The Thread where I air my grievances with the Assassins' Creed series SPOILERS EVERYWHERE

[Dalisclock]

Anyway, they pull the data off the spear and it goes to the Battle of Thermopylae where you play as Leonidas reenacting 300 with the spear, which gets snapped when Leonidas gets killed and then ends up in the hands of his son, Daughter, who gives birth to two kids, the younger of whom is then demanded to be murdered by creepy masked dudes who are....wait for it, PROTO-TEMPLARS! And it goes wrong and the both kids fall off a cliff near Sparta and the older ends up in a boat and ends up on an island on the ass end of Greece called Kefalonia, where Kass grows up being cared for by a local dipshit named Markos(and she still has the spear, which she uses instead of the hidden blade). Anyway, years pass with Kass being Markos/Cousin Roman's personal enforcer and there to bail him out when he predictably pissed off the wrong person and/or does something stupid(this is implied to happen quite often) until Kass runs afoul of some mysterious shady dude and that sets her on the trail to leave the island on an assignment to kill her dad. But it turns out the shady dude was also a member of the shady masked proto-templars called the Cult of Kosmos who all hang out under the Temple of Apollo at Delphi and do bad things all over greece because they're dicks(but they're basically Templars, so I repeat myself).

So after taking way too fucking long to explain how the plot opens because this plot kinda dumb in how it's set up and justified, the plot splits into 3, which is arguably something new and interesting for the series, in theory at least. The main thrust of the plot is the family plot. Kass runs around Greece looking for her scattered family and eventually meeting them all, including her brother Alexios who is known as Deimos(Terror) and works as the Cults Dragon(He doesn't run it, I'll get to that in a moment) in addition to being violent and deranged(as opposed to Kass, who's just heroically violent because she kills people for money and when she doesn't like them). Interestingly, because of the choice system, you can end this storyline and the main plot with your entire family alive and reunited, all dead with Kass as the only remaining member of her family or somewhere in between, which is determined by a few key choices that, like the Witcher 3, will show results hours down the line.

The 2nd plot is the Cult of Kosmos, where you hunt down the entire cult, but often by hunting down minor members to find the location and identity of major members to eventually work your way to the one in charge(AKA not Deimos). Now, some of these guys you'll end up killing per the storyline, but a good majority of them you need to do some work to find and kill and they're 42 of them scattered all across Greece. This makes up the majority of the Assassinations in this Assassins Creed game and while you can kill some of them as you work your way through the plot, you can't actually finish this plot until likely after you finish the main storyline due to the level gating, as in some of the bigtime cultists are near level 50, which is about the point most gameplay missions top out(even though the levels go up to 99 but that's mostly for bragging rights and so you can unlock the entire skill tree). So this is arguably the longest part of the game.

The 3rd and final plot you don't actually bump into until about midway through the game and while it's the shortest it's also heavily level gated so you probably can't finish it until after you beat the main game because of how high your level needs to be. So basically at one point you're directed to visit a very desolate island in the middle of the map, one that looks like it's been destroyed by a volcano. On the island you find a large door opened by solving a big mirror puzzle that's been there....I don't know, A couple years or a millennium or perhaps more.I have a bone to pick with this particular bit that I'll get into later. Once you get the door open, you end up in a huge ISU temple looking out into a sunken ocean city and meet a mysterious man, Pythogeus, who holds the staff Layla was looking for. And he's also Kass's real dad and also this is Atlantis, or what remains of it.

So you're given the task of finding the keys to Atlantis in the form of 4 ISU golden magic balls scattered around the map. But unlike the other ones, these are SPECIAL. It turns out that in addition to being keys, these ones also turn humans who touch them into huge suspiciously familiar monsters. Notably the Sphinx, the Minotaur, the Cyclops and Medusa. And anyone who manages to kill one and picks up the magic ball(now freed from it's human host) then turns into the same monster. This doesn't work on Kass because she's full of ISU genes and special. Basically, Kass might as well be an ancient aliens Demi-God in the setting, apparently being the most powerful of the Protagonists in the entire series because she's got the most ISU genes(remember kids, training and smarts and environment don't make you special, it's having all the right genes. And that's totally not cringy).

Anyway, basically Kass needs to find the 4 monsters and defeat them to get their special ISU balls to put in the big Atalntis gate to do something that I don't remember. Oh, to get the staff, which then makes her immortal while she holds it. And to feed into the Atlantis DLC. And they do make interesting boss fights and are thematically placed well. The minatur is in a huge ISU laybith under Knossos on Crete(though why the iSU would build a massive Labyrinth is unclear since you fight the minotaur in an arena beyond it), the cyclops is in a cave on an island, the Medusa is in a Petrified forest on Lesbos and the Sphinx waits near Thebes. Interestingly the Sphinx is a riddle contest and when you solve her riddles correctly, she dies(if you don't, she insta-kills you). There are also a few other cyclops on isolated parts of the map, but these are basically just boss battles with no real purpose. One is fought in a volcano and another in a bay full of shipwrecks).

