Assassin's Creed: Odyssey - The Review (2018)

[Music] you want to know why the average pop song is three to four minutes long it's because when albums were first invented the old 75 s from back in like 1858 they clearly hold about three or four minutes of music 100 years later they moved to the vinyl 45s and they too could only hold about three to four minutes of music in this standard 7-inch press by the time cassettes and CDs and me disc players and the digital formats arrived the damage was already done three to four minutes per song is what an audience was accustomed to and while longer the music is certainly made if that music ever wants to get played on the radio then it better have a radio edit ready because it's gonna get cut down to size what has changed and changed considerably is album length your old vinyls could hold a max of 40 minutes but as the format was retired and we moved to cassettes and CDs which could hold 80 minutes of music we saw an explosion in the average length of albums this is a graph that shows average album length for just hip-hop albums and you can see the trend here and it was mirrored in other genres as artists felt the need to deliver more songs more minutes more bang for the consumers buck it was a sense of more is more eventually people just got tired of this obviously more songs on an album doesn't make it a better album and eventually artists became more confident in their work and then it can stand on its own two feet without being propped up by blows that should have been left in the recording studio the average length of hip hop albums declined from a high of 75 minutes in 1998 to a low of 56 minutes in 2014 and here's when things get really interesting in 2015 album lengths rose sharply across almost all genres you want to know why streaming hit the mainstream Spotify and Pandora became the go-to way of listening to music and the way their algorithms sword's suggests and calculates revenue or favors longer albums over shorter ones the more time someone stays on your album the less likely they are to click on to another album so albums got longer on top of this billboard which is the organization that calculates and reports on music sales and determines which are the best-selling albums of the month or year they change their calculation for the first time in 23 years and they decided that from that point on 1,500 streamed songs now equates to one album sold artists were now more incentivized than ever to go for lengthy albums since streaming had become central to the way that success would be measured this led to some really interesting decisions being made about what is and what is not included in an album like when Drake released views in 2016 and included hotline bling as its final track a song that had come out a full year before now did he do that because he felt like hotline bling belonged on that album as part of the statement he wanted to make or did he do it because adding a track to his album especially one as popular as hotline bling was gonna see the album do better on streaming platforms the truth is we'll never know but we do wonder now don't get me wrong here Drake is an artist just like everyone else who puts out music and artists always have artistic intent behind what they do I'm sure that Drake wanted to say the things he said in his one hour and 21 minute album but he surely had an incentive to bring more to that album than he otherwise might have because the economics of music evolved at that time of that album's release and he was likely responding to that [Music] more so than even music the economics of video games continue to evolve at breakneck speed horse armor into online passes into day one dlc into season passes into micro transactions into loot boxes into battle passes it seems relentless and you can't help but feel that we're only at the beginning of all of this what are the more fascinating evolutions of the past few years is the idea of games as a service which is the idea that the game you buy is more of an ongoing long-lasting experience rather than just a finish it and you're done sort of deal like we've experienced over the past four decades of gaming regular content updates weekend events seasonal events new items added multiplayer major DLC drops all of these things are designed to keep you playing for longer periods of time because woven into all of this is a business model that's designed to keep you spending like music in the streaming era the more you're playing the more the publisher is getting paid so it's in the interest of gaming publishers to make their games last longer even when the game itself doesn't need to be that long [Music] as I look back on Assassin's Creed Odyssey the 11th main game in the series the core idea or memory or sensation that I associate with it is pilote I love long games and they are among my favorites I'm pretty sure I skipped the whole young fiction genre in my teens because I played Baldur's Gate instead I remember every damn stone in morrowind because I spent so much time there GTA 3 and vice city didn't leave my ps2 for months on end every Final Fantasy game from 7 onwards Mass Effect was my defining game of the Xbox 360 generation and The Witcher 3 is among my favorite games of all time including the astonishing DLC and as I look back over all of those incredible games I don't think for a moment about the bloat or the grind I think only about their greatness but Odyssey just feels long in a way that I have never experienced before and that's because it's opening act is strong and it's closing act is phenomenal but the solid 30 hours in the middle of that really drags and it's this part that I remember more than any other because it was painful for me to push through many will love this section because it's just a steady grind of side content that provides a gameplay loop that they enjoy while others like myself will lament the fact that their progress through the excellent main campaign is constantly stalled as I'm forced to do dull and uninteresting side content and much like drake's decision to include hotline bling in views we do wonder about why this bloat exists because of the economic equation in play I'm not saying that this game is