Assassins Creed Odyssey - The Ultimate Critique - Luke Stephens

this is the full critique of Assassin's Creed Odyssey and all of its DLC this was a project that took over a year to finish and the excessive length of this video I think is evidence to that effect now originally this was uploaded as three separate videos months and months apart but now that all three parts are done have congealed them into one giant mass which is this monstrosity to which you're about to bear witness I've done this so that you can consume the whole critique in the way that was originally intended I've still included timestamps below and I encourage you to jump around to the discussions that interest you most or watch this video in parts or watch the whole video from start to finish whatever suits your fancy I won't judge to give you a generalized idea of what you're dealing with this video is broadly broken into three parts a discussion on the narrative the gameplay and then a discussion on the DLC and there are sub discussions throughout needless to say I get really detailed in here so if you're looking for something very light then this isn't the video for you but then again you probably didn't click on this video unless you had some idea of what in almost three-hour long critique on a single game would bring and lastly I repeated in each of the three parts but spoiler warning everything in the game and its DLC will be spoiled so consider yourself warned but with that thank you all for your support throughout this endeavor and especially to all of you patrons that make these crazy projects possible but with all that I love you all enjoyed the video Assassin's Creed Odyssey launched on October 5th of 2018 to critical acclaim widely regarded as one of the best modern generation Assassin's Creed games it sought to do a lot of things all at once it was building on the foundation that origins had laid but it is clear that this game is the one that Ubisoft was thinking about when they were designing origins in the first place this is their magnum opus now because this game is so important for Assassin's Creed as a franchise on the whole I decided that I was going to cover it in much more detail than I typically cover games of this sort now the reason that I've decided to discuss the narrative first is because everything else in Odyssey is designed around the narrative this isn't always the case in video games but in this particular instance the gameplay was framed around how the narrative is structured and not the other way around our goal is not to break down the main story and offer a commentary but rather to look through the game and the design choices that were made this is primarily because if you had already played the game it wouldn't do you any good and if you are still on the fence as to whether or not you should play the game that we just end up spoiling everything for you and so we're going to toe the line between the two however I should still issue a spoiler warning because I am going to be describing the opening hours of the game in a fair amount of detail setting up the stage for all of the characters and then I'm also going to be breaking down several side quests that are fairly pivotal now if you're still looking for broad recommendations as to whether or not you should play Odyssey what I will tell you is this Assassin's Creed Odyssey is in my opinion the best that the franchise has ever been now there's a lot of caveats attached to that statement however as broad strokes as a video game this is one of the most impressive games that ever has been released by Ubisoft and was one of the most impressive games that came out this year which is why it was nominated for game of the year against the likes of spider-man God of War and Red Dead Redemption - this game is remarkable and is not one that you to miss that isn't to say that it's perfect or that it has been without its fair share of controversy specifically within the Assassin's Creed fanbase but don't worry we're gonna talk about all of that in this video simply if you have not played Odyssey yet play it but with all that said allow me to explain how I played the game that way you can have a proper understanding of how I approach the game and where I am coming from when I make the criticisms I'm about to make my first playthrough was with Alexios however I did go back through several sections with Cassandra to gauge her plotline I also watched several selections from playthroughs where people were playing as Cassandra to see what she had to offer in addition to also reading through the wiki pages for this game to figure out how her story differs from Alexey OSes what I will say is in general the characters are very very similar often sharing exact lines with pronouns swapped here and there however there is a significant difference in terms of the emotions that are conveyed and the quality of the acting in my opinion having played through roughly 70 hours with Alexios and another 10 or 15 with Cassandra I already am regretting my choice to play as Alexios my personal recommendation is that you play as Cassandra especially because now Ubisoft has confirmed that Cassandra is the Canon character this isn't to say that Alexey OSes performance is poor it's just to say that compared to Cassandra her writing and the way that she delivers her overall performance is much more relatable unsympathetic now that could simply be because I'm a man watching a girl go through very difficult challenging circumstances or it could be more broadly that she simply performed her role better I'm not completely sure all I know is that when these emotional moments hit that we will discuss in a few moments I felt much more sympathy for Cassandra compared to Alexios now as I said I'm going to be discussing the gameplay of Assassin's Creed Odyssey in the next video once again subscribe if you would like to see that when it comes out however I do think it's important to communicate that over the course of both playthroughs I bounce between multiple difficulty levels to try and gauge how the leveling system work at these different difficulties however it is my general philosophy that I should play through the game in the way that most people are going to be playing through or what money people would consider to be the normal difficulty settings because that tends to be more where the developer intended you to play the difficulty settings above and below the normal setting tend to be for people who are looking for an extra challenge or who are just looking to get through the narrative they tend to be the people on the outside looking in as opposed to the people making up the majority of the playerbase and so for simplicity's sake we're just going to say that I played through the majority of the game on normal as I said a moment ago I spent about 75 hours roughly playing through as Alexios and I spent another roughly 13 to 14 hours playing as cassandra however by the time that I'm done making this video there will probably be another five hours added to each of those as I go back to capture additional footage I also went all the way through to the very end of the game with Alexios going through each of the three phases of the ending which I'll explain later but with all of that said let's get into it Assassin's Creed Odyssey as a game stemmed from one decision that Ubisoft made fairly early on and that was to transition and make this series land as close to the witcher 3 as possible assembly that is so often drawn that I will not be mentioning it further for the rest of this video this isn't because I think it's a poor simile in fact there's interviews that the game's director has given where he said outright this is what they were trying to do but rather I want to criticize and look at this game as a standalone product and not as a direct competitor to one of the best games ever made now for some this shift in focus was a bad decision however I would argue that it isn't Assassin's Creed has had great worlds and World Design in general going all the way back to Assassin's Creed 2 and with each consecutive release it has seemed as though UV soft is aiming to broaden their horizons and make their games more open-world exploration based titles as opposed to stealth linear title and I think that that's not even a controversial thing to say because when you compare it to any of the games that have released in the last five years that's the general trend starting with Assassin's Creed 3 they slowly started expanding the world doubling down on hunting mechanics crafting and the like and then once they expanded into unity they tried to go back to stealth mechanics that game had some issues though and then syndicate came out with the open-world focusing once again on exploration gang management crafting and all sorts of collectibles based on the timelines we've been given it seems as though Ubisoft decided to transition towards the direction of origins and Odyssey around the release of Assassin's Creed unity which makes sense that game was not well received and so you would expect them to make a fairly significant shift afterwards as I said this design shift frustrated many in the Assassin's Creed community according to a recent poll that I conducted 38 percent of Assassin's Creed fans consider these new games not to be within the purview of Assassin's Creed as a franchise but rather something else arguing that Assassin's Creed has died for some this means that they're not going to be playing Assassin's Creed games moving forward because they miss the stealth based or linear adventures of Assassin's Creed 2 Brotherhood and the like however for others this is a welcome change because the old formula was stagnated but all of this is beside the point for the broad narrative design of Assassin's Creed Odyssey the point being this transition has been made but we will return to this point towards the end of the video because I think it's very important now because of this choice to transition away from the scripted linear sequences and instead focus on the broader RPG mechanics of an open-world exploration based title the game's story is fairly elaborate now I'm going to give you the full set up for the games main story and then we'll discuss it in more detail after I go through it during the opening sequence the game gives you the option to play as Cassandra or Alexios and as I said previously my personal recommendation would be to play as Cassandra even though for the broad-strokes of the narrative it doesn't make a huge difference the game opens up with a flashback to Leonidas and the battle at Thermopylae with the 300 which was eerily reminiscent of the intro for unity for whatever reason which happens to be one of my favourite game intros visually of all time this section is highly cinematic and is indicative of the style that the rest of the game will reflect they're trying to tell stories based on people who are real they're not going to be doubling down on the more cartoony nature of stories that have played the series in the past and it works this moment is really beautiful while Leonidas describes to one of his generals that he wishes that he could have taken his son fishing before leaving and now facing his imminent death it's a really solemn and beautiful moment and I frankly love it now through this section you get to see roughly how the gameplay is going to work specifically with the combat but don't worry we're going to discuss that more in the next video after that we get to move on and see some of the present-day content these moments in the most recent Assassin's Creed games have been very very minimal and so we're just going to slide past it for now because quite clearly to Ubisoft these moments are not as important as they used to be point being the same girl that we saw in origins is still hunting down artifacts and apparently has a sidekick now after this they make you choose which character you want to play as and then you get introduced to the player character in a fairly underwhelming way which is actually pretty interesting when compared to how origins introduced the player to biock it is surely intentional when introduced to biock the player saw him chasing down one of his son's killers and you see him very gutturally screaming and hollering all the way up until the point when he chooses to very gruesomely kill this man it's very very interesting and violent and it catches the players attention whereas in Odyssey were introduced to the player character with a nice gliding and calm trip across the country scape on the island of Vilonia at which point the camera then swoops in to whichever player character you selected when you see them humming and singing to themselves while sitting on a roof it's very calm and sets the stage for what the first roughly five hours or so of the game are going to be now to me it seems that they introduce you to your character this way so that you feel the same way that they do this is known as an empathetic setup basically they want you to feel as pigeon-holed on this small island as the person on screen and it works you just watched Leonidas fight a bunch of Persians in a very gruesome battle and now you are sitting on a rooftop humming to yourself all the player can think about is when they're gonna get to do the same stuff Leonidas was doing and that's exactly what the player character is thinking as well it works really really well because it makes you want to go and do what the player character wants to go and do it's simple but effective now you are a mercenary and you tend to serve as the raw muscle for those who need it on the island of Catalonia this nicely also explains the physicality and justifies everything that you do from freerunning to fighting massive hoards now your backstory is also pretty intense and these are things that you learn slowly over the course of the first four or so hours of the game through quick flashbacks that happen as you go through the main questline your family is to send it from a long line of great warriors and so you were given the spear of Leonidas which is an e su artifact or a first civilization artifact which means that later on in the game it's going to explain a lot of the more supernatural abilities you're going to have while using it you're born into a family that's comprised of a father a loving mother and a younger sibling who is an infant when everything I'm about to describe goes down as you would expect if you choose to play as Cassandra Cassandra is the older sibling and Alexios is the baby and the opposite is true if you choose to play as Alexios nikolaos who is your father and a Spartan general trains you in the proper ways of survival and combat and you see this in a couple of cutscenes which are very beautifully rendered and animated and are very very sensitive and delicate and established this sense that the characters you're watching actually you care for each other it's a nice change from games such as syndicate which is the last title that this particular team worked on wherein you feel as though jacob and evie frye feel for each other but it's a much more rival risk relationship we don't get to see any backstory or have any real motivation to justify why they care for each other you kind of have to take it on blind faith basically life is good for this young family and just as everything seems to be fine and dandy the Oracle of Apollo also known as the Oracle of Delphi says that the younger sibling whoever that may be is going to lead to the downfall of Sparta and therefore the leadership of the Spartan regime feels as though this child should be eliminated because after all the Oracle is the Oracle and so they determined that the reasonable reaction to this news would be to kill your younger sibling by throwing them off of the top of a mountain but it is important to stress that the parents weren't happy about this nikolaos dreads doing it but must or else he and his whole family will be deemed traitors who are apparently complicit in allowing the downfall of Sparta because the Oracle claimed that the child would lead to the eventual downfall so if you were to stop the child's destruction then you would in turn be complicit in the destruction of Sparta therefore being a traitor your mother is not amused and is screaming for them to stop while it happens it's pretty intense and I'll just let it play the article has spoken to prevent spark as for the child must fall first this happen please you know he helped us he will need those solids [Music] [Music] shit's over paper her dishonor for the life she has snuffed in [Music] [Music] [ __ ] [Music] [Music] your blood is tainted rid yourself of is poison bother [Music] and so your character tries to stop the priest from turning your sibling into mashed potatoes at which point you knock both of them off the mountaintop and so you are immediately deemed a traitor and this means that your father Nicholas must throw you off of the cliff as well because if he doesn't it means that he will be complicit in the destruction of Sparta and in the death of a priest which is obviously not okay and so he throws you off as your mother screams in the background it's what they call a classic lose-lose situation but somehow you survive this you escape to the sea you get in a boat and sail away at which point your boat is overturned and you wash up on Kefalonia which is where you meet Marcos and is the same island where you eventually will be introduced to your adult character and so in this moment where we are first exposed to our player character what's been going on is that since we washed up on shore we have been working for this gentleman Marcos who runs a bunch of different businesses lends money out is basically a scumbag and we are his hired muscle we do all of his dirty work but recently we've pissed off a guy named the cyclops who basically owns Kefalonia is very wealthy and very powerful turns out that marcos owes you money for some of the things that you've done for him across the island but instead of paying you back he borrowed more money from the cyclops and then bought a vineyard turns out this is pretty funny because Marcos when were introduced to him basically makes it clear to everybody that he has no idea what he's doing and just like the idea of buying a vineyard so he borrowed a ton of money and then bought it I'm sure we all have friends who behave that way heck I might be one of those people too already we can see the focus of this game taking over they're making sure that every character you interact with has a strict personality and is an individual they want to make sure that when you're talking about the game to your friends you can reference Marcos Oh who's Marcos oh remember he's the stupid guy that bought a vineyard and wanted to come on July and even though he had no clue how to oh yeah I remember him that's what they're going for in this game and that is how you know you have a living breathing world when the people are real people and so far so good and so Marco says that he can pay what he owes you if you do some things for him so that he can get his money back one of which includes stealing the fake eye of the Cyclops which is made of obsidian which they could sell and so you steal it at which point Markos reveals to you that you couldn't actually sell it because everyone on the island knows that the eye is a property of the Cyclops and so the only way you could sell it is if you were to somehow get off the island so you're already back where you started and normally I would be upset that the developers put me on this wild goose chase only to all of a sudden explain that it didn't actually matter because the characters couldn't actually use the thing that they stole or obtained however in this case it actually seems to work because Markos is fully aware that he couldn't sell this and sends you on this goose chase to buy time and when cassandra finds out about this she is just as frustrated as the player-character is going to be you can be a little verbally rough with Markos but the problem still persists the Cyclops still holds all of the debt and he is soon going to come and collect and so Markos tells you about a couple other projects that you can do for him to try to weaken the Cyclops so that you could eventually interact with him and one of these particular tasks is to investigate a group of individuals who just sailed to the island on very fancy ships which would imply that they're friends of the Cyclops because clearly