 

[Dalisclock]

The Peloponnesian War is going on pretty much for most of the game and except for a few bits doesn't really matter much. Mostly it's an excuse for sea and land battles, a few of which you have to participate in but most you do not. In addition to this there is a bunch of other stuff to do. Like how AC4 followed up AC3's ship combat by letting you sail around the map in your own upgradable ship, Odyssey follows up Origins by doing the exact same thing. And yeah, it's fun, but the ship is mostly a money sink to give you something to spend all your cash on after upgrading your gear because nothing else in the game is that expensive.

Aside from that, there's a whole mechanic where you kill mercenaries that roam around Greece and since you're also a mercenary(the Eagle Bearer, because you have an eagle that acts as a drone cam for you) killing other mercenaries that rank higher than you to improve your ranking and also get cool shit and buffs. Technically the mercenaries also act as a deterrent to you getting caught and causing problems because you get a bounty on your head if seen doing shit, but you can just pay off the bounty from the map screen and make them go away. Otherwise you have to deal with mercenaries showing up at the worst time(normally when you're trying to sneak around somewhere) and those guys must have a GPS transmitter on you or something because they seem to know EXACTLY where you are when triggered. Origins had something like this as well but it was in the form of 10 wandering elite mooks, one per region, but when they were gone they were gone for good. Here the game has a ton of them and even when you kill one, another one is generated to fill his/her spot in the rankings. It's a whole game within the game like a knock off of the Nemesis system from the Shadow of Morder games but not as good or interesting.

On a related note, you can also knock mooks over the head and recruit them for your ship crew. If this sounds familiar, it's because MGS5 did much the same thing, except this game doesn't have a fulton system and you're not Big Boss(well, yes, I know technically neither was Venom but still...). It's fine, it's meant to boost your ships ability in battle but mostly you never see these dudes again once you recruit them and you can also recruit certain NPCs to join your crew and they tend to have much better stats and skills then the randos you shanghai.

There's a ton of shit I could go on about this game and I'm not even sure where to start honestly.

 

[Dalisclock]

I guess I should start with the way the game is constructed. So as mentioned before, this game differs from earlier games which had main missions and side content by having the Family plot, the Cult plot and the Atlantis plot that run mostly parallel with each other. On the bright side, this sometimes means you can jump around and you don't have to do the cult or Atlantis plots if you don't want to. Though you're pretty much gonna finish the family plot first because it requires the lowest leveling to finish, while the other two need somewhat higher levels to complete. On paper this sounds like it could be a good idea because it's spread out and much of it is optional. What this really translates to is being unfocused as hell.

The game is already quite huge and long because the family plot has this annoying tendency to stop your progress and ask you to go do 3 things in different regions before letting you proceed to the next plot point. It does this a couple times, eating up hours of your time, even if you know where the next plot point is located, no you can't just go there and trigger it, you have to do the 3 things. Now add it multiple more hours to finish the Cult plot by finding and killing all 40ish members so you can find out who runs it and what they want(and granted, it's kinda interesting what you get at the end of that because I thought at the time it implied history was supposed to go differently and somehow you sent history down the wrong path or something). With that done, go do the Atlantis plot which is basically 4 boss fights that you need to be high level for(like the last one is around level 50, which is endgame level. Everything above 50 is gravy for getting more skill points) and you'll probably want to do this because, well, getting the Staff was Layla's original goal with doing this whole animus thing and Atlantis directly ties in with the 2nd DLC, and on man do I have things to talk about there. So to really finish the game by finishing the story content, yes, you have to do all 3 plots and that will push your game out past 50 hours even before you start the DLC.

Unlike the earlier AC games(like all of them up to this point), you now have the binary choice of Kassandra or Alexios and whoever you don't pick gets cast as the Villian. I mean, on it's head that's fucking wierd, because the stated reason is because you've got 2 DNA samples to pull from and whichever one you pick ends up being the hero(as opposed to picking one and playing as the villian and picking the other and playing as the hero, which honestly would have been far more interesting) but you can just handwave the animus was furiously chugging it's little mechanicqal heart with a fuckton of Greek history filling in the gaps like frog DNA in a genetically engineered dinosaur. What's far weirder is that no matter which one you pick, the inherent sexism of Ancient Greece kinda exists but not for you. Among other things, it's stated women aren't allowed to compete in or even WATCH the olympic games. Of course, there's a fucking subplot where you are required to compete in the olympics because the athlete you were escorting made a dumb and fell off the boat only to immediately drown. There's even a quest in Olympia to help a woman who was banned from watching the games, which you can do as a Woman and nobody really cares and it's never addressed at all.

