I finally got around to playing and finishing Assassin's Creed:Origins(I'm only a year behind on the series, Hooray!). Overall, I can really see why it deserves the praise it gets. I played Syndicate a month ago and found it okay(if firmly hanging out in the safe zone, afraid to take any risks), skipped Unity(because of it's many issues) and found Rogue to be a good idea with a flawed execution(it really needed a bigger budget and better writers) and it feels like Origins is the best game since Black Flag. Granted, the last 3 games in the series haven't exactly been stellar in any regard.
This isn't so much a review but rather me rambling off a lot of things that I've been mulling over in my head over the past few weeks.
So the world is well extremely well done. I'm not an egyptologist but it feels like they did a damn good job with their depiction of ancient egypt, especially considering the space compression involved. The map rivals Witcher 3 as far as scale and how well put together it feels, especially since Witcher 3 was spread out across 3 Maps(not counting the Blood and Wine DLC). Even the empty parts of map in the far south and southwest are amazing to travel through and it's so interesting to wander around out there and find something tucked away back there(like the precursor site on the far southern edge of the map).
The degree of flexibility the combat system gives your character is nicely done, where combat is a fairly viable option if/when stealth fails. Especially when you get a predator bow and can snipe enemies from high places without making a sound, ride in on horseback with a weapon with long reach and smack people around without too much fear of death or just wade in and start stabbing everyone. I think the only times I really died was when either I got into fights with people much higher level then me(so they tanked everything) or a couple of the boss fights where 3 hits can kill you.
However, the deluge of new weapons does get a bit much at times. Especially when a lot of them aren't nearly as good as the ones as you already have(especially if you have rare or legendaries) and you've been doing decent upgrading. Even breaking down/selling them feels more like house cleaning then anything else.
I get the beef gated level system and I'm fine with it. It's been a staple of RPG's since forever, but it does feel a bit ridicolus at tiimes to run across a group of level 40 snakes that are exactly like the level 1 snakes at the beginning of the game except with a bigger number, because everything is scaled to region. I guess it's a oldschool RPG problem but it just feels off at times. On a similar note, I really don't like the idea that you can walk up to a sleeping dude and stab him in the head in what should be an instant kill, but because because he's more then 3 levels above you it just takes off a chunk of his health and wakes him up. Same with headshots with a predator bow, which seem less reliable if their level is higher then yours for instant kills.
I'm also kinda annoyed where the game dispenses with the "Target is here. Go kill him however you like" in exchange "Oh, it looks like you've entered a combat arena. We wanted to show off how much we liked Dark Souls by throwing you into a Souls-like Boss fight. Hope you got good at the combat by now. Also, fight an elephant because we said so". Look, I liked Dark Souls and Bloodborne and Souls-like and I don't mind the new combat system being lifted with minor changes, but dumping you straight into straight on soulsy boss battles feels lazy and unjustified and very "un-creedy".
What the hell is up with the crafting system? You have to skin entire families of crocs and or lions and attach diamon....er, carbon crystals to make some of the high end gear. Not that it matters much since I was about halfway up the crafting chart on most of my gear by the end and doing just fine. It's as bad as having to skin entire whales to make a damn pouch in Black Flag.(Seriously Edward, It's a whale. How much material do you need to make your pouch slightly bigger?)
The general plot was well done, though it does have it's issues. I would have liked to get some hints of what Bayek was doing during that year between his son getting killed and killing the Heron. I also have to question why the time skip between killing the Heron and fighting his bodyguard, when the two are literally on opposite sides of Egypt, yet you wouldn't know that at first glance because the cut makes it feel like they happened really close together.
I also want to know exactly how Bayek is the last Medjay considering the Medjay more or less stopped being mentioned by history about 1000 years prior to Bayek even being born. A couple people mention this in game and it's never addressed, but most people still respect the title enough regardless.