they're wealthy and so you go to the house where they've been staying kill everybody involved at which point a cutscene plays where you see a man named Eleanor step out of the house and offer you a quest the quest basically involves sailing to a small island just offshore of the one you're currently on to collect a shroud and once you return with the shroud Alpen or is going to pay you you bring the shroud back to him and he pays you a ton of money turns out he doesn't even want the shroud and that it was Leigha test he tells you that he needs you to kill somebody by the name of the wolf of Sparta on the mainland however the problem is you're still stuck on this tiny island and you don't have any way of getting off and back to the mainland for that you're going to need a ship which Cassandra can't afford and you can actually go and speak with one of the shipbuilders on the island which point he tells you that you're going to need a hundred thousand drachma if you want to purchase the ship something that's a lot of money even in the endgame and so frustrated cassandra is going to return back to Marco's at which point he's going to inform her that the Cyclops seems to have just returned and that he's weak enough that you might be able to take him out completely you find him in the middle of a torture session with a sailor named Barnabas and then this happens I swear each one what difference does it make I have never so much [ __ ] God talk from one man all my days let him go no did he say Cyclops did he hurt your feelings I don't like it when people call me that you so fat I mean big and strong and you really do only have one give it to me give it to me and I won't kill Marcos for having you steal it give it to me you want it I'll get it [Applause] [Music] understandably he gets pissed that you take his obsidian eye and shove it up the butt of a goat and so he begins to fight you you kill him and his men which is the first major fight that you're going to have in the game at which point you saved Barnabas and then he tells you that he has a ship which will let you command since you saved his life and guess what now you have a way of getting to the mainland woop woop you say goodbye to Marcos and to Phoebe who is effectively your sister character and then you sail away with Barnabas at which point you start to talk with them and tell him what you're doing and he tells you that the wolf of Sparta is a man named Niklaus which turns out to be your father and so all of a sudden this is no longer just a contracted killing for some quick cash this is turned into a family reunion and both the player and Cassandra or Alexios have a reason personally to hunt this man down you jump through some hoops killing some people smashing a couple ships and eventually you get to the beach on the mainland and you meet Nicholas's new son Stentor who prevents you from meeting the wolf of sparta until you help him defeat some of the athenians held up inland you do so and after a nation battle or two which we'll talk about during the gameplay section in the next video you're allowed to meet with the wolf one-on-one once you begin speaking Nikolas figures out who you are and then explains his side of the story as to why he had no choice and he does a pretty good job of it honestly I feel bad for the guy and at this point the game offers you a choice here you are prompted with killing him or releasing him and this is your first major choice in the game with long term consequences however there are some side quests that will also have consequences which we're going to loop back to and to be honest this actually does matter if you decide to kill Nikolas which no one would probably fault you for even though he was obligated to do it he still threw his children off of a cliff which is hard to justify if you do that you're going to take his helmet return back to Eleanor you're gonna get your paycheck and continue fighting and hunting down the people that he asks you to hunt down you are also forced to kill stunts or if you do this which means that both of these characters are no longer gonna show up at the end of the game because they are well dead and they're not going to be there when you're going for the good family ending which is the first phase of the end of the game which if that sounds vague and strange I'll explain that more in detail in a few moments however if you spare him you just take his helmet and tell him to lay low and disappear for a little while and once you return to stand tour he sees that you have this gentleman's helmet and assumes that he is dead at which point he pays you and you get to continue on your path even though you didn't actually kill the man that you were contracted to kill now this is a technique that they use multiple times over the course of Assassin's Creed Odyssey the ability to lie to other characters in the main story and it actually works pretty well some other games have tried to do this and have done a fairly good job but it tends to be fairly obvious that the character is lying because it's almost as though they want to make sure that the player is aware that the character is lying or that they have a short memory and don't remember that they didn't kill the guy that they said they just killed I understand why some people might be frustrated that they have to go and start lying to people in order to progress but I think it actually works quite nicely and to be perfectly honest if I found my father spared his life even though I was being paid to kill him and then wanted to still get my paycheck by bringing the helmet back I would probably lie about it so it only makes sense to me now when we talk about consequence in RPGs and narratives specifically there's always degrees of consequence there's small decisions that don't really have an impact in the long term and then there's a larger consequences and decisions that you make which have overarching consequences on the game world and the characters therein killing or sparing Niklaus is a fairly large decision but it's only gonna come up again towards the end of the game when he shows back up with you and your family if you choose to kill him he just isn't there and it does sort of alter the tension and the feeling of the ending but because he's dead it's not brought up directly other than a couple lines that your mother's going to say when she describes that he was a good man blah blah blah this is one of the things that Assassin's Creed Odyssey really relies on is the player assigning value to particular moments they don't tend to wallow in self-pity or show the characters on quiet walks thinking about life they tend to let the player do that as they explore the world and then assign their own emotional value to certain instances and this can work very very well when it works but then it also fails miserably when it doesn't and I'll discuss a couple examples of that in just a few moments regardless of what you choose to do with niccolo's and Stentor from here your journey takes off and you can begin exploring the way that you want to explore and so effectively that is the intro the intro all of that this game really is huge and you are gonna have to set aside roughly 50 to 60 hours just to finish the main story and probably around 70 to 80 if you want to tackle most of the side content that doesn't even include if you wanted to go back through on say a New Game+ and play with the other character that you didn't choose but from here on out the game consists mostly of pursuing your mother during the course of which you will begin to infiltrate the cult that controlled the Oracle and made her say what spurred your family's collapse you go on to one of their meetings and then you discover that your sibling the one that was thrown off of the mountain as a baby survived somehow and is now involved with the cult of Cosmos if you played Cassandra you'll see Alexios fully grown and vice versa which is pretty cool and actually surprised me because you know they threw the baby off of a cliff and apparently the adult priest didn't survive and neither did all of the other babies but you know we'll discuss this in a minute the game continues on with you exploring the world fighting cultists and trying to resolve your frustrations about your family's collapse and the ending comes in three phases which we'll discuss in a bit but before we get to the ending we need to discuss all of the things that the game wants you to just look past now the use of coincidence excessive violence that you're supposed to ignore and unlikely people or events within narratives is completely normal especially in video games there's actually a term that's been deemed specifically around this which we'll discuss in a moment a ludonarrative dissonance but the point is is that this has to be consistent in the world throughout the reason is because there's often a lot of coincidence involved in many stories or a lot of excessive violence that you're supposed to ignore or certain things that are predictable or that are plot twists even though they're incredibly unlikely this happens all the time and the only time it becomes an issue is when the world doesn't seem to buy into it either or if the player or reader or whatever medium it may take the form of doesn't actually buy into it being possible an example would be the baby surviving the fall I could actually write this one off because it's hinted at many times throughout the story and the narrative that Alexios and cassandra come from a line of almost superhuman individuals and that they were chosen by the first civilization these people are special effectively and so I could sort of write that one off especially when we look at the context of the lore it kind of has to happen but if we look at the excessive killing that happens that's where this starts become an issue if we look back at Assassin's Creed 2 for instance it's always stressed that when you take a life you are taking a life I did a critique of Assassin's Creed 2 where I broke this down in greater detail if you would like to see that make sure you check it out and the nice thing about these early games in the franchise is that they always gave you stealth as an alternative to all of this if you didn't want to kill untold hundreds of people you could avoid it by sneaking around and of course there were exceptions to that rule as there are in any game or any instance but that was always the underlying theme was that you life has value and you only take the lives that you need to take here that's been stripped and you can kill 15 dudes just have a short conversation with another in order to progress the plotline and my question is are we just supposed to ignore that if not why not mention it it is a video game but still it is an issue other games have dealt with this properly in my opinion such as in Red Dead Redemption - I won't spoil anything major but there's a moment where Arthur is forced to look back on his life and judge whether or not he's been a good man and he looks back and based on your honor basically your morality he can either say that he's been a good man and he's done a good job or he's been a rotten man at which point you can choose to either double down on being a bad man or a good man or you can try to save yourself hence the name Red Dead Redemption in Odyssey though there's never a moment other than a few offhanded lines which I don't take seriously and apparently neither did the character or the writers where the character actually looks back and realizes that they might be doing more harm than good that they are responsible for killing thousands of people just to find their family or just to get some quick gear or upgrade these things it's supposedly ignored which is where we come to ludonarrative dissonance as a major issue ludonarrative dissonance is effectively a phenomenon that happens when you have a character such as Nathan Drake for instance who's supposed to be a good guy who's doing everything right and is fighting the bad guys but at the same time he's killing hundreds and hundreds of innocent people just to get through a particular level and usually how this is justified is that the writers will say only things that happen during cutscenes are considered canon however that isn't necessarily the case when you're talking about a game like Uncharted or Assassin's Creed Odyssey because many of the cutscenes blend flawlessly into the gameplay and you'll have characters describing that you need to go and kill this individual in order to get past this guard in order to get past that wall in order to get past XY and Z and so that doesn't quite work and unfortunately in Assassin's Creed Odyssey just like with many narrative-based games it's just ignored and you're expected to ignore it and move on not think about it or dwell on it for very long the games that come along that do recognize just how many people are being killed and slayed for some sort of selfish pursuit those games do very very well an example being Red Dead Redemption to where there is an honor mechanic actively employed that has an impact on the ending you will get in order to drive healthy and reasonable behavior so you aren't just killing untold hundreds and hundreds or thousands and thousands of people and it is frustrating because stealth for the narratives sake is usually a very important element the ability to be more of a pacifist and get to get through missions without needing to kill anybody it's a very important element of game design especially when we're dealing with an intense narrative where we're supposed to relate to and feel pity for our protagonists but unfortunately in Odyssey it's almost completely ignored for the sake of the new fun combat it's understandable but it does limit how much I can care for Cassandra and Alexios this is especially true for Alexios because Alexios is voice actor tends to revel in the violence as you would kind of expect a young man to do however Cassandra tends to approach it more delicately almost as though she doesn't want to be violent or to be doing these things but she was forced to by way of her birth and by way of the circumstances surrounding her childhood another example of things that we're just supposed to accept and ignore all of the other implications would be the mythical creatures that we come across towards the end of Assassin's Creed Odyssey for many these will seem a bit jarring they did make an active effort to ground these creatures in the lore of this particular game but in the broader context of the franchise it's a bit of a stretch basically you encounter Griffin a cyclops a Minotaur and Medusa and these are some of my favorite moments of the game in terms of graphics and gameplay especially because you hear them talking about a Minotaur for so long you go to islands where they're still discussing it where their worship and all the while you're just expecting to possibly see this thing and you never do until the very end of the game when you actually can interact with it and fight it it's absolutely awesome and it included some of my favorite boss moments that I've had this entire year even with the likes of God of War having come out as well now there's always been supernatural forces at play within Assassin's Creed games it's always been there since the very first title but we haven't seen the manifest in this kind of way before at least in the main game in Assassin's Creed origins DLC there were many supernatural designs and moments and to be honest I loved that DLC and it was one of my favorite downloadable content packs of any game that came out within the last few years but basically it's an excuse to have an epic boss battle that looks cool and is a tad nerdy but that's basically all it is it's form over substance you're not to take it super seriously I don't think anybody is going to be looking at Assassin's Creed Odyssey seeing that there's a Minotaur Griffin a Cyclops and Medusa in the game and assume that the writers just naturally stumbled upon having those moments and encounters happen quite clearly the game designers said wouldn't it be awesome if we could have the player fight a cyclops and then a Minotaur at the end of a labyrinth would that be cool how can we justify that in the game world that's clearly what happened here and if you're playing this game as a game first and a lore based narrative experience second it's great but if you go into it with the latter perspective leading the way it might be a bit jarring and frustrating and this is where a lot of long-term Assassin's Creed fans have become upset with the franchise Ubisoft has stopped since origins pretending that Assassin's Creed is supposed to be realistic and as instead doubled down on the fun magic stuff that happens I understand why people might not like it but this is clearly the way that it's headed they wanted to have this be their open-world fantasy action RPG they've moved on from the attempts at ground narratives from years past simply Ubisoft doesn't want you to take Assassin's Creed super seriously they want you to play it as a fun open-world exploration based title with some RPG mechanics they don't want you to approach it as a present-day storyline based narrative driven experience focused on Abstergo the Templars and the idea that there's this new world order that's trying to eliminate free will in humanity that is still at play that's still a theme that goes on in the background of the game but that's not what the game itself is about that's what the overarching narratives about but that's not the lens that you should view the game through now this is a video game but I would argue that all of this realism still does matter because this is an RPG RPGs need worlds that are committed to themselves and Ubisoft my one major criticism of them is that they're scared of commitment now Assassin's Creed odyssey's director guy by the name of Scott Phillips has actually said himself that The Witcher 3 the elder scrolls and fallout are among his favorite games and he said quote that's where we wanted to push Assassin's Creed as a franchise into those games more choice for the player and quote the issue being if you want a truly grounded an interesting RPG the entire world has to be on the same page in The Witcher 3 Elder Scrolls and fallout weird stuff happens all the time but everyone in the world is on the same page and everything that happens is believable in the world when you have an issue is when things happen that are not grounded in the world that they've created such as in Fallout 4 with the boy in the refrigerator which is at this point a living breathing meme now our PJs have a lot of moving parts but for the moment we're going to look at the worlds narrative themes specifically because we're gonna discuss the narrative consequences soon all this is very tough to criticize because whether or not it works for you is all dependent on how you approach the game now for me it's fun and light-hearted and a game first while being a grounded story second I don't tend to take the narrative of my Assassin's Creed games very seriously while some of you might I personally don't and so the game works pretty well as a fun light-hearted RPG but if you were approaching it expecting the depth of some of these other games we've discussed you might find yourself being sorely disappointed because simply that isn't ubisoft's intention when they develop a game like this now something I can quite easily criticize is how the game tries to end itself and yes I phrase it that way very intentionally because I feel as though the game doesn't know how to end and maybe it doesn't want to but either way the main story doesn't end in even a sort of satisfactory way now as I mentioned earlier the story has three phases to its ending the family ending be what I will deem Atlantis ending which is found and achieved by defeating those mythical creatures we just discussed which by the way is the coolest ending and then the cultist ending which to be perfectly honest is pretty disappointing and that is found by defeating all of the cultists in the game now for me it just doesn't work you reach the family ending roughly 40 hours into the game but then in order to reach the Atlantis ending you have to spend another 10 to 15 hours doing side quests to level up to the point where you can defeat the mythical creatures and once you defeat the mythical creatures you get a couple cutscenes that wrap everything up and you feel as though that's the end of the game but