long and grindy so as to sell you microtransactions but I'm also not ruling out that possibility because the inclusion of the 50% xp booster in the store forces us to ask that question we are being obtuse if we do not face into that question and leave some room for the possibility it's absolutely not required to purchase an XP boost in Odyssey especially if you enjoy the site content in this game but if you're like me and you just want to enjoy odyssey's main quest lines then the inclusion of this optional XP booster will Nora way at you as you tribe through a 20th Bandcamp cleared wondering if all of this is designed to get you spending instead of playing I had not planned to do a full Assassin's Creed Odyssey review before I played it because the truth is I hated origins and I wasn't interested in just [ __ ] all over the next one in the series I don't like doing reviews like that but having spent 60 hours with the title now and completing everything you can do except for some exploration and some side quests this is such an important title to talk about the evolution of its narrative design shows such promise its combat is so improved over origins but it has so much further to go it's game systems are so ambitious and brilliantly woven into other game systems and the broader game narrative there's so much good stuff here but all of it feels obscured by the bloat it's a natural evolution of the desire to make open worlds bigger without asking why they should be bigger and it's the product of a business model that demands more time and more money spent without asking have we gone too far I enjoyed Assassin's Creed Odyssey but I am fearful of the potential impact that it may have on the future landscape of triple-a single-player games and the way they are designed and monetized and today I want to talk about that and more ladies and gentlemen I present to you my review of Assassin's Creed Odyssey you [Applause] [Music] I want to begin by challenging something that Assassin's Creed Odyssey is getting universal praise for and that's the size of its world reviewers everywhere are applauding Odyssey for what is possibly the largest open-world we've ever seen in a single-player game it's huge but I think the size of this world does far more to hurt this game than help it open well design is not new we've been playing open-world games for decades now but it seems like in the last 10 years or so open-world design has become almost ubiquitous present appearing or found everywhere I didn't choose that word by accident obviously Ubisoft have more than any other publisher driven the trend towards open-world games such that the majority of their franchises are now open-world franchises each of them sharing some core design philosophies underpin them things like towers to unlock a view of an area tons of map icons to explore lots of on-screen UI pointing you where to go lots of side missions to push you out into that open world and a focus on systemic gameplay design rather than scripted storytelling you'll be worlds keep getting bigger just as all open worlds do from all publishers but I've never once heard a valid justification for why these worlds need to continue to get larger a movie isn't better when it's longer a novel is an inherently better when it has more pages a multiplayer map in a first-person shooter isn't better when it's bigger yet the philosophy of more seems to permeate open-world design with such alarming fervor that it almost feels exponential at this rate for what I can tell the assumption is that if we have more real estate in a game then we have more range in the visual palette one area can look like this and the next area can look completely different because we've got enough square miles to mix it up I think that's true if you do it right here's how Odyssey does it this is a temple in Assassin's Creed Odyssey here's another temple here's another one and another one and another one and another one and so on I've seen this temple about 20 or 30 times as I've been playing Assassin's Creed Odyssey the first time I saw it I was awestruck it looked amazing so much detail so huge I climbed all over it just to check it out but by the fifth time and as what was going on and I really only cared if it had a sink point at the top of it there are plenty of examples I can provide of this but you get the point ancient Greece in Assassin's Creed Odyssey is massive but because it has so many square miles to cover it's necessary for the developers to copy and paste vast amounts of art assets across different locations changing up some of the typography and layout to give the impression that we're exploring a new place where each place really ends up feeling almost identical to the last there are some exceptions to this stepping into Sparta for the first time I remember that because there's nowhere else in the game where you have this layout the ESO technology locations we visit us so striking because they're so different from the rest of the map and they're all individually handcrafted this game is capable of tremendous beauty but most of it looks the same because the development team were forced to populate square miles rather than carefully curate specific memorable spaces if you haven't done so I recommend watching Jim Sterling's video where he talks about his love of the Yakuza games and praises its open-world design because the fact that it goes for small memorable locations I subscribe to the same school of thought I remember every square inch of Hyrule Field in ocarina of time which was also an open-world game by the way and because I had to know that space I could form a connection with it the likes of which I never achieved in any part of Odyssey its moments of arresting beauty so easily forgotten as you see the same site again and again in various locations revealing the fact that the first moment you saw that thing it wasn't really that special after all beyond visual splendor the other objective of gigantic open worlds is that they give more space for activities if we have more real estate than we have more towns more bandit camps more forts more sink points more stuff to collect in this way square mileage equals content and in this regard Odyssey will delight