Look, I'm totally up for female equality with males in fiction, even fiction that is based in history because you usually find a way to handwave why at least certain women have privilege(usually class or money) if you work hard enough(and if it's fantasy you have more leeway). It's when you explicitly point out women don't have it so good compared to their male counterparts due to the setting, you can't just then have the PC do anything they want with no addressing it. Kassandra isn't nobility or royalty(and in Greece that has limited reach to begin with because all the city states are sovereign), she's a mercenary and while she's quite, quite good at what she does, there's no attempt to explain why she's treated exactly the same way as Alexios would be in the same scenario other then the obvious fact that there's no attempt to write any of the dialogue around the possibility of a male or female. Hell, they use the same title/descriptor in conversations regardless(Mistios or Eagle Bearer) so they can use all the same voice lines. Apparently Kassandra was the original sole protagonist before the higher ups quashed it if some reports are to be believed, but there's little hint of that in the writing. Everyone just treats Kassandra as if she's a guy and there's like no nuance to it. Even Evie in Syndicate made a crack about wanting the right to vote at one point.

Speaking of wasted potential, the Peloponnesian war is just kinda there for show in this game. It's part of the plot and Kass takes place in a couple of actual battles, but there's nothing particularly interesting here. There's one brief attempt to show Greek line tactics at Thermopylae at the beginning but nothing beyond that. All the battles are basically one big fucking melee fight between the Athenians wearing blue and the Spartans wearing red and you affect the battle by finding 3 officers amongst the crowd and kicking their asses, which shifts a big balance scale on the screen. Once it tips totally to one side or another, one side routs and the battle ends. The area you're in then turns red or blue denoting control but there's like no difference other than the color the guards/soldiers are wearing when you gleefully murderlize them and neither side holds a grudge if you assassinate their dudes.

 

[Dalisclock]

Hell, at one point you get a house in Sparta and you can still help Athens conquer most of the map, go home to Sparta and nobody cares or even mentions it. Hell, you have friends in both cities and both sides are totally cool with you walking around even if you've murdered hundreds of their soldiers. Even if you turn the entire map red or blue, the war still drags on with no end in sight even up to the endgame. Look, I 'm not expecting Ubisoft to do Rome:Total War style large scale battle tactics here but I'm disappointed they didn't even attempt to show warfare as at least somewhat organized at least when battles started. Even AC3 attempted to depict 18th century battle tactics even if they were scripted set pieces or small scale line volleys.The Ship combat is a little bit better because it does use Ramming and boarding actions, though Arrows weren't like cannon fire they're depicted as(which feels like a holdover from black flag) but still kinda inaccurate.

I'm gonna gloss over the fact that battles weren't really that common during the war(despite lasting 30 years) because Sparta had a big Army and not much of a Navy while Athens had a Big Navy but not much of an Army. Athens built big walls from the city to their main port so their navy could operate unmolested and Sparta would come every year and try to bait the Athens to fight on land by burning the farms outside the walls. I get it was done for gameplay purposes but I really wish it had been done differently to be less artificial.

So the Map and setting are generally the best done elements of this game ( what other game allows you to bumble around ancient Greece on this scale?) and it's goddamn beautiful and often a joy to just wander around and explore the whole of Greece. With that being said, it feels like there is a drop in the level of quality compared to Origins and this is where I'm gonna get really petty with the history/architecture/geography thing. So there are underground tombs here like in Origins, but the tombs aren't nearly as interesting as they were there. Origins seems to have a puzzle element and often ISU tombs deep below them as a reward of a sort. Odyssey feels like they aren't nearly as interesting. But beyond that, there's details(or lack attention thereof) that irks me in ways I want to ***** about.

So like Origins, you have different styles of ruins all over the place, which fits conceptually because before classical Greece, there was the Minoans and the Mycenaeans, who both existed 1000 years before the game takes place and left visually interesting and distinct ruins all over the place. Essentially the Ancient Greece of Ancient Greece(which no doubt was fascinating to them to see these old ruins and not have any real idea who built them because of the whole Bronze Age Collapse causing writing to just stop for a couple centuries).

The problem is that while in some cases the ruins make perfect sense, other times the ruins feel wrong somehow. Like you can stumble onto ruined and crumbling classical greek temples, which look like they've been abandoned for a far longer time then they could possibly be in this time period. You find Minoan Ruins in places the Minoans probably never settled(mostly on Crete). There's ruined Classical Greek pillars in Minoan ruins which make no sense at all. I can tolerate the minion ruins looking probably better then they should for the sake of looking good but at least get your fucking art assets right guys.

