Assassin's Creed Odyssey Broke Me

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Eden into contrived request mechanics it makes the modern day a parody of the games that had good Monday usually the Animus all wrong it skips over huge plot points like Juno and what happened with Lela and William if ELLs utilize Darius correctly and turned him into a walking sales pitch for Assassin's Creed as a brand and worst of all it did my boy bike day okay that that last one was a joke before I get the usual you just hate order soon because blade wasn't internet that's not why um sure I do hate that give-give your character sequels let us invest in them there's a reason Ezio still the poster boy but that's not the reason I hate Odyssey there's plenty more valid and better reasons but it's okay they've removed what made Assassin's Creed Assassin's Creed most people say I don't care about Assassin's Creed anyway so for me personally this doesn't bother me at least it's a good RPG right wrong Assassin's Creed Odyssey is the most false pseudo RPG I've ever touched role playing games with my favorite genre of games ever since Skyrim I've tried so many RPGs Skyrim fallout 3 new vegas fallout 4 Mass Effect 1 2 3 and Andromeda kotor the witcher 1 2 & 3 horizon zero dawn kingdom come deliverance final fantasy Morrowind oblivion the fable trilogy and that's just naming a few i love role-playing games assassin's creed Odyssey is not a good role-playing game it's a [ __ ] bad one and I know I'm gonna see the dislike skyrocket which is also part of my point who is this game actually aimed at people who have no interest in critiquing games people who have no want to dig deeper and look at the narrative more closely the gameplay mechanics how things are balanced the fans of this game purely want flashy colors lots of XP every 5 minutes and for anyone that doesn't like it - just shut up and simply not play it but I'm sorry that's not how this works that's not how critiquing works I loved Assassin's Creed I loved RPGs this game makes a mockery of both and you best be sure I'm going through voice that I never spoke about this when the game launched I focused solely on what it did wrong with the law what it did wrong as part of the Assassin's Creed brand because well that's my area of specialty and every other critic Under the Sun was talking about how it was the next Witcher 3 did these people play that witcher 3 or was it something you just had on in the background because the witcher 3 fills its vast yet deep world with stories with characters and with things to do that all feel meaningful all of which have depth all of which contain writing and acting on par with that of the main story and with the best games out there it fills its world with heart with soul with character do you know what Assassin's Creed Odyssey does none of those things on the surface sure it has dialogue options like The Witcher it has a perk system like The Witcher it has side quests like The Witcher it has locations to complete like The Witcher but that's all it is on the surface all you have to do is play one quest from The Witcher 3 in one quest from Assassin's Creed Odyssey to see the stark contrasting quality levels and my god if you can't I'm sorry but you're wrong it's insulting to me that this box job of a game is even compared to one of the all-time greatest games ever made a game that has immense love and care and passion and heart it's insulting that these are even compared but back on track I wanted to tear myself from the rest and do something different for Assassin's Creed files but with the final DLC all done and dusted with Odyssey seemingly now behind us I felt it was time to let it all out pick apart this game once and for all and explain exactly why Assassin's Creed Odyssey is a [ __ ] dreadful game okay so let's talk about fundamentals of role-playing games what do you need first is a vessel to roll players in your role-playing game now there are two ways of doing this way number one is the Witcher way which gives you a pre-established character with cool character traits and you guide them through this world and through this story you feel immersed in who they are when you hit a dialogue tree you choose what to say but you want choosing whether you should be a good person or a bad person you just choose an answer to give that's based on the character you're playing us that kind of sounds complicated so let me try and explain in The Witcher 3 Geralt has core character traits he's self-serving yet caring to those he loves he's brave but also afraid to let his more vulnerable side show those are just a few character traits these traits define the answers you can choose from every answer is always Geralt every answer fits into his core character you're just choosing which one to go for the second way is the Elder Scrolls approach this gives you a full blank slate completely blank you name your character you voice your character and you pick choices to go for these choices are not based on anything they are purely different emotional answers kind mean sarcastic ruthless generous you pick who you want to be in each encounter and you base that on what you've built up for yourself in your mind for your completely blank slate for character now one thing you should never do is mix these because if you do you're left with a pre-established character who has no character traits and flip flops between one mood and another a character that you can't make your own but also isn't their own character this is what Odyssey did first are all dialogue is preset it's gender-neutral therefore you get no quirks of male or female as much as the media would like you to believe this isn't the case men and women are different and they act differently and say different things and so that's a first step to achieving an awful protagonist in order to see like I said they combine these two ways of serving a protagonist to the player I played Cassandra and I couldn't establish any core character traits because there aren't any is Cassandra loving and kind well she can be and she can't be I might choose to help someone out of kindness and I might choose to call another a mean name I might choose to help someone with their farm but I also might choose to cook out an old man and [ __ ] his wife you see what