Sadly, near the end of the game there feels like there's kind of a cosmic deadline looming because the pacing starts getting wierd and it feels like a lot of things are being rushed. The Roman stuff around the 2/3 part of the plot feels really underdeveloped. Actually, pretty much everything once Cleopatra gets the throne back, Pompey is killed and the Siege of Alexandria/Battle of the Nile happen this kicks into full force The battle on the nile in particular is basically you going to two arena type areas and fighting two bosses back to back, then you're rushed off to Siwa, then up to Cyrene(though you can actually take your time getting there and probably should to level up and appreciate the atmosphere). Once you finish off Flavius and Aya goes to Rome, there's literally a 3 year timeskip between them sitting on the beach together and the final bits, but it all happens in like 30 minutes of gametime. You do the ship battle, dropped into a boss fight before crossing a courtyard to the Senate building and then "Press X to stab Caesar".
What makes it feel even rushed more is that fighting and killing Flavius is the emotional climax of the game. He's the man responsible for the death of Bayek's Son, he's one of the last of the Order of the Ancients still in Egypt and his fight is suitably challenging and feels very final. Fighting Septimus after that doesn't feel nearly as interesting and is a lot harder then it should be because now you have to use Aya and you have no opportunity to upgrade her weapons, level her up or even prep for anything.
And I get it, they wanted to end the game with the most famous assassination in history, that of Caesar in the Forum in 44 BCE. It was established way back in AC2 and AC:B that Brutus was an assassin, but here Brutus shows up like twice as one of "Our Roman allies". The problem is that Ceaser isn't in the game very much up to this point and the reasoning why Aya is so into killing him is never really explained very well, seemingly boiling down to "He's a Tyrant so Stabby Stabby. And while this series has often been prone to showing things as black and white rather then shades of grey, wether or not Ceaser was the greater of the various evils that was Rome's leadership during the period is still being debated. It's not like the Republic was a wonderful land of freedom and equality that was only crushed into the dirt once caesar declared himself dictator, it had been a rotten corrupt system for quite a while leading up to it and the romans on the other side of the civil war hardly seemed much better. Someone who is more familiar with Roman History might disagree but I digress.
It also doesn't help that Ceasers relationship to the Order is never really explained. Was he always a member? Did Septimus get him to join around the time of the battle of the Nile? Why does the whole thing just feel so tacked on? Why does it feel like there was a third act involving the Roman Civil War that basically got left on the cutting room floor and that sequence at the end is what was left of it.
Along the same lines, I feel a bit underwhelmed by the handling of the precusor stuff in the main plot. The entire plot was set in motion by the Order threatening Bayek and his son to tell them how to open a door beneath the Siwa Temple using an Apple of Eden. Except near the end they use the apple and a staff to open the door and reveal a Holographic projection of the Earth with ISU sites all over it. Flavius apparently didn't bother sticking around very long to look at it and Bayek, aside from an odd moment of knowing EXACTLY what he's looking at after about 5 seconds of looking at a Globe he's never seen before(and I'm guessing most people from that time and place probably don't know what the shape of Earths landmasses look like well enough to make that assumption), it's pretty much forgotten and not remarked upon again.
I'm guessing it's supposed to be a call back to the end of AC1, when Altair sees the same holographic globe, but it just feels like it's left there with no explanation why it was considered important(other then explain perhaps why Brutus knew about the Vault under Rome and maybe why the Templars knew about the one under the Vatican...where the Vatican would be in a couple centuries...despite showing spots on a globe). And the apple, which Bayek eventually gets back, is thrown in a chest. Presumably, if the AC wiki is to be believed, this is the same apple that Altiar eventually finds under the Temple of Solomon about 1200 years later, somehow gone from that box to the Temple mount (Though I've never figured out exactly how people are able to trace which apple ended up where based on the in-game stuff).