you still remember that there are a ton of cultists that you need to defeat and so you spend another 10 to 15 hours going through side quests levelling up defeating these cultists and then you get basically a cutscene that tries to wrap everything up and that's it and you're back in the game and everything continues the way that it did before it leaves the player constantly thinking that there's going to be one more thing at the end of the rainbow which is good I suppose because it means that it's driving you to continue playing but when it drives you to continue playing and doing things that you aren't particularly excited to do it doesn't actually work for example if we're driving the narrative with the desire for us to resolve the frustration that my family has fallen apart ever since I was a child you would think that the family ending would be the one that's concrete once that ending occurs you can put the controller down and move on with your life however that isn't the case once the family ending occurs they basically just join you on your ship the addressed you as you go through and explore the rest of the world hunting down all sorts of creatures and you're just expected to continue and it's sort of anticlimactic because there doesn't seem to be any true resolution they just sort of hop on your boat and that's it as for the Atlantis ending this one is actually pretty cool and fairly satisfying because we get the reveal that whichever character you chose to play as is effectively the gatekeeper of Atlantis all the way up until the present day which is where we get the Layla sequence in the present day which feels as though it's the quote-unquote true ending of the game it's that ending which you're meant to see and meant to leave the game on the ending cutscene sort of reflects this because you'll see your character discussing with Barnabas and a couple of other people depending on the choices that you've made what they're going to do now what they're supposed to do now that everything seems to have come to an end and to be perfectly honest I think this is because Ubisoft didn't want to have a Fallout New Vegas or fallout 3 situation on their hands where you have to stop playing the game once you resolve the main story and main questline which is perfectly understandable and reasonable they want to give you a reason to continue playing the game with the character that you've spent 50 60 70 80 hours developing they don't want any complete satisfaction and resolution because that would then remove the drive to continue playing especially because it looks as though there's not going to be an assassin's Creed game in 2019 meaning that Odyssey is going to be there long term cash cow through DLC for the next year which means that they don't want to end player involvement by having a really conclusive main story they want to leave the door wide open it's understandable but especially for a narrative based RPG game or at least a game that's trying to be that it's frustrating now as for satisfaction in general in the narrow we can look at consequences in general for me and in my opinion satisfaction in RPGs tends to be borne out of these consequences and to be perfectly honest the game has many of these consequences in varying degrees as we discussed earlier and even a few surprises such as discovering that your sibling is a member of the cult it makes sense in the broad scheme of things especially when you consider that they would have had to hire voice actors so they might as well double down and have them play multiple roles effectively it just kind of makes sense and for resolving your family troubles it's not a bad idea and thankfully they took many things into consideration to ensure that your choices would even affect the lives of your direct family members so if you make certain choices throughout the main story quests you will eventually reach the top of the mountain where all of this started and where you were both thrown in the very very early stages of your lives and you have the choice where you can either save or try to save your sibling or you can kill them because they've committed too many crimes against Sparta against humanity blah blah blah and for this I'm very thankful that they didn't chicken out and force everybody to get along or chickened out and force you to kill them in order to avenge your father or whatever it may be it's very very nice and delicately handled there's other surprises that they pull out occasionally as well such as revealing that Nicholas is not actually your father but it's actually your stepfather and that your true father is somewhere out in the world only to encounter him much later on in the game probably the most stark example however I could draw of consequences motivating the story and vice versa would be Phoebe's death in Athens Phoebe as I said is the sister character that you see in the early stages of the game and keeps popping up eventually she finds her way to the main land which is surprising because it took your character killing many many people in order to get to the mainland but she just happens to stumble her way onto the mainland and find you but regardless as we discussed coincidences do happen for the sake of narrative delivery but as you speak with her and as you go through the rest of the main story in Athens specifically everything starts to fall to crap plague comes war over reaches the land and eventually Phoebe is caught up in the middle of it and as far as I'm aware there is no way to save Phoebe she will die no matter what now while this isn't a direct consequence of player choice being that it can't be stopped it is a reflection of consequence upon the overarching story and narrative so it does still hit the player as a consequence of their actions even though the player couldn't have done anything to change it and this beat in the story is actually pretty well designed and I think it works quite well I just wish that they've focused on it a little bit more and drawn it out a little bit further there are later mentions to ensure that she was properly buried which are a nice touch certainly but there isn't a huge character shift as you would have expected at least in terms of the delivery of lines and the overall performances effectively Phoebe dies and then there's about ten minutes of cutscenes and scripted dialogue sequences after that and then everything goes back to normal and is hunky-dory there's no mentions of it while you're on horseback there's no introspective moments with the player character just out in the world it just happens and you're expected to just move on once again as we said earlier most of the emotional weight of these moments have to be given by the player you have to assign emotional weight to instances such as these otherwise they simply aren't going to hit you at all and there are many more examples that I could draw of emotional moments hitting in surprise instances or as a result of your actions whether direct or indirect but the pacing in general of these moments tends to be what's messed up which is to be honest expected of a team that hasn't done an open-world RPG such as this before writing in these narrative beats is fairly straightforward if you hire a half-decent writer they can do that however making sure the paces with the game play properly is really really difficult some games do it really well and others struggle with it immensely but to be perfectly honest I believe that they could have reflected this if they had taken a few steps which all reference in among now this leads us into the discussion of consequences within an RPG in general and ian's assassin's creed Odyssey there are a lot of consequences reflective of your actions one of the earliest and simplest examples that I could draw happens on Kefalonia the island where you begin the game and it's usually tackled within the first few hours of gameplay and it's a quest called blood fever in this quest it's fairly straightforward Phoebe tells you to go and investigate this family who is the family of a friend of hers you go down there and realize that everyone's sick all of the buildings have been burned down and something strange has happened you speak with the guards that are holding this family hostage seemingly and find out that this family is also infected and so if you want to save the island from whatever plague they happen to be infected with you have to turn a blind eye while the guards draw their swords and kill the family including children in order to save the island or if you stopped the guards from doing this you will likely dam the rest of the island to the same sickness that took over the rest of this small portion of the village it's both a tough and easy decision all at the same time the fact that they add in the kids there really drives it home and makes it difficult to decide what to do because on the one hand you don't know how sick this family actually is but on the other hand you know that it's a plague and we are on a remote island and should the plague take over everything could collapse and the fact that this quest happened so early on in the game is almost cruel from the developer's perspective because the player doesn't know to what extent consequences are going to be present within the game and so they're likely thinking well it couldn't be that bad maybe like another house is gonna die and they'll burn it down whatever even that would be cool I'm sure it's not going to be extensive but as I can report here for you now there are drastic consequences based on your decision in this moment if you choose to save the family and kill the guards that are going to kill the family what's going to happen is you're going to leave the island on your ship thinking everything's hunky-dory and later on Barnabas is going to tell you that a sickness has overrun Kefalonia and that you shouldn't go back there for fear of becoming infected as well if you do return back to Catalonia what you will see is that there are piles and piles of bodies that are being burned because that family went on to infect other people who infected other people and the entire plague has spread so in saving four people you ended up killing likely dozens upon dozens if not hundreds more and the most impressive thing about this is that most people are probably not going to encounter this whatsoever they're going to hear barnabas say something while they're sailing across the sea ignore or tune it out and just move on they're not gonna connect that their decision to save that family in order to make phoebe happy had long lasting repercussions for the life of those living on that island it's a really nice touch and it's something that reflects very very well for the direction Ubisoft is going if they're trying to tackle this as an RPG with real consequences in the world that they have built on the flipside if you choose to walk away and not interfere the island is fine Phoebe gets pissed at you at first saying that you should have saved them and that that's her friend and that by not saving them you're a bad person all of this stuff but if you return to the island hours and hours later down the line everything will be fine and everyone will be healthy and happy and that's just one small side quest that takes probably three or four minutes to complete in total from the time that you accept it it's tiny but there are huge consequences as a result of your actions it's really cool as I mentioned earlier the death of Niklaus if you choose to kill him versus sparing him on top of that mountain there are vast consequences that come about as a result with the nation battles that you can encounter it's a pretty cool idea and we'll discuss it more in detail in the gameplay critique which will be coming soon but these tend to focus more on the overarching theme impacting consequence it doesn't tend to impact the characters that you're seeing hardly at all but out of this I would draw my major criticism for where Odyssey falls short with regards to its RPG mechanics and that is that few consequences feel as though they permanently affect the player character what I mean is in the same vein as Phoebe's death that something that should permanently change an individual their outlook on life and everything that they do but when you're playing through the game as Alexios you feel as though it's just another day on the job sure a couple cutscenes changed and the couple lines are delivered that make him sound sad but it's not a huge event in his life there's later references to it and times when he asks them to make sure that they gave her a proper burial and things like that but it doesn't change his outlook on the world as you would expect that it would or maybe it would reflect and force him to change his stance on violence and from that point out there is a morality meter where he's forced to play much more pacifistic aliy that could be really really interesting and it would be a reflection in the game played to enforce an emotional response that the character is actually having but once again that would require a bit of courage and bravery on Ubisoft's part in order to force the player to go through the game a certain way to reflect an emotional change in the character as a result of a particular consequence that happened within the world that's not something that you be soft is known for and I doubt it's something that they will become known for it's just not their Forte now as for sidequest consequences as I pointed out with the example of the blood fever sidequest some of these are really really good a lot of these quests are downright hilarious and offer some really interesting and surprise twists to the story such as the supa do side quests that I mentioned in the video Assassin's Creed Odyssey proves something incredible links in the description but I do have some issues with where and when these side quests are designated the overall design is okay and in general their approach to make sure that every side quest has a story associated with it is great and I love that design decision and I think it works very very well however there are some more mechanical and gameplay oriented issues which we'll discuss in the next video but as for now we'll discuss the narrative pros and cons basically there are a ton of these side quests and when I say a ton I mean a ton in origins one of my major criticisms of that game was that there were so many side quests but you had to do them all if you wanted to level up properly without having to pay for an XP boost and Odyssey there are so many side quests that honestly I think most people are going to be going through the game even if they 100 percent the main story they could potentially be skipping out on 30 to 40% of the side quests there are a ton some of these side quests are purely dynamic and are just for grinding if you want to however the majority of them are completely different change in theme based on the region you are within such as if you're on a coast or on a mountaintop the quests given are going to be different and will reflect the train an area you are in if you're in an athenian area the quest will reflect that sort of uppity type of person that you would expect to find in an athenian area whereas if they're in a Spartan area they will reflect that particular type of person as well and as I said a moment ago these non dynamic side quests all have a story associated with them which is something that we found out back in 2015 was going to be the intent of Assassin's Creed's quest designers from that moment forward and as we can see now they weren't kidding the only time when this isn't true is when the quest is a list based quest and include retrieving a bunch of things in order to qualify for the next phase of the character's story per se an example being the daughters of Artemis quest for example we have to kill a bunch of legendary beasts in order to qualify and basically buy your way into their circle and what I will say is that the side quests that land really land and are phenomenal some of the side quests I went through in this game I will not forget for a very very long time and I think the designers over at Ubisoft for that and to be honest this game as an RPG has a lot going for it that I don't feel this game is getting credit for it has a sprawling open world with many factions and choices it has ethical and moral consequences for your actions and these choices it has a plethora of side content a literal metric but ton of content character-driven side quests and a character-driven main story and in general its narrative and they focus on making sure that all of the characters you encounter are unique individuals with personalities it is frustrating though because Ubisoft is scared to commit to major narrative moments and shifts even if it's just for 20 or 30 minutes where they change up the way that the content is being delivered in order to focus on a narrative beat it's unfortunate that they don't do this and I'm hoping that they can learn to have more faith in the narrative moments that they craft moving forward and lastly let's discuss the biggest issue that most people have with this game and that is that some people say that Assassin's Creed Odyssey and origins for that matter are not real Assassin's Creed games now the first thing I will say is that this estimation is perfectly fine and you're entitled to your opinion however this does not replace active criticism of the game because if you want to do that you need to criticize the game itself you don't just get to criticize the fact that it bucked the trend from games that are anywhere from 3 to 10 years old that doesn't mean that it's inherently bad in fact many of those games that it bucked the trend from were considered to be the worst in the series so yeah what I'll also say is that the series has been moving away from stealth which is most people's frustration with Assassin's Creed Odyssey and origins since Assassin's Creed 2 and the few times that they've tried to make stealth more important or in some cases even the focal point such as Assassin's Creed unity they tended to fail miserably and yes I know that unity had a plethora of other issues but the point still stands because the actual gameplay mechanic and the design choice behind it is what was criticized at the time and not just the game as a whole and regardless managers are gonna look back at that and not care what the minutiae was or what the individual instances were all they know is that unity was more stealth focused than the previous titles and the titles that came after it and it happened to do the worst so for them they don't really care and to be perfectly honest for Ubisoft and in general people seem to prefer open-world exploration over stealth I'm not saying that this is better but this has just been the direction that they've been going for a long time this is the game that they've wanted to make since Assassin's Creed 2 a huge sprawling open-world with branching narratives decisions that have consequences to them combat that's enjoyable and fun to play and voice acting and graphics that are almost unparalleled in the industry furthermore all of this leans so heavily into the series greatest strengths which for a long time has been world building in historical settings and so it makes sense that they would put a lot of focus into this new direction and so if you're an assassin's creed fan that doesn't like the way that they're headed that's perfectly fine and you are absolutely entitled to your opinion and I completely respect that opinion and in many cases I do agree with you I think that stealth should be a greater focus in these games moving forward because I think narrative lis it's an important tactic that they be able to employ however this is the direction that they're going and it's going to be where they continue to focus for the next several titles if any of these recent sales or interviews are to be believed if you prefer the og stealth based gameplay of Assassin's Creed one and sort of to that's okay but understand that Ubisoft has not made stealth a main focus in these games since Assassin's Creed 2 if you're one of those people that's okay but just realize that you were never going to like Odyssey or origins for that matter because you're still stuck on a game from almost a decade ago I know that might sound harsh but that's the truth as I see it all of this is a moot point though they're moving this way regardless so the question is how does it do as