I'm saying this is wildly inconsistent there is no character Casandra is not a character you might comment oh here are Cassandra's core traits but that's based entirely on your own choices and when your own choices can be wild and erratic you have no character foundation you just have this empty husk who has a name and a face that you can't make your own but a personality that you can have be whatever you want at least in certain situations if you're going to have a pre-established character you need to do the groundwork to build that character to make them believable you then guide them through the world but regardless of your choices it will always stay true to who that character is but in this game it's not the choice between being empathetic or ruthless it's a choice between being entirely good or entirely evil or somewhere in between you can slaughter entire villages for Christ's sake you cannot be attached to a pre-established character if that character has no core character traits I can't feel for Cassandra the same way I can feel for a lawyer or Geralt because the choices don't reflect one single character and different approaches that they might take they just resemble random potential choices that anyone could take depending on who they are which builds no connection between the player and the pre-established character the reason this works when you give the player an entirely blank slate is because it allows you to put yourself into the role in Skyrim I'm playing myself and the driving force of the game is the world that you're dropped into you make your character but when a game is doing half the work for you giving you a character with a backstory a name a face and then saying oh but they have absolutely no character you just choose it's a huge disconnect you can only have one or the other if you go in between it's lazy and you miss the point of having a strong role-playing game if you missed the role-playing in role-playing game [Music] core pillar number two is dialogue touched on it briefly in the character section but dialogue in Odyssey is well not the dialogue itself but the dialogue choices is my point here dialog choices in games can go a few ways so like I said you either have the Elder Scrolls approach of most dialogue being world surfing where you choose what you'd say because it's your character and that choice will then affect the quest you have a system like The Witcher in which choices for sure can affect quests but most of the time it affects relationships it changes the way people perceive Geralt of Rivia and then you have games like Mass Effect in which your dialogue basically serves as homemade character development or dialogue for Shepherd is fleshed out but there are two extra options which you can only access if you go one way or the other on the morality scale so if you choose a lot of empathetic options in dialogue you'll slowly unlock Paragon options which essentially works as character development it takes Shepherd from being his neutral self with of course his contained character traits to being a better more good version of himself alternatively you can go the other way and end up with renegade which is a more ruthless Shepherd all of these options however adhere to his core character or her core character traits because you can be both in Assassin's Creed Odyssey they sort of do some of these things and none of them it's similar to my previous point but the choices you have because of the way the character is set up you'd think would work like Elder Scrolls so your choices affect the world you choose something the quest goes a different way which sure sometimes happens you either kill an insignificant guard or you don't it doesn't really matter but it's a choice and then sometimes your choices are supposed to affect relationships who joins your crew if a certain character teams up with you or not if someone wants to [ __ ] you on a 10 site this game is odd the main point here being they tried to use choice to shift narrative and character without having a character with core traits to tether that narrative to that that made sense to me but that comes off as overly convoluted let me try again the main point here being they tried to make choice affect the way story flows for a character without first and foremost giving that character core traits with which to draw a sin and Link that character to the personal narrative that they're trying to tell because initially they failed to establish a character with core traits for us to be invested in the narrative itself the and work because the backstory and the motivations might not line up with the Cassandra or Alexios we've dreamed up for ourselves it disconnects the player from the roleplay that they're trying to create it doesn't let us ever fully immerse ourselves in the protagonist or in our own character as it sits awkwardly in between the two extremes therefore choice often has no consequence because trying to tell a story tethered to a character that we can shift at the drop of a hat means that the choices often need to feel drastically different however cannot drastically affect the plot itself this game flip-flops between trying to tell a straightforward linear narrative whilst also trying to allow choice you see why this simply doesn't work you can't show us flashbacks and establish Cassandra as a character whilst also saying you're allowed to choose whatever the [ __ ] you want if you want to be evil you can but it conflicts directly with the protagonists fight against evil in demos in mocap cutscenes where we see the protagonist without choice exactly as the devs intended them to be it can be wildly different from what we've been choosing as players the difference then with The Witcher is that no matter which choice you pick it's always Geralt Geralt is a Witcher he's self-serving he doesn't owe anybody anything he's always been like that but also he has a caring side to him you could choose to slay a beast purely for money that's Geralt you could choose to slay a beast for the people and ask for no reward that's Geralt in order to see you can kill an entire town [ __ ] an old woman and be the hero of the day they all conflict with they're all Cassandra a canon character with no traits no morals nothing an empty husk with a story we're meant to