What's even worse is that you find Underwater ruins in the ocean and while this is interesting from an exploration aspect because you get to go diving for treasure in the ruins, it makes far less sense when a number of these ruins are far too deep underwater to make any sense. Some of them are just off the coast so you can kinda handwave maybe they slid into the sea due to an earthquake(in which case they shouldn't be THAT intact) or something but a couple are out in the deep water between islands and deep enough that the only way they make sense if they'd been built there to begin with, but that implies the sea level would be MUCH lower when it was built, which implies these greek temples(which could be no more then 1000 years at most) would have to be built during the fucking Ice Age......15000 years ago(or 12500 years before the game takes place).

There's also easily found ISU ruins you can find in certain places on the map, out in plain sight and within walking distance of major cities of the period which somehow eluded both historians and people living at the same time to ever write or depict and I guess the Templars just covered them with camo netting or something in the intervening 2500 years since then or something.

 

[Dalisclock]

And since we're talking about Atlantis, okay, the Atlantis thing is conceptually fucking cool. Hell, the way you're led into it is cool. It's the actual way it's set up that annoys me thinking about it. So you're told to go to an island in the middle of nowhere in the Aegean and find the remains of a long since exploded Volcano, that being Thera and it's famous eruption over 1000 years prior to the game(3600 years ago to us). Except there are contemporary ruins on the island which look like they're supposed to be ruins from the Eruption but they're way too recent, not damaged enough and in the wrong damn place(the center of the caldera). Then you open up a stone doorway on the island and follow a route that makes no fucking sense for anyone who isn't a parkour assassin to traverse(AKA anyone normal) that drops you into a huge ISU gateway room that looks out under the surprisingly intact underwater ruins of Atlantis. It's just that the gateway room doesn't make sense in how it's positioned compared to the island above it, the tunnel that leads to it and no you can't swim down from outside to inspect the underwater Atlantean ruins.

It's even worse when you play the Fate of Atlantis DLC(set 75000 years ago) and realize the Thera doesn't match Atlantis at all compared to the maps and the Thera eruption is still implied to have happened in 1600 BCE so that's not the source of the myth. And then you get the historical oddity of Kass having heard of Atlantis when she gets there for the first time, despite the fact Plato hadn't written of it yet so nobody should know about it and the actual city in universe having been long since wiped out 75000 years ago. Like that's a long fucking time to repeat legends of a long dead city nobody can find anymore and PLATO HASN'T TALKED ABOUT YET!

Sorry, I needed to gripe about that. Finally, before I get to the DLC, I want to gripe about the general weirdness this game feels like it has. So you have the giant statues depicting Greek myths(including the skeleton of a massive snake near Delphi which I'm pretty sure is supposed to be the mythical Python) and Greek monsters all over the damn place. The giant statues, BTW, are because Ubisoft(per the history tour) wanted to show how the Greeks saw the gods being part of the world around them and possibly because Ubisoft really wanted to have the Colossus of Rhodes in there but couldn't figure out how to fit it in.

I can't help but feel that Ubisoft kinda wanted to make this more "Mythical" and related to the actual Homeric epics then they ended up doing. The problem is that they would have had to set the game during the Late Bronze age to pull that off and not only would have had to deal with the fact the Classical Greek buildings wouldn't exist for centuries after that(a good 500 years at least), there's honestly not a lot we really know about Mycenaean(Bronze Age) Greece because of the subsequent Dark Ages after the Bronze Age Collapse. So instead it feels like they just decided to go with classical instead and plaster massive mythological statues all over the place to make up for it.

I'm gonna do the DLC in a day or so because I have far too much to talk about those as well.

 

[BrawlMan]

In Universe though, it's justified that Layla has joined the Assassins(because the Templars turned on her during Origins and she gets recruited at the end) and now she's looking for the Staff of Hermes, another magical ISU thing(but not the Staff of Alexander or the Papal Staff, which are also powerful ISU relics. I checked the Wiki to ensure they're different magical doohickys). Oh, but this time they don't have a 2000 year old body to jack into(Phrasing, I know), they have an ancient spear fragment that has some 2500 year old DNA samples on it and they somehow knew those would be useful so they scraped some off, plugged them into the animus and found out they DNA was too old and Fragmented to be useful on it's own. Not to worry, just feed into Herodotus's Histories and that'll fill in the missing gaps and neatly explain away any historical issues with a slightly more detailed handwave of THE ANIMUS DID IT! then previous installments of the series. Strangely enough, the DNA they get off the Spear, rather then being one of the MANY MANY MANY People killed with the Spear over years and decades, is the one person they need it to be, though strangely since there's male and female DNA, you just pick which one you want and the animus does it's jiggery pokery to build the simulation from there(and cast the one you didn't pick as the villian). If you pick the female, you play as Kassandra and if you pick the male, you play as Alexios. I picked Kassandra because I liked her VA and model better.