those who enjoy the simple pleasure of turning a question mark into a check mark now I won't pass judgment on this sort of gameplay loop I mean I like the dumb inane grind of games like warframe or destiny so Who am I to say that clearing a map of near-identical activities is any less dumb it's not and I know a lot of people who love that and that's fine I actually totally get it it can be really nice if you've got nothing else going on just to slip into that but don't expect any variance within that model you'll soon memorize the layout of caves you'll soon see recurring patterns in fort design you'll soon see the same bandit camps out in the woods and you'll get endlessly frustrated whenever you see a marker out on the open water because it means you're gonna have to do the underwater thing that sucks in pretty much every game finally there's one other gameplay system that I feel really cheapens the impact of this open world and that's ironically enough the new parkour system that they introduced in Assassin's Creed origins see before that in the old Assassin's Creed games you had to look for places to put your hands if you wanted to climb something things like railings or ledges or whatever you need it to have a thing you could climb before you could actually climb it in this way the parkour system meant that some parts of the world could be built such that they couldn't be climbed on or climbed over you had to follow a path set down by the level designers giving them control over the way you experienced an area but in origins that system was changed such that you could climb over almost anything like look at this what the hell am i holding on to here it's ridiculous and it means that when I get to a town instead of having to remember that this Street connects with that Street which leads to this walkway past that temple on the right etcetera I know I just push forward to walk over the top of everything in origins and Odyssey I travel as the crow flies and I don't really care what I'm flying over while I do that with the Citadel of Mass Effect have been as memorable if I could just ignore its walkways and climb over everything with the journey to high Hrothgar have been as memorable if I could just climb up a sheer cliff and then walk in the back door obviously the parkour system in Assassin's Creed is a core part of the gameplay loop and I would never propose abandoning but I really believe that it's just gone too far now it provides too much freedom such that the impact of world design is significantly lessened because I never really have to look at what I'm climbing over I just push forward to win now my point here with this section is to say that I feel that an open-world game designed in the Ubisoft way particularly here in Odyssey really suffers from diminishing in terms of its impact on the player it's striking at first but after about our fifteen or sixteen you've seen it all even if you've only uncovered a small portion of the map and my mind goes towards the sheer amount of hours required to produce this content and how much better those hours could have been spent had they been used to craft more Sparta's more places that are unique and that we remember after the first time we visit them there's over a thousand people working on Assassin's Creed games at any point in time and I can't help but feel that their efforts are misdirected when they design an open-world under this current philosophy I think we'd say let's develop a crunch and a more meaningful more memorable open-world if these developers were directed to create something smaller and more intimate but the most damaging consequence of this design philosophy is the way that it demands side quests to justify the existence of this space and force players out into this world to make use of it Odyssey side quests are the core of the blows that spoils this otherwise excellent experience so let's take a look at them now you who is this aphasia this is the misty us is going to reignite our spark my love oh we've been through this I can't satisfy you anymore you're going to kill me with your last nonsense I'm going to make you an elixir that will give you the vigor of a man a fraction of your AIDS [Music] your husband is tired allow me to satisfy your hunger I've never been with a mercenary before very well let's see what you're made of side-quests design is this elusive holy grail in video games it's almost impossible to get perfect just because one game does it in one way and gets it sort of right doesn't mean that another game can do it in a similar way and not get it completely wrong there's an x-factor to sidequest design that you can't quite put your finger on but you know it when you see it I think there's two underlying design principles that drive sidequest design gameplay incentives and narrative hooks the gameplay in centers part is really clear complete X squares to get X item to gain X amount of experience to unlock X ability points so on so forth the player is offered a path to power through these quests and they can choose to either take it or not if the incentive is good enough the player will do it if it isn't they'll likely skip it unless they have completionists this is a style of side quests most commonly used in MMOs like World of Warcraft the narrative hook part is much harder to land if you're going to ask a player to go out there and kill ten goats you should at least give them some sort of reason why they're killing ten goats it doesn't really matter most of the time but it's just polite window dressing so the player is at least somewhat immersed in the world and they can feel like the developer has put in at least a modicum of effort to offset the boring [ __ ] they're about to make you do different games approach the narrative hook differently The Witcher 3 manages to pull off its side quests design because it's moment-to-moment writing is really strong listen to this old woman just talk about a frypan the protection see he just asked Saul polite Ron Gotti birchbark by chance toilet barriers or even a few cones no says I and you must be right dr. pester folk at night with such foolery just staring at me pan like a magpie or a copper lend it to me grin I'll give it back come