Dew want?
There’s a theory people learn when they go to business school; that the rate of innovation is inversely proportional to the cost of failure. When failure is cheap everyone innovates, when failure is expensive no one dares. I’m in the camp that believes this pressure has been slowly winnowing away at the AAA space for over a decade now. The cost to develop these games has risen to the tens of millions. No one is going to step very far out of line to try something new when they have a formula that works. (Here’s a fun party activity; without mentioning plot or characters describe game mechanics and see how long you can go before your friend figures out if you are talking about Assassins Creed or Horizon Zero Dawn.)
People like open world. They like a main quest line with lots of side quests. Achievements are rewarding and so is collecting stuff. Don’t forget the stealth and the crafting. These things are fun and as long as there is a new crop of gamers coming along every year these titles will continue to be successful. The existing audience however will probably eventually look for something new.
We live in a great time right now for indie games, and some really fun stuff is being made. Unity and Unreal threw gasoline on the fire when they opened the access to their engines. As the cost of failure dropped, the pace of innovation rose and we now have titles like Kerbil Space Program, Don’t Starve, Factorio, Prison Architect, Sang Froid, etc…
When your friend made that comment about AAA games being all scavenger hunts, I’ll bet he was really trying to say something like this.
It’s a bit of a clumsy workaround, but you might use a tablet by the side to consult wikipedia. Not as comfy as an in-game codex and maybe a bit distracting, but it does work and might very well provide better information than the Ubi discovery mode.
You’re quite correct. The D&D Player’s Handbook (3.5, didn’t stick around for 4.0 and after), for instance, doesn’t go any further than Level 20. Videogames tend to have ridiculously high levels, because they tend use them as a way of quickly rewarding players for, well, playing. Rats need their pellets.
An additional problem for cRPG’s is that they usually have far less enemy variety (whether it’s animals, humans, monsters etc.) than pen & paper RPG’s anyway. A game in a historical setting has the added problem that it mostly has to rely on human enemies. That can work, with sufficient visual variety, good AI and a relatively ‘flat’ power curve, meaning levels add only a little bit in terms of combat power, keeping even ordinary opponents dangerous, especially if they outnumber you.
Hi,
Interesting review, I haven’t run into many reviews making the point concerning gear churn, at least not the way you did. I did notice that the game throws a wide variety of weapons at you, few of which are actually from the game’s timeperiod. Makes sense if gear churn is a thing, you quickly run out of the historically accurate stuff…
Liked the second gameplay video BTW, gave me a good look at the ‘secondary’ areas in the game and their content. I’m a historian by background (not an Egyptologist, but Egypt is a pretty significant secondary area of interest to me) and I’ve been looking at AC:O gameplay videos to make an assessment of what Ubi got right and what they got wrong. So far it’s a mixed bag, but with some lovely stuff :) However, I guess it’s probably really hard for absolute laymen (and -women) to distinguish between what’s historical and what’s not in the AC:O gameworld.
Anyway, as a gamer I’m not really tempted to buy it, but I will probably get it when the ‘discovery mode’ comes out next year. See if the ‘educational’ mode is any good.
Regarding some of the things you were wondering about in that second gameplay video (the ‘birdhouse towers’, the pottery kilns, the kites etc.): most of that stuff is from contemporary, not ancient Egypt.
The pigeon towers are actually kinda interesting from an agricultural-historical perspective: in the medieval and early modern periods they played (and probably still do) a major role as suppliers of meat (stuffed pigeon, yummie!) and perhaps even more importantly, pigeon faeces used as fertilizer.
Pigeons may have served a similar role in Ptolemaic Egypt (useful as sacrificial animals too, at least to the Greek gods). However, they were housed in pigeonhouses that looked different from the contemporary ones you see in AC:O (fashions change over time, even in the most conservative of societies).
Oh, and that god you wondered about, ‘Poseidon’ with Cerberus next to him? Serapis, a Hellenistic fusion of the Egyptian gods Osiris (ruler of the Egyptian underworld) and Apis. Osiris was equated with Hades (Greek god of the underworld), and that’s why Serapis has Cerberus next to him. This is one of the details that the game gets absolutely right, btw.
I read that first as pigeon faces and thought cool! or gross! or weird!
Hey, cool, thanks so much for those details, Andreas! That’s the sort of stuff Ubisoft has put in their previous games and it feels conspicuously absent here. Which is odd given how much love they obviously put into the setting.
To Ubisoft’s credit, they probably explain label Serapis’ temple, but I don’t think they explain it. And there is a brief bit when you meet someone early in the game who takes you to Aya where he talks about a hybrid Greek/Egyptian god. I bet it was Serapis.
-Tom
This just happened to me this morning, and that sounds like the word he used indeed.
I bet Shaun Hastings would’ve had something snarky to write about pigeon poop and mixed gods.
Agreed 100%. I’m 100% against level scaling (and, actually, increasingly against levels and hitpoints…). An orc should be an orc no matter where… or when… you encounter it. Maybe there are slightly more powerful orcs, the alphas, that are stronger, or quicker, or have a better leadership AI, but still an orc nonetheless. As a more seasoned (note, I didn’t say higher level) player, orcs can still be made a challenge – just toss more of them at the player. Early in the game an orc or two may be challenging, but later in the game, perhaps 20+ are needed. Though it had levels, I thought City of Heroes did a pretty nice job of ramping up difficulty by having minion/lts/bosses and ramping up the number of villains per pack.