I do rather like the fact you can encounter more ISU ruins throughout the game, because their ruins are creepy and remind of something you'd see in a Lovecraft story(Cyclopean seems an appropriate descriptor) and while it was kinda interesting to find and activate the recordings, I'm not sure how I feel about them. From what Ive pieced together, apparently Desmond stopping the solar flare just delayed mankind's end a couple of years and now the ISU are desperately trying to send Layla(not Bayek, who doesn't even seem to acknowledge the messages at all, so to him he's just putting silicia in a thing and then just standing there for a bit, apparently) a message. That somehow she needs to "Wake up" and see the code which is time and somehow alter time to prevent the world from ending again. Possibly using the animus to do so, though the whole thing feels so vague as to be utterly none-helpful. Seriously guys, you're the ones with the future seeing ability, why can't you be more specific? And you freely admit you made humans without the "Knowing" sense, but then say "You need to see and do what we could not". Guys, if you can predict possibilties and your tech is magical compared to 21st century human tech, exactly what do you expect humans to do to fix things? Hell, all Desmond really did was use the animus to find where things were(the two grand temple keys and it's location) and then press a button to set in montion the plan you guys couldn't.
Also, there seem to be hints that whatever this plan is, it might save the ISU as well, which makes it sound like a trap considering even the nicest of the ISU(minerva) considered the humans little more then pets. But again, this is posited on the idea that Layla can somehow save a race that had every advantage over humanity and yet couldn't save themselves, and the only reason humanity survived 2012 was because they laid pretty much all the groundwork for desmond. Here's a warning, here's the key to the outer door, here's the other key to the inner door, here's the map to the temple where the doors are. Combine to push button and activate machine that nobody knew existed and apparently nobody still knows exist to save humanity from threat nobody except like 3 people knew was even coming and still apparently don't realize almost killed everyone. Hell, the goddamn templars either couldn't figure it out or couldn't be bothered to do anything about the solar flare despite the fact that, controlling most of the world, they have a hell of a lot to lose from it ending, and yet there doesn't to seem to be any fucking indications that Templars had a fucking clue what they missed by minutes, even years later in the MD story.
*Sigh* I want to get interested in this particular plot and think they were going somewhere interesting with it, but I wanted to be interested in the Juno thing as well, but that whole plot thread ended up getting strung out forever over the course of Black Flag, Rogue, Unity and Syndicate(after being introduced way back in Brotherhood) only to be finished off in the comics(Juno gets a body and then the assassins kill her. Presumably for good this time).
On a lesser note, I'm curious why none of the ISU vaults/ruins have anything in them other then maybe a piece of eden. The ruins survive for 75000 years more or less intact and the pieces of eden much the same, but none of the ruins have furniture or even bodies in them which I find bizarre. Are the Templars getting to all of the ruins first and removing everything? Why haven't we seen of this yet? Am I thinking about this far more then the writers did?
I know I've griped about it before but I'm yet again disappointed by the fact that yet again the series had the oppurtunity to show the Templars/Proto-Templars as having goals and ambitions others then power, the acquisition of power and just being assholes to everyone and yet again basically blows it. There are like 3 members of the Order who are kinda sympathetic/empathic, the Hyena(who was trying to bring back her child), the Scarab(who was trying to reclaim a city from the desert) and the Scorpian(who at least apologizes for his fellows behaviour) but the rest are basically Jackasses who come across as outright sociopaths half the time.Especially the Crocodile, who seems bored by the fact she outright murdered a 10 year old by drowning her.
This game does have it's share of wierd bits, probably more then the rest of the series(except for Odyssey, I presume).
-I did appreciate the tomb exploring experience from earlier games made a comeback, especially since some of those tombs are the fricken pyramids. However, it does feel a bit off for two reasons. The first being that Bayek outright disdains tomb robbers for disrespect to the dead, which jives nicely with his character but the game doesn't seem to notice if you go through each tomb and plunder the crap out of all of them. At least, Bayek never, ever acknowledges it, which just seems strange. I'm also somewhat bothered by the fact that almost every tomb is entered by a rather large, obvious entrance, suggesting tomb raiders have recently been there, except there's plenty still to find and you almost never find dead tomb robbers inside. Even wierder considering the Pyramids were robbed in real life, but this happened LONG before Bayek was born. As in, the reason the Egyptians stopped building massive pyramids and switched to burials in the valley of the kings during the New Kingdom(a good 1000 years prior to the game) was because the Pyramids and other tombs being robbed was a well known issue amongst the egyptians(thus making the tombs harder to find). King Tut's Tomb was notable because it had remained sealed until the 1920's and everything was still inside. So yeah.
