Good to hear. Maybe they patched it, or I was hearing/reading about Origins. I do specifically remember in Origins that there was a special vendor who would appear. If you availed yourself of his services (I never did) I think it basically took you to an Ubisoft storefront or something.
No, thats not it at all.
The special merchant, which is in Valhalla as well, is just selling parts of the same stuff you can purchase for real money IN the Ubisoft store, i.e. outfits which are just cosmetics. And with the new outfit system, no-one should ever need that.
If you really wanted to, you could run missions to earn that currency. But after running one, I was solidly convinced that the correct response was “fuck this noise.”
That vendor only offers cosmetics. You can go to the DLC store in the main menu and purchase the stupid gems or whatever they’re called and you can buy XP/resource boosters as well, but they’re really not necessary. I never bought them and I rapidly overleveled in all three games.
Funnily enough, that same kid NPC lootbox vendor shows up in Valhalla and works the same way.
The equivalent Ubi store lootbox vendor in Odyssey is that one guy near the beginning of the game, but he doesn’t offer random fetch quests. They moved that to the village statue menu.
Ok I had wayyyyy more fun tonight just following quest lines. I knew I had to be just missing something as everyone else seemed to like it so much. Maybe I’ve finally cracked the code on UBI games for myself. Stop wandering aimlessly. So silly. But there’s a question mark over there!!!
Origins is so pretty that you’re not really hurting yourself by checking out how gorgeous everything is. I can’t believe what they created. It’s so fricken huge, and the cities and the countryside look so good. I have no idea how they pulled that off.
But yeah, I feel like the Ubistuff (eh, Tom?) is there for a certain type of player that doesn’t mind doing something completely mindlessly over and over again.
Like the type of person who writes a negative review for a really good game saying “Great game, shame it was only 10 hours”. I see it as the equivalent of giving a hyperactive kid the lawnmower and going “Okay sonny, go kill some grass for a few hours”.
I put hundreds of hours into both Odyssey and Valhalla and I never felt this was the case. There is nothing you can buy with real money that fundamentally changes the game or gives you any sort of real boost in the game compared to what just comes through normal play in my experience. Pretty much all of the weapons and armor sold in the Animus shop are sidegrades–they change how things work sometimes but are not actually “better” than the things you find. In Valhalla, too, even the exact same things they sell can be had for free in the game through the opal merchant sometimes.
Did anyone play Odyssey with interface elements like waypoints switched off? Did it ever get super frustrating? Did you end up turning any of the interface elements back on?
At some point, I want to restart a playthrough with MAXIMUM IMMERSON, but I wonder how well the gameplay holds up. I wonder how practical it is to play this way.
-Tom
It’s generally fine but there’s the occasional thing you need to turn the radar back on for. Wandering NPC, hidden entrance, that sort of thing. From memory anyway. The ubigames may have run together a bit in my mind :)
The regional level bands annoyed me, and then I got stuck on a ship-based story mission I couldn’t win. That led me clean all the icons off of three or five regions over maybe another forty hours. I figured at max level I would have the right tools to beat the mission and not have to deal with people being amazingly strong demigods the next region over. Which led me to discover that the implied level 50 maximum from the map was not a maximum level. Refocusing on the story quest instead of the icons saved me from burning out. Definitely follow the character-based stories! In the course of that, you’ll learn which icons have rewards you want, you’ll see more of the world, you’ll find interesting and little-advertised encounters. Then you can focus on just the things that have become meaningful.
Playing it on the hard difficulty meant I didn’t feel empowered to fight until very late in the game. From what I remember, the post-50 tiny benefits really pulled an assassinate-in-combat build together. Presumably the game offers more success in more play styles much sooner on normal difficulty.
Thanks. Given what you and others with much longer playtimes than mine have posted, I defer to your collective wisdom about this.
To be fair, Ubi’s approach to the store stuff can leave the impression that it’s something you really need to get, but in truth it’s mostly cosmetic. Some good cosmetics, and cool stuff that is different, but in quantifiable ways identical to what you can get without money.
As long as you can find ladies to sing you sea shanties, I think you’re good as far as cosmetics.
Greece is so boring , don’t do it Tom.
Focus on one of the AC games that has lots of Roman ruins and stuff. :)
This is such a baffling statement to me. The setting for Odyssey is almost a character unto itself. It’s one of the best-realized game worlds in all of the AC iterations.
And we know that in the real world setting, there are a lot of historians who specialize in classical ancient histories who fully believe that the main reason Greece was ever settled was the inherent beauty of that area of the world.
Seriously, the landscape, lore and rest of the setting are wonderful.
I kept on annoying my wife by screaming look at this! The game is just too damn pretty for it’s own good. The computer was occupied last night so because I’m insane I installed Unity on the Xbox. Amazing how different that plays, but geez it looks pretty damn good.
I plan on going back on playing the older games by trying to stick to the stories. We’ll see how that works out. I think Black Flag is as far back I’d be willing to go without a remaster though. I’m too fancy for janky crap.
Yeah, even more so than the technically more advanced Valhalla, Odyssey is awe-inspiring in its look and general atmosphere. Epic is the word, indeed, Homeric even.
Do you literally have to turn the interface elements back on? I wonder if you’re given descriptions or general areas to search? One of these days I’m going to try a hardcore no-interface playthrough.
He’s just joshing me for a) my frequent statement that Ancient Rome is the most boring period in all of history, and b) his disappointment in Odyssey for reasons that I’ll let him spell out. I think his parents were murdered by Ancient Greeks, or something.
-Tom
Of all the AC games I’ve played lately I would easily put Valhalla in dead last for looks. Unity, Origins and Odyssey are all nicer to look at.