I wanted to avoid complaining about specific mechanical and design issues as they pertain to my personal dislike for them. As much as I absolutely loathe grinding and preparing for some big encounter only to have all my preparation dumped into a toilet, I’ve bitterly tried my hardest not to make too big of an issue about this when it occurs, lest I become a broken record.
I’ve been complaining about this type of stuff for years, as seen in this brief 2010 comment on the subject:
As for Bayek, I spent days grinding him up to 40, figuring that was end game given the fact that all the highest zones on the map capped out at that level. I also tend to hate boss fights, and because of this I tend to go into these things as prepared as possible: with max level, fully upgraded gear, the the best skills unlocked, etc. And yea, that was more or less all for nothing. The only time I got to use him was vs a War Elephant that was super easy compared to the the level 40ish one they dropped in an arena somewhere for me to fight. but that’s okay with me, I prefer to get my kicks from the regular game and to breeze through boss fights when possible.
I can also understand why some (lazy?) designers might sometimes want all characters to be at a specific baseline for certain encounters, so they don’t have to design or balance around a variety of builds, but it still sucks the fun right out of a game designed around these types of builds and customization.
Anyway, yea… this aspect of RPGs has always nagged at me, and I used to get more worked up about it than I do now days. I think my #1 annoyance for playing as Aya was the loss of Senu. Man I loved the utility of that stupid bird.
Lucky for me I own that too, I got both this and Odyssey on a great sale a while back. I’m playing Darksiders 3 and plan to go through a few other games I have waiting before coming back to an Assassin’s Creed game. I don’t want to burn out.
My brother has been playing his first Assassin’s Creed game on his Switch, Black Flag. And based on his experience it sounds like I might want to play that one too.
When I “takedown” enemies, sometimes they lie on the groan moaning. Does this moaning attract guards, or is it just a artistic flourish. Is there anyway to finish them off, or should I just ignore them, I can’t seem to target them.
Cleaning up my backlog I decided to play this. The framerate is atrocious. Not because of the hardware because the game reported CPU and GPU utilisation never really goes above 30% yet the framerate fluctuates between 30-60 fps (I’m on RX 480 still). So it must be a programming issue.
However, the game is interesting. Coming from Odyssey, gameplay is very much the same, except with LESS cookie-cutter forts, which is good. There is no branching dialogue tree but really Odyssey offers an illusion of choice and there is only a few meaningful choice to make, so the absence of agency doesn’t really matter. This game very much views the relationship between Egypt and Greek with the same kind of anti-colonial lens as native Americans and the English rebels in Assassin’s Creed 3. Ratonhnhaké:ton was caught between colonisers infighting, just as Bayet was caught between feuding siblings Cleopatra and her brother, both view Egypt as a tool in their powerplay. Which is fine by me because it is at least consistent with historical records.
I’m maybe about half way through the main story. Bayet’s story of vengeance is interesting, because it is consuming him and Aya was a bad influence on him by siding with Cleopatra.
Naive or indifferent? The Greeks did not preserve Egypt’s culture. The library of Alexandria housed mainly Greek knowledge. As an Egyptian, Bayet got no stake in the palace intrigue of Cleopatra other than Aya siding with her (both rulers were probably very similar as far asfar as Egyptians were concerned). As a medjay, sort of desert ranger, he really isn’t doing his job when he goes on a murderous rampage across Egypt.
When they are moaning, that means you did a non lethal takedown. In Odyssey you can move the moaning body out of the way but in Origins they stay put. If you kill them by swing a sword at them then they become corpses and corposes can be moved. This is an odd design choice and was obviously fixed in Odyssey.
Dunno, really, but it seemed at the time I was playing the game that he was too trusting and too unaware of the political intrigue going on. The Romans are definitely imperialists, beyond a doubt. The Greeks, well, it’s not like there was a single “Greece” that colonized them. The Ptolemies grew out of the dissolution of Alexander’s empire, and from I’ve read (admittedly, not a huge amount), the dynasty was more concerned with establishing a secure local base than in proselytizing Greek values. Sort of following the fusion idea more or less I guess. But in game terms, I’d agree, Bayak gets swept into stuff way outside of his ambit.
Like all the Diadochi, the Ptolemies had ambitions of restoring Alexander’s empire. Ptolemy I spent much of his time gobbling up parts of Syria, setting the stage for the innumerable wars they were going to have with the Seleukids. Ptolemy III marched as far as Babylonia in his campaigns, and his fleets campaigned in Thrace. He was unable to unseat the Seleukids, however, and the empire unravelled under his son and grandson, leading to over a century of Civil war. By the time of Cleopatra and Ptolemy XIII, Egypt was de facto a protectorate of Rome, with the throne essentially a gift from Rome to whichever dynast they favored.(Caesar himself passed the law that made Ptolemy XII a ally of Rome in return for a bribe the equivalent of a years annual revenue from Egypt) and was restored to the throne after a revolt by Gabinius, a client of Pompey (and later Caesar). Ptolemy XIII made the mistake of misjudging Caesar’s character when he executed Pompey, and the rest is - as they say - history. Cleopatra had also lived in exile in Rome in Pompey’s house so - apparently - had a somewhat better idea of Roman character than her brother.
Thanks @Soma. Now that I’m playing Cyberpunk where it’s easy to incapacitate from afar via hacking, I can see how being able to distinguish between the two is useful. Alas as far as I can tell there doesn’t seem to be a way to do it – for a while I thought maybe the color of the outline determined the difference, but after playing with it I don’t think that’s the case.
I have gone around when fighting scavengers and put a bullet in every head of every downed corpse, just on principle, those guys are the worst. Oddly, sometimes you seem to get extra XP for finishing them off.
In Cyberpunk, the dead ones usually have a pool of blood they lie in, and they don’t wiggle. The live ones don’t have the pool of blood, and usually wiggle. Sometimes it’s tough to see. I just use the Q key (PC) to weapon smash them. That saves a bullet.
So it ended rather abruptly after the point of no return. I still have a few regions and 2 DLCs to explore but I’m not sure I have the time to chew through those. Somebody in Ubisoft obviously watched Liz Talyor’s Cleopatra a bit too much, because in the game Cleopatra looks and talks very similarly to Liz Taylor in Cleopatra. Aya sounds like a South African or Dutch, I’m not sure if it is intentional. 🤣
The story probably is the weakest part of the game. The land, the pyramids, and Alexandria are the strongest. The skill tree has a lot of dead wood. There are a few skills that are super effective (like bulletarrow time bow or sleeping darts), which means there is really no point using or even investing in other skills.
Interesting. I’ve never seen anyone wiggle about. I’m playing on an Xbox Series X, so maybe that got cut from the Console versions in an attempt to save available performance for something else on the base consoles.
I heard that there was no point in leveling up for the ending fights, because the end takes place in modern times anyway. True? Or am I getting my Assassin’s Creed games mixed up.
I was definitely having a good time with it, and it certainly looked nice, but I’ve switched over completely to playing Cyberpunk 2077 at least for now.
Yeah, don’t have a console, so can’t add to the info on that. On the PC it can be really subtle, depending on how the bodies are positioned. Not helped by the fact that the geometry often causes corpses to flop and wiggle even when they are dead.
So I finally finished the plot of Origins today after 5 years+ of owning it. Pretty good story, I thought. Bayek is one of my favorite protagonists, too.
Surprised there wasn’t some long credits sequence at the end (which was the one that did that and even had the gall to make it unskippable?). I have both DLCs but didn’t start either. I take it that if I’m under-leveled for them the game boosts you as necessary.
