In the following lines you’ll find a message from Assassin’s Creed Odyssey’s Creative Director Jonathan Dumont -
Reading through player responses of our new DLC for Legacy of the First Blade, Shadow Heritage, we want to extend an apology to players disappointed by a relationship your character partakes in. The intention of this story was to explain how your character’s bloodline has a lasting impact on the Assassins, but looking through your responses it is clear that we missed the mark.
Alexios/Kassandra realizing their own mortality and the sacrifice Leonidas and Myrrine made before them to keep their legacy alive, felt the desire and duty to preserve their important lineage. Our goal was to let players choose between a utilitarian view of ensuring your bloodline lived on or forming a romantic relationship. We attempted to distinguish between the two but could have done this more carefully as we were walking a narrow line between role-play choices and story, and the clarity and motivation for this decision was poorly executed. As you continue the adventure in next episode Bloodline, please know that you will not have to engage in a lasting romantic relationship if you do not desire to.
We have read your responses online and taken them to heart. This has been a learning experience for us. Understanding how attached you feel to your Kassandra and your Alexios is humbling and knowing we let you down is not something we take lightly. We’ll work to do better and make sure the element of player choice in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey carries through our DLC content so you can stay true to the character you have embodied throughout.
Seems like a nuanced, fine response to me. Good for them.
As for the main character being black, there are two arguments. The first is it’s ancient Greece and that wouldn’t make any sense. And the second is screw that noise, people should have the ability to play characters that represent themselves. I lean towards the latter myself, but don’t have strong feelings on the matter.
This is the DLC episodic weirdness interfering with the story line. In the end Kassandra has that magic staff from her father, which means she will live forever as long as she has the staff, so mortality isn’t really an issue for her.
Also by the end depending on player choice, her whole family can be sailing around Greece with her: adoptive father and brother, blood brother and mother. And Ubisoft is telling me they have NOTHING to do with her baby? Come on.
If the DLC is set BEFORE the ending, then it would make sense. And frankly I thought Natakas isn’t a worthy mate for the demi-goddness Kassandra, maybe Darius is. But then, who am I to judge? It is like having an opinion on my mom/dad/brother/sister/BFF’s choice of new mate, I can have an opinion but ultimately I respect their choice and judgement.
The lack of coherence with the main game bugs me infinitely more than the whole play agency issue. My agency in Kassandra’s life is pretty much dictated by Ubisoft, so I respect whatever choice Ubisoft made to the story of Kassandra. The story of Kassandra is Ubisoft’s story, I’m just here for the ride. It is like ME3 all over again: people only want what THEY want, never acknowledging that we as players are given agency over Kassandra/Shepard in so far as the developers allow it. They are never “our” character in the first place.
And bugs. I have as many CTD playing this 5-6 hours DLC as I did playing the ENTIRE vanilla game.
“Since the story is choice-driven, we never force players in romantic situations they might not be comfortable with,” Dumont says. “Players decide if they want to engage with characters romantically. I think this allows everybody to build the relationships they want, which I feel respects everybody’s roleplay style and desires.”
In a completely authorial control manner, you are correct. The consumer of any media can only claim “ownership” of a character or story as far the creator lets them. In this case, Ubisoft’s own marketing set players up to fail. Or, more accurately, Dumont set himself up.
I love the disconnect between…‘Hey, let’s go kill a bunch of people’ and ‘please be sensitive about my life choices’. Looking for both of those things from the same source…huh.
That’s the issue of giving more and more player freedom, that the story permutations the developers have to do increase more and more (and this game isn’t precisely Fallout New Vegas), or alternatively, your story is more and more limited and generic. ie: if you can define race, sex and gender of your MC, the story can’t mention or use those features.
Update: Ubi is patching the game to rename the Achievement/Trophy “Growing Up” to something else based on the complaints that child-bearing is not maturity.
I mean, I agree with the thought that having a child isn’t 100% related to maturity, but really, who cares? Was there any internet outrage because something that small and irrelevant?
How so? You think there were no black people in ancient Greece? While they might not have been a common sight, the ancient Greeks were familiar with them, and there’s no reason to believe there were no black people in Greece at all, as even in ancient times, people were remarkably mobile. (Here, read this from the Met as a starting point.)
The internet outrage over some facial animation was so bad that it cancelled all DLC and, for the moment, any future chapters in the Mass Effect saga - why would this be a surprise?
