Assassin’s Creed Odyssey (Gaming)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Saturday, December 29, 2018, 13:09 (2163 days ago) @ cheapLEY

Just picked up ACO (on sale for $40 CAD on the Xbox store) and I’m absolutely loving it so far.

It’s a mechanical sequel to AC Origins, so if you played much of that game, you’ll have a basic idea of what to expect.

It starts off much better than Origins did (I thought Origins was downright BAD for the first ~6 hours, but then it begins to find its stride). So far, Odyssey has a better narrative thrust to kick things off, some interesting mechanical layers added on, and the world is jaw-droppingly gorgeous. Oh, and ship combat is back in a big way, including the “board the enemy ship” stuff from AC Black Flag, and it’s just as addictive now as it was then.

Also like Origins, AC Odyssey has a quest-chaining system unlike anything I’ve seen in any other open-world game, and the loop it creates is super compelling. I find the quest systems in most games usually work like a menu at a restaurant. I’ll look at my quest log, pick an activity that I’m in the mood for, complete it, then go back to the log and pick another, and so on. But with these newest AC games, I’m constantly stumbling across new quest items mid-mission, and I often allow myself to be diverted by them (rather than stating focused on the objective I’d started with). So I’ll often pick a quest item to get going, and then 3 hours later I’ll end up completing that mission after encountering and completing a dozen other objectives, all without ever leaving or aborting the mission I first started with. It makes it a difficult game to put down, because there are so few clear-cut breaks in the action.

I’ve heard that the game suffers from a lot of bloat and redundancy in its middle hours, so I’ll see how it goes. But so far, I’m having a great time with it.