I’m sure it’s a fine game but they may as well scrap the name at this rate. At least in Origins we got…origins. Supposedly Odyssey is about the First Civilization (I guess), and the modern day is bigger (supposedly). But hey, no Assassins are present here. Ubi forgot those.
Would like Assassins in my Assassin’s Creed. Just an opinion that will get laughed off by most people, though.
Again, I’m sure the game won’t suck. Maybe it’s just them ‘testing’ out how well their naval things work with this engine, maybe in 2020 we get a huge-normous Assassin’s Creed with Assassins, Templars, a modern story, actual hidden blades, all the crazy included. Maybe.
I mean I’m one of those weirdos who liked the modern day framing device, as it was an in world explanation for the games mechanics and systems.
Not that they always lived up to the promise of the premise, but it was a good idea at core.
Honestly my issue with the name is it never felt like I was an ‘assassin’. The covert and stealthy implication of the name never materialized. And rather than try and refine the concepts from 1 to be more stealth killer, they gradually went the other way.
Still didn’t stop me from loving Black Flag, but let’s be honest. The name is really little more than a bolted on marketing gimmick.
I’m always frustrated by how low effort the narrative of the AC games seems to devolve past the halfway point. You’re spending how many man-hours making the narrative in-game, can’t you guys spend like a couple of weeks worth of creative thinking about the narrative so that it isn’t a parade of MacGuffins, red herrings, inconsistent and unbelievable plot twists and deus ex machina solutions?
It’s almost like there are two plot teams.
Plot team A: the A team, good writers. They know that 90% won’t get past point X, so they spend all the effort up to X.
Plot team B: the B team, the narrative is nothing but goofy Astergo randomness and philosophical psychobabble, nothing makes sense and hand waving is everywhere. Because that’s what the 10% apparently stuck around to see?
I don’t know how well this applies to Origins. The Abstergo randomness and philosophical psychobabble was limited to three modern-day sequences that lasted all of five minutes, (unless you went wandering through the protagonist’s laptop files - something I don’t recommend unless you’re really a big fan of the AC movie with Fassbender and want to see the lame way it ties into the game) and a handful of tomb reward exposition dumps that had no bearing on the story. Bayek’s journey was really quite normal as a revenge tale, and it all rolled out with little to no AC weirdness.
What was weird was that for the first time in an AC game, the Animus glitches were acknowledged by the NPCs in the historical narrative and treated like they were actually happening.
Wow really? They connected the AC movie with the game? Actually now that I think about it I assumed Fassbender was playing Desmond, is that not the case?
Barely. You have to dig through a bunch of really boring text files on the modern-day protagonist’s laptop to see the connection. The character invents the portable Animus in the game because she’s trying to impress Sofia Rikkin, who was played by Marion Cotillard in the movie.
Fassbender’s character was someone named Callum Lynch.
I’m with @Knightsaber here, Syndicate has been (so far) my favourite AC game, and is probably the main reason why I didn’t really enjoy Origins after a while.
I love a good RPG open world-game, but I love stealthy games where I get to sneak up on my enemy from behind and instantly kill them. Call me boring (or a psycopath), but I miss that.
I guess I just have to change my mindset about the new games and try to enjoy them for other reasons, and look for my sneaky assasin games elsewhere (luckily, Hitman 2 is just around the corner).
@Knightsaber and @kristina are in the know. Syndicate was the last great AC game. Also its focus on a smaller but much more detailed map, that seemed to respect the players time was something I very much welcomed.
For AC Origins I still have probably a dozen side missions I haven’t finished, and both the DLC’s. It’s a damn big game, and I became burned out on it.
Now with Odyssey being almost twice the map size of Origins, someone has to eventually say, its too damn big…
Our compulsion to do everything labeled as an objective of any type in games like this is surely just a source of boredom. We should do interesting stuff, not the stuff placed there by 17th junior designer on the left. It’s like turning up and eating the whole buffet. When less is more, the player can handle the less part, even if the designers don’t.
Yeah, sure, me too, I mostly crept around with a predator bow and went for missions far below my own level to be able to do one hit kill them, but I don’t really think the game is meant to be played that way. Luckily, there are so many side missions that you’re basically constantly overleveled anyway.
Yeah, this, I just didn’t find any joy in playing after a while, and I still had a shitload to do. Will probably give it some more time after a while, and I’ll probably buy Odyssey as well, but… on sale. In addition, I do NOT like the ship battles I tried in Black Flag so… I’ll only be buying this for the gorgeous graphics. =(
Oh and yeah. Sure, a game can be big, as long as the content is fun and various enough. The Witcher 3 and Dragon Age: Inquisition have huge maps and a million of side quests but I enjoyed pretty much all of them (even though a lot of people will NOT agree with me on the DAI part =))
Scott Phillips, the Game Director for Odyssey, was the Game Director for Syndicate. He also was the Design Director for Saints Row 3 & IV. He knows what he’s doing, so I have every reason to believe Odyssey is going to be a great game, even with him operating inside the machine that is Ubisoft.
The stuff placed by 17th junior designer shouldn’t be in the game in the first place if it is not high quality. I hope Ubi finally learned that lesson after seeing TW3’s success.