-The Death scenes have gotten really....dramatic. Including acknowledgements of the person being actually dead("Why did you drag me into the afterlife?"), one person starting to climb a stairway into the sky during the conversation, and some of the DLC ones are just...wierd.
-One of the really optional side missions involves seeing a meteor land, solving a puzzle using a sundial which causes big blue lights to shine into the sky and then going inside a sealed temple and seeing a crossover from final fantasy XV emerge from a sealed...something before disappearing and leaving a fantasy sword/shield behind(which you can pick up and use effectively...and it's not a joke weapon either). And you get a skin for your camel that makes it look like a chocobo. Bayek even comments about it, so presumably it's real and not an animus glitch.
-So out of all the side quests, I rather enjoyed the stargazing one. It had some nice character development for Bayek and his son while also giving some worldbuilding on the Egyptian Gods. It even helps Bayek gain some sort of closure on his son when it's completed. What makes it wierd is when you finish it, you can go to a map of egypt under the sphinx and open a door which will only open once all 12 constellations have been found, and inside you can get a special skin for Bayek that makes him look like Iron man because sure...why not? What makes it wierd for me is that it's activated not by Bayek pressing 12 buttons across Egypt, it's literally him looking up at the sky and finding 12 constellations in 12 specific spots, which the map room somehow knows and decides to open access. There's no explanation for this at all, like the "Find all the music boxs" in Syndicate or "Find all the stone keys" in Black Flag, where you are collecting physical objects to open a door.
The Curse of the Pharaohs DLC was probably the most intriguing DLC since "The Tyranny of King Washington" for AC3, but there's no real explanation for any of it, other then "These Pharaohs once had an Apple of Eden, it got passed down and said apple might be giving everyone the illusion of all of this weird stuff happening. Maybe? Don't get me wrong, I love the fact they actually made 5 new maps for the DLC, 4 of which being surreal representations of the Egyptian Afterlife, but damn if none of it really made any sense. Especially since each Pharaohs corpse had to be defeated in a Dark Souls-equse boss battle to put them to rest because....reasons? And Bayek seems to have no issue with either plundering the afterlife or fighting people who would at least be former highly respected kings(except for Akhenaten ) and at best actual divinities in Bayeks worldview.
So yeah, this game had a lot of interesting things about it and a fair number of holes.
This isn't so much a review but rather me rambling off a lot of things that I've been mulling over in my head over the past few weeks.
So the world is well extremely well done. I'm not an egyptologist but it feels like they did a damn good job with their depiction of ancient egypt, especially considering the space compression involved. The map rivals Witcher 3 as far as scale and how well put together it feels, especially since Witcher 3 was spread out across 3 Maps(not counting the Blood and Wine DLC). Even the empty parts of map in the far south and southwest are amazing to travel through and it's so interesting to wander around out there and find something tucked away back there(like the precursor site on the far southern edge of the map).
The degree of flexibility the combat system gives your character is nicely done, where combat is a fairly viable option if/when stealth fails. Especially when you get a predator bow and can snipe enemies from high places without making a sound, ride in on horseback with a weapon with long reach and smack people around without too much fear of death or just wade in and start stabbing everyone. I think the only times I really died was when either I got into fights with people much higher level then me(so they tanked everything) or a couple of the boss fights where 3 hits can kill you.
However, the deluge of new weapons does get a bit much at times. Especially when a lot of them aren't nearly as good as the ones as you already have(especially if you have rare or legendaries) and you've been doing decent upgrading. Even breaking down/selling them feels more like house cleaning then anything else.
I get the beef gated level system and I'm fine with it. It's been a staple of RPG's since forever, but it does feel a bit ridicolus at tiimes to run across a group of level 40 snakes that are exactly like the level 1 snakes at the beginning of the game except with a bigger number, because everything is scaled to region. I guess it's a oldschool RPG problem but it just feels off at times. On a similar note, I really don't like the idea that you can walk up to a sleeping dude and stab him in the head in what should be an instant kill, but because because he's more then 3 levels above you it just takes off a chunk of his health and wakes him up. Same with headshots with a predator bow, which seem less reliable if their level is higher then yours for instant kills.