care about with no traits and no values to tether them to the personal plot that we're supposed to be invested in the choices do not enhance the story they restrict the story and character along with giving the illusion of free will a good staple of any role-playing game is choice we touch slightly on the theme of choice in the past two sections but let's delve a little deeper the main tagline for this game was this isn't just any Odyssey it's your Odyssey meaning you paved the way in this world and turn the story into your story and that's a lot of [ __ ] anyone who genuinely believes this I'm sorry but you're a [ __ ] there might be one or two choices that genuinely do affect things whether certain characters die or not is the main one either you can say of your family or they die and those are the main choices but they don't really affect anything they're very self-contained events and that's not consequence of choice I can slaughter an entire town and there's no repercussions even Red Dead 1 which came out 9 years ago did this better you kill one person and there's minor consequences how even GTA did this better years and years and years ago even the older Assassin's Creed games gave your base actions consequences but this game that prides itself on choice on being your Odyssey can't and I'm sure people will use the argument that well if you murder a town then you get wanted and bounty hunters will try and kill you but they won't if I look at the map and hold the Y button now they don't care because I paid digital money to nobody and I'm fine it's a weird an immersive version of the notoriety system that's done a million times better in other games again it's the way Quebec design their games its illusion of consequence without having to bother to actually make consequences and this translates into dialogue choices for example the first time I noticed this was right at the start when you pick a horse there's three to choose from and you can ask about each one no matter which one you end up choosing Marko's gives you this line and it's called Phobos for voz but why if your game actually had a grand choice you'd either just give us a single horse like in The Witcher 3 or you provide an actual choice the fact that the precedent set from the start of the game is that your choice doesn't matter is very strange to me now the second major example in stark contrast to the first is the end of the game now the only I got was a strange middle ending where my adoptive father Nicholas was alive my mother Marini was too but everybody else was dead now any good RPG any of the endings should be viable for example in The Witcher 3 there are a few endings and you could probably make a case for all of them being the right one because they're all equally thought-out however the ending I personally got for Odyssey I found hilarious after everything that's happened cassandra is sitting in a family home with her mother and nikolaos in dinner I laughed at the scene and then got a flood of comments saying that the ending being bad was my fault and that I didn't get the good ending because I made the wrong choices but I thought this was my Odyssey I thought this was my story and now I'm being told that the ending being bad was due to my choices that's not good writing that's dumb if you have to make specific choices in order to get a satisfying ending then why have choices at all it's just another example of choices being absolutely useless in this game they're there purely to make the game look appealing to anybody on the outside they don't actually serve a purpose the story always ends the same cassandra has no growth due to these choices she's always on one fixed path no matter how many innocents you kill how many goats you save Cassandra is always on the same path linking back to earlier I could spend my whole game slaughtering towns and then decide to execute a cultist because they're murdering innocents and well then like a Sancho will be a hypocrite but that shouldn't be possible but it is because of the lack of care that goes into these choices they don't consider all the options and it shows okay let's take a break from narrative and story characters and whatnot and discuss some of the mechanics the leveling being a huge one Odyssey is one of the most unbalanced games I've ever played every time you get a new main quest it ends up being a few levels above you and the damage difference between those levels is huge on top of that Odyssey has a fixed level scaling you can't turn it off it's always on which is hilarious and just shows what they're trying to do let me explain in most RPGs level scaling is used for new game+ you start new game+ and you don't want all the enemies to be level one it'll be too easy so you whack on level scaling and all the enemies jump up to around your level which makes new game+ more challenging more fair and more fun in order see it's always on by default always now surely you get what this means it means that leveling up is pointless unless quests are a higher level than you it means if your level 10 and a quest is level 10 there's no reason to level up because the enemies will always level with you and so there's no advantage to being a higher level it means that if you level up they level up and so nothing changes there is no balancing it's just constant enemy level scaling which shows their laziness it shows how unbalanced and messy their stance system is because if they allow for you to turn off level scaling would really show you'll be able to see the vast difference in power levels so instead of making a balanced experience they just locked enemies to never be hugely weaker than you sure you can turn level scaling to light and it makes it a bit more lenient but it's never vast origins didn't have level scaling The Witcher 3 doesn't by default and you don't really notice because of the quality and the balancing far better in The Witcher 3 mind you whereas in Odyssey there is a big gap between levels and you never get to use the advantage of that and there's good reason for this this helps them push microtransactions why you ask well let's look at the other end of the scale leveling takes a while and if you're as much as one or two levels below an enemy they're gonna [ __ ] destroy you enemies are huge damage sponges as it is