Origins would be good for the History mode. I did love wandering around all the cities.
I enjoyed both Origins and Odyssey - despite being Ubigames [tm], there was some real history-nerd love baked into both games. And borh games are gorgeous.
I liked Origins too, though I think it suffers from the plot being tied to things that are both more widely known and which have a huge body of scholarship around them. Namely the stuff tying in with Cleopatra and Caesar, and all that. Kassandra’s Greece, while resting on a historical foundation, is suffused with myth and legend and even the ancient historians out there won’t feel too pushed into a corner by the way things are handled.
Yup. I didn’t really care for Origins and Valhalla, but I loved Odyssey. Even then, there’s so much content that even loving it I grew tired of it after 100+ hours, but I still think of it fondly. I might even come back to play the DLCs eventually…
Odyssey and Origins are both impressive as far as art design, scale, and the amount of stuff to do.
I only played each for about 12 hours, though I played them both twice from the beginning, and from that limited play time, Kassandra and Bayek seemed to be the best characters in any AC game I’ve played, especially Kassandra.
And still, Valhalla is the one of those three modern AC games I’ve played the longest. Haven’t finished it, but must have put at least 40 hours into. It’s not for the main character Eivor, nor the environments (it’s also a great looking game, but Greece and Egypt appealed to me more), or story. The gameplay loop just hooked me, and I didn’t feel so overwhelmed with side quests and activities which is what happened with the others.
(I also think Eivor is underrated - he starts off as one of the dullest AC characters, but over the course of the game becomes likeable; there’s also some humor and silliness sprinkled throughout, so like espressojim says about Odyssey, Valhalla doesn’t always take itself as seriously as it first seems).
I too have a soft spot for Origins, and especially for Bayek,whose actor absolutely killed it in the role. If by the plot ending in the Ubi trash can you mean that contrary to history, Aya ends up stabbing Julius Caesar dead, fine, but I really appreciate the bittersweet ending to the Aya and Bayek relationship.
As to Odyssey, I’ve liked a lot of what I’ve played of it but I really wish they hadn’t gone and over-complicated the gear system for min-maxers (and, let’s face it, probably to work more MTX in there somehow for $$$). I liked how Origins just let you find cool weapons, use them and raise them as you leveled with sufficient in-game cash.
I mean the whole ending goes… off the rails, imo. It sort of works in that there are characters and things are happening and decisions are being made. I don’t think the many endings work at all. I also the actual effort at making the endings themselves went down. I remember a sequence that would take 3 minutes to load, then the camera would oan down, then a character would grunt, then the camera wood pan up, then it would load for another 3 minutes, it was hilariously uncinematic.
I leaned from Odyssey the way to use gear is to utterly ignore the text on the gear and just scroll around and watch which numbers go up or down on your stats. Aside from some specific counter examples that’s the best way to treat gear, as a boost to your number. I also more or less ignore the armor value - it generally doesn’t matter, the things that kill you hit so hard a little more armor doesn’t matter.