This is a weird and interesting choice. It basically allows ubisoft to give you a choice of two protagonists(and have the one you didn't pick) be the main villain of the story because.....LOOK OVER THERE, but also because of the Fragmented DNA thing, allow you to have conversation options for the first time in the series and then adjust the timeline to account for it. And while it's dumb, it's not really any dumber then like half of the other shit this series has pulled, such as being able to pull ancestor DNA for both of the Frye Twins when Evie apparently never had kids and if she had then one of their kids would have had to....ewwwwwww. Or the fact that the games allow you to see things that the characters in the games are not privy to because they weren't there(Syndicate was particularly bad about this but apparently Unity did much the same thing).

​

 

[Bob_McMillan]

I've wanted to make a thread about choosing your gender in video games for forever. It just never seems to be worth the effort.

I thought the way Syndicate did it was fine, because they still wrote everything specifically for Evie and Jacob. Although I could have definitely gone without the ridiculous amount of female enemies who stick out like a sore thumb.

But in Odyssey and I assume Valhalla, it doesn't seem to matter what gender you are. Which sucks because frankly, being a woman back in historical times was obviously not great, so being a female Assassin badass should definitely stand out and lead to some good stories. It also seems like a lot of work, with very little payoff. So much extra voicelines. Unlockables and gear need to be tweaked. And I assume the writing is a little more complicated.

I hardly want to go back to the sausage party that was 2000s to 2010s gaming, but I'd rather they actually make a choice instead of hiding behind a "choose who you want to play as!" gimmick. I guess its yet another "this is what RPGs do so we should do it too" thing, so even less of a fan of that.

 

[Dalisclock]

I've wanted to make a thread about choosing your gender in video games for forever. It just never seems to be worth the effort.

I thought the way Syndicate did it was fine, because they still wrote everything specifically for Evie and Jacob. Although I could have definitely gone without the ridiculous amount of female enemies who stick out like a sore thumb.

When I played Syndicate I did mention how this bugged me though in general it doesn't matter much. They're mostly standard mooks who you don't fucking care about regardless despite Ubisoft basically trying to cover up for their "Women are too hard to implement" crack over Unity and appear Woke. Though once again you can just handwave the lady mooks as "THE ANIMUS DID IT!" or something about the Templars having very progressive hiring policies or something(The assassins have had women in the ranks forever).

And Syndicate is honestly so bland it's unlikely anyone really remembers much of it regardless. People remember Unity because it's both really pretty when it wasn't terrifying people and Origins was remembered from changing the setting and gameplay and reviving the franchise from stagnation. Syndicate ended up being the poor middle child that gets lost in the shuffle.

 

[Dalisclock]

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I do feel like I'm wasting my breath bitching about AC having stupid science considering it's all stupid science. I guess it's a matter of there's the baseline level of stupid, namely the Animus and the Precusors and the genetic memory shit, which I can tolerate for sake of the premise, but then there's the fact the series keeps introducing shit that's much higher on the Stupid scale and after a while it becomes really hard to just roll with. The Sages is a continuing one that pegs the stupid meter pretty hard but they keep finding new ways to keep doing so.

 

[Bob_McMillan]

When I played Syndicate I did mention how this bugged me though in general it doesn't matter much. They're mostly standard mooks who you don't fucking care about regardless despite Ubisoft basically trying to cover up for their "Women are too hard to implement" crack over Unity and appear Woke. Though once again you can just handwave the lady mooks as "THE ANIMUS DID IT!" or something about the Templars having very progressive hiring policies or something(The assassins have had women in the ranks forever).

And Syndicate is honestly so bland it's unlikely anyone really remembers much of it regardless. People remember Unity because it's both really pretty when it wasn't terrifying people and Origins was remembered from changing the setting and gameplay and reviving the franchise from stagnation. Syndicate ended up being the poor middle child that gets lost in the shuffle.

I stayed away from Syndicate for so long because I thought the combat looked a whole lot worse. I think it was mostly the guy I was watching play the game, but he made it look like a standard grunt took 20+ punches to finally go down. And Jacob would cycle through the same 5 animations too, it was like we'd gone back a decade to KOTOR style "stand in place and fight" with no weight or satisfaction.

And then Origins and the newer games came around with their ridiculous mobile game animations...

But yeah. Syndicate is just so adequate it overwhelms you. Most of the bad stuff from Unity was gone, but so were the good stuff. It felt more like a sequel or expansion to Black Flag than Unity.

 

[Dalisclock]

Odyssey, not content in bening probably the biggest AC game of all time in the base game, had two planned DLC: Legacy of the First Blade and The Fate of Atlantis, each of which might as well be it's own sequel to Odyssey considering each DLC runs 15-30 hours total depending how much of the side content you're doing.