an open-world fantasy RPG and I would say it does very very well as an assassin's Creed game in the same vein as unity and syndicate not very well but to be perfectly honest it seems as though Ubisoft once to forget about those games and move on completely it might be frustrating for those of us who really did enjoy unity and syndicate for their own respective reasons but Ubisoft is moving on and leaving those in the dust I actually think that there's a moment at the very end of the game once you finish the cultist ending that reflects this very idea that Ubisoft is leaving behind basically Pythagorus is going to go through and have a monologue where he describes generally what humanity is doing and in the context of the game itself and the narrative it makes sense and he's describing what humanity is doing but as he's describing this they're also showing clips from Assassin's Creed unity and syndicate the games that this team worked on last and to me it seems as though Ubisoft is sending us a sort of delicate and subtle message that they are moving on from their past I'll let this clip play and I want you to think about what is being said in the context of Ubisoft not just the narrative ilex use it was never supposed to be like this decades ago a group of people gathered together to uphold a theory which they believed could control the universe that the world functioned in equal parts order and disorder but some fell loving into the wicked arms of chaos and the culture of cosmos was born they abused their power casting the Greek world into eternal war one you were created to stop in destroying the cult you have done what I could not you are a hero but this imbalance comes with a price my child for without chaos there is supreme order a loss of progression and freedom but there is still hope hope in you hope in the future you will bring we must fix the mistakes of the past use the staff repair the rift in the universe the world depends on you Alexios you need to be the hero again Ubisoft is trying to evolve the franchise and while it is change and change can be scary and frustrating while it's being undertaken I think at the end of the day it is a good thing and we should welcome it with open arms even if it means that things we previously enjoyed are going to be figments of the past now it's no mystery that Ubisoft has been slowly changing their philosophy when it comes to open-world game design over the last few years if we look at their games from the early 2010's and early 2018 it's clear to see that Ubisoft used to tackle these games in a very unique way you see I'm being facetious because in reality Ubisoft style of open-world game became synonymous with repetition and boredom for instance let's look at a game such as watch dogs watch dogs is good in some ways and certainly was a unique idea initially but it is no mystery to anyone who has played the game that many elements of its design were grossly mistaken what I mean is that when a game designer is deciding how they're going to structure the overall experience it's important that every choice reinforce the experience you're trying to deliver I know that it sounds very simple and even obvious but you'd be surprised how often this very obvious thing is completely disregarded or simply can't be achieved given the resources available an example being if you are a mercenary style character who's trying to exact revenge upon some evil character who harmed somebody within your family you need to make sure that the overall experience the gameplay the narrative choices and the morality encased in those all reinforce the overall idea and feeling and emotion that you're trying to convey to the audience now if you are paying attention to my brief description there just a moment ago you'll realize that this has been the plot for roughly for at least that come to mind of Ubisoft's most recent RPG open-world games you play as a rough-and-tumble mercenary which justifies all the gameplay expertise that your character has in the form of fighting dodging climbing running all of these things that are not within the realm of possibility for most people you're also trying to exact revenge upon some evil force which justifies all of your actions and provides just enough justification for you to go through the rest of the game over the course of the next 20 to 80 hours exploring the world trying to hunt down these quote-unquote evil people who are bad because they happen to know or work with the guy who did something messed up it's a simple recipe and for the most part it works really well as I said we're not going to be tackling the narrative super in-depth in this video as I've already done that in the last video rather I'm telling you this so that we can frame the overall discussion around gameplay properly now every game has problems watchdogs has had its problems and every Assassin's Creed title has had its share of problems I'm not here to directly compare and contrasting criticize one game over the other because that's not what this video is about instead we're tackling one specific game in trying to tear it apart the reason that I'm talking about watchdogs is so that we can discuss where Ubisoft was and how far they've come with watchdogs you have a very stiff protagonist who's exploring a world that is fairly uninspired very very monotonous bland and uniform across the entire map and more importantly the gameplay while fun initially with the gimmick of being able to hack in to all sorts of different things from lights to steam machines to cars to security guard terminals all of these things can create some very interesting situations for the player but over the course of the game it started to wear thin because it wasn't backed up in the rest of the game it wasn't backed up in the narrative or in the music or in the character acting none of it reinforced the experience it was incredibly jumbled and as a result players had this disconnected feeling while they were playing the game especially near the end now all of this brings us to the question what exactly has Ubisoft changed over the course of the last few years the last few entries of the Assassin's Creed series and other games such as the division and watchdogs 1 & 2 what have they done to change that formula to improve it based on the criticisms we have levied against them well to me it seems quite clear that the one major change that they have made is that they're moving away from a collectathon style of open-world design towards a more interactive and dynamic style of open-world what I mean by this is previous Assassin's Creed games such as even Assassin's Creed 2 way back in the day had collectathon so you would go through and you to collect all of these feathers and do all of these crazy obscure things in order to reach completion that was what a major element of the content within the game was was hunting down these unique items that you could only get in certain locations move all the way up to 2015 with Assassin's Creed syndicate and this is still true although different they've learned to slap a new coat of paint on it but you're still chasing floating pages through the air you're still doing all of these things that are very very monotonous and tedious but it's more content and it burns up lots of gameplay time so you should be happy about it right well I and many players said no and Ubisoft seemingly heard because with Assassin's Creed origins and Assassin's Creed Odyssey both games revolutionized the formula and mostly dumped this now I say mostly because it depends on how you define collectathon as to whether or not these games fully shed the constraints and bounds of collectathon game design because certainly there are still a variety of dynamic quests which you could say in a way serve as collectathon materials they're very shallow and they just repeat and they are very monotonous but they're more content so you should be happy about it certainly that's still here but we also need to look at what has been added into the formula in addition to all of these things for instance Assassin's Creed Odyssey and origins both rely heavily on side quests for instance back in 2017 when they were preparing to advertise for Assassin's Creed origins the game's director ashraf ishmael said many times that they wanted to tackle side quests in a way very similar to that of the witcher 3 now don't worry I'm not going to be making a comparison or doing any of that crap rather I just want to point out that this philosophy has carried through all the way to Assassin's Creed Odyssey specifically the design choice that every single side quest should be motivated by a story and if you play Assassin's Creed Odyssey you will realize this is the case almost immediately in many open-world games are told simply to do something because the character wants you to do it or you'll be given some lame explanation that oh well my mother NEADS berries so you should go and collect them or Oh a settlement needs our help go and help them out things like that which you could say is a story but it isn't it's completely missing the point rather what is meant by informing a sidequest with a story and having a story to tell within that sidequest means that from start to finish there's a character that's unique in the world who's living their own life and is trying to expand upon their prospects or enact some action upon the world or other characters within it and they need your help to do so and over the course of the side quests you get to participate in that experience so you go from point A to point B with the characters within the quest and this is part of what I and so many viewers perhaps even such as yourself love so much about Assassin's Creed origins and Odyssey specifically that whenever you go up and you engage in a side quest with another NPC you will no doubt be exposed to a very unique story that catches your eye and makes you want to continue playing and exploring the world and if you're looking for specific examples don't worry I have one but I've already discussed it in another video specifically the example of supa Deol and his parents I'm not gonna spoil that side quest for this video if you want to see it I've linked that video down in the description box below as well now so far in this video we've been making a lot of comparisons between origins and Odyssey and Assassin's Creed 2 versus watchdogs the original and the division all of this has been building up to the basic distinction between those games and the new guard of Ubisoft open-world games whether you or I or somebody else on this planet likes it or not Ubisoft has fundamentally shifted the way that they are designing these games Assassin's Creed origins and Odyssey are nothing like Assassin's Creed unity Assassin's Creed 3 and 2 and rogue they are fundamentally different games for some people that's a very good thing for others it's depressing because they miss those games but what you can't argue is that the games are fundamentally different now out of full transparency I will tell you straight up Assassin's Creed Odyssey and origins specifically are games in the style that I greatly enjoy open-world narrative exploration based RPGs that have tons of content that I can lose myself in four weeks or even months on end moreover these are games set in historical settings which I find greatly interesting which greatly adds to the overall value of the experience within my mind for instance I'm a huge fan of ancient Egyptian history so much so that even when I was 6 7 8 years old I was reading books on how they mummified the dead in ancient Egypt yeah I was that kid now is all of this to say that I don't have my qualms with the games or that I don't have my issues with the gameplay design or some of the choices that they made in these games no absolutely not I do have my issues with the games and they are by no means perfect but rather I'm just trying to be completely transparent and tell you that I enjoy the way that these games are headed yes I enjoyed the previous game such as Assassin's Creed unity and syndicate and rogue but those were games for their time we've evolved as has the entire industry and it's time that Assassin's Creed evolved with it now one of the common accusations levied against Assassin's Creed Odyssey is that it's simply a reskin of origins and the people that levy this accusation I would say have not played the game for an extended period of time while initially they do appear similar and I will grant you that initially when I was playing the games I thought the same thing it seemed to me that this was simply a reskin after all these games came out only a year apart so you know how different could they possibly be but what's become clear to me over the course of playing this game for dozens upon dozens upon dozens of hours is that this game is the evolution and more than anything this is where origins was trying to go this is the game that origins was setting the stage for everything from the water ship and swimming mechanics to the combat systems to the armor systems to the way the damage is calculated to the way that dodge animations are played everything has been leading up to this point so with this let's discuss some specifics the games world is one thing that it's been lauded for and that is simply because it is huge and in this world water is very heavily used to me this seems like a direct response to all of the praise that black-flag received and if you played Black Flag you'll see that the layout of the world within Odyssey is actually very very similar to the structure that they laid out back in 2013 with that game specifically the ocean envelops major islands or land masses and those land masses hold certain cities and separate the map into different I suppose you could say biomes or areas of the world that feel distinctly different now back with Black Flag it was a very rudimentary system and style of this sort of map layout more specifically you could sail the ocean seas and you could go through the water in your giant ship hunting whales and taking down trade ships and fighting other pirates and it was fun and exciting and great but if you wanted to go back on land you only had a few port cities that you could go to you couldn't simply land on an island and then go explore the entire island now in Assassin's Creed Odyssey you can do just that it's completely open basically if you can see it and want to go there you can go there for real and I'll be honest this degree freedom is actually pretty crazy and very very nice early on in the game when you first unlock the ship you'll likely feel like you want to go exploring and unlock many other sections of the map which you are completely free to do however because this is an RPG with different leveling systems you will need less to say encounter all sorts of creatures or other humans who are much higher level than you which will keep you out of those areas for good well I shouldn't say for good at the very least until much much later in the game for instance when I was playing through Odyssey early on I encountered an island with level 42 lions which I didn't think much of I thought there fricken lions this isn't gonna be hard at all but they one shot at me once again because the leveling system is exponential you will end up in these instances where even just two or three levels makes one hell of a difference and so certainly going up against a level 42 lion when I myself in level seven was not a great idea now based on my estimations the map can basically be divided into six individual parts rural areas city areas military outposts set pieces as I call them ruins and then the sea itself and what I mean more specifically is within the rural areas for instance this is just widespread open areas of grass trees forests and these can usually be divided into three subcategories such as Spartan rural areas Athenian rural areas and then wild rural areas the great thing is that you can actually tell the difference between these when you're in a wild area there are no people around it is just you and nature and these are the moments when you usually are hunting or just exploring for cool places this is completely separate from the rest of the world and feels unique and in and of itself special on the other hand the Spartan and Athenian rural areas usually house farmers and smaller huts of people lower populations but each feel unique and they've put so much attention to detail in this even the lingo and the slang that the people use in these smaller villages will be different depending on where in the map you are as a result the quests that you accept within these unique areas feel incredibly unique to that specific area and the people within it for instance when you're in Athens you will tend to find requests for very uppity aristocrats who are very full of themselves whereas out in Sparta you'll be doing more crude and rude side quests it's a small detail but one that has overarching impact across the entire game as a whole and it's something that many people I'm sure are not even going to be actively or consciously aware of when they play through the game because it's done so subtly they don't call attention to it very directly they just let it sit there and for those of us who want to overanalyze the game I suppose it's there for us now as for cities and military outposts these always break down into Spartan or Athenian the game doesn't prevent you from tackling either one of these you can tackle both or one over the other in order to affect the policies within the nation-state you're fighting for but just wait we'll discuss that more in a little bit another category of areas on the map as I said were set pieces and these are what I would characterize as areas of the map which are specifically constructed for a unique moments within the game's narrative or that you travel to specifically for some sort of visual component this could be the island that you eventually find Medusa on or for instance pefki and Masada down in the southeastern area of the map which is where you'll eventually find the Minotaur each of these areas has a very very unique feel but that unique feel is calibrated and designed specifically around one moment in the narrative that you go and experience whether it be Medusa or the Minotaur each of these have their own flavor and that flavor is painted all across that entire island where they are and beyond this we have ruins which are very self-explanatory these often are designed in such a way that they inform the player if they're looking to be informed and if they simply want to explore and run past them they can do so what I mean by this is that most of these ruins have been placed and there are notes around or other side quests tell you stories of what happened in those ruins before they became ruins rarely will you find an area on the game map where there are ruins present and there's no story associated with them once again the attention to detail that the developers went to in this game is off the charts and I do not want to let that be understated it is ridiculous the effort and attention to detail they poured into this world and lastly the other element of the map is the sea which is such a massive component of this game that you can't ignore it in fact when we're discussing this open world we have to also discuss how you navigated in Assassin's Creed origins you are basically relegated just on your horse you had to ride around everywhere and if you wanted to go from one end of the map to the other you had to set your horse on the auto ride mode and then you just sat back as you went and grabbed a beer or oh right we're supposed to be advertiser friendly you go and get an apple juice and chillax while your horse does all of the work where ads in Assassin's Creed Odyssey it's much more active than that the way I like to think about it is when you're exploring on your horse it's a sit back sort of exploration of the world which is fine and occasionally necessary especially as you get later in the game and you've seen most of the things that you'll be passing but when you're on the sea it often is a lean forward type of experience as opposed to the laid-back experience because when you're leaning forward you are intently focused on what's going on especially as you explore the game world and there's other ships that are coming in and are aggressive towards you you have to be actively attempting to control your ship and defend yourself and you can't just