Assassin’s Creed Odyssey is one of the few games where choices can have an impact on the game’s world and ending. True enough, we are given many decisions to make right at the start of the game. Choices from tweaking the graphics setting, to purchasing from a wide array of outfits in the in-game store, it was not as simple as it seems. Jokes aside, these are not only the things that makes Assassin’s Creed Odyssey unique from its predecessors.
Alexios or Kassandra?
The game provides player with the choice of main characters Alexios and Kassandra at the start of the game. Both characters share the same storyline in the game and have the same romance options. Yes, this game allows you to decide who to start a romantic relationship with. This would also mean that you are able to decide the character’s sexual orientation. However, it was confirmed that Kassandra is the canonical protagonist based on the upcoming Assassin’s Creed Odyssey Novel. If you are interested to find out more, the novel will be out on 30 October 2018.
Interactive Dialogue System
The interactive dialogue system the game apart from the rest of the Assassin’s Creed franchise. For the first time, you are able to make choices that actually have a significant impact on the character’s development and the overall story.
If you have played the Mass Effect Franchise before, you will find this dialogue system very familiar. Beside the usual dialogue choices for contextual information, there are also choices that will directly impact your character or the overall story. Not to mention, these choices are permanent. One example of how the game clues you on the impact of choices would be the symbols beside a dialogue option. Choosing an “attack” option will increase your bounty and results in more people trying to kill you. With this dialogue system, players can have a more immersive experience through a bigger sense of control in how the story goes.
New Gameplay Mode
To complement the interactive dialogue system, there are now two gameplay modes available – Guided Mode and Exploration mode. Guided Mode is the traditional game mode where markers are displayed at all times and quest objectives are given to you. Whereas Exploration mode is the new game mode in which the player is required to investigate the world to uncover targets and quest objectives. Exploration mode is designed to be the way to experience Assassin’s Creed Odyssey which makes a lot of sense as it complements to the interactive dialogue system. This would encourage players to pay more attention to the dialogues. This is because it will help in uncovering the targets and quest objectives which are hidden in Exploration mode.
Gameplay
Very much like Assassin’s Creed: Origins, the game is very beautiful and the animations are still fluid and responsive. The game map is also huge, and it would take a long time to fully explore the whole of the game’s world. All the RPG element that was added in its predecessor are still in the game, albeit with some improvements.
Equipment
Full outfits are now removed from the game. Instead you can now equip individual parts of the armor. From breastplate to greaves, each armor piece will affect your character’s looks. Unlike in Origins, you do not upgrade each of your armor pieces to give a boost to your overall damage. In Odyssey, an engraving system replaces this.
Engraving
Engraving provides different bonuses to your equipment, such as the one in the picture above. To discover and unlock other bonuses, players have to complete various tasks and challenges. To the surprise of no one, you would require rarer equipment to have more engraving slots to further boost your stats. Love it or hate it, this feels very much like an RPG game.
Skill Tree
Similar to Origins, there are still 3 distinct paths – Hunter, Warrior and Assassin. New to the game are the active skills that are that can be activated through hotkeys. These skills require adrenaline points that are obtained through combat.
Above is an example of attempting to Sparta kick the boss and send him flying off the cliff. In reality, the boss just rolled down the cliff and die as it is rather difficult to perform the ones that you see in trailers.
Stealing
Stealing is now back in the game! You are now able to loot from civilian and houses. However, if you are caught, your bounty meter will increase and in turn be hunted down more often. This helps to make the game more realistic, as you can no longer just walk into a random civilian home and loot everything with no consequences.
Assassination Targets
In the mercenary menu, there is a list of assassination targets. The difference from the previous game is that each target’s strength and weakness are now shown to the player. This is very similar to the targets list found in Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor series. As such, it allows players to plan out their strategy when attempting to take out each target.
Naval Battles
Naval Battles now play a much bigger role in the game. You can now customize and upgrade your ship to increase its effectiveness in naval battle. You can also recruit soldiers by knocking them out instead of killing them. These soldiers, when assigned as lieutenants will provide bonuses for your ship. There are limited slots for lieutenants, thus deciding on who to take the slot can be difficult.
During a naval battle, you can choose to sink the enemy ship immediately or weakening the ship and boarding them. By boarding them and killing all enemies on the board, you can loot better rewards. The naval battle is also much more fluid now as your ship will automatically go closer to the enemy ship when boarding, and even when docking your ship. This removes the hassle of adjusting the ship to board or dock properly.
Conquest – Affect The Tides of War
The story of Odyssey revolves around the war between Spartans and Athenians. To integrate the story well into gameplay, conquest is implemented. As a mercenary, you can choose to help Sparta by weakening the Athenians through completing a series of objectives. How much a side is weakened can be seen through the bar representing the nation’s power in the world map. This feature helps to keep players more immersed in the story as your actions affect the outcome of the war in different regions.
No More Stuttering
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey has some improvement in CPU utilization, and despite using Denuvo, there isn’t any stuttering issues. However, the game requires a more powerful GPU especially when exploring large cities. If you are interested to find out more about the performance of the game, you can visit here.
Worth Your Money?
After a few hours of playing Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, the game has constantly amazed me with how much fun it is. All the improvements and new additions make the game feel fresh and different from the previous Assassin’s Creed games. Being able to make choices in the game, which affects the story, helped me get more immersed into the dialogues. I find myself much more interested in every dialogue that I came across.
Nonetheless, the game can be improved in certain areas. Once such example is the exploration of locations. In order to fully explore a location, all the location’s objectives have to be completed and is similar to Origins. This can get repetitive as you explore more and more areas.
If you like Assassin’s Creed Origins, I will definitely recommend you to try out this game as it has everything that makes Assassin’s Creed Origins great as well as a lot of new features that help keep the game fresh.