Legacy of the First Blade isn't that big a departure from the base game. It concerns Kass meeting an assassin from Persia named Darius, notable for assassinating King Xerxes(you know, the Villian from 300?), and his child who have arrived in Macedon. They're being hunted by the Persian Branch of the Order of the Ancients who are hunting "Tainted Ones" AKA people with ISU genes and super Parkour/stabby skills. So now you have a bunch of new jerks to kill as they move into Greece. And yeah, in addition to the 42 Cult dudes to take in the base game, now there's an additional 20 or so Order targets in this game(some required, some not) spread over the 3 chapters of the DLC.

It's generally a simplified affair of killing the order of the ancient dudes and kick their asses out of Greece with the help of Darius. Or not since it's implied they basically take over for the cult since canonically the cult all dies because of you or something. So it's much like a traditional AC game, even down to length. This would be fine except that it's already piggybacking off a much larger game that you may or may not still be working through(and god help you if you've just finished the main 3 plots of the base game) because adding another 20ish hours of more stuff to do and 20 more people to kill is a good way to burn people out.

The big thing this DLC is remembered for is it's problematic element. So remember I mentioned Darius has a kid in tow? Well said kid is a 20 something person of the opposite gender of Kass/Alexios and the game almost immediately starts trying to matchmake the two of you because the whole BLOODLINE(the ISU genes you both have that make you special) which suddenly becomes a huge fucking deal(while barely touched on in Odyssey proper). Even worse, Kassandra isn't conically straight or gay, because game allows you to romance anyone and everyone out of a number of NPCs, which pretty much implies you bed them but most of them kinda just vanish after you complete their arc(one of them shows up later and mentions she's been helping row the ship, which feels awkward). Interestingly, because there's more romancable female NPCs then male ones, then if you play as kass then there's more gay romance options then straight ones(and implies they just went with Alexios when writing despite Kass being a playable character).

Legacy of the first blade, however, don't fucking care. The plot will force you to hook up with Darius's kid no matter what and produce a baby. Even the dialogue choice system is basically a big "But thou must" because you can attempt to tell your intended baby daddy/mommy to fuck off and it won't matter(the fact Darrius's son/daughters is kind of a boring drip and some of the romancable NPCs are more interesting then him/her makes this even worse). Because you have to have the super gene baby, which then gets kidnapped by the Order, retrieved by the end and eventually packed off to live in Egypt with Grandpa Darius never to be seen or heard from again(and will never be mentioned at all by anyone, even Kass, once this happens). And to top it off, it's blatantly shoehorned into Origins by having the kid be the ancestor to Aya (so Kass gets to found the Assassins by proxy. *Groan*). And just for good measure, you get a scene where see the kid and their descendants growing up in Egypt in a montage as the Sphinx and Pyramids are built in the background. I know what they're trying to do there but yeah, no. Odyssey takes place around 400 or so BCE. The Sphinx and Giza Pyramids were about 2000 years old at that point, unless somehow we're meant to believe the Templars rewrote the history there too.

Next up, FATE OF ATLANTIS!

 

[Dalisclock]

While Legacy of the First Blade was basically a call back to the earlier AC games in general, Fate of Atlantis, OTOH, was basically a much expanded take on the Curse of the Pharaohs DLC From Origins. That DLC was where you got to visit 4 different versions of the Egyptian Afterlife(on their own smaller maps) and everyone quite liked it, so of course, Ubsisoft decides to do the same thing in Greece.

So basically the setup for this is that now that Layla has the staff(given to her by kass in the modern day because the staff makes you immortal, and Kass has been hanging around the AC universe for the past 2400 years as a result) and inside the safe is an ISU who got downloaded into the staff. Her name is Aletheia and she's a good ISU, she swears, and she's totally gonna help Layla wield the staff without going crazy or dying or something. So she gets Layla and Kass to go to the Atlantis gateway(in different time periods) because you keep switching off between Layla and Kass and it gets a bit weird honestly, including both of them going to a series of tombs to find symbols to unlock the gate and...basically, the point is that Layla is allowed by Aletheia to enter the simulation as Kass to enter the simulation to go to Elysium, a simulation of the Greek Equivalent of Heaven/Paradise.

Elysium is a huge map and quite gorgeous. It's very much what a lot of people would see Heaven as being like, though with more (and Bigger) Greek temples and such and Ruled by the ISU/Goddess Persephone. It's an interesting dynamic because Kass she's this as the legit afterlife, though the ISU clearly refer to themselves as ISU(and not gods) and there's bits of their tech and aesthetic clearly on display, making it unclear how much of what you're seeing is real and how much is window dressing for Kassandra. Though at the same time everyone here except for Kass is meant to be either an ISU or a dead human. At one point she needs to meet Leonidas, her grandfather and hang with him for a bit and he's portrayed very much like he is actually the soul of the real man and not a simulation and it's weird. Anyway, the general point of the DLC is fermenting a revolt against Persephone because she's a jerk or something(though kass doesn't seem to care much about overthrowing the afterlife and leaving it in Chaos). From there you end up getting tossed down a well into Hades for the 2nd chapter.