mentally check out it's a much more active style of gameplay which i think is very very good it's subtle but it's important now a lot of improvements have been made to the overall traversal mechanics such as the free running and the horse riding it's all much more responsive and intelligent this time around I rarely felt as though the character was doing something I didn't want them to do which has been the age-old problem with these games is that they constantly feel as though it's you versus the controller whereas in this game it feels like you are an extension of the controller or perhaps vice versa however I still feel as though exploration often can become monotonous specifically because when you're exploring certain areas of the map and you feel as though you're bouncing all around it isn't as interesting as it could be mostly because the game allows it to be uninteresting what I mean is that if the game forced you to actively go and explore yourself or to run from one location to the other and if the quests and locations involved in them were designed with this in mind it could be done in a much more interesting way as opposed to just saying run from this side of the map to the other you can either take your boat there or you can run there or you can ride your horse there or you can just fast travel there they give you all of these outs instead of specifically calibrating an experience for you to make sure that it's interesting and intriguing now the issue with this prognosis is that inevitably somebody down in the comment section below will be saying that this is removing player agency from the equation and yes that is correct when you remove player agency usually it has to be for some specific purpose for instance when you remove the ability to make choices in a narrative usually you are replacing that choice with a strict narrative that you control that you hopefully can polish and refine into something better all I'm saying is that navigation can work the same way if they can make it so that exploring an island doesn't feel as though it's just a wandering fest but more specifically feels as though it's a guided and polished experience specifically calibrated for that island in that moment then the players will not ever feel as though they are grinding from one end of the map to the other but rather feel as though they're exploring a world that deserves to be explored now while we're discussing navigation it's important that we discuss fast travel and the way that it works in Assassin's Creed Odyssey these fast travel points are based off of synchronization points that you find as you explore the world you know these these are the points that have been in the games for years and years where you climb up on top of some tall structure and then tap e or Y and then the camera swoops all the round them while playing dramatic music and it's supposed to increase synchronization with the Animus or something and then it also doubles as a fast travel point at least in this game now initially I didn't think that I had a problem with this however as I explored the world further and further I repeatedly had the experience where I would find some new island I would explore it loot it do something cool and then I would leave without synchronizing at that point because after a while you feel as though you've synchronized so it simply skips your mind and as you continue to explore the world you realize only later that you've been to that island but you didn't synchronize with it so if you need to go back there for some side quest you have to sail all the way back instead of simply tapping the fast travel button which I recognize sounds as though it's a contradiction with something I previously said - let me address that as I previously said when Ubisoft gives the player these outs when it comes to traversal it seems as though it dumbs down the experience or as though it makes it simpler or easier and therefore more boring and monotonous and it feels more like a grind when you are spending most of your time going through load screens to fast travel across the map as opposed to traveling there yourself and that still holds true however with this map because we are using fast travel points it can't be denied that the way that those fast travel points were implemented caused some issues now I have no doubt that they probably experimented with other forms of synchronization or fast travel points for instance on most islands there's multiple zones that you explore as you go throughout the island from point to point this is how the map changes from this sort of Illustrated view to the full satellite view if you will I wonder what would be wrong with just allowing fast travel to zone that you have previously discovered and explored it seems as though that would be simple enough especially if you're going to encourage fast travel anyway with the way that you're structuring your quests why not just embrace it and allow people to fast travel wherever they want well I'm sure that they felt as though this was too freeing and it would make it so players felt just that they were just exploring and never had any sort of interaction that unlocked the island or that specific place in some notable way simply running around unlocked it for them effectively and of course without seeing that alpha build I can't say definitively whether it works or doesn't work or whether this could improve the exploration experience or cause it to have more issues but what I can say is that many other games don't even bother with some sort of notable moment where you unlock the ability to travel to somewhere whether we're looking at Red Dead Redemption - or The Witcher 3 or even Skyrim in these games you just explore and by exploring the world you gain the ability to travel there the most extreme example being with Red Dead Redemption - where you don't even necessarily need to travel to a location in order to travel there because of their stagecoach mechanic effectively all I'm saying is that if you be soft is going to commit to one of these options they need to commit to it you can't have it both ways if you're going to try to encourage players to explore the map in an in-depth and intense way where they're going through in the same styling as a Red Dead Redemption - traveling on foot and horseback you need to make sure that that is the experience you are trying to force players to experience and once again forcing players into an experience is not inherently a bad thing as long as that experience is good and on the other hand you need to make sure that if you are giving players the utter freedom to fast travel from location to location in order to complete quests that you make it as convenient fast and easy to do as possible so that it doesn't feel as though you're spending the majority of your gameplay time on load screens as opposed to actually playing the game but I suppose that's enough about traversal and navigation I think what most people are interested in hearing about is the combat which is definitely fair now the combat system is mostly built and defined by the equipment that you're using in a given moment this includes swords and armors and how you've decided to level up your character through the three branch basic skill tree now one thing certainly has changed a lot since Assassin's Creed origins and that's how the game systems handle elemental damage and a lot of the more RPG esque elements of weapon customization that you would expect to find in a game such as this what I mean is that in Assassin's Creed origins if you wanted to get a sword that had high fire output all you had to do was to find a sword with just that it had a special perk that allowed it to output fire damage specifically and then you could perhaps boost it with some abilities here and there or perhaps certain armor pieces but for the most but that was the main component in Assassin's Creed Odyssey however it's changed a little bit certainly you have weapons that do give fire perks and boosts but if you want to have that specifically on your weapon you need to make sure that you use what they now call engravings which work sort of in the same way as the witcher three's rooms where you can customize it and swap them out depending on what you're building in that exact moment personally I like it but it is an adjustment if you're coming from origins origins sort of does all of that for you Odyssey you have to be a little bit more proactive in how you customize and build your character I won't spoil exact details but in my experimentation it seemed as though fire output was heavily spammable and was very very easy to borderline break especially later in the game against some of the end game bosses I actually found myself questioning whether or not I had the difficulty on the proper setting because the fights seemed to be too simple when you had high damage exploitation enabled in your build it's a small detail and it's something that's actually really common in games that elemental damage build ups feel as though they're breaking it this is true in monster hunter world this is true and even a game as simple as South Park the stick of truth know all this leads us to also discussing the leveling system which obviously is very closely tied to the combat because your leveling system seems as though it has a direct impact on the damage calculation and then of course also your overall health output in addition to your defense from incoming attacks basically your level is directly tied to your survival in any sort of physical confrontation which makes sense but it depends on how its implemented now in Assassin's Creed Odyssey and most Assassin's Creed games they employ what is known as a dynamic difficulty slider which if you've watched this channel at all you probably know is one of my major pet peeves I hate dynamic difficulty sliders in games in my eyes if you're going to play the game on hard you should commit to playing the game on hard and you shouldn't have the option to slide it around the only reason they give you the option to slide it around is because they're worried that the game won't be balanced in certain moments and I fully recognize that's very dumb down view and perhaps inaccurate I just hate it okay I'm allowed to hate stuff but this all ties back together to a criticism I made while we were discussing navigation when you give players an out in a difficult situation or a frustrating situation they will inevitably take it so for instance if you chose to play the game on hard in the opening sections of the game and as you explore the world it seems as though hard is a good difficulty for you but eventually you run into a boss which is really really difficult and you feel as though your bill just isn't suited for them instead of giving the player the ability to properly read the [ __ ] their character so that they could properly tackle this boss and feel as though they were kings and queens once they got through it instead Ubisoft decided to just give you the ability to slide the difficulty down too easy where the calculation would become such that your character was completely overpowered against that particular fight making it much more easy to win so even if your character were built in the complete opposite way and everything he was doing had no effect upon the the boss that you were fighting you still had a way to get through it and to me that's very very frustrating because if you're going up against a boss that has high defense against blunt weapons players should look at that and then alter their approach to that boss fight the moment that you decide you're going to coddle a player for being ill-prepared or for not taking the necessary precautions and preparations for fighting a boss that's when the whole boss fighting system starts to fall apart because once a boss is no longer a boss and can be instantly nerfed with a few button presses it loses all meaning and I know what you're thinking why don't you just not alter the difficulty and certainly I didn't alter the difficulty when I was going up against those bosses but it was clear that the game was designed in a way where they expected you to do that if you started to have a difficult time with a boss fight they didn't give you the ability to go back through and reconfigure your care Derr an example being that when you go up against most bosses in the main story you will reach a checkpoint and once your character dies against that boss because they're very difficult you will simply reload at that checkpoint going right back in you don't have time to go and redo your armor or to start outside the tent and or try to redo it the only exception to that rule is in these large nation-state battles that you can find yourself participating in which are some of my favorite moments in the game because you can go up tackle it see if you can handle it and if you can't they spit you back out at the very beginning before any of it takes place and you can go and start from square one whereas in the narrative if you go after a boss and you aren't properly leveled to it you can either load a much much earlier save file and try to go back through all of the sections you just did with a higher level character after grinding a little bit or you can go and simply lower the difficulty get through the boss and then alter your character it's very clear they had one of those in mind as the intended option what makes this very aggravating and see if you're going through the game on a harder difficulty the leveling discrepancy that you can experience the world with is much much lower so for instance in my testing it seems as though the easier difficulties you could usually get through a mission if it were for ish levels higher than you you could still do it it might be difficult it might take some chopping away and the bosses and characters might feel as though they're damaged sponges but you could still do it as you go up to the normal settings and the harder settings that decreases from four to three to two and once you get to the harder levels or even the hardest difficulty it feels as though you absolutely have to be the same level as the opponent you're fighting or perhaps even a level or two above the character that you're fighting in a given moment in order to stand a chance now once again that's all tides the leveling and the balance and they give the player the ability to adjust that but it has many consequences outside of just these larger battles or narrative fights that you find yourself participating in specifically stealth this is an assassin's Creed game you expect stealth to be a major component and certainly when you go through the games on the harder difficulties often you tend to rely on the stealth more and more you go through the game trying to avoid confrontation because it's much more difficult instead sneaking around doing what you need to do however because Ubisoft has invested so much into their new fighting system they want you to have those interactions and those experiences where you start to fight with hordes and hordes of enemies so stealth has been gutted to a certain extent so much so that one shot kills and stealth kills with your sort of hidden blade are completely broken thanks to the leveling system and what I mean by that is that you can't do it on higher level opponents you just can't you jump down from a roof stab them in the head with your sword and they get up with half health still remaining once again I think I should say that I understand why this is the case and I don't fault them for designing it in this way but it does seem very very strange that there isn't some compromise between these two options because on the one hand stealth feels as though you should be rewarded for participating in it after all it is an assassin's Creed game but on the other hand if you for instance allowed one shots to be possible no matter what the boss was even if you were 30 levels underneath him and you could still one shot him with your hidden blade thing it does seem as though that would break the system very very quickly you could start spamming it and you can end up getting gear that is way higher level than you should be dealing with early early on simply by spamming that ability and once again if players can do something they will do that something and the solution to this issue I think they've already laid the foundation for and they sort of dabble in it as you go through the game and this is specific abilities for certain opponents and mercenaries for instance that you can encounter as you go through the game so for instance some are much more resistant to poison others are much more resistant to fire others can't deal with animal opponents and things of this nature this is similar to for instance shadow of Mordor which had this same system with an emesis system where you had unique characters that you were fighting against that each have their own unique fears or abilities immunities and you had to tailor your approach according to them sure some people were easily spammed and you could get through them quickly but others led you to dealing with them in a much more complex way where you had to figure out how to combine their weaknesses into something that was useful for instance in Assassin's Creed Odyssey you could have moments in the game where large high-level forts had soldiers in it where their helmets made them invulnerable to drops from above so if you wanted to assassinate them you had to do it from a bush or perhaps they were very vulnerable to poisoning within a well or something like that but you couldn't go and stab them for whatever reason perhaps they just would dodge it quickly and that's something that they had trained things like this that would create a much more variable and dynamic experience as opposed to simply trying to stab somebody in the face and at only dealing half damage once again I think it makes more sense to create more complexity around these things as opposed to simplifying it and then just embracing the faults the game does employ a cultist system which sort of acts once again as the Nemesis system in shadow of Mordor where there's a big collection of different people that each have their own personalities and are doing their own thing but you only unlock them by finding clues as to their identity by slaying other cultists or by completing other missions and quests as you go through the main story and it seems to work ok but once again it leads to a disjointed ending in the game which I also discussed in the previous part I honestly wish I could talk more about the cultists but to be perfectly honest they just feel as though they are Rhys kins of basic NPCs that are surrounded by a bunch of guards that's what most of them end up being a couple of them gets in cool cutscenes that play but for the most part they're just regular people that run away from you once you find them it's not really that interesting it's just tedious now one mechanic that is new did the franchise that I did find interesting was the nation-state battle mechanic where you are engaging in all sorts of political espionage in order to affect the political outcome between Athens and Sparta and occasionally they'll have you do things like this in the main story mostly for demonstration purposes but when you're on your own it actually can lead to some interesting rewards and it can also impact your overall experience in certain areas of the map if for instance you help Sparta Athenians will become very very hostile towards you or they will disappear completely and you'll end up with a bunch of Spartan soldiers occupying the area while the Athenians are being burned in pyres next to you or to the contrary it'll flip the other way and you'll end up with Athenians dancing around and singing while spartans are on the outskirts of the town plotting revenge and their next move now I'd hoped that I would find myself doing this a lot and engaging in these systems and battles a lot but inevitably it just turns into a way of collecting higher-level loot because when you encounter a more difficult battle specifically with the underdog party and you help them win the battle you get a higher level loot and more of it than you would if you were just helping out the regular guy which is interesting and fun and whatever but it never feels as though you are motivated to help one side over the other and if you do there's going to be major consequences as a result of your actions it feels as though there's