I'm also kinda annoyed where the game dispenses with the "Target is here. Go kill him however you like" in exchange "Oh, it looks like you've entered a combat arena. We wanted to show off how much we liked Dark Souls by throwing you into a Souls-like Boss fight. Hope you got good at the combat by now. Also, fight an elephant because we said so". Look, I liked Dark Souls and Bloodborne and Souls-like and I don't mind the new combat system being lifted with minor changes, but dumping you straight into straight on soulsy boss battles feels lazy and unjustified and very "un-creedy".
What the hell is up with the crafting system? You have to skin entire families of crocs and or lions and attach diamon....er, carbon crystals to make some of the high end gear. Not that it matters much since I was about halfway up the crafting chart on most of my gear by the end and doing just fine. It's as bad as having to skin entire whales to make a damn pouch in Black Flag.(Seriously Edward, It's a whale. How much material do you need to make your pouch slightly bigger?)
The general plot was well done, though it does have it's issues. I would have liked to get some hints of what Bayek was doing during that year between his son getting killed and killing the Heron. I also have to question why the time skip between killing the Heron and fighting his bodyguard, when the two are literally on opposite sides of Egypt, yet you wouldn't know that at first glance because the cut makes it feel like they happened really close together.
I also want to know exactly how Bayek is the last Medjay considering the Medjay more or less stopped being mentioned by history about 1000 years prior to Bayek even being born. A couple people mention this in game and it's never addressed, but most people still respect the title enough regardless.
Sadly, near the end of the game there feels like there's kind of a cosmic deadline looming because the pacing starts getting wierd and it feels like a lot of things are being rushed. The Roman stuff around the 2/3 part of the plot feels really underdeveloped. Actually, pretty much everything once Cleopatra gets the throne back, Pompey is killed and the Siege of Alexandria/Battle of the Nile happen this kicks into full force The battle on the nile in particular is basically you going to two arena type areas and fighting two bosses back to back, then you're rushed off to Siwa, then up to Cyrene(though you can actually take your time getting there and probably should to level up and appreciate the atmosphere). Once you finish off Flavius and Aya goes to Rome, there's literally a 3 year timeskip between them sitting on the beach together and the final bits, but it all happens in like 30 minutes of gametime. You do the ship battle, dropped into a boss fight before crossing a courtyard to the Senate building and then "Press X to stab Caesar".
What makes it feel even rushed more is that fighting and killing Flavius is the emotional climax of the game. He's the man responsible for the death of Bayek's Son, he's one of the last of the Order of the Ancients still in Egypt and his fight is suitably challenging and feels very final. Fighting Septimus after that doesn't feel nearly as interesting and is a lot harder then it should be because now you have to use Aya and you have no opportunity to upgrade her weapons, level her up or even prep for anything.
And I get it, they wanted to end the game with the most famous assassination in history, that of Caesar in the Forum in 44 BCE. It was established way back in AC2 and AC:B that Brutus was an assassin, but here Brutus shows up like twice as one of "Our Roman allies". The problem is that Ceaser isn't in the game very much up to this point and the reasoning why Aya is so into killing him is never really explained very well, seemingly boiling down to "He's a Tyrant so Stabby Stabby. And while this series has often been prone to showing things as black and white rather then shades of grey, wether or not Ceaser was the greater of the various evils that was Rome's leadership during the period is still being debated. It's not like the Republic was a wonderful land of freedom and equality that was only crushed into the dirt once caesar declared himself dictator, it had been a rotten corrupt system for quite a while leading up to it and the romans on the other side of the civil war hardly seemed much better. Someone who is more familiar with Roman History might disagree but I digress.
It also doesn't help that Ceasers relationship to the Order is never really explained. Was he always a member? Did Septimus get him to join around the time of the battle of the Nile? Why does the whole thing just feel so tacked on? Why does it feel like there was a third act involving the Roman Civil War that basically got left on the cutting room floor and that sequence at the end is what was left of it.