you have to keep [ __ ] wailing on them but if you're a couple levels below them you do not stand the chance couple this with the fact that every few main missions the quest level jumps about eight levels and leveling up takes [ __ ] ages in the side quests usually mundane fetch tasks that don't provide a lot of XP you're left with no hope but to just cave and buy some [ __ ] XP boosts which is what this game is designed to do I could try and take on Medusa it'd just be way too difficult i'ma do sir I think would be easier than the cultists because of the cultists it's like I have to fight them and beat them and if I'm five levels under where they are like that's gonna be tough how much would it be if I got the microtransaction I hate myself for buying into it right no way I did it why did it not the [ __ ] well the [ __ ] did you steal my money I did it already why do I only have 200 yeah it did go through where are my [ __ ] healings credits cube Assad just stole my money please tell me it works though please please tell me they gave me my [ __ ] time savers let's do it XP permanent XP boost lovely okay we have an XP boost wonderful let's see if it improves it greatly or not I hope it does because if it doesn't I'm gonna be really upset look guys I'm sorry I had seen a kind of hate myself now actually but you know that's the lesson I've learned today I think you see recently they wanted to crackdown on story create mo quests that allow for XP farming not because they care about the integrity of the game if they did they wouldn't sell XP boosts it's because they want to sell XP boosts and the entire game is built around that it plays like a free-to-play MMO like a mobile game you have loop boxes you have special currencies and gems and helix credits everything takes ages to achieve and you can bypass that by spending money upgrading gear takes far too long because the amount of [ __ ] materials you need and you can buy that for real-life money everything is skewed its skewed in a way to make you be soft money to take your money sure you don't have to buy any of these packs or boosts but the game suffers for it regardless because of how it's designed and people buy these things they're used to it they'll buy into this system and Ubisoft will win I remember the nightmare pack first asin's Korea origin we kicked up a fuss nothing changed and we even got people fighting back at us not understanding the principle we were fighting against Odyssey suffers greatly based purely on how it's designed and the game doesn't come first it's designed around selling these extras if the cane was balanced you wouldn't need to buy them and so it has to be slightly unfair to the point where someone even me might cave and buy one and it's terrible practice there's a test that you can do a test to see how good an open-world is Luke Stephens made a video on this where essentially you play a game for an hour you capture footage and then you watch the footage back and count how many times you got distracted by the world and how long was in between those events how many times something of curiosity drew you win I'll link his video down below now I tried this myself the other day on stream where I was playing Odyssey I said I'm just gonna walk I'm just gonna see what catches my eye I'm gonna be genuinely open to this and on the way to my next quest see what draws me in and well I didn't I never felt compelled to visit the five hundredth bandit camp in the game or the 237th cave I'd seen or walkthrough another copy and pasted town just to explore because I knew nothing would be there I knew the locations would give me five objectives to loot chests for gear I would used to kill three captains and then to give me 400,000 XP because I was Dublin 99 and XP is arbitrary at this point only the town's would be filled with the lifeless NPCs that a copy pasted and procedurally generated walking around in a soulless way in this town that had no care put into building it and so I just ran in a straight line to my quest I jumped off of cliffs and climbed huge mountains and just plowed my way forwards there was no care for which duration to take because well it doesn't matter I have no full damage so I can just go forwards climb jump down a hundred feet and keep running and eventually reach my destination where I'd be told to collect things and then do it all over again there's no connection to this world it's not a world you know immersion here nothing to tether me to this world and the characters and the day-to-day life I can't interact with anything or enter buildings of interest beyond empty houses with no life I can't live in this world I can't do anything beyond going from A to B to C to Z and seeing the same town's the same NPCs the same caves and camps and animals and mountains over and over and over again in this huge vast empty shallow shell of an assassin's Creed world it gets to a point where it's [ __ ] mind-numbing you settle into this feeling constant ambiguity you can't tell two areas apart from each other everything starts losing identity at any sense of world-building because they wanted to make the largest world possible and so the quality slowly dwindles until there's nothing you start to see the numbers you start to see the code that holds this game together because it's so bare-bones it's so basic it's just this empty husk of tape together pieces filled with the same MPC's telling you to go and find things there's no heart here there's no life it's just [ __ ] dead let me give you an example I'm gonna show you exactly what I mean let's compare walking through Athens the biggest city of Greece in Odyssey with a few other games let's the other worlds compare [Music] he'll Ambani Horan [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] Miriam Helmick nasty they should get it Oh any civilian the other way clears away [Music] hey partner mister and what do you want just give me a drink quick alcohols the only thing that makes the pain of life go away [Music] thanks for your time do you see it yeah because if you die I I don't know what to say RPGs have sidequest side stories that tell a narrative about a location about a character Odyssey has tasks there are a few side stories let's be fair they try at times you can see writers have an outline of a small narrative