D:
You played this for more hours than I’ve had free time in the last 3 months!
Chi I just ignore my eagle. It feels gamey. My K just does what she does without that bird.
Chi question for you since you have conquered: How does the story measure up? Just a yay or nay.
Good Lord - how do you find all the treasure and trinkets and whatnot then?
I may be the wrong person to ask about the story, as I’ve never had an issue with the story from any of the AC games. The gameplay in the ‘modern’ section in Revelations wasn’t the best, nor was I happy with what they did with Lucy, but always thought the story was fine.
That said - I liked all three aspects of the story. Not sure what to make of the one that ties into the modern day storyline in terms of where the series goes from here (starting in at least 2020, I guess). But I certainly enjoyed my time in ancient Greece. It may never happen, but I’d love to see them revisit Italy in this style in this time period (with the Colosseum all finished and in use, or the Forum - just any of the stuff that by the time we got to the late 1400’s, it looked like it does now). Maybe even throw in the eruption of Vesuvius into the timeline (ala the earthquake in Lisbon in Rogue). But that’s really more of a where issue, not how the storyline moves on from here.
Hope that made some sense. Hard to discuss the story w/o being spoilery, and I don’t want to spoil anything.
How different are modern and ancient Greek? Is the earlier language at all comprehensible to Greek speakers today?
One of my modern Greek teachers once said that if Thucydides were to step into a time machine and travel to the present day, he’d be able to understand much of the contents of a modern Greek newspaper (we’ll leave concepts like TV, social media, etc. out of this). He would be unlikely to understand much of spoken modern Greek, however. Not so sure if the reverse would be true, since ancient Greek is more difficult than modern (kind of like the difference between Italian and Latin, but less pronounced).
Many words between ancient and modern Greek are similar. Modern Greek grammar is (a lot!) simpler than ancient Greek. The major difference is the pronunciation. For example, ancient Greek bèta is pronounced veeta in modern Greek (the letter beta now sounds like V rather than B and the eta is prounced as the “ee” in English cheek, not as the E in English bed). A lot of the sounds have shifted to ee, a process that appears to have started already in Hellenistic times.
For example, ancient dromoi (“streets”) was pronounced in the fifth century BC as you would spell it (with oi as in English oy), but a modern Greek would pronounce it as thromee (the delta is also no longer pronounced as a D but like the th in English that). Likewise, drachmai would have been pronounced more or less as drachmaye (with ch as in Loch; aye sort of as in Scottish aye), but in modern Greek it’s pronounced as thrachmeh (the ch less hard, more like the beginning of “who”; with meh as in the exclamation “meh!”).
Incidentally, in modern Greek, a hard D sound is created by combining the Greek letters ν (ancient: nu; modern Greek: ni) and τ (ancient: tau; pronounced as taf in modern Greek). This to make up the fact that the δ is now pronounced as a hard th.
As an aside, in the game, drachmae (Latinized version of ancient drachmai, plural of drachma) is pronounced as drakmee. The latter is the modern Greek pronunciation for singular δραχμή (the name of the currency used in Greece before they switched to the Euro). The plural would be be δραχμές in modern Greek, pronounced drachmes (with the -mes bit sort of like English “mess”). It sounds a bit weird to me to have the people in the game pronounce drachmae (in the subtitles) as singular (and modern) δραχμή.
Fascinating.
Indeed.
To my untrained ear it all sounds fantastically authentic.
All I remember from high school Greek is “ti touto to prachma” teach would exclaim while leaning over and offering a mind blowing view down her blouse if you had anything but your book on your desk.
Oh yes, this game sure does bring some sweet memories.
I totally expected “drachmae” to be pronounced as you indicated the Ancient Greeks would have, and hearing the last syllable as “me” like that disconcerted me.
Still, from what I’ve seen/heard at least most of the accents sound authentically Greek. The Markos character sounds a bit iffy though, as iffy as his name would have been, I guess (it’s way too Latin/Roman sounding, as is Drusilla as you point out).
Well, something can be inaccurate, yet still feel authentic. From what I’ve seen of Odyssey, there are plenty of inaccuracies (from the armour and equipment, which often veers wildly into sheer fantasy, as well as the ridiculously oversized Zeus statue on Kefalonia), but it still feels, overall, true to the spirit of the time period it tries to evoke (as far as I have been able to experience thus far, which isn’t much).
An example of something that doesn’t feel authentic (which is a much graver sin for a piece of popular entertainment, in my opinion, than featuring inaccuracies) is Wrath of the Titans, the sequel to the rebooted Clash of the Titans. The story leans into the deaths of the Olympian gods, which is decidedly not a theme from Greek mythology, and so makes the whole movie feel inauthentic as a consequence. (It would have been far more fitting for a movie based on Nordic mythology.)
h Yeah AC:O wears it’s being a videogame on its sleeve. The weird armors and weapons, superpowers such as not taking any damage from jumping off of mountain cliffsides or magic spotter drone eagles… or the chaotic messes of set piece battles. No lines in there to speak of, tho people do break off and run away once one of the bars reaches zero. They’re not dropping all their heavy bronze kit when doing so tho.
I don’t think the role women often play in the game is very authentic either, but it makes for an excellent bit of 21st century pop culture that shows how far we are coming in that aspect of human nature. (IMO)
To me the Greek accents and soundbites for people in the streets are awesome coloring. They make the experience feel real or at least Greek as fuck. Like something you’d dream up while teach is droning on about the intricacies of the grammar of a long dead language and you’re staring at one of those beautiful big plates of the acropolis as it would have looked in 345bc.