on what's doing throwing in the dark we've got a soft art so I gave it to him now you're literally doing a quest here about a fry pan in her house but the writing is so smart and the voice actors performance is so on point that you're invested in that fry pan you care what's going on here because this NPC made you care about it and that's art mass effect uses its broader world to create its narrative hooks when you're doing a side quest for Rex to help cure the genophage which is a virus that renders his species sterile you are so invested in that side quest because the story arc is so awesome and so central to the Mass Effect universe that you're just soaking out every detail as you're going through it sadly Odyssey side quests don't have the moment-to-moment writing quality necessary to capture or hold your attention nor do they have the deep connection to the world building that might motivate the player to dive in and learn more a solid 90% of Odyssey side quests of this sounds like you need to find the docks for Poseidon then I insist you retrieve the acts for me do you know where the axe is Bandys took it there's a cave east of town if you follow the path along the shoreline I'm sure you'll find them I'll go take a look because the motivation provided in these exchanges is so meaningless Odyssey side quests mostly feel like MMO side quest just vehicles to push you out into the open world to see it and to collect the necessary experience to progress to the next interesting story mission they very much fall on the gameplay incentive end of the side quest design spectrum there are absolutely some exceptions to this there's a solid 10% of quests which are brilli to be honest like this awesome grandma who just wants 60 times but for everyone enjoyable sidequest there's literally nine others that are so forgettable but I struggle to remember them even now a day after finishing the game all of this would not be so problematic if you were not forced to suffer through these side quests as part of the games core campaign to be clear ancient Greece is a heavily level gated world with each territory having a required level before you are able to operate effectively in that space going up against an opponent one level higher than you is sort of okay two levels is pretty tough and three levels is basically impossible you may as well not bother at that point so the entire time the game is very tightly managing where you are and what you're doing you'll move through the campaign fairly briskly until level 25 we just sort of the first 15 to 20 hours of the game and I recall as I was playing this that I was thinking to myself thank God they changed the level gaining [ __ ] from origins in origins you had to grind side quests for hours on end to progress the next campaign quest and it was the number one reason that I hated origins it drove me insane that I was forced to do these quests because so little effort had been put into them where games like The Witcher it didn't bother me because the narrative hook part of that equation was working so well and some of the absolute best content in The Witcher 3 were these incredibly well written side quests but in Odyssey at level 25 you hit a hard hard wall I had not done many side quests up to this point and when I completed this campaign quest at level 25 I saw I needed to be level 32 to continue the main quest each level in Odyssey takes about an hour's worth of play time to hit so I was looking at a solid 7 hours of this so you want me to give you something like me you understand perfectly then it's all yours now the degree to which you're going to enjoy Odyssey is going to depend almost entirely on your attitude towards this forced level grind and I think that's such a shame because without it this game would absolutely be spectacular and it would have been a title that I could recommend unreservedly to anyone as I would something like spider-man or God of War just one of those games that has something for everyone on some level but with the grind assassin's creed becomes yeah it's good but watch out or man you're gonna hate this if and it's such a damn shame because the narrative that's woven into the core campaign quest is just brilliant when it's firing on all cylinders don't believe me let me show you [Music] ancient Greece is the birthplace of Western civilization there were great civilizations before the Greeks but the stuff they did stuck around and shaped our world today the earliest Western text we have is Homer's Iliad Herodotus was celebrated as the first ever historian Hippocrates gave us the medical code that doctors still use this day Pericles and his contemporaries gave us democracy and the rule of law Socrates and his contemporaries gave us philosophy Pythagoras and his contemporaries made huge advancements in mathematics Aristophanes Sophocles Aeschylus dozens of others gave us Greek drama and comedy Phidias inspired the Greek sculpting style that has remained timeless ever since the impact of the Greeks on our society today cannot be overstated but in addition to this the Greek pantheon and the story of its gods is among the most beloved mythical stories mighty Zeus with his lightning bolt Artemis the hunter Aphrodite goddess of love Poseidon the vengeful god of the sea not to mention the beasts and monsters that stork those ancient stories like the Cyclops or the Medusa or the Sphinx or the Minotaur it was an age of imagination as much as it was an age of society and reason and the achievement of Assassin's Creed Odysseys narrative is that it manages to hit both of those beats while also telling a gripping tale of family Redemption while also leaning deep into the law of the assassin creed series you play as either Alexios or cassandra two siblings separated at a young age when the Oracle decrees that one of them must die cast off a mountaintop in Sparta which believe it or not was actually a very common occurrence in ancient Sparta what begins as a quest to track down your missing sibling and mother and father soon balloons into a broader Odyssey thrusting you into the middle of the war between Athens and Sparta the emergence of an all-powerful cult the desire to retake your place in Spartan society and a