some benefit and perhaps some interaction in certain areas but it never feels as though the consequences are real at least for the player character and honestly I think this is mostly because they give you complete freedom to go to whichever side that you want to go to so if I want to fight with Athens one day and Sparta the next you can do that and they're not gonna stop you they don't ever seem to become aware of the fact that you are the guy or girl that keeps killing all of their men in these battles but whatever now I suppose we should talk briefly about boss fights and by boss fights I could talk about the ones in the main story which are usually pretty fun and have a unique gimmick but more specifically I want to talk about the very very end game boss fight specifically the mythic ones in Assassin's Creed Odyssey you can encounter the Griffin a cyclops a Minotaur and Medusa herself and these are some of if not our right my favorite moments in the entire game now I stayed away from spoilers pretty hardcore leading up to my exposure to these characters of course I saw Medusa in the trailer and as I explored the main story I never encountered her so I felt as though I was still going to find her at some point on one of the higher level islands on the north east side of the map however I didn't know what to expect this I especially didn't know that I was going to encounter a cyclops and a Minotaur and then also a Griffin but I was open to whatever as I explored a temple with another character I started to feel as though something was a little weird or off and I'll let this section just play for you because I want you to experience exactly what I experienced just even if you've seen this before wipe your mind and watch this and just imagine my face when this happened the house of the gods creators of the universe stretch your mighty hands and so it goes from zero to sixty almost immediately and even though I've been fighting smelly Greeks for the last however many hours of gameplay all of a sudden I've been thrown up against a cyclops who is massive and towering and very very powerful and it feels as though I'm playing some sort of God of War Assassin's Creed crossover and I'm loving it I think what surprised me most of all is that this boss battle isn't actually that bad the animations are well done the hitboxes are good that the movement system is very very good the tracking he even gets to the point where if you're shooting at his eye with your bow he will cover it up as he runs towards you it's so well done it's it's very very interesting that we only encounter these characters once and to be honest I think that's why these moments are so special in my mind because they were so unique you only fight the Minotaur once you only fight Madhu so once you only fight the Griffon once you only fight the Cyclops one so you only do these things once the developers didn't feel the need to copy and paste them all over the map after this moment it's completely unique and that's what makes it so special their recognition of the exceptionality of this event each of these battles is unique in its own way with the Cyclops you got to run around get in get your dinky stinky do your thing with the Minotaur similar boss fight but it's very dark and dank and I decided to take my PC out and play this boss fight on my OLED and I can highly recommend if you have an OLED even if you're playing the game on PC go play this boss fight on your ola it makes such a difference the boss fight is unreal when you're playing on a display like that as for the Gryphon it's more of a quiz and trivia thing it's okay it's good not it's whatever but Medusa I did find myself feeling as though this boss fight had the least effort put into it it was very very shallow it seemed to go over quickly and I didn't have much difficulty with it even though I went in under levelled now as always this is just one man's musings perhaps you had a lot of difficulty on one that I found really easy and you got through one really easy that I had a lot of difficulty with once again it can be very unique and specific to your particular build by the end of the game my build was very specifically crafted towards fire damage with duel weapons and dual blades so it could be just me but I'd also be interested in hearing your experiences make sure to leave those in the comment section below I'd like to hear how you experienced these fights now we're going to be going through both major DLC expansions to Assassin's Creed Odyssey legacy of the first blade and fate of Atlantis we're going to be going through them in a fair amount of detail just enough to spoil pretty much everything important so if you're interested at all in those DLC I recommend that you stop this video go play through them it's about 30 hours of content all told this video will still be here when you're done but if you're looking for a broad recommendation or warning to stay away what I will say is that the DLC in general offers more of the same if you really liked Assassin's Creed odyssey's main campaign you're gonna love legacy of the first blade it gives you a lot more of the same to tackle although it has some pretty severe problems in terms of writing and the meta implications of the story but we'll get to that later and then fate of Atlantis is like curse of the Pharaohs in Assassin's Creed origins for their DLC pack it's where most of their effort went to most of their energy there's a lot of very expansive an impressive world design here in general it's quantity over quality so if you're interested in the novelty of going to Hades or exploring Atlantis that's something you can do but in terms of gameplay fate of Atlantis and legacy of the first blade are some of the most repetitive DLC expansions I've ever played like seriously for one it's okay to double down on the gameplay loop and system that you established in the main game after all chances are people who are playing your DLC probably liked the core game that the DLC is being added on to so that makes sense and I don't have a problem with that the problem comes when that's all you're offering and it's just more of the same furthermore a lot of the content in fate of Atlantis specifically is so dry and repetitive it's a significant drop in quality when contrasted with the main body of the core game the main game their whole philosophy in the development process was to have a story attached to every single quest that you do whether it's a side Qwest or a main story quest that's pretty much gone out the window when it comes to the DLC packs for odyssey my honest recommendation would be that you don't bother getting either of these expansion packs unless you're a die-hard fan of the core game or unless you get it as part of some larger pack or at a heavy heavy discount it's a significant drop in quality it's very frustrating to me especially knowing what Ubisoft is capable of based on what we saw in the core game it's just kind of disappointing across the board but we're gonna be getting into all of that in the coming sections of this video which will of course have timestamps below in the description box as well in case you want to jump around to different sections so consider this to be your spoiler warning let's begin so as I said this whole season pass and all of the content contained therein leaves a very bad taste in my mouth and that should mean something because I'm a die-hard Ubisoft and boy especially with Assassin's Creed I think they're one of the most underrated developers in the industry I think they pushed the tech boundary more than most developers out there today I usually love their stuff but I am NOT blind to some of the major shortcomings involved with their latest titles we all know what I'm talking about and while Ghost Recon breakpoint seems as though it came out of nowhere when looking at this DLC and all of the episodes they released I can see shadows and hinting towards a corporate culture that seemed to be tolerant of shortcuts and laziness repeated content basically all the things people hate about Ubisoft and it's so unfortunate because I felt as though the core game of SAS ins Creed Odyssey cut out a lot of that stuff it was way better than most people gave it credit for and like I said every quest line had something original to it had a storyline attached to it but with this DLC they have leaned heavily into all of the things people don't like about large open world sandbox RPGs that go for quantity over quality and are just trying to rack up as many gameplay hours as they possibly can now the structure of Odysseys DLC directly mirrors that of sanskrit origins seasonpass and of course they had the two major expansions they're released in episodic formats as well there's where the hidden ones and then the curse of the Pharaohs I critiqued both in a video similar to this one I'll also have that linked below now this simile is very very important because origins was of course a reinvention by the same team that developed Black Flag and then Odyssey was developed by the team that did syndicate and this is how it tends to go usually the Black Flag team is the same team that innovates on the formula for instance right now they're the team that are working on whatever next year's Assassin's Creed title is going to be likely a Nordic one I've done videos on that before as well and then after the Black Flag team does that and innovates on the formula in some way this team that did syndicate and now Odyssey they come in and they work with that formula that's been established by the other team they play with a little but stretch it out to go much bigger broader go for quantity over the initial innovation that was shown off by the Black Flag team now furthermore for origins the DLC was structured such that the first expansion was going to focus on the gameplay mechanics that had been established in the main body of the core game and then the curse of the Pharaohs was going to lean heavily into the sort of mythological magical spirit realm stuff much more fantastic than anything you saw in the main body of the core game and that same thing has happened here legacy of the first blade leans heavily into the gameplay mechanics of the main game and then fate of Atlantis just goes crazy with the spiritual and mythological fantasy stuff which some people love some people hate that's just a matter of personal preference but it does seem to be the direction that Ubisoft is leaning with these games now all told there's probably about 35 hours of content here for most players in both of these expansion packs for Odyssey I've done some testing with the XP boost that Ubisoft sells for a few bucks and from what I can gather it looks like there's probably around 28 hours of content if you're using the XP boost I mean the fact that you can shave around than hours of grinding just by purchasing a product I don't think that says a lot of very good things about the way that the grind an XP boost system is established and built I'm with all of you I don't think XP boosts should be a thing because I think it generally encourages the developers to stretch out the grind incentivize you to purchase those XP boosts so that you don't feel as though you're just chugging along writing the same content over and over and over and over again but with all this I think it's important to ask ourselves why these DLC are being made and who they're targeting because every product is aimed at some market every marketing strategy is designed around some demographic and it seems as though the way they're structuring it implies that they're trying to scratch the backs of two people very different at the same time on the one hand you have somebody who is not a fan of the mystical stuff doesn't care about the fantasy realm magical contents of the latest Assassin's Creed games and it's just interested in being an assassin running through ancient and historical settings meeting interesting people and exploring the world in the map that's what Assassin's Creed has been about for almost a decade at this point since they made some big shifts around Assassin's Creed 3 so that's what you got on this hand on the other hand you have what Ubisoft probably considers to be their new generation of fans for the Assassin's Creed franchise these are the people that are much more interested in the open-world exploration based titles that lean heavily into RPG mechanics and of course go for quantity and scale above a more linear story now in the core game what you get is what you get you just gotta get through it and love it if you love it hate it if you hate it but with these DLC it gives you be soft a chance to give players more specifically the thing that they like and give them a lot of it the thing is though the main game tries to make both of these parties happy at the same time which is why they blend the two together so it creates an experience in Assassin's Creed that mixes both of these different types of people's likes together and it creates sort of a hodgepodge fantasy RPG with some historical elements in it which can often cause people to just not connect with it but after playing the main game and dealing with this weird mix Ubisoft now offers you the DLC which gives you a much purer experience on either side you either get the pure sort of classical Assassin's Creed stealthy gameplay experience or you get the fantasy open-world RPG with crazy set pieces that Ubisoft also seems to be trying to get into it's very bizarre to me and it seems as though they're trying to make two very different groups of people happy with the same product and I'm just not sure if that works for me it meant that with the origins DLC curse of the Pharaohs and the hidden ones I really liked curse of the Pharaohs I didn't really like hidden blade I thought it was kind of buying time for the development of curse of the Pharaohs it seemed very called in to me and then for Odysseys seasonpass I appreciate all the effort they went into with fate of Atlantis but I find myself connecting more to the legacy of the first blade first of all because technically it's much more polished and there's far fewer technical issues that I encountered again we'll talk about this more in a minute but also because fate of Atlantis really leans into the fantasy elements to the point where it doesn't feel like Assassin's Creed at all it doesn't even feel like Assassin's Creed Odyssey truly fate of Atlantis left me just confused in terms of tone in terms of pace in terms of gameplay design all of it and yes I know her light just turned out it is 10:13 p.m. at night when I'm recording this so it's her bedtime but we got a filmer video she's a trooper though she's used to this type of thing so she'll just go in her cave go to sleep she's adorable but all of this is very highbrow and vague so I want to get into the nitty gritty and specifics we're gonna go through legacy of the first blade first and then we're going to go into fate of Atlantis and discuss each episode as we go so legacy of the first blade has a pretty cool narrative concept at the outset as the DLC is described on ubisoft's website and official product page it says quote encounter the legend who wielded the first hidden blade and changed the course of history upgrade your Spartan hero and boost your legend with enhanced gear and brand new abilities combat new and unrelenting enemies on land and sea as you journey through ancient Greece explore the world and uncover new revelations about the origins of the assassins Brotherhood should I be a voice actor maybe right if y'all can do it I can oh that sounded like I was throwing shade at young ya I'm not love you buddy you're doing great stuff I've just I know you do voice acting so I'm moving on now this expansion contains three episodes in all told these episodes can take anywhere from just a couple hours to chug through each of them or they can take as long as five hours apiece depending on how slow you take it what other stuff you're doing at the same time I mean again this particular expansion is taking place in the same map and world as the core main body of Assassin's Creed Odyssey so if there's other side quests you get distracted with you can do those intermittent with these quest lines it all just kind of blends together each of these episodes has a different theme and especially in terms of gameplay shift what you're doing over the course of whatever quest lines they assign you now the quest line to start the legacy of the first blade unlocks after chapter 7 in the core game or in other words after you complete the main story quests lines on Naxos furthermore it's also recommended that you start at around level 30 now early on you meet a character named arias who you find out was also an assassin and has some checkered history and has done some nasty things but all told you decide to work with him and you guys chip away at the mean evil people that are in charge over the area that you're currently working in sound familiar well it's because it's also what you were doing in the main body of Assassin's Creed Odyssey I mean again nothing has really changed here and this carries through pretty much the entire expansion they throw in some little stuff in terms of narrative that's really weird and bizarre which I'm going to talk about in a second but all told this felt like a mini quest line design to wrap up the main gameplay elements of the core game all into one questline so for instance the first episode is entirely focused on melee combat the second episode by the time you're done with it is entirely on the sea and centers completely around naval combat that's pretty much all you're doing you're fighting on your ship and then the third episode leans heavily into the stealth of mechanics and gameplay systems that they used in the first game giving you some broader levels and different things to try and they also throw some new abilities at you such as what they call the death veil which basically means that if you assassinate some sort of enemy NPC while being completely hidden nobody's seeing you the body can disappear and evaporate pretty much immediately meaning it's much easier to stealth kill an entire camp it's not realistic at all which is why I have a problem with it it just seems like a weird gimmick to make the game easier and I mean again whenever you add a gameplay system like this you have to ask okay well what's your intention versus what is the actual effect of that change with this if you make it so stealth kills make the body immediately disappear if you have this ability what's that going to change in terms of the level design it means that the developers will likely be throwing a lot more enemies in there because the bodies are just gonna disappear as long as they're standing near a bush when you happen to assassinate them and sure enough by the time you get to the end of episode 3 the levels are filled with tons of guards where you're just expected to move from Bush to Bush assassinating them nobody's smart enough to even realize what's going on I mean back when I critiqued Assassin's Creed origins one of the things I found so impressive about origins was the fact that the AI was so dynamic that they would recognize when one of their buddies was lying dead or had been attacked or was not on his regular route so maybe he was busy engaged with you and then he would go and search for him and if they found a dead body he would get upset look around for you and when he couldn't find you if he didn't he would pick up the body and then they would take them into a field to bury them this is something you can test yourself it was little touches like that that made the characters and NPCs and enemies feel like actual people it made you second-guess whether or not you should be killing all of them back in the day Assassin's Creed used to pride itself on the fact that you couldn't just kill NPCs needlessly you had to maintain a certain aura of I guess you could say professionalism within the Assassin's Creed you couldn't just go around going crazy but in this game it's a complete free-for-all now listen if Assassin's Creed wants to turn itself into a sandbox where you can do anything that's ok games have to shift and develop and franchises have to do that too but you have to realize that is in complete conflict with the entire animus storyline the fact that this is all supposed to be built off of genetic memories that are being passed from generation to generation so in theory you shouldn't