they wanted to tell the main issue is in Odysseys mechanics and structure and pacing it gets in the way for example you have one quest line with the rebels on that island I forget exactly what it was about it was a while ago now but essentially it was a group of rebels and you side with them and there was a love triangle for some reason he could sort of [ __ ] everyone cuz like you can always do that in Odyssey and it's useless and there's never a relationship or emotional connection like other RPGs romance is normally serve a purpose but not in this it's just mindless sexual encounters to pacify thirteen year olds who play these games but you could see there was a storyline that was quite clearly a storyline the writing was fine I don't have a huge issue like it was a serviceable side story the issue comes from its structure and pacing and believe me when I say this is one of the very best side quests that Assassin's Creed Odyssey has to offer the story that were trying to tell gets bogged down by the go here kill this mentality of us on screen Odyssey the fact that every quest is go to a bandit camp but and supplies go to a fort kill captain's go to this location kill the official collect supplies burnt ends and in between all of this is the mediocre dialog with terrible animations and poor voice acting how am I supposed to care about any of this all of your side quest missions are just things that I can do in the open world they're never unique and the fact that this mentality for mission structure carries across to the main story is a [ __ ] joke why is every single mission just tasks I can do in my free time imagine if the main missions in Assassin's Creed 2 were just collecting feathers are doing beat up events never any unique missions crafted simply because it was a mission in order see you can go to forts and kill captains and burn supplies in the open world but in missions they make you do the same do you honestly think this is compelling level design this is compelling quest structure this is [ __ ] awful it's fundamentally boring and it does nothing to captivate the player most of all it's lazy lazy is how I would describe most divorcée perhaps that's what they were going for perhaps the point of this game is to be an MMO disguised as an RPG miss that because this game misses the mark on every single thing that makes a role-playing game a role-playing game it's superficial at best and downright terribly made but worst linking back to my points earlier about the world itself this game focuses so hard on making the biggest world with the most [ __ ] to do that it fails to make the world deep it fails to make the content substantial and so it fails to be an RPG now I could go in depth about every single aspect of this game I could sit here and ramble on about the button mashing combat I could sit and talk about the Icarus mechanic and how it serves no purpose anymore but to clutter the screen with icons for Monday and repetitive objectives but I have so many major topics to go over that it would just bog down the video to go in deep on any of these things like the absolute state of these Mass Effect Andromeda looking animations and the budget Skyrim s voice acting but I don't have time for it so I guess I'll move on from the fact that you can choose to romance the head of the cultists during the climactic final confrontation or the fact that procedurally generated NPCs can end up looking like white people wearing black face like the NPC's look like they're not part of the world itself and for some reason the fire doesn't look as nice as origins I mean what way is this how did they do this I guess we should move on and stop lingering on things like the unnecessarily far away camera angle and the unemotional animation let's talk about some major topics ok I'm really done with these minor things let's move on the cultists system probably the only thing in Assassin's Creed Odyssey that I can actually praise I'm not going to here though that's not the point of the video although I think the base system itself is interesting and could work if maybe scaled down and made in an actual Assassin's Creed game with Assassin's and Templars that's not enough it still suffers from the same issues that plagued Assassin's Creed Odyssey padding the system is disguised as a deep system which allows for you to track targets across a large world and take out these characters who were semi developed but they aren't they have text on a page sure but these aren't characters they're just people in masks dotted around the large map so many of them all over the place like 37 of them and they're all the same they have no personality there is no dialog no cutscenes no iconic Assassin's Creed confession just go to a location kill a person done that's it it's not good it's vapid and it serves purely to pad out the game and again it's another system in this game that gives the illusion of depth which the theme it runs throughout this cam all of it serves to give the illusion of something without having to actually achieve that promise and everyone eats it the [ __ ] up now I've got over most of the main game's issues the main things that I feel need to be addressed I'm sure there's more but these were the main things that I've seen being praised and so these are the main things that I wanted to deconstruct following this we have the DLC the big expansions for Odyssey the first of all being the legacy of the first blade this was the first DLC of the two and I've extensively gone over my issues with this DLC from the law to the animations and structure the downright mistakes to [ __ ] [ __ ] of shite they get the AC law wrong they get real world history wrong they kicked up a shitstorm from the LGBT community when they force the protagonist to be straight again displaying their lack of care for choice when the entire game was marketed on that premise it took a homophobic act for the mainstream community to notice that [ __ ] lack of care with the writing their lack of consistency with writing they hide some random bloke from EA to write legacy the first blade why why did they think this guy could write the DLC which was based around Darius they didn't even get the original writer of Odyssey no wonder there are huge inconsistencies and no wonder they pissed off so