mythical quest to seal the gates of Atlantis by far and away the biggest gameplay change between Odyssey and origins is that there's now a dialogue system allowing you to choose your responses to questions and make decisions and these decisions can have huge consequences on the way if it's play out from minor side quests to major milestones in the main story it's this change more than any other that moves Assassin's Creed from an open-world action game with RPG elements like we saw in origins to a fully fledged RPG here in Odyssey with this system in place we're able to define the identity of our main character in a way that we haven't before if we want to be the good guy we can do that we can extend compassionate words of advice and support declined payments for jobs well done show mercy to those we've defeated more than any other protagonists in assassin creed history this hero is our hero and we can shape both his broader story and his personality it works and I feel that after spending 60 hours with my Misti oz I've grown quite attached to him in a way that really resonated with me at the game's climactic finish I will say that the motivations of this character are hard to connect with though and that's because the game forces you to change allegiances so often see you're in the middle of the Peloponnesian War which is the great conflict between Athens and Sparta of the 4th century BC and each territory on the map is actually controlled by either Sparta or Athens by completing objectives in each region like clearing forts or looting nation chests and burning war supplies you then expose the regional leader who you can then assassinate which will trigger a conquest battle between Athens and Sparta you choose a side in each of those battles and after the battle is decided the forts in the region are pre-populated our new leader is installed and you can begin the whole cycle again should you choose this can create really awkward circumstances where you're fighting to kill lots of Athenians who have control of a region and then when it comes time to complete the conquest battle you can fight for the Athenians which sounds really dumb but you can do that or you can be on a main quest where you're desperately trying to demonstrate your loyalty to Sparta by completing a whole bunch of side quests but you're also simultaneously murdering hundreds of Spartans and finding four Athenians in conquest battles when I first saw this regional conquest system I had imagined that just as I could choose my responses in dialogue with other characters I could choose who wins the Peloponnesian War by slowly but surely conquering each region of the map in the name of my chosen side but I soon learned that this system only exists to trigger conquest battles which give me a chance at pick lewd and after that I was really disinterestedly is it little incentive but it really confuses a lot of the central motivations that your character professors - at various points throughout euro - see but while the broader narrative is confused and contradictory the more focused Taylor family Redemption is really gripping your sibling has fallen under the sway of the cult of Cosmos a precursor to the Templars that would later emerge in history and you need to either kill your sibling or save them your choices along the way shape one of nine potential outcomes to the story and I was really really invested in all of this while it was going down it's slow to move because of how much side content is required but when you're in it you're absolutely in it throughout your journey you'll do that very assassin's creed thing where you bump into the leading figures of the error like Pericles of Athens or Hippocrates the healer or Herodotus the historian and a lot of these become very central figures in your story it's sort of a double-edged sword with these characters in their stories because some of the quests are really well-written and really leveraged the significance of those characters like if you're doing a quest for the philosopher Socrates you're gonna be talking about the nature of man and good versus evil and whether we should kill one man if it's gonna save a hundred others and all that sort of thing but on the other hand the quest with these characters very often involve a lot of back and forward ISM as you meddle in Athenian politics and tarry with personalities see there's really four acts to the Odyssey experience there's the first 15 hours where everything's getting set up and it feels great then there's the next 15 hours when you're thrown deep into the Athens verse Sparta war and there's the next 15 hours when you're trying to reclaim your home inspired while also wrapping up your family story and then there's the last 15 hours where you're trying to seal Atlantis that second and third act is where you'll cross paths with these historical figures the most and it's also the part of the game where the narrative drags the most as cool it is to hear Socrates ask rhetorical questions at first it definitely wears thin after the 50th question he throws at you and you'll start to see these conversations and the quest they throw your way there's more of a pacing mechanism to slow down your main quest progression but it's something really valuable or meaningful in the broader context of the game but I really want to stress just how absolutely fantastic the last 15 hours of this game is both narrative Lee and at this point you've finished the family drama and you have two objectives left kill all the remaining cultists and seal the gates to Atlantis now the culture system is absolutely genius it fits so perfectly with assassin Creed's law this nefarious cult of masked individuals has embedded itself in the upper echelons of the ancient Greek world and as you play you have to uncover their identities and assassinate them finding out who they are is baked deep into every game system some clues are hidden inside a fort some of them are on regional leaders meaning you have to weaken a territory to expose them some of them are in naval battles or conquest battles some of them are just hidden out in the wild there's almost no part of this game that doesn't at some point touch the culture system and its impact