Chapter 2 is a new map and Realm, that of the "Hell" like realm of Hades, though the Greek version wasn't really that bad. Greek Hades was more of a shadow realm where like 95% of everyone ended up when they died and was a shadowy version of life on earth that just never ended with no real joy or torment(though many would consider that Hell). Hades doesn't want you there but when you showed up you had to kill good boi Cerberus and that apparently is allowing the dead to escape, so you need to recruit famous Greek heroes by beating them in boss fights to guard the gates for eternity. And all you do is fight them, they go to the respective gate and that's it. Then at the end you fight Hades because Hades doesn't want to let you leave anyway. It's all very nice looking(for a drab despairing afterlife) but really it's mostly just killing stuff and leveling up for the most part. After Beating Hades, you end up in Atlantis for the final round.

 

[Dalisclock]

Atlantis the full ISU city in it's Prime and explorable, run by Poseidon who greets Kass as the chosen "Judge" to determine if Atlantis is worthy to survive, which gives her carte blanche to go explore and all that good stuff. So on one hand, Atlantis is magnificent and really quite the sight to behold and explore. It's a depiction of a full ISU city at their prime before their civilization collapsed, where ISU and humans live side by side as relative equals or something and apparently a great library of their knowledge. There's some neat story and worldbuilding bits here for the rest of the series.

Unfortunately, the whole thing feels kinda disappointing on another level. For the whole thing about being a full map of an ISU city in its prime, it's still a big Odyssey map and there's very little that's new here from a gameplay perspective and the thrill wears off far quicker then it really should have. Maybe it's because you had to slog through 10-20 hours of Elysium and Hades to even get here(or perhaps despite it), but after a while it feels like more....STUFF. It's just really high tech looking STUFF but it all works much the same way as it does anywhere else. Restricted zones, enemy camps, etc(despite the fact you're supposed to be an important person and should have complete access to everything) are all here like they are in the main game. Except there are ancient greek boats at the docks and no sign of actual vehicles or anything like that, and there's that weird sense of unreality like there was in Hades and Elysium of how much of what you're seeing is actually "Real" and the game never really elaborates on this.

It feels like this is kind of the inherent problem with the ISU in this series. Yes, their stuff and them have been a part of this whole series since day 1, but they were initially mysterious creatures we knew nothing about, but as the series goes on(especially the newer games) we keep learning more about them and not only does it strip away the mystery, it also makes them feel less interesting and the whole thing feel poorly thought out and written. Seeing glimpses of an ISU city years ago would have been amazing(Yes, I know there's a brief video of one getting obliterated in Brotherhood or revelations) but now it just feels tiring and anti-climatic.

Oh, and the game pulls this interesting plot twist where you find the Lab of Aita and Juno(who are alive at this point) and have been making clones of Kassandra(or Alexios, if you picked him) because the "hybrids" can be weaponized or something, as well as being responsible for the OLYMPOS spheres(the ones that turn people into Greek monsters) but then they reveal that these are Aletheia's memories that Kass and Layla are reliving so.....ok. Also the fact, they finally show Juno again after offering her in a comic feels like a slap in the face to people who were kinda interested in seeing where that Arc was going(or was supposed to go). Basically, long story short, Atlantis is self destructed by Poseidon and Kass(doing Aletheia's memories) to keep the monsters from getting out of control or something and Atlantis sinks into the sea. And that's it, it's over. The whole Atlantis Plotline is finally brought to a close.

I'm not mad at the Atlantis DLC. I really want to like it and to some extent I did enjoy it for what it was. At the same time, I guess I wanted it to be something more(not longer, it's plenty fucking long at 15-30 hours for all 3 chapters combined), more then just a new map and some new shiny stuff to climb over and new stuff to grab. I feel like it could have been something better and grander then it ended up being so there's there's feeling of disappointment. Maybe it's because of the sheer amount of fat in this game that makes it hard to really savor the meat that's there, because by the time I finished the base game(doing a fair bit of the side quests and such) and both DLC, I'd clocked over 100 hours in AC Odyssey. And I was just tired and done by the end.

I do like Odyssey conceptually. I enjoyed a lot of my time with it. But the thought of playing it again for 50+ hours to see the entire game makes me feel exhausted. I feel like maybe if I played it with a mod or something that allowed me to just do the good parts and skip most of the bloat I might want to dive in again someday, but that's a long time from now.

Anyway, I'm gonna take a break for a bit and then pick up with Unity as a game in progress.