be able to just kill anybody and do whatever you want and furthermore that's one of the reasons people have actually been upset about the move towards an RPG system because when you have branching dialogue and choices where every gamer is going to have a different experience that brings up real questions about what is established lower what actually is going on in this world if it's all built off of genetic memories are you saying that people are still choosing within the genetic memories or is it a chicken and the egg sort of thing where your choices are actually what happened and you're just walking through and that choice line wasn't established until you made those choices it gets very complicated and obviously you can say what does it matter does it actually matter any of this well yes and no I think it matters insofar as the narrative has to make sense within the world that they've established I'm fine if a world is written for a narrative piece of some sort whether it's a game movie novel whatever it may be I'm fine if that world is weird bizarre impossible that's ok my only request my only demand is that the people within that world the rules within that world are established and are consistent an example of course being death stranding a critique of which I'm working on right now I recommend you subscribe if you want to see a similar treatment to this given to death stranding in death stranding the world is bizarre and there's a lot of crazy things that happen if you watch one trailer you can see pretty clearly there's some weird stuff going on but once you play through the whole game you realize that that world as weird as it is is governed by rules and those rules are consistent all the way throughout my problem with assassin's creed as of the last few years is that it seems as though they're changing this world and it's getting weirder but they aren't settled on what rules there are that guide and govern that universe that they're building specifically in origins there were supernatural things going on but it's heavily implied that they're partially hallucinations and then they're also partially visions from the issue and from these supernatural powers it's kind of vague and they make it just weird enough that they can find some different ways of getting around it but in Assassin's Creed Odyssey they just throw that to the wind they have a Cyclops a Minotaur they have all this stuff in the main body of the game just completely accepting the fact that they're throwing out the realistic elements of the franchise and leaning heavily into the supernatural elements and of course I'm not the only person bringing this up pretty much everybody who's a fan of Assassin's Creed and has played the last few games knows that this is a debate that's currently going on within the franchises fans and likely the developers as well I've spoken to a couple of them many of the developers that work on the Assassin's Creed franchise watch my videos have seen critiques of mine on the games I'm very flattered by that and I don't mean any of this personally all I'm saying is that there has to be some sort of clear concise rule set established for the world that these characters are operating within otherwise it just gets nonsensical it's bizarre and it makes it seem as though the writers and the developers aren't taking the world seriously and if the world isn't being taken seriously by the people crafting it why should the play or the people engaging with that world take it seriously either and taking things seriously brings me to the next topic which is one of the weirder moments in legacy of the first blade you see as you go through the main story of the first episode you're working with Darius you're hunting down some people it's just more of the same by the second episode you meet another individual and you start to talk with them you start to get a little flirty and you start to get the hint that the developers and writers really want you to find this person attractive and they want you to engage in some sort of romantic relationship with them now this is not new to Assassin's Creed Odyssey of course in the main game you can do all sorts of things I famously made a video about soup IDEO and his quest line which is a direct mirroring of the Oedipus story I did a whole video on that it did very well again links below so romance options are nothing new and I don't really have a problem with that within the Assassin's Creed franchise and how they've built up Odyssey in origins but the thing is in Episode two you can't actually avoid this romance major plot points of Episode three and even sections of the fate of Atlantis refer back to this moment back to this relationship that Alexios or Cassandra have the player doesn't have a choice here if you decline and push away the love interest you just are forced into it anyways now I understand for the lore of Assassin's Creed to work you have to have some sort of heterosexual relationship where you make a baby and you continue on your genetic line that makes sense it's just the way that this world and this narrative plotline works it has to happen at some point but what they've done before is they just don't show it so you can leave it to your imagination how they had kids or how they passed on their lineage and all of this is where Ubisoft actually got in a lot of hot water surprisingly when episode 2 launched this is an excerpt from an article written about this scandal soon after the episode launched they said quote Assassin's Creed odyssey's creative director has apologised for a story choice in the games latest expansion that forces the main character into a heterosexual relationship undoing the promises of same-sex romance options in the main game and reversing the personal stories some players may have built quote Alexios and cassandra realizing their own mortality and the sacrifice Leonidas Emma their grandfather and mother made before them to keep their legacy alive felt the desire and duty to preserve their important lineage do ma the game director reasoned he went on and said our goal was to let players choose between a utilitarian view of ensuring your bloodline lived on and forming a romantic relationship now let me get this clear I'm not one of those people that is super pissed because writers put two characters into a straight relationship and didn't have more inclusive relationship options available I think especially in this world you have to pass on your lineage somehow otherwise the game doesn't make any sense whatsoever the lineage wouldn't have passed on so you wouldn't be able to even experience ancient Greece in this way so it has to happen at some point I don't have a problem with them establishing it my problem is that they give you the aura of choice make it seem as though this is your choice to engage in this relationship when in reality it isn't and do ma even refers to this directly he says that they needed this to happen so they gave the player the option between quote letting players choose between a utilitarian view of ensuring your bloodline lived on or forming a romantic relationship basically if you were role-playing as a homosexual character you were faced with a choice of turning straight or just sucking it up getting your dinky stinky and making a baby so that your bloodline would pass on in this way it's a weird choice to offer players and I think my biggest issue with this narrative plot point is that it just didn't need to be in the game whatsoever it really is just not worth the trouble if you want to do something like this you simply cannot have already given players the ability to write their own narrative to do their own thing to establish their characters traits as they did and then rip it away from them and pretend as though it's just well yeah you've made all those choices and role played in a certain way in the main game yeah forget that we want to have some sort of emotional appeal in Episode two so we got to do this overall it just seems really lazy that they felt as though they couldn't establish a broader personal connection between Cassandra or Alexios and Darius unless they had some sort of middle person and the baby involved I just don't think you really need to do that if you day we're going to do this they just shouldn't have had romance options in the main game and they should have just plowed through it just it just was a mistake I don't know how else to put it and again all of this just reaffirms the idea that Ubisoft is kind of conflicted with itself on what it wants to be does it want to lean into the narrative stories the linear stuff or doesn't want to give players complete and utter freedom of choice you can do either but when you try to blend the two you end up with something like this where nobody's happy because on the one hand players who were already role playing as somebody straight who would you know have babies with whoever they want to have babies with you end up with them being upset because they didn't have any agency in the decision anyways and then you have players who role played as gay or just weren't interested in this romantic option that was presented to them during the DLC you end up with them being upset because again they were forced into a decision that they didn't want to make when it was already established that players had the agency in these sorts of romantic options it's just lazy but all told to be perfectly honest I don't have a lot to say about legacy of the first blade it just is more of the same and other than this weird scandal with forcing you to have a baby that's then eventually taken away from you by Darius so that you can start over at the end of the deal see there's not a lot here I mean you play it you go through the motions and there's some emotional Appeals where you have of course a child and then also your love interest that's forced upon you gets killed and it's very sad and then Darius takes the child away but the problem is you know when you go into those emotional stories that this is just a DLC expansion and there's another one coming furthermore after you get out of this DLC expansion you're gonna go back to the regular gameplay loop which likely means that Cassandra or Alexios aren't gonna be just dedicated mom or dad they're probably gonna get the you know slate wiped clean just like at the end of a sitcom so that the next episode can start all over again and you can continue chugging along your merry way but with all of that said I want to shift towards fate of Atlantis now when it's being sold for full price fate of Atlantis cost 25 dollars here in the States if you want to buy the full season pass it'll set you back 40 bucks so over half of the entire season pass is wrapped up in the fate of Atlantis so clearly the standard is set pretty high especially when you consider that $25 is not a small amount of money especially in the gaming industry when you're talking about a lot of double-a titles that will cost less than or equal that amount needless to say my expectations were high and Ubisoft talked this expansion up a lot just like they did with curse of the Pharaohs and I enjoyed curse of the Pharaohs so I was all down to have my mind blown and traveled to all of these mythical lands and fight all sorts of mythical beasts so I booted it up and whoo oh boy where do I even begin with this so like you remember how I said my favorite thing about the main body of Assassin's Creed Odyssey was that every quest had a story that's not a thing here forget that so episode 1 sets the player up in Elysium which is basically heaven for a bunch of very special people that were carefully selected by the Greek gods and it really is beautiful and furthermore it leans heavily into the isus story arc which was established back in Assassin's Creed 2's visions of Adam and Eve in the garden and honestly this blend works very very well melding the e-soo storyline and characters in with the Greek royalty and God hierarchy works really well and so in terms of tone design again world design everything like that this is a really interesting way of doing it now in terms of structure the way they've set everything up is that you have these large lifted areas that you can climb up the side of or you can teleport to the top using these small little stations I was trying to figure out why they felt the need to do this and I think it was just to give the map better look of verticality even though in reality if you were to just squish all of the peaks down all of these large plateaus down to ground level the map would be pretty much the same size and at first it seemed like it was really cool cuz you get up to this crazy high vantage point you can look over the map and see a long distance and then you see how you're basically in the fishbowl of this ocean Waterfall cave seriously I don't even know what to call it I guess it's a crater maybe what would even call this thing that the city's in but as I play more of the Elysium section in Chapter one I started to see that this was likely just to pad out traversal times because if the map were flat it would be very easy to traverse from place to place to place something which they're going to be asking you to do a lot of where as if everything is raised yes you can just climb up the side of the cliff which takes about a minute to 90 seconds to get from the bottom to the top depending on where you start or you can run around to a specific point on the map around this raised area to teleport to the top at which point you still have to climb a little bit but you can skip the brunt of it now because I'm me and I make everything more complicated than it needs to be I actually got out my phone and I timed the average difference on trying to climb up to the top of one of these plateaus five times each five times I just climbed up the side of it by hand free climbing and then the other five times I started at random spots and ran to the teleportation pillar and shot up to the top what I found was it's actually between five and ten seconds for either one of these options give or take so you're not actually saving time by running off to this specific teleportation pillar thing you can actually save more time just climbing up the side of the cliff depending on where you start so those things are kind of useless furthermore and made me realize that it likely only exists to lengthen the amount of time it takes to get from the bottom of the map to the top section where most of the quest lines will be established in these larger levels built on top of these cliffs and this was the first truly were in this hole DLC expansion that I saw because it made it seem as though Ubisoft was just trying to pad out gameplay hours by making things more tedious and good God Almighty was i right so for instance they have a ton of mission surrounding smashing statues this is about as repetitive as you can get because the statue is literally the exact same and the area that it's sitting within and the enemies are literally copy and pasted all around the map you also have the usual checklist of things you have to do in certain enemy bases so you have to go through destroy certain containers destroy this number of cargo holds from some sort of political power and then you've got to go and shoot these towers with an arrow and then you got to run around and kill three captains and then kill the one guy that's the chief of everybody it leans again into everything that most people are frustrated about when it comes to Ubisoft titles you know the idea that everything is just there to pad out gameplay hours make things more tedious go for quantity over quality another example will be something I didn't realize until I got to the DLC fate of Atlantis specifically it's something that I think is true in the main game but I didn't realize it until now this was my big realization in the middle of chapter 1 every time your character levels up it Karissa's perception increases I may tell you this every time you level up it's written in text right along the bottom of the screen and I never really thought about what that meant but what it effectively means is that it Chris's perception of different items enemies mission objectives you name it all increases so he can see farther he can see through walls and buildings and things like that I never actually thought why this was done why they felt the need to increase perception why wouldn't they just have it set on a static level well it's because they start spreading stuff out and relying on you using Icarus to discover where you need to go so for instance one of the things I loved most about Assassin's Creed Odyssey in the opening hours is the fact that characters would assign a mission unto you and they would tell you and describe to you where on the map you were you didn't just have some waypoints show up in the middle of nowhere somewhere you've never exploit before but instead they would tell you the island they would tell you some sort of landmark you had to go and find and then they told you to the south of that it made it feel much more believable and realistic and in the early hours it choruses perception was low enough that you had to pretty much get to where you were going before Icarus would ever be able to see or find that waypoint for you if anything he was sort of an afterthought he would help you once you got to the area of the mission that it was assigning you to trying to get you to go to it Chris will pop up and show you precisely within that smaller area where you were supposed to go but with the dlc by the time you're playing here your level is probably well above 4550 and it Chris's perception is going to be off the charts to the point where are hundreds and hundreds of meters away it chris is able to see your Waypoint and the game leans into this basically demanding that you instead of just exploring an area just pull it grows up he'll look around he'll pinpoint where everything is because again most of these quests involve fetching or destroying or killing a certain number of individuals people with things whatever it may be so you just end up checking off all the boxes Ikaros spots everything and then you go and tick through each of them one by one and this Elysium chapter also features one thing I hate so much in video games and that is the reduce their control in this area questline basically it's a perpetual thing that sits until you've done something vague such as reducing an enemy's control or some sort of main character's control in an area and it's done by ticking away through various tedious activities that they also assign to you in subsections of sub quests underneath the main quest it's just again tedious it's a developer's way of saying listen we know that you're plowing through the main story but we spent all this time developing side quests that you haven't been playing so go do a bunch of those and then we'll let you move on in the main story ideally your side quests should be interesting should have stories driving them should be fun enough that the player wants to engage with them for the sake of engaging with them not just because they have to grind out a certain number of XP points not just because the main quest is hard locking it behind a reduce control limit again this shouldn't need to exist and if it does exist in your game I think it's a bad sign of the rest of the questing structure and probably the smallest and simplest example of this tedium that personifies all of fate of Atlantis for me is this specific area you see there's these little items you can collect called enigma da Austria's and I know I'm probably mispronouncing that you see it's sitting on top of these pillars and it looks as though you should be able to just climb up this after all these characters able to climb up the pantheon able to climb up lighthouses cliff sides if anything this should be a walk in the park but no all of this stuff is designed very carefully so that the player can't just climb up it in order to get to this collectible item you have to literally go down cross over to the other mountain climb up it then cross over a rope this item is designed and placed in just such a way so the player while exploring will discover it see it try for a couple minutes to get up racking their brains over how they all of a sudden forgot to free climb and then realizing in order to get it they have to go down cross over to the other mountain climb up it and then cross over a single rope it's not fun this isn't a fun engaging