is that it draws you out into the open world to find these clues in a way that's so much more engaging than a games dull side-quests obviously this cult is analogous to the Templar order we're used to but this is by far the best expression of that law in a gameplay sense and I'm sure we'll see this system return in future Assassin's Creed games it's just brilliant and as for the Atlantis staff man it is just the best Pythagoras asks you to seal it because the power it holds is too great he'll ask you to find the relics that can seal it each of them hidden in a high-level area you'll have to complete a quest chain to unlock the relic which you'll find is protected by an ancient mythical beast the Cyclops the Minotaur the Sphinx and the Medusa the final quest arc is just the perfect way to finish a game that spends a disproportionate amount of time on petty politics and personalities it's the sweeping Homeric epic that the game feels starved for up to that point and I think it's a shame that the game saves it's best stuff for last because I am certain that a majority the playerbase won't push through the grind to see it one of the things I hear most when people talk about the new Assassin's Creed game is not my Assassin's Creed it's this idea that I don't care how good the game is it's not really an assassin's Creed game it's not as similar to how people talk about the prey game from Arkane Studios funnily enough since Bethesda bought the IP and canceled the sequel being made by human head Studios and then put the name prey on an immersive sim being developed by arcane a lot of people hate prey purely for this reason and they feel like if you're going to change a game so significantly it shouldn't use a brand label or an IP to help smooth the transition there was certainly a lot of truth to these complaints with origins narrative Lee the game strayed really really far away from the whole Templars versus Assin theme coming back to it only toward the end in a cutscene that felt very shoehorned in that coupled with the changes to parkour combat and the adding of the level gating and a bunch of other stuff yet this was not an assassin's Creed game and I think anyone complaining about that certainly has a point it's different here in Odyssey I've already talked about the narrative lengths and the way the culture system provides a very authentic assassins vs. Templars tale on the one hit kill assassination side the developers have solved this in a fairly ingenious way as part of a broader effort to develop the RPG framework for the game's combat here's how it works there are three different core damage stats that will determine your play style in Odyssey there's the warrior damage stat which basically buffs you're in combat damage so when you swing a weapon in combat it hits harder it's simple the hunter damage increases your efficiency with a bow now this is sort of an auxilary or complimentary spec rather than a core spec since it's not quite efficient enough to make it your main method of playing particularly on a controller where aim is trickier than with a keyboard and mouse still you can put out a lot of damage with the spec if you use it as part of being a silent distant assassin almost like a sniper and it works quite well in those circumstances the final stat is the assassin damage stat which as you'd expect increases as your assassination damage so if you build towards this and stack it as high as you can you can and will one-hit ko almost any target in the game with the exception of elite enemies and bosses you're still going to fight these guys but they will be severely weakened from your initial assassination strike which gives you a big starting advantage supporting each of these stats is an ability realigned with that type of damage the hunter tree will give you the ability to control the arrows as they fly or hit more targets at once the warrior tree will give you the now cliche spartan kick which feels awesome by the way as well as a number of other really ferocious overpowering abilities the assassin tree will aid your stealth and allow you to move faster apply poison to your weapons and other upgrades that fit with the whole assassin stick best of all you can actually respect at any time for free so you're not locked to one play style threat playthrough you can mix it up whenever you please the gear system further augments is there are four lute qualities normal rare epic and legendary and the legendary stuff is very often collectible armor sets that provide bonuses when you wear the whole set things like 15 percent bonus poison damage that sort of thing there's also an engraving system for each slot allowing you to further customize it to your taste and you can actually upgrade each item as you go through your journey so if you become particularly attached to one you know weapon or armor set you can bring it with you so long as you have the materials to keep it upgraded which isn't cheap but it's also very doable they definitely got the economic balancing right on this one I have to say that the RPG and loot system here is really straightforward and really simple but it's very well put together it's the perfect casual RPG system in that it's not particularly deep but it does manifestly change the way you play and the decisions you make in moment-to-moment combat it's really really sound and I honestly got sucked into the hunt for specific armor pieces or upgrade materials because the system really did win me over in the end it's a big achievement especially when compared with the pointlessness of origins fake RPG systems now coming back to the earlier point of not my Assassin's Creed what you can already see from this system is that if you want to be an assassin you can do that now it's just a trade off since you'll be doing less damage in combat and you'll be less effective at range in this way being an assassin isn't the default option it's a choice and it's yours to make depending on how you want to play the game personally I love this a lot of people didn't like the old Assassin's Creed combat just as many people didn't enjoy the focus on still and assassination this now gives you the choice to play entirely as you see fit all of these RPG choices