 

[Fallen Soldier]

I played the first game back in 2007. It was ok but nothing too special. I missed out on most of the games til Black Flag where I thought it was pretty good but only on the pirate aspect and not the assassin part. I didn’t return to the franchise again til Origins because it was often compared to the Witcher 3. I thought it was fine enough and made me get AC odyssey. But man was that game too bloated for its own good.

 

[thestor]

I haven't been to this forum in years (literally), so please let me know if this should better be discussed elsewhere:

How important is the whole "Assassin's Creed" to the the Assassin's Creed series? In other words, the whole Assassins/Templar conflict, the Animus, the secret history, the ISU artifacts, how much do they add to the games? Were they essential or would the whole series have worked perfectly fine without it, just having you play an action-adventure in different (famous) time settings?

 

[Fallen Soldier]

I haven't been to this forum in years (literally), so please let me know if this should better be discussed elsewhere:

How important is the whole "Assassin's Creed" to the the Assassin's Creed series? In other words, the whole Assassins/Templar conflict, the Animus, the secret history, the ISU artifacts, how much do they add to the games? Were they essential or would the whole series have worked perfectly fine without it, just having you play an action-adventure in different (famous) time settings?

In my opinion not much in the grand scheme of things, at least not since Origins. Sure the Isu artifacts are still a target of the assassins and templars or their ancestor groups, but all they do is serve as plot objects. They delved into the back story of the assassins and templars since origins, but aside from Bayek of Siwa you don’t really play as a typical assassin. The playable characters of Odyssey and Valhalla aren’t part of the brotherhood, and have their own agenda’s. The rpg trilogy can be seen as its own thing really.

 

[Dalisclock]

I haven't been to this forum in years (literally), so please let me know if this should better be discussed elsewhere:

How important is the whole "Assassin's Creed" to the the Assassin's Creed series? In other words, the whole Assassins/Templar conflict, the Animus, the secret history, the ISU artifacts, how much do they add to the games? Were they essential or would the whole series have worked perfectly fine without it, just having you play an action-adventure in different (famous) time settings?

Mostly the Historical parts of the game stand on their own and you could honestly strip the MD part out of most if not all of them and not even really notice. The Animus is mostly to justify some of the collectible but also so they can handwave any historical inaccuracies, or more drastically, weird and/or glitchy shit as something weird going on with the animus and or how it' s presenting information. For example, Altair would drown if he fell in the water but Ezio can swim and it was explained as being a bug that had since been fixed. Or in some games they would have blatant anachronisms and leave a note in the database saying "Yeah, we're aware this didn't exist in the time period but it's so iconic we put it in there anyway"(IE the queen's staircase in Nassau in AC4).

As for the ISU stuff, it totally depends on how much you enjoy the sci-fi aspect it brings. I enjoyed it for the whole mystery aspect it added to the game, though I feel they've kinda ruined that now in the newer games by slathering ISU ruins and relics everywhere in Egypt and Greece(though Rome had no less than 3 ISU vaults under the city). Mostly it's used to justify the plots of the historical gameplay by having some magical ISU thingy that is responsible for miracles and magic and shit like that being the mcguffin of the week(after which they presumably all get shipped off the giant Indiana Jones warehouse to be studied by "Top Men").

And the Assassins vs Templar thing is the big driving point of the series, but honestly it's lost it's charm. It almost always some variation of Templars act like dicks with power, piss off the wrong guy with special ISU/Assassin genes by murdering someone he cares about or something like that and then that one guy ends up killing them all. Except the Templars always take back what they've lost pretty quickly between games and the two groups exist pretty much to either chase after ISU shit(for reasons), grief each other or both. It's basically a game of Spy vs Spy that goes thousands of years and counting. I've barely noticed that the Assassins aren't really a thing in the more recent games because you do the exact same thing you always do but with the names changed.

Some of the games have tried to show some nuance in this relationship(3 had the Templars have at least interesting and somewhat sympathetic motives) but generally it's "See that guy? Fuck that guy!"

 

[Drathnoxis]

If the Animus is capable of having historical inaccuracies and glitches how the heck can it be relied upon as a source of information? How could you ever be sure that what you've seen in the animus is fact or bug?

 

[Dalisclock]

If the Animus is capable of having historical inaccuracies and glitches how the heck can it be relied upon as a source of information? How could you ever be sure that what you've seen in the animus is fact or bug?

Well, there's a perfectly logical and reasonable explanation for this.

 

[CriticalGaming]

I have found myself giving Valhalla another go. And for some reason I can't explain, I am enjoying myself way more than I remember. Something about the side content being so bite sized is really appealing to me because in a short gaming session I feel like I can bang out a good handful of these things and feel like I have made progress for my character even if I've not progressed the actual game at all.