many people who chose to make the character gay because they had just had that thrown back in their face and it's hilarious to see Ubisoft true nature show they just don't care the Canon of Assassin's Creed was a total shambles after this DLC and so very many ways I'll link all of my videos on the issues down below of which there are three they're worth watching if you're interested but I'll quickly list some here we go Daria's for some reason dresses like an assassin and has a mandate like an assassin before the Brotherhood was created it's very clearly just iconography for the sake of it at the expense of narrative integrity the leap of faith was established in origins as something that was important to biock taught to him by his father and in something he was going to teach his son which he couldn't do to his death and so made it integral to the assassins in the dlc it cannon Isis to both Darius and Cassandra from performing the leap of faith hundred years before by lift and also they've been doing it without knowledge of the other discrediting the emotional weight the origins gave it and suggesting the loads of people just happen to perform this iconic move they make Oya from Oregon's the descendant of Cassandra which makes no sense given that I would have been with the same even if it been a hundred years she would have a high concentration of EC blood that dismal miles who only needed to be in the same room as a piece of eating for back-to-back yet it didn't for Iyer or her son they [ __ ] up when the pyramids were built like thousands of years I've kind of [ __ ] it up and so many more like I said videos on that a link below this just illustrates their lack of care not just with assassin's creed but in general they do not care about consistency the fate of Atlantis the second piece of DLC for Assassin's Creed Odyssey the law for this we we don't even need to bother with that just yet but holy [ __ ] just as a piece of paid content this is appalling absolutely [ __ ] appalling the first episode was 8 hours of nothing they tried to give us a political struggle yet fails on a huge level to make an intriguing or interesting and instead gave us 8 hours of nothing it's classic Odyssey you go from A to B to C and so on for hours killing people taking over forts you find items it's [ __ ] terrible the second episode was considerably shorter at just under half the length of the first mainly consisting of the same [ __ ] though you spend time getting armor going into tombs and pressing a button next with tablet and rinse and repeat all the while with this background story of the modern day character of Laila has Sun trying to learn how to use the staff Hermes through Cassandra and at the same time it's corrupting her but we'll get into the narrative a little bit later on then we have episode 3 you finally get to go to Atlantis we're yet again we have a badly ramped political struggle of the e-soo but this isn't real but it also is real they don't do a hugely great job at explaining why we are where we are and how much of it is real and how much is false and so this dlc has you level up a knowledge meter which oh boy we'll get into that when we delve into the lore but you need to level up this knowledge meter by doing four hours of mundane tasks like going into tombs opening chests it's the classic Odyssey grind fest for absolutely no reason and that's the whole DLC doesn't people paid for the fact that any of this content cost money is quite frankly disgusting they pushed out this skeleton of a DLC full of padding a nonsensical storytelling to justify their grindy gameplay in order to take money from you it's just I have no words it's scummy practice you can tell they don't care about telling a story by the fact they keep switching out their writers for DLC because they just want to push something out right I guess we should talk about the law the story and what the [ __ ] they've done with this [ __ ] mess of a DLC first things first like I explained the story is leyla in the modern day after the events of the main game she has the staff of Hermes and needs to learn how to use it the voice within the staff is an issue called ilithyia she guides Leila and uses Cassandra's memories in order to teach Leila which fine whatever that's a setup you have your usual messy animations with poor acting and then we do episode 1 episode 1 doesn't do a whole lot nothing egregious with the story here just sort of no we then move on to episode 2 so for some reason these staff is making Leila evil I guess it makes sense given that the Apple made a Marlene [ __ ] and the same for Abbas so it makes sense the people who don't have a su DNA get corrupted by pieces of Eden it's not exactly a well made and developed storyline we just sort of see Leila being angry a lot and there isn't a proper descent we also can't sympathize with Oh which is odd considering we're playing as her there's no legwork done for these characters or story and so it falls flat and moments like this which I'm sure meant to be impactful come off as [ __ ] hilarious [Laughter] [Laughter] then we move on to episode 3 and oh my [ __ ] god how did this even get made so I already talked about the horrible grindy gameplay but excuse me for a moment while I go full a/c youtuber and just go in on this terrible misrepresentation of the law so from the get-go we're told about the sixth sense a sense that the east you have now people have thought for some reason that this was eagle vision but it isn't I know in Assassin's we've won the Animus lady calls it a sixth sense but it's not the sixth sense it's complicated for sure but we've known about this issue Sixth Sense since about Assassin's Creed 2 it's actually the e suit ability to see time and read time and use that data that's how they knew Desmond would be where he was viewing ncos memories and what time they would be there so that they could leave messages it's how they contact humans it's hel Minerva built her AI device which saves the world it's explained properly in origins and then completely thrown away in Odyssey for some reason they simply refer to the sixth sense as knowledge now for some reason people have been sending me this clip from Assassin's Creed Brotherhood in order to justify this just let me play it for you to be safe now you can