Assassin's Creed Odyssey - It's time to Greek out

LK! I think I might try m/kb again today. That would sure make the bow easier. Lotta keys to press with m/kb though.

Plus I use the arrow keys for movement. God only knows why I never got used to wasd. I may try mouse a few minutes.

Iamdisappoint.jpg

Also news on AC3 remastered!

https://assassinscreed.ubisoft.com/game/en-us/news-updates/336067/assassins-creed-odyssey-post-launch-q-a

My odyssey is over. Such a great game, I’m sad to see it done. Definitely my favorite of the series, and my GOTY. I wonder where they will go from here, and if any future entries in the series will be able to match the joy I got from this one.

My prediction is Asia, assuming the broad format stays the same.

If it were me I would swap round a few other things.

Such as?

Just tweaks. I think I might try more explicit time travel. At the moment you go to other eras and are very much of that era. I wonder what sort of story you could tell if you kept your original identity, like a more typical time travel story. Not because I think that’s ‘better’, but 11 or 12 ACs in I think the series needs to keep switching things up. Maybe worlds are smaller, but there are different periods you can access. Not too different in concept from the modern sections they’ve always had, but make all the times adventures rather than offices…

I’d also include a less lethal combat tree :/ Just make your bare hands a weapon option that is always there alongside the weapons equipped.

I might experiment with flight too. They’ve added it in to the Far Crys, but in the AC, Ikaros gets all the air time. :) I wonder how actually transforming into an eagle would fit in…

Which is quite necessary - it always bugged me how 300 straight-washed the Spartans into this very modern, very US-centric idea of masculinity that totally was not in line with ancient Greece.

I find it fascinating that when sailing near Chios you can see (but presumably not actually reach) the Turkish coastline. Has anyone actually tried to sail that way? What happens?

Tom tried on his Friday stream and you hit a sort of invisible smokey wall.

Sounds like the usual No-memories-beyond-this-point wall.

I think the Adrestia should have a little captain’s boat lashed on, that I can step into rather than having to swim ashore half the time. Preferably with someone else to row.

I started writing my series on Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey. The first article is out now.

More to come; comments welcome.

Great write-up Josh! I love this under the picture of K (a direct quote from the linked article by JoshoB):

“Kassandra says “Malaka!” a lot. Malaka is a modern Greek curse word, used like you would “asshole” in modern English. It can be used to call someone names, but it’s also used to joke around with people you know well. If you step off the plane in Greece, it’s likely to be one of the first words you’ll here. Curiously, in the game, Kassandra also uses it as an expletive analogous to English “son of a bitch!””

I admit I have started to say Malaka a bit in real life. Looking forward to more. Especially how well you think ancient Greece is depicted (animals, housing, etc)

Patch 1.07 out today. Raises the level cap, adds the ability to cosmetically adjust armor, adds some questline thingy.

I’m getting some kind of dissonance every time I remember this is a single player Ubisoft game.

Generous initial content? No overbearing narrative framing. No in-game annoyance attempting to get you to use some out-of-game boondoggle? Constant bug fixes? Free additional content? Who even are you, and what did you do with the real Ubisoft?

RH maybe they learned not to be such big Malakas.

That’s a great start! I like the historic context of national shield emblems, the (relative) roles of women, ect, use of modern pidgin Greek (Americanized with no case endings) vs ancient Greek.

A few possible topic ideas i’d be interesting in reading on.

Accuracy of day to day clothing? You already mentioned the often anachronistic armor types.
Wood vs. stone temples? Gilded artwork?
Accuracy of painted temples? We know they were painted, but do we have any ideas how?
Relative layout of cities? Were Greek cities walled? Are there any archaeological finds about the actual layout of streets in ancient Greece? In the Origins discovery tour they used the sketches of an archaeologist (?) to reconstruct Alexandria.
Relative accuracy of size of Trireme? (I don’t expect much here from the game, but just curious).
More Sparta vs Athens comparisons. Size of cities in-game vs archaeological evidence? Differences between Doric and Attic Greek? How comprehensible were they with each other?

And done. 126 hours for this one compared to a paltry 99 for Origins. I was more brutal in Egypt and more mobile in Greece. Those ‘99% complete’ markers are annoying me now. I did everything dammit :)


A good time was had. Well done Ubi. Now wait a couple of years for the next. Or give Far Cry the same kind of reboot.

More obnoxious to me was turning them into these stalwart defenders of freedom, when from all I read they were murdering bastards who slaughtered their slaves for fun and who kept an entire population subjugated along lines that would have made American slave-owners complain about the inhumanity. There’s a brief gesture in this direction in one quest I recall, but for the most part the game keeps repeating how they preserved Greek freedom.

Actually all of the greek world held slaves, often people who lost a battle here or there. The Spartans were exceptional in that they had an entire stratum of their society in slavery, the helotes.

But not that exceptional, because the same sort of societal organisation is found in medieval Japan, pre-industrial Russia, everywhere the peasantry or serfdom was bound to their land and property of their lords who had complete discretion in how to deal with them including selling them like cattle or murdering them on a whim.

I’ll probably deal with all of those issues sooner or later! I actually had a bit about the clothes in this first article all ready, but I scrapped it to save for later. For example, Markos has some really weird golden “buttons” that keep his chiton together!