explorative rewarding experience this is just tedious and mind-numbing and no it's not a puzzle and I get it it's an item that you're supposed to like search for and find it's not supposed to be easy to find but it's not a puzzle this doesn't require any sort of thought on the part of the player any sort of creative solutions or anything this is just a time void now another thing that started to happen during chapter 1 of fate of Atlantis that caused me a lot of concern was the fact that the game kept on crashing now I was playing on PC with a controller the way I play through pretty much all of my Assassin's Creed games and I've never had issues like this before I didn't have issues in the main game but specifically when playing through the fate of Atlantis chapter 1 DLC chapter 2 and chapter 3 all episodes of fate of Atlantis I had consistent crashes that caused not just the game to freeze but it caused my entire computer to lock up to the point where I had to shut the whole thing down I was actually talking to a friend of mine who does tech support after I had a bunch of hard drives fail erasing most of my chapter 2 in chapter 3 footage from fate of Atlantis and he actually told me it's quite likely that these crashes based on the error codes they were spitting out caused instability on the hard drive that they were being saved - which could have also impacted the stability of the drive as a whole causing them to eventually crash I don't know if that's true but it's pretty bad if if that is the case that your DLC is so broken you're causing hard drives to become unstable like that that's bad but I'll give you beefs off the benefit of the doubt after all because I don't know if this is true what he was describing was way above my realm of understanding when it comes to hardware and tech and computers stuff so I'll leave it up to him there's other things that show a real lack of polish throughout the whole DLC for instance there are many instances like this throughout the DLC that just show a consistent lack of polish but this is again where the technical issues came in because I had so many problems trying to record the footage for this critique trying to play through it with game crashes and everything normally I would go through something like this two or three times before making the critique on it however for this I've had so many problems with it if I were to do that it likely would mean that this critique wouldn't come out for another six months or so at the rate it was going but all told in my research it seems as though there are choices that do have an impact but again we know how this story has to end because we've already seen where Alexios or Cassandra depending on who you chose ends up at the end of the main game you know how it has to end you know how it is established at the end so the choices really don't have that much of an impact at the end of the day but I do want to talk a little bit about episode 2 and episode 3 now like I said I lost most of my footage for these sections especially episode 3 but I do have a couple things I want to say about them episode 2 takes you to Hades where you actually get to explore Hades which is pretty cool and in general it's a very interesting visual presentation however in terms of gameplay it leaves a lot to be desired just as with episode 1 episode 2 leans heavily into repetitive tasks into asking you to chip through a list of enemies just to pad out gameplay hours seriously if you were to cut out most of the tedium and leave it to just the bare bones and the meet the big boss fights and the interesting set pieces this DLC would likely be 1/4 the length while you're in Hades you run across several characters from the main storyline specifically around the family and this is actually kind of cool to see that these characters that ended up dying as a result of your actions whether at your hand or just indirectly from something you did or a decision you made to see them actually in Hades it's it's pretty cool actually in episode 2 actually also has some of the most interesting boss fights I've ever seen in an assassin's creed title and that's not saying a lot certainly but these things actually are pretty well polished and established and I actually like how they work pretty well they're flashy they have individualized move sets they're tough they require precise timing and they require some effort and it got me thinking maybe this is where Ubisoft is starting to shift the franchise maybe they're going to try to meld something like Star Wars Jedi fallen order and a broader exploration based title altogether with RPG mechanics sort of like blending Sakhi row with an assassin's creed title it seems interesting and the combat system has a long way to go before they get to that point and they got to cut out a lot of the bloat here in order to get something lean enough to really be usable and to be held in that high regard but nonetheless it does seem interesting and if a company that has as much manpower at their disposal as Ubisoft is going to get into these types of games I think could be really interesting to push the scope of these types of titles it could be interesting to see how it develops and given the wild success of something like Star Wars Jedi fond order with a gameplay system similar to that I think it shows good things for that I don't know if you could call it a whole genre of game but certainly a subset genre Minnie Jean of the larger action RPG genre that blood-borne Dark Souls secure ro tend to operate within and lastly in Episode two you get to deal with some very emotional moments with characters from the main game like I said you get a lot of people from the main story coming back and you get some resolution with characters who you likely established a pretty significant emotional relationship with which I'm actually a fan of now it's been a while since I went through the main game of Assassin's Creed Odyssey so not a lot of this stuff is very fresh in my mind again it seems as though a lot of these emotional appeals depend heavily on you having recently played through on you having recently seen these characters and had these emotional moments so it didn't hit me as hard as I think it'll hit some they're people but nonetheless it was cool and this is a much better emotional tactic and appeal than forcing somebody to have a baby that they're going to inevitably lose like it just this is better and in Episode three you actually arrive within Atlantis itself and it's as you would expect a very beautiful representation of the mythological city known as Atlantis and if episode one focused on exploration episode too focused on melee combat Episode three really leans into the diplomacy the branching narratives the dialogue options in fact there's probably more cutscenes and talking in Episode three than in the other two episodes combined no I'm actually okay with this specifically because they've leaned so heavily into melee combat for hours upon hours upon hours at this point thrips ode 1 and episode 2 believe it or not it can start to feel a little stagnant and so to play into a mechanism that isn't used a lot in the DLC and certainly isn't used a lot even by the end of the main story of Assassin's Creed Odyssey I'm actually really in support of it to see how much Ubisoft can apply pressure to bend and morph and mold the story and experience around this mechanism being the dialogue system the narrative choice system and the idea that the player can establish their own directives but unfortunately by the time you reach the end and I won't spoil a lot of the choices you have to make just in case you've gotten to this point and you're thinking oh maybe that's worth a try it's it's really underwhelming the choices they confront you with and more specifically the impact of the choices that they throw at you I call this Titanic syndrome because you know how it's going to end so the stakes are seemingly very low because there's no mystery mystique risk is not a thing here because you know how it's going to resolve itself you know Atlantis only ends one way you know where Alexios or cassandra has to end up at the end of this story at the end of this arc you know how everything has to resolve itself so the stakes are fairly low and furthermore a lot of the dialogue writing over at Ubisoft for episode 3 specifically is pretty bad I mean even in episode 1 at the very end of the episode there's modern-day sequences that are just downright cringy such as this one and the thing is episode 3 relies so heavily on the quality of the dialogue because it mainly focuses on the choices you're making within these dialogue sections to have anything less than stellar writing really underwhelmed the player it really undermines the experience it pulls the whole thing down makes it so it's really hard to take the story seriously when the writing is pretty black and again none of this is meant to be personal but it's just a matter of concision cutting things down and I know it's ironic for me to talk about trimming things down and making them concise I get it I'm not strong in that department but at least I'm aware of it and actively cut things down to try and get them as concise and clean as I possibly can there's moments in episode three where it looks as though Ubisoft just straight-up isn't trying anymore they're just letting the line out as far as they can go just letting the flow door drift way off into the sunset where it's never gonna be seen again just because they're not concerned with trimming things down the dialogue goes on and on and on the monologues drift for minutes upon minutes upon minutes and then at the end of this they give you some sort of dialogue option and you've zoned out to the point we have no idea what you're actually responding to and Ubisoft is in a weird position because they tend to cater to Western gamers who play Ubisoft titles and the thing is Ubisoft has a demographic that tends to lean much younger and their attention spans tend to be much shorter I'm not just making this up I actually have done surveys and polls of players in addition to testing statistically several gamers that play Ubisoft titles that I know and spacing out moments where they drifted and lost focus on certain dialogue sequences I can actually back it up statistically and the thing is when your audience has a lower attention span not that there's anything inherently wrong with that it just means that you're much more active psychologically speaking the onus is on the developer to make sure that the story can keep up with that rate of processing and moving and thinking about different things all at once you have to cater to your audience a game such as death stranding can take a long time with their dialogue and cutscenes and everything by the end of the game because the only people that will have gotten to that moment are people with a longer attention span it knows its audience and it caters to that audience but the thing is if you're gonna develop all of these DLC expansions to try and cater to the Ubisoft gamer whatever that may be usually people that are just fans of a lot of content checking off boxes they are much lower attention spans compared to somebody who's playing like death stranding for instance with 20-minute cutscenes if you're going to cater to those and then transition and try to stretch things out into five ten-minute cut scenes where dialogue is just going on and on and on you're gonna run into some trouble because like it or not you condition the player as they're engaging with your content and at this point by the time you reach episode three you're likely 70 80 90 hours into Assassin's Creed Odyssey and everything it has to offer and at that point you've been conditioned to a certain pace and rhythm of dialogue and in Episode three that goes out the window and they start writing small novelettes for each and every scene that you go into it's bizarre but at this point I want to talk about all of the DLC on a much more meta scale because there are as I said at the top very concerning things within these DLC that make me concerned about the future of the franchise like I said there are some real strange choices that were made throughout legacy of the first blade and of course the fate of Atlantis but to put it succinctly it seems as though Ubisoft is actively conflicted as to what they want Assassin's Creed as a franchise to be do they want it to be the broad open-world exploration RPG or do they want it to be a more linear stealth game do they want it to have all this magical mythical stuff in it or do they want to take it more seriously historically speaking as long as they all of these things together it creates a weird hodgepodge that leaves a lot of players feeling as though Ubisoft isn't committed to a single idea and at that point the player is not going to become committed to that single idea or to any sort of concept of the game's narrative story world universe whatever it may be because it seems as though the developer hasn't even taken the time or effort to put themselves in that position to take it seriously say what you will about the early games about Assassin's Creed one two even three Brotherhood revelation all of those games they took their story in their world very very seriously even origins took its world and story very seriously Assassin's Creed Odyssey started to really fudge it and take it for granted and play around with it a lot which was all in good fun but then fate of Atlantis and legacy of the first plate just throws all of it out the window and it just shows to me a real identity crisis now a lot of stuff played into this I don't think it happened in a vacuum I don't think this type of thing can happen just out of nowhere it seems to me that this DLC and Odyssey more broadly was a result and a reflection of the corporate attitudes of the management within Ubisoft at the time this is of course the same management that led to the eventual release of Ghost Recon break point and several other Ubisoft releases that were met with less than critical acclaim and from what's been said publicly the CEO of Ubisoft Yves geumja who's also a co-founder and a game developer himself it looks as though they're aware of all of these problems of the lack of concise identity of the weird bizarre lack in quality in some of these recent releases the rushing out the copy and paste in nature basically just the lazy development strategies that it looks as though some upper level management was employing Yves chemo has said that they're going to take steps to correct this that they're going to actively pursue ways around this sort of lazy development style that they're going to improve it which is why they delayed pretty much every game in twenty tene into 2020 and apparently I've heard some rumblings they've pushed back some games that were supposed to launch this coming spring back into the fall or even into 2021 they're really taking the seriously and taking a lot more time which you know we can roast Ubisoft all we want about rushing things out or doing things poorly and there's this problem and that problem but this is honestly the type of response that we would hope for they're taking it seriously they know that this is a problem and they're taking active steps to correct the mistake at least that's what we've we've been told that's what I've heard from people within the company it seems to be true and like I've said in the past I will criticize a company to hell and back when they do something incredibly stupid borderline evil as I've done with Bethesda a lot but that is with the strict caveat that I will compliment and praise companies lauding them excessively when they do something good because if I don't do that what worth do my criticisms actually hold if I'm just the guy that criticizes everything constantly my criticisms don't mean a whole lot and whenever I say something like that people think I'm throwing shade at other youtubers I'm not I'm just calling out something I see in the industry a lot which is that we just like to be recreationally outraged and I think that's stupid people deserve a second chance people deserve the chance to correct their mistakes including large companies that are developing something and working on things that people like you and me fans of these franchises love dearly we should all want these companies these artists these developers to improve on their craft to make improvements and fix their mistakes that's what we should all be rooting for and that requires second chances third chances that requires giving them grace praising them when they do something good but it also involves holding them accountable when something is done poorly which I feel as though the DLC for Assassin's Creed Odyssey was it was done poorly it's too bad because I really was looking forward to the DLC when I heard they were going to Atlantis I was intrigued especially when they started talking about some of the new boss fights they wanted and a lot of this stuff it was done pretty well and can tell there were some very passionate people and talented artists working on this project but the direction the writing across the board it just seems as though this thing was rushed out it wasn't given the time and the attention it deserved or needed and it leaned into a lot of old habits that Ubisoft I thought had dumped after origins but apparently they're back to their old ways so we'll just have to wait and see if this is Ubisoft and Assassin's Creed moving forward if origins really was just a fluke or if they're actually aware that they fell back into old ways and they're going to take active steps to be revolutionary again to try something new and different in 2020 but those are just my thoughts let me know all of yours in the comment section below thank you for watching honestly and truly I am sorry that this took so long to get out and I appreciate you putting up with all of the difficulties with regards to lost footage and weird artifact it's just this video has been the most difficult to get together and finally put out of any video in the last year and a half probably that I've made so I do appreciate your patience I'm glad we got all of this settled and done and I'm ready to move on to the full critique of death stranding again make sure to subscribe if you want to be notified of when that goes live I also have a lot of other really cool projects coming out and I'm very excited to be working with some really cool sponsors who are helping me take this channel up a notch in terms of quality in terms of content in terms of styling and the efficiency of my work it's really remarkable and I'm incredibly blessed to have amazing sponsors to have amazing viewers like you it really does mean the world to me but that's all from me me and Khaleesi thank you very dearly for watching and sticking with us all this time it means the world I love you very very much and I'll see you in the next video peace out [Music] you

Channel: Luke Stephens

Views: 1,117,370

Keywords: luke stephens

Id: UfvOLjZkGrM

Length: 169min 45sec (10185 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 04 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

I've only seen his Witcher 3 video, and I wasn't a fan. His observations were pretty basic and I'm not sure if he played the other games. What irked me was that he called his video "The Ultimate Critique". I'm pretty sure he was just trying to be clickbaity, but it irks me that he would do that.

Also, if I'm not wrong, he plagiarized hbomberguy's Bloodborne video. Which is saying something.

[u/Trajforce]

go to the gameplay section 1:07:13 and tell me from that point is the gameplay good or not?

[u/simon1996111]

Played every AC game that was launched on PC. This one has very low place when it comes to this franchise. There is a lot of reason why i don't like it and main reason is that.. it's not realy Assassin's Creed game. You're not an assassin, you're mercinery, no hidden blade, free-runing feels strange, at some point you can't even die from falling, you have some "super attacks", no eagle vision, main character can kill whole village of innocent people and nothing changes, you can devestate place that Spartans are rulling, but they still let you join them as if nothing happened, ISU technology and DLC was just ridicioulous, you fight with Hades, minotaur, medusa, cyclops.. So much have changed that it was very tiring to do this game to 100% (at least i wish i knew if i did it to 100%)