go into creating a combat experience that I have really mixed feelings about see in the past Assassin's Creed games combat was highly reactive you'd be out there with fire guys standing around you all sort of waiting to take turns attacking you and then one guy would and you'd have to parry and then one shot him and then the next guy would have a crack and so on it was this sort of choreographed dance with very specific dance moves all of it about timing in origins this was changed to be very proactive combat now had a light attack and heavy attack model and your job was to basically overwhelm your opponent as quickly as possible the problem was it was just so one-dimensional as the entire thing was just about dodging shield breaking and waiting for your focus ability to charge there was really only one way to play origins and it got old really fast odyssey's combat does provide a fair amount of range propped up by these abilities you can select in your ability tree so for me since I chose the assassination build my combat rhythm was typically open with a hero strike which is a move that deals bonus damage based on my assassination stat and then I'd apply poisons to my weapons and then I typically de shield an enemy if they had one and then I just go ham with light attacks until my cooldowns were up again so what I'll say about combat in Odyssey is that it feels like it's more about style than substance and that it's good from far but far from good spend enough time with it and you'll begin to see all of the little flaws that make it very easily cheesed for example controller layout is actually really problematic there are two ability wheels that each hold four abilities one of them is for your ranged weapon and the other one is for your melee weapon you can switch to a secondary wheel for each weapon but to do that you need to hold l1 and then press down on the d-pad now this sounds fine but it's actually really shitty to do in the heat of combat and it means that you're going to just not bother using a lot of those secondary abilities because it just becomes too annoying this is actually really important given how central your ability cooldowns are to the Corps combat rhythm and a simple change of allowing us to bind our melee abilities to the range wheel would have vastly improved the combat but more important than this though is the disruptive impact of invulnerability frames or iframes during combat your abilities each have a sent animation with them that make you totally invulnerable while you're doing them so you very soon begin to use this to your advantage by using these abilities the second enemies are about to strike it really does break combat to be honest and particularly with boss fights you'll find them extremely easy most the time because of how often this mechanic can be exploited and the thing is the game's designers kind of know this so they sort of build in these cheesy damage mechanics to counter your continued environment like fire holy [ __ ] fire in this game is absolutely [ __ ] ridiculous I can tank like ten guys at a time but if a single one of them has a fire weapon I will run away because the second I'm on fire are completely melt it's so stupid so imbalanced bosses are generally these giant meat sacks that don't do very much until they have this one ability where they can just one shot you and most of the difficulty you'll have during these boss encounters isn't staying alive 90% of the time it's avoiding that one ability they use 5% of the time that will just instantly destroy you it's a very casual combat system but where the casual design was really well executed in the case of the RPG design the casual combat framework provides just as many misses as hits it's fun and I feel like I'm being really nitpicky here given that overall it works well enough it's just that with a game 60 hours long you really start to see all of this stuff clear as day had the game been a tighter experience overall I probably wouldn't have cared about these little imperfections but I feel like I've already made this point well enough the game is very very long and I think now it's time we talked about why I think that is and we'll explore why I think Odyssey is the most heavily monetized single-player game I've ever played did you survive that champions dive you need to retrieve my trial talking from a test in the darkest depths of the water below [Music] you just give me the my luck I stalk him some might say you've paid to skip others might call you an honor less coward but know this today you've invested in not dying an excellent choice Sam Fiona so I'm really lucky because over the course of my time on YouTube I've attracted the attention of a number of people in games development I talk about games in a certain way that resonates with a lot of game devs who obviously hardcore players and who are deeply invested in the future of the industry so they reach out to me and we form friendships now I have a pretty strong network across a lot of major developers and publishers and one of the things I hear from most of them is the influence of the money men or money women money people and the way that games are designed today they tell me of a tension that exists between game designers who just want to make a really good game and the money people who want to take those ideas and find ways to monetize them these money people they have a lot of power they cannot just be shooed away they must be obeyed if you're a passionate developer you must sacrifice a portion of your creative vision at the altar of their KPIs and that's not me talking out my ass about articles I've read on Kotaku that's me talking with these developers myself about their stories it's just a fact of life when you work for a major publisher including Ubisoft I really believe that the monetization of single player experience is the next war on which the monetization battle will be fought we've sort of hit an equilibrium with multiplayer games we understand that if you're going to maintain servers and apply constant balance changes or a1 developing your content then you need a revenue stream to do that we're ok with the sale of cosmetics and other non core gameplay features within that but we