never know only try brassy you would see Sal days here knowledge has been locked away basically Juna says that knowledge on the sixth sense has been locked away from humans which tells us two things one it's not Eagle vision as humans have equal vision and it's solely of human trait and also that the sixth sense is any suit trait and it's been locked away from humans now believe it or not people have been using this clip to try and say look Juno once said that it's knowledge so Odyssey is right you you can't be serious right I'm being pranked Shirley do you take everything people say at direct face value do you think Juno was saying that knowledge has been locked away literally like in a box somewhere with a padlock there's just knowledge in there just the physical representation of knowledge obviously not it's metaphorical she's saying that knowledge of the sixth sense has been locked away from humans but I guess Quebec took it at face value - look we've got a bit deeper into this than I wanted to but I was trying to illustrate that this DLC was marketed as the Odyssey DLC for AC fans this will be for people who love the law but the law is all wrong it's a mess it doesn't respect us Athens creed it makes a mockery of it Juno shows up with AI eater and it's [ __ ] weird it makes no sense nothing here has consequence because it's merely a distorting memory of the issue so what was any of this surely this didn't happen because then why would Juna have been made a member of the Capitoline triad why would she be researching how to save the world if they didn't trust her from this early on it makes no sense this whole DLC is a strange obscure depiction of issue worlds why is everybody Greek why is there an underworld why do they say Morocco why does Ares get angry when you kill his dog surely this dog wasn't real in actual AC Lauren history none of this makes any sense Quebec seemed to be confusing myth with truth when it comes to Assassin's Creed the Easter one myths they want gods they didn't have magical powers they were just a really advanced race that lived on earth before humans they created humans they made technology like the pieces of Eden temples we find a left behind from their civilization it's intriguing because there's no magic because it's all grounded in science and reality when you start adding huge demon monsters and three-headed dogs and werewolves it just becomes a [ __ ] show and that's exactly what you've done this DLC both DLCs this entire game every piece of content included is the strangest patchwork mess of RPG mechanics of an MMO approach microtransactions like a mobile game Vegas asin's creed law which tries to connect to the previous games enough only to justify its existence and sell copies to Assassin's Creed fans it's repetitive gameplay plagues every single quest animation and dialogue serve only to make a joke of everything the total inconsistencies throw me every time only meant to take this seriously is this a serious story in the Assassin's Creed universe is this a joke in the Assassin's Creed universe is this making a mockery of Assassin's Creed law or is this trying to use it the best that they can but they don't know what they're doing it's all of these things and none of them I wanted one last time to pour what passion I had left for this franchise I once deemed my all-time favorite into a piece of writing and so I guess if this is the last time I'm going to talk about this in a video in a constructive manner outside of tweets here in their discussions on podcasts or drunk rats on live streams might as well make it worth it I loved Assassin's Creed I loved what it stood for its themes its complex narrative its interweaving of characters stories and settings I loved the music the power it held the fact I could feel so emotionally tied to these characters simply through music the mythos of the ones who came before their tires to the war between the assassins and the Templars the mysterious pieces of Eden and the temples from this old civilization woven with the creed of this ancient quarter of assassins that fought against tyranny and injustice the way you could just embody that role of somebody working from the shadows to serve the light the fact that the opposing order was never plainly the gray areas for both orders were incredibly interesting and how that link to the narrative of the first civil was even more so the world's history felt real and grounded we could explore these worlds and be immersed in their environment whether it be the harsh hostile world of the Third Crusade or the colorful tropics of the Caribbean maybe the central city of Rome and the conflict became with being in such a place or the deserts of ancient Egypt brought to life and turned into its own character I can't ever leave behind what Assassin's Creed did for me as much as I say and proclaim that I don't care it's not true of course I care about what I had about what it meant I care about what they do wrong I care about the lack of care displayed by the company that owns the brand that I loved of course I care but I think it's fair to say that although I care about what I've once had and that I care about how much this franchise meant to me I don't hope anymore but it'll get better that somehow it'll resurrect because that's ridiculous it's long dead I don't even necessarily want good games I think it's fair to say that I don't care what they do it's more that I miss what was I missed the old direction the old purpose I miss Assassin's Creed and this really is a message to all of you to Ubisoft and to myself although Assassin's created being flip flopping for years and never quite felt as ruined as it does now I never felt the way that I did after finishing the final Odyssey DLC because not only did Odyssey dismantle the brand it made a mockery of it it showed blatant disregard for a franchise that I loved it took the law and used it for contrived storytelling mechanics it used a conic lines of dialogue as cheap fanservice for no reason it sought a vacant story in a shallow world to make money in nothing more not only is Odyssey not a good game not only does it fail to be a strong RPG or a quality game in its right it's worse than that because well because it's Assassin's Creed Odyssey thanks for watching you you [Music] you [Music]