Along the same lines, I feel a bit underwhelmed by the handling of the precusor stuff in the main plot. The entire plot was set in motion by the Order threatening Bayek and his son to tell them how to open a door beneath the Siwa Temple using an Apple of Eden. Except near the end they use the apple and a staff to open the door and reveal a Holographic projection of the Earth with ISU sites all over it. Flavius apparently didn't bother sticking around very long to look at it and Bayek, aside from an odd moment of knowing EXACTLY what he's looking at after about 5 seconds of looking at a Globe he's never seen before(and I'm guessing most people from that time and place probably don't know what the shape of Earths landmasses look like well enough to make that assumption), it's pretty much forgotten and not remarked upon again.
I'm guessing it's supposed to be a call back to the end of AC1, when Altair sees the same holographic globe, but it just feels like it's left there with no explanation why it was considered important(other then explain perhaps why Brutus knew about the Vault under Rome and maybe why the Templars knew about the one under the Vatican...where the Vatican would be in a couple centuries...despite showing spots on a globe). And the apple, which Bayek eventually gets back, is thrown in a chest. Presumably, if the AC wiki is to be believed, this is the same apple that Altiar eventually finds under the Temple of Solomon about 1200 years later, somehow gone from that box to the Temple mount (Though I've never figured out exactly how people are able to trace which apple ended up where based on the in-game stuff).
I do rather like the fact you can encounter more ISU ruins throughout the game, because their ruins are creepy and remind of something you'd see in a Lovecraft story(Cyclopean seems an appropriate descriptor) and while it was kinda interesting to find and activate the recordings, I'm not sure how I feel about them. From what Ive pieced together, apparently Desmond stopping the solar flare just delayed mankind's end a couple of years and now the ISU are desperately trying to send Layla(not Bayek, who doesn't even seem to acknowledge the messages at all, so to him he's just putting silicia in a thing and then just standing there for a bit, apparently) a message. That somehow she needs to "Wake up" and see the code which is time and somehow alter time to prevent the world from ending again. Possibly using the animus to do so, though the whole thing feels so vague as to be utterly none-helpful. Seriously guys, you're the ones with the future seeing ability, why can't you be more specific? And you freely admit you made humans without the "Knowing" sense, but then say "You need to see and do what we could not". Guys, if you can predict possibilties and your tech is magical compared to 21st century human tech, exactly what do you expect humans to do to fix things? Hell, all Desmond really did was use the animus to find where things were(the two grand temple keys and it's location) and then press a button to set in montion the plan you guys couldn't.
Also, there seem to be hints that whatever this plan is, it might save the ISU as well, which makes it sound like a trap considering even the nicest of the ISU(minerva) considered the humans little more then pets. But again, this is posited on the idea that Layla can somehow save a race that had every advantage over humanity and yet couldn't save themselves, and the only reason humanity survived 2012 was because they laid pretty much all the groundwork for desmond. Here's a warning, here's the key to the outer door, here's the other key to the inner door, here's the map to the temple where the doors are. Combine to push button and activate machine that nobody knew existed and apparently nobody still knows exist to save humanity from threat nobody except like 3 people knew was even coming and still apparently don't realize almost killed everyone. Hell, the goddamn templars either couldn't figure it out or couldn't be bothered to do anything about the solar flare despite the fact that, controlling most of the world, they have a hell of a lot to lose from it ending, and yet there doesn't to seem to be any fucking indications that Templars had a fucking clue what they missed by minutes, even years later in the MD story.
*Sigh* I want to get interested in this particular plot and think they were going somewhere interesting with it, but I wanted to be interested in the Juno thing as well, but that whole plot thread ended up getting strung out forever over the course of Black Flag, Rogue, Unity and Syndicate(after being introduced way back in Brotherhood) only to be finished off in the comics(Juno gets a body and then the assassins kill her. Presumably for good this time).
On a lesser note, I'm curious why none of the ISU vaults/ruins have anything in them other then maybe a piece of eden. The ruins survive for 75000 years more or less intact and the pieces of eden much the same, but none of the ruins have furniture or even bodies in them which I find bizarre. Are the Templars getting to all of the ruins first and removing everything? Why haven't we seen of this yet? Am I thinking about this far more then the writers did?