understand that paying for power is across the line and we start to push back then publishers are absolutely going to keep trying to push what they can in this space but I feel like they know we've drawn a clear line in the sand for now on the single-player side I think we've all been operating under the assumption that single player games wouldn't be subject to the same aggressive monetization that multiplayer games see but a few games have really challenged this Deus Ex mankind divided sold its upgrade kits shadow of war famously imploded last year under the weight of the loot controversy and eventually went on to remove loot boxes completely last month it was revealed that Devil May Cry 5 will sell red orbs for real money cash sparking instant outrage from its loyal community the Assassin's Creed games have long had microtransactions in fact they were among the first to offer them in full price single-player games an assassin's creed 3 players could purchase a short cut for the games multiplayer mode allowing you to skip straight to level 50 in Assassin's Creed 4 they offered some of the first microtransactions available to improve the single-player experience offering packs that unlock map markers and provide materials such as wood or metal or stuff like that unity and syndicate both allows you to purchase helix credits which could lessen the grind someone but these games really only took you about 15 or so hours to beat so purchasing them sand a little bit silly in origins they further upped the ante these time saver packs they saw would sell ability points making your character inherently more powerful as well as currencies Odyssey goes the whole hog by selling cosmetics for your ship and horse a variety of weapons full armor sets map unlocks currency packs but most importantly they now sell a 50% XP booster which applies permanently to your account as I booted up the Odyssey shop for the first time I was struck by how closely it resembled a mobile game with its combination of items and currencies and boosters but it wasn't until I hit the punishing grind at level 25 that I recalled the 50% xp booster that I saw earlier thought to myself hmmm I wonder there's two ways you can look at the grab within Assassin's Creed Odyssey you can look at it as a result of those passionate game designers who so wanted to provide an overwhelming amount of content to the player and wanted them to experience it so they chewed XP gains with that objective in mind or you can look at it another way as a result of the money people coming in and putting the screws to the developers asking them to carefully tune the XP curve at certain points so as to frustrate and exhaust players so that they might relent and spend I did not purchase XP boosters but multiple people have numerous reputable sources have concluded that the game is better when they are applied because it moves you through the grind so that you can get to the good stuff I wish that I had purchased those boosters because I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever none that I would have enjoyed this game more had they been applied to my account the mid-game is so long and so dull and the start and the end of the game are just fantastic and had I been allowed to just experience that I would have absolutely adored this game where now my feelings on it are very mixed I know how this section of the review will be met because it's always the same whenever you talk about microtransactions people will likely get angry and complain about greedy publishers or they'll defend these sorts of practices because they believe it's optional and they'll talk about player choice they'll say just play the game and it's fine or you're meant to do side quests stop complaining there's even a strong counter insurgency I'm seeing where people who raise issues about microtransactions are now being labeled sensationalists or chronic complainers but here's my take everyone was fine with loot boxes in their games until suddenly they weren't the trend towards monetizing multiplayer games happened way faster than with single-player games and I think 2017 and Star Wars Battlefront 2 represented a crash of sorts where things had gone too far after building up for too long overwatch as loot boxes are perfectly fine from one perspective but on the other hand they softened the ground for what EA would later attempt to do with Star Wars I think the parallels here with Odyssey are very important to draw I do not think that Odyssey is ruined by its microtransactions far from it in fact I think this is an excellent game in most regards I just think that it's too long and that its length ends up hurting it more than helping it but while I don't think that Odyssey is ruined by its microtransactions I do think they soften the ground for more ambitious single-player monetization in the future and then in the years to come when the crash finally happens as it did with Star Wars Battlefront 2 will look to Odyssey as we do to overwatch as a warning sign overlooked and a herald of things to come but the good news is that that's a problem for tomorrow we're oughta see is here now for us to enjoy and if you're looking for a massive open world a gripping story hundreds of things to do and collect a robust RPG system and flashy combat then there's very little chance that Odyssey will disappoint its ubisoft's most ambitious entry into the Assassin's Creed franchise and if you can push through some of its more drawn-out sections it's absolutely worth the price tag and then some [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Skill Up

Views: 809,959

Keywords: skill up, skill, up, gameplay, games, guide, assassin's creed, assassin's creed odyssey review, assassins creed odyssey, new assassin's creed, trailer, combat, vs origins, review, greece, characters, best weapons, best armour, ps4, pc, xbox one, xbox one x, ps4 pro, 4k, hdr, graphics, graphics comparison, should I buy it, before you buy, ubisoft, 2018, what's new, odyssey vs origins, quest, xp, grind, naval, cultist, mercenary, ending, cutscenes, movie, release date, open world, microtransactions

Id: dOrKtZsoy30

Length: 47min 46sec (2866 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 12 2018