Wow, I just realized that Acropolis works out to be “city in the heights.” /slaps forehead
Reached an interesting point where I’m levelling rapidly. That means I’m rapidly out levelling my equipment… So I grind quests to get mats to upgrade my gear, only to level even faster.
It is a vicious circle.
Yep. For a while there I was cringing every time I gained experience. It was all I could do to keep my main gear leveled. Once you reach a certain point though, it doesn’t cost as much to upgrade your gear.
Are you being vague for spoiler reasons, or does the cost curve just level off eventually? If the former, feel free to spoil it for me so I know when to start upgrading en masse and stop scavenging for weapons.
Ha ha! I was being a bit vague about it. Blacksmiths reduce their prices as you make your way up the mercenary chain. Think that has something to do with it. I also had a lot of bounty quests running in the background that got completed while I did other things.
I also pretty much wore purple gear as I leveled as it seemed to cost less to improve than legendary gear. After a while, I only upgraded my key weapons and warrior gear. I never bothered upgrading assassin gear.
I hit 50 pretty early and a lot of that pressure goes away at that point. Still, leather always seems to be in shorter supply for me than the other materials.
Well, that would be hard to do! We know from e.g. the poetry of Archilochus that the thing they’d get rid of first, if they had to flee, was their heavy shield. It’s fr. 5 West (here in the translation by M.L. West):
Some Saian sports my splendid shield:
I had to leave it in a wood,
but saved my skin. Well, I don’t care—
I’ll get another just as good.
Wonderful bit of pragmatism.
Women didn’t have voting rights and were mostly expected to stay at home (while the man was mostly outdoors). Of course, it’s all fairly relative: women of lower class would have been expected to help out on the farm or to help their husbands in their workshops. (It’s been argued that in pottery workshops, it would not have been uncommon for men to make the pots and women to paint them.)
It’s complex, in other words. I mean, Athena is one of the major deities in the Olympian pantheon – a warrior-woman, with wits to match, who has no trouble besting Ares in combat (as per the Iliad). Artemis is a skilled huntress, who doesn’t accept any bullshit from men (viz. the unfortunate Actaeon). Then there’s the heroine Atalanta, who took part in the Caledonian bull hunt – plenty of female role models, even though Atalanta’s story can be read as a man ultimately “taming” a “wild” woman. Women also served as priestesses in temples dedicated to female deities, which was an important (if not very influential) position.
And the argument can be made that whatever is produced about the ancient world doesn’t just reflect that time period, but is (or should be) relevant to the modern day. This is the argument that there is no objective science/scholarship: even deciding which period to study and what to write about are deeply subjective choices, which you generally make because you want to figure something out. (Obviously, in scholarship, you have to stick close to the sources – in entertainment, you’ve got more leeway.)
Whenever people asked me why I studied ancient Greek warfare, my reply was that I didn’t understand why people waged wars against each other, and I figured that studying it in a culture remote in time and space would help me to better comprehend why people fight. (And no, I didn’t get any real answers to my question except that wars are complicated things and people tend to be selfish and greedy.)
I picked Cassandra in Odyssey and I think they’ve handled her well. As far as I know, there are no female mercenaries in the sources at all (Artemisia of Halicarnassus, a Carian queen who commanded her fleet personally, comes close), but considering the female deities and Atalanta, as well as the mythical Amazons (a society of female warriors), it doesn’t strike me as all that far-fetched. Among the Spartans, women were also encouraged to exercise and learn how to fight – not because they were expected to join the men to fight, but rather because of the belief that they’d birth stronger, more capable sons.
Cool, thanks. Come to think of it, all of the female greek deities are pretty fucking badass. I always enjoyed the shit between Hera and Zeus. He often came off the buffoon in that.
Notice how Cassandra is about the first female protagonist in a major triple A production who does not have huge barely bare breasts jiggling all over the screen. That IMO signifies a coming of age of the medium, its no longer only made for 15 year old white boys jacking off to memory images of their Greek teachers :p
Josh we would all love a live view with you and the archeologist wife. I would have bugged you about it already until I played the game to level 20 or so and realized: It is a game not a ancient Greek sim.
That said I would love to see you in a live cast or vid telling us what is bad or good in what is probably the 2d best realized open world game ever.
I miss a shield.
A word about leveling and gear. There was a time early on when I switched to playing Easy mode. Partly to move the story along faster, some fights just seemed stupid long vs. damage sponges but partly too as I was so clumsy with the controls. But at some point, late 20s levels, I tried Normal out again and found I no longer had a problem. Again, partly I was getting better at the controls but also I had some good abilities and some 2/3 and 3/3 which let me control fights and health much better.
When I went to Easy mode I stopped worrying so much about keeping my gear up and just used what I found; Legendary and Epics when I could but Rares too (and engraved of course). But I stopped spending the drachmae to keep the gear up to level. And because I was on Easy a lot of gear I found was 4 levels below me but it suited me fine.
I’m level 40 now and since going back to Normal with fights and rewards just 2 levels below me it feels just like Easy. Fights might be a bit harder but all my gear is a bit better too. Long story short I saw no reason to even “upgrade” gear to my level and continue to see no reason. The one thing that I’ll do it for is when I get all 5 pieces to a Legendary Set that I want to wear I think.
Amazon set! rawr!