I know I've griped about it before but I'm yet again disappointed by the fact that yet again the series had the oppurtunity to show the Templars/Proto-Templars as having goals and ambitions others then power, the acquisition of power and just being assholes to everyone and yet again basically blows it. There are like 3 members of the Order who are kinda sympathetic/empathic, the Hyena(who was trying to bring back her child), the Scarab(who was trying to reclaim a city from the desert) and the Scorpian(who at least apologizes for his fellows behaviour) but the rest are basically Jackasses who come across as outright sociopaths half the time.Especially the Crocodile, who seems bored by the fact she outright murdered a 10 year old by drowning her.
This game does have it's share of wierd bits, probably more then the rest of the series(except for Odyssey, I presume).
-I did appreciate the tomb exploring experience from earlier games made a comeback, especially since some of those tombs are the fricken pyramids. However, it does feel a bit off for two reasons. The first being that Bayek outright disdains tomb robbers for disrespect to the dead, which jives nicely with his character but the game doesn't seem to notice if you go through each tomb and plunder the crap out of all of them. At least, Bayek never, ever acknowledges it, which just seems strange. I'm also somewhat bothered by the fact that almost every tomb is entered by a rather large, obvious entrance, suggesting tomb raiders have recently been there, except there's plenty still to find and you almost never find dead tomb robbers inside. Even wierder considering the Pyramids were robbed in real life, but this happened LONG before Bayek was born. As in, the reason the Egyptians stopped building massive pyramids and switched to burials in the valley of the kings during the New Kingdom(a good 1000 years prior to the game) was because the Pyramids and other tombs being robbed was a well known issue amongst the egyptians(thus making the tombs harder to find). King Tut's Tomb was notable because it had remained sealed until the 1920's and everything was still inside. So yeah.
-The Death scenes have gotten really....dramatic. Including acknowledgements of the person being actually dead("Why did you drag me into the afterlife?"), one person starting to climb a stairway into the sky during the conversation, and some of the DLC ones are just...wierd.
-One of the really optional side missions involves seeing a meteor land, solving a puzzle using a sundial which causes big blue lights to shine into the sky and then going inside a sealed temple and seeing a crossover from final fantasy XV emerge from a sealed...something before disappearing and leaving a fantasy sword/shield behind(which you can pick up and use effectively...and it's not a joke weapon either). And you get a skin for your camel that makes it look like a chocobo. Bayek even comments about it, so presumably it's real and not an animus glitch.
-So out of all the side quests, I rather enjoyed the stargazing one. It had some nice character development for Bayek and his son while also giving some worldbuilding on the Egyptian Gods. It even helps Bayek gain some sort of closure on his son when it's completed. What makes it wierd is when you finish it, you can go to a map of egypt under the sphinx and open a door which will only open once all 12 constellations have been found, and inside you can get a special skin for Bayek that makes him look like Iron man because sure...why not? What makes it wierd for me is that it's activated not by Bayek pressing 12 buttons across Egypt, it's literally him looking up at the sky and finding 12 constellations in 12 specific spots, which the map room somehow knows and decides to open access. There's no explanation for this at all, like the "Find all the music boxs" in Syndicate or "Find all the stone keys" in Black Flag, where you are collecting physical objects to open a door.
The Curse of the Pharaohs DLC was probably the most intriguing DLC since "The Tyranny of King Washington" for AC3, but there's no real explanation for any of it, other then "These Pharaohs once had an Apple of Eden, it got passed down and said apple might be giving everyone the illusion of all of this weird stuff happening. Maybe? Don't get me wrong, I love the fact they actually made 5 new maps for the DLC, 4 of which being surreal representations of the Egyptian Afterlife, but damn if none of it really made any sense. Especially since each Pharaohs corpse had to be defeated in a Dark Souls-equse boss battle to put them to rest because....reasons? And Bayek seems to have no issue with either plundering the afterlife or fighting people who would at least be former highly respected kings(except for Akhenaten ) and at best actual divinities in Bayeks worldview.
So yeah, this game had a lot of interesting things about it and a fair number of holes.
