and realized that a lot of people had this problem, and there where even more people who spent hours to compile guides that would give you the perfect order to visit the areas and do the quests, so that you have the best game and story experience. Wow. I actually sat down, reading a guide while playing the game, just to know where to go next, so that I would have a nice experience exploring the world and doing the quests in an order that made sense for the story line, because the game "suggests" that I am free to do whatever I want but actually punishes me when I do it the wrong way. This, to me, felt really bad. For someone who likes to play the entire game and reach 100%, the approach that Odyssey gave me felt really unpleasant. Origins did a much better job by giving a sense of direction and then just letting you move on and on; later games like Valhalla managed to have actual freedom of movement on the map, and Mirage gave hints on a best way to proceede while still allowing to move around freely and making the order not care storywise. Odyssey is the only game that - at least for me - did not work at all as a unguided open world game.

But even besides all these criticism I cannot deny the positives; there is a beautiful world out there to explore. The map is incredible and the world looks stunning and beautiful and as with Origins you get emerged into everyday Greece of that time and feel like being there and taking it all in, due to buildings, social events, etc. You feel the wonders, the greatness, the presence of the Gods that Greeks must have felt in that time. And the story of Kassandra is interesting, dramatic and touching - and especially the ending in the DLCs give her so much more depth and emotions. It is a beautiful story. This is combined with a beautiful soundtrack and - to me - one of the best songs in the series: "Odyssey" that unfortunately got totally underused in favor of the Ezio song (which for instance played in the menu and the map).

With this I feel bad giving the series less than 4 points, even though the overall experience is still worse than most other games in the series.

There where three DLCs;
- Legacy of the First Blade is a series of three DLCs that introduce us to Darius and his Natakas - two Persians who are hunting for some Cult that is pretty similar to the Cult of Kosmos and after trying to set foot in Persia now tries to undermine Greece.
This story is in parts strange and useless, but adds to the flavour of the story - it's the DLC that I like so much because it gives Kassandra a bittersweet ending.

- The Fate of Atlantis is the largest of the three and compares to Origins Afterlife worlds - only this time we get to Elysium, the Underwold and Atlantis. This DLC allows the world designers to freely express their interpretations of the different aspects of Greek believe as well as on Atlantis which is both Greek- and Isu-related in design. We learn that Atlantis is one of the cities where the Isu lived together with their Human slaves, and Kassandra is to stop the fate of Atlantis of being drown because Humans and Isu finally stop getting along. This last section for me was the weirdest, because I found it difficult to fit into everything we have known so far about the Isu, but it was still a fun DLC with a lot to explore.

- Those Who Are Treasured is the cutest and most fun of the three DLCs, storywise, as it tells a vacation story that includes Kassandra, Barnabas and Herodotos, and takes place on Korfu. It is a comparably small DLC that tells a story that does not add at all to the general game lore and as such feels like a self-contained side quest; but it was really fun.