Oh, one thing I forgot: the ‘funeral procession’ you broke up wasn’t a funeral but a procession involving the statue of a god (taken from its shrine) visiting another deity’s temple. That would have been a major event with lots of people attending - more than the handful you’re seeing in the game.
What you made Bayek do was most certainly sacrilege. If I remember correctly, that would probably get him burned (no body for burial heheh). Maybe impalement as an alternative. Sacrilege-committers and tombrobbers (when caught) came to a sticky end in ancient Egypt (pun intended).
The absence of an in-game codex is regrettable, for sure. The discovery mode they announced will only appear sometime next year, and by that time most gamers that are likely to play AC:O will probably have moved on.
If I might make a suggestion to all those who are interested, there’s a British documentary series called ‘The Ancient Egyptians’ (2003), that gives some idea of life in Egypt from the POV from the Egyptians themselves.
The first episode revolves around a campaign in Palestine by Pharaoh Thutmoses III (so not very relevant to the history and society of late Pharaonic Egypt), but ep 2 involves tombrobbers and features the actual historical Medjay, ep 3 involves a nasty power struggle within an Egyptian temple and ep 4 involves the Apis cult during Ptolemaic times. I’m pretty sure the last ep was used as source material by AC:O.
A bit more dry but still worth it because of the magnificent 3D reconstructions is the ‘Ancient Egypt’ video provided by Italian studio Altair4 Multimedia. The studio specialises in ‘virtual’ archeological reconstructions. Some of the locations in that video are also featured in AC:O and gives a good look at these places during their heyday. Unfortunately the accompanying commentary can be a bit dry (even for my taste). Altair has placed this video on their channel here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abvJuTX0yxU
Yeah, after 25 hours or so in the game, I’m done. Sadly, after reading Toms review I know understand why I sometimes wasn’t as anxious to get back into the game, as I should be, and normally are. While incredibly beautiful, the games scenery is just that - windowdressing - while there usually is quiet a lot to do in the AC games, there is actually very little to do here, other than, as I remember thinking quite early, just chasing the questionmarks and clicing on things.
The loot system is horrible - my version came with a legendary shield and sword that I just upgraded all the time, because it was better than anything else I found.
Not being able to play as Arya…Ayea? Whatever her name is, is an incredible shame as well. The lack of ingame codex is horrible as Telefrog has mentioned several times - I’d actually forgotten how much I learned in the Ezio games, but I did…quite a bit.
Wonderful looking game, thin on gameplay :-/
So true, many locations I’ve come across look so cool, and I ask myself wtf is this?
Also each zone should have had a fort that was under control of Ptolemy, which you would liberate for Cleopatra. A huge missed opportunity.
The game went from having too much Ubistuff, to not enough Ubistuff.
Welll 25 hours isn’t such a bad ROI in my books. Most games don’t make half that for me. :)
I’m at around 20 hours and probably get a few more in, I can’t see myself lasting to Bethesda-level time investment though…
So we never get to play as the wife? That’s a missed opportunity. Shame.
Not in any meaningful way. There are a few scripted sequences where you control her, but it’s just for a few kills. She also stands on the boat during the scenes when you drive a boat.
My guess is she was deliberately held back for DLC? She’s credited with some off-screen villain kills that feel like set-ups for an add-on.
-Tom
Thanks, good (if disappointing) to know. I sure hope she is usable in free roam via DLC. What a waste after it felt like Ubi finally got a clue with Syndicate. Then again, they also added levels, a loot grind, etc. Ugh. When are they going to nail the perfect blend of world building and game play?
One -really- big one. That would have been great to play and after X happened, I expected to play that, and I was greatly disappointed that it simply ended there.
What if I told you the first two hours were filled with wonder, and shortly after that, I had a feeling that my gameplay consisted of
- opening the map and selecting nearest questionmark or synchronization area
- Close map, and beeline towards the selected part, using the compass that shows me the direct way. OR, if I’m lucky, I have a waypoint there and can just beam over there, bypassing the journey completely.
And thats it? Once you get there, its usually one of two things
- Kill a guy and loot a treasure (For some reason, this gives extra experience)
- Click 3-4 different places on the ground (“Detective mode”)
While the game IS incredibly gorgerous, I’d rather they spent some of that manpower beefing the gameplay. As it is, its like they ran out of time and didn’t put in major areas of gameplay.
I mean - Take Skyrim (Yes, I know, but there is a reason its still being played among the top 50 games on steam) - Who doesn’t remember the first few journeys there? Coming down from the cave to the first town? The trip to the barrows? I remember the first snow hit me in the face on the way to the barrow, close to where the bandits had taken over that abandoned tower - such an incredible feeling, such a feeling of massive scale.
My first adventure through the tomb was a harrowing experience that took 3 hours(1) because I was sneaking the whole way, and was deadly scared.
Hell, one of the mest interesting experiences in Skyrim is when you are told to go to the wise men at the top of the mountain. You DO get a waypoint marker,but man - that journey around that incredibly massive mountain - the struggles on the way, against bandits, weather, finding me way? The quest itself was nothing special, but the journey? Oh man, the journey was incredible -. looking at your map , not to find a new questionmark, but to figure out how the hell you got there, because GEOGRAPHY MATTERED, just like in the real world - THAT is worldbuilding, and makes the journey interesting.
In origins - it does not matter.
Ah. As soon as I heard the game added loot levels, I knew this is how things were going to turn out. They went on hiatus only to learn the wrong lessons.