This game has it’s hooks in me good. I’m not sure how to figure out hours played on Xbox, but it’s going to approach Witcher levels in a week or so.
As mentioned upthread, you can unlock female crew members along with their songs.
I didn’t read that before it happened to me. To me, that was a Red Dead Redemption crossing into Mexico moment with emergent gameplay. I had just forcibly recruited by knocking out (Shanghaied?) an all female strike force. We had some fun raiding enemy ships for the pirates. But then as a mission reward I got the female pirate crew skin. Holy cow, pulling out of that female pirate island with an all female pirate crew and then hearing them break out in song was awesome.
I like to get them singing and then go ashore or underwater. Sometimes when I get back they are still signing and it’s like these mythcal Greek reverse-Sirens calling me back to the boat.
a) It doesn’t FUNDAMENTALLY alter the course of the game, but it certainly changes some things down the road.
b) If you’re trying to min/max as a good character? Yes, you should have. Games like these always consider forgiveness in just about any circumstance to be the “good” thing to do.
Finally finished the game and all the DLC. Not going to get too deep into it, as I can be rather wordy, and don’t feel like using spoiler tags (I’ll wait until it seems like I can at least reference some stuff w/o it being too spoilery). 447 total hours according to Steam, although not sure if that’s totally accurate. Still, no complain about it being worth the money.
One thing I will mention is Layla. I don’t hate her like a lot of people seem to, but she’s definitely no Desmond. She seems very entitled - some of which is probably justified, but it’s not a good look when compared to Desmond. I’m still interested to see where they go with her character in future games. And I hope they do continue her story, and don’t just decide to end it in some other media form - like comic books - as they apparently did with the whole Juno thing. Terrible idea.
Spoiler Alert for main story, when you come back to Athens…
Nooooooooo! Phoebe! And there goes the last of my humanity. Now I’m a killing machine, both Sparta and Athens will die. Man, I hate seeing little kids die in fiction.
So unless I missed it, no one has talked about the combat in super detail. I personally love it. I love the variety of weapons, I mean almost everything is there. Daggers, short swords, long swords, spears, long axes, staves, sledgehammers. . .
One thing I really like is that the DPS stats are a rough estimate. If you can’t connect with the enemy then the DPS doesn’t matter. This means there are some weapons that I find much easier than others, and get into a rhythm with. For instance, I thought I liked the spear, and it’s great for poking, but I don’t like it’s mega attack (rb+rt on Xbox). It twirls around too much. Now the long axe! That’s a spicy meatball mega attack, it smashes straight down and you can chain it super well. I’m also starting to love staves, their normal attack animations really do it for me, they are way quicker than say, a sledgehammer or axe. The daggers are hit or miss, I feel like they are great for close up interruptions but terrible when your enemy has a lot of orange charging/shoulder drop attacks. The swords seem all around balanced, great for fighting men, not so much beasts. I never use them for the big hunts, that’s a spear/axe job.
As for abilities, I’m still respeccing occasionally to mess around with them. I have decided I more or less don’t like the bow abilities besides predator shot. Triple shot and the raining arrows one don’t seem to come in too handy very often. I like crafting the various arrows but that’s about it on that path. Would like to hear from a master archer on a good archery build. Heal thyself is required. Charge attack is required. I keep break shield on the back burner melee slot, I don’t use it much but it comes in handy when I remember. I always forget the Harrass with Lieutenant ability, I might drop that one altogether in a future respec.
I guess I more or less follow the “assassinate until you can, then tear shit up mano e mano” style of play. By the way, the Spartan kick is the second best kick ever implemented in a videogame. We all know what the best kick ever in gaming was…
Fate of Atlantis DLC is free on most (all) platforms until Sept 1. Get it while it’s hot!
As for me, I’m still loving the all-female choir on my boat. This game is more or less a sailing/ship combat simulator for me now, with the occasional foray inland, where those landlubbers lie.
I met the Sphinx last night and solved it’s riddles. Wow! That thing is cool looking. If you get them wrong, do you have to fight it? It was huge, I can’t imagine they coded a fight. I kinda wanted to though, to see what happened.
Looking forward to some more stuff like that. I have The Minotaur on my list, though the quest is level 40 and I’m not there yet.
One of my favorite parts in the game was speaking with Socrates. It’s impossible to tell how he really was, of course, but he fit the character in my mind’s eye very well. I wonder if Plato might make a cameo as that’s how we know most of Socrates actual discourses and philosophies, from his student’s writings.
Xenophon was also a bit more than “a soldier turned historian”. Also, “soldier” is not a word I would ever use to describe ancient Greek warriors, not even mercenaries, as it’s anachronistic.
It’s interesting how the game keeps pushing me to upgrade the Warrior tree. I was hoping to stick with hunter/assassin abilities, with daggers. But many of the missions are flat out melee battles, so the shield-removing ability and spear become necessities. It’s still fun, just need to re-adjust how I play the game.
Infiltrating bases is still my favorite part of the game.
Also, I’m lvl 15 and haven’t done much ship combat yet. Unlike Black Flag, there isn’t a lot of open water to traverse (so far).