Channel: LazerzZ

Views: 1,171,300

Rating: 4.2752304 out of 5

Keywords: gamer, gaming, games, video essays, broke me, ac odyssey, assassin's creed odyssey, lazerzz, odyssey, critique, critic, long form, discussion, ac, assassin's creed, bad, assassins creed odyssey isn't good, bad rpg, rpg, witcher 3

Id: aCuXlPC6gsQ

Length: 47min 5sec (2825 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 26 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Treviso]

Some previous posts to this link have been removed, due to either not being properly spoiler tagged (in the title itself, not just with a tag), having a non-descriptive or click-bait title or a combination of those.

This is the first properly formatted post and as such will be the only one left up regarding this video.

And this last line here is a friendly reminder to keep the discussion directly related to the topic of the video itself.

[u/Valtari5]

Very competently made video, for sure. He put a lot of care into making this. Even though I belong to the crowd that doesn't want to kick Quebec in the balls, his criticism is valid and should definitely be forwarded to Ubisoft so that they try and mend the wounds inflicted upon the community by Odyssey. On a side note, Quebec will likely not touch AC for many years, so there's that, I guess.

[u/Hydr4noid]

Idc what people say, i love james hes absolutly spot on in this video

[u/Mr__Streaker69]

As a fan of Assassin's Creed for nearly 10 years, I can confidently say that this is the most divisive game in the entire series. Even fans of Odydssey have to admit that the game is dividing the fan base and that Ubisoft needs to do something to appease both old and new fans. I've seen comments on this subreddit saying that fans who dont like Odyssey have to stop complaining and move on. But I think the fact that lifelong fans like LazerzZ are not happy with Odyssey should highlight that Odyssey is not a good Assassin's Creed game. (Emphasis on Assassin's Creed )

Personally Odyssey is my least favourite and I struggle to even call it an Assassin's Creed game. Everything James says in his video is spot on and I hope that the next game will change the course of following games to be more in line with previous games. But if this new Viking game is the same or doubles down on Odyssey's mechanics then this might be the first AC game I haven't bought and that makes me sad.

[u/turetsi]

That was an amazing video. Couldn't have said it better.

[u/DXtime98]

A must see video.

[u/SaadetT]

That end speech resonated deep with me. I actually cried watching E3 when they revealed Odyssey because I could already tell that the Assassin’s Creed I knew so well and loved, my first video game love, you might even say.. was dead.

[u/SofusLee]

Definitely a must watch, voices all of the genuine fanbase's opinions

[u/ZedErre]

I've seen the whole thing, and even though I love Odyssey, I found the criticism fair.