Assassin´s Creed Mirage Quick Review

 

I've had something of a rough relationship with the Assassin's Creed franchise of late. I always thought the games were verging on 'Soulless' as they slowly circled the drain but it wasn't until we reached the RPG age were we really saw the bubble begin to burst and the limits of creativity start to cease. From Origin's beautiful but lazy world which lost the personality of previous world spaces, to Odyssey's outrageous padding to extortionate lengths to Valhalla's everything. I'm not kidding either- Valhalla's length, pathetically miniscule narrative, eye brow raising acting from core members of the supporting cast, lack of focus- all Valhalla has going for it is half decent combat- which still doesn't feel as satisfying as the Ezio days in their prime. I really thought that Ubisoft had truly lost the plot and was absolutely not willing to offer them the benefit of any doubt when the kowtowing began begging people to give them another chance for Mirage.

Valhalla was their most successful entry ever, afterall- and given that monetary gains is literally the only north star for a studio as creatively bankrupt as Ubisoft, there was little reason to believe the disgusted reaction of those who care for quality touched literally anyone at the studio. But... I should have taken into account the fact that Ubisoft would love to make similar profits for less effort- those introducing smaller side games as mainline entries that are quicker to make does fit into that profit margin. But would making the game smaller be enough to rekindle what was once genuinely unique about the Assassin's Creed franchise like the developers insisted? Or are we just circling the drain yet again fooling ourselves that this is a high value franchise?

Mirage does indeed strip away a lot of the superfluous fluff that has come to dog this franchise, from the hopelessly lost modern day narrative that nowadays meanders with pointlessness- (it isn't gone exactly, but all the set-up was done at the end of Valhalla for those who actually stuck out that 130hr snooze fest. All thirty of us.) all open world side objectives are tired directly towards reinforcing the gameplay loop in some significant fashion, and the 'Investigation' style story telling method they inherited from the RPG saga of games is centralised around a single target with only five branches- meaning you can actually keep abreast of clues. The actual character introductions are still prototypically weak for a Ubisoft game so you can't actually figure it out like you could with Odyssey- (which is what made the investigation tab so good in that game) but I could follow the thread of the plot. I appreciate that.

Speaking of little things I appreciate- goodness I forgot how much I missed the codex entries! Part of the charm of these games was visiting some far off culture and reading small write-ups about how significant this particular building was or how that aspect of life functioned. All that had been relegated to the optional 'educational mode' since Origins- but I'm so glad it's been brought back for Mirage. I genuinely love these tiny bite-sized lessons into aspects of the world I'm actively invested in and find the aspect of these being real-world info pockets all the more interesting. There's none of the flavour of the Ezio saga data entries- but I get they're trying to find their feet again- I'll give them space to figure it out.

Mirage's mantra seems to be 'bringing stealth back to Assassin's Creed' after that style of play had become whittled down in Odyssey and straight up discouraged in Valhalla- and to this end the team actually did a respectable job. Nerfing healing avenues and gutting combat are supremely inelegant ways to force stealth as the viable playstyle, but actually developing patrol routes for areas, multiple entry angles and giving us tools that aid a ghost-like approach actually work pretty well. I think the team might be a little rusty with how they handle such tools, however, because the smoke bomb is insanely overpowered and probably should have been reconsidered on the design floor. When you can easily wipe out an entire room of already aggroed enemies by dropping a single smoke bomb- maybe there's a balance concern or two.

Actually the biggest problem this game's stealth really has is the fact that this entire title has been built on the bones of Valhalla- a game clearly not made to facilitate stealth. You'll enter full blown fights with a couple of guards and brutally murder them in vibrant slashes a single corner away from another guard who simply didn't hear any of it. You can alert a pick-pocket victim, jump into a haybale right in front of them and just wait the two minutes of guard searching before doing the exact same action again with everyone haven forgotten you. They've even regressed in the way they handle the all important 'escape' pillar of gameplay- back in the Ezio days you'd have guards rush out ahead of you and preparing chest swipes to catch you running past- in Mirage I literally jogged away from full-notoriety chases whilst fiddling about on my computer playing Dying Light as the same time- there's clearly some wanting developments in the stealth department.

Where the experience is most focused, however, are the returning 'Black box' missions as they were once coined for Unity. Essentially pitched as playgrounds with a major target you are free to hunt down anyway you like- like a typical Immersive Sim would do it- Mirage realises this in perhaps the least impressive fashion this series could manage. Essentially you have the freedom to approach some targets with two or three options, but a single cinematic tailor-made assassination opportunity the game wants you to use. Otherwise you can just jog up and clumsy slap them until they fall over- those are your options. I like the idea- but unless you have level designers with the kind of fire in them that the Hitman developers at IO boast- it can end up as a bit of a wet fart in execution. 

Overall I am actually shocked to say that I enjoyed my time with Assassin's Creed Mirage far more than nearly every other title in the Assassin's Creed franchise over the past 10 years- and that is because this game didn't linger long enough to get on my bad side. Other than several horrific crashes I suffered through this game gets exactly to the point, executes it's mission and sods off on a decently high note. I miss the days of lean Assassin's Creed and recall how the best paced game in the franchise was actually the slick Brotherhood- for which this title is a pale comparison- but I can see the rough inspirations. I would actually go so far as to give this a C+ Grade, against all belief. I shock even myself. Still- nothing truly interesting from a narrative standpoint- particularly given that the twist is well known by anyone who endured Valhalla- it was only ever a question of how they were going to pull it. I guess the only thing I really learned is that apparently Basim knew the entire time, which clarifies a bit of Valhalla's two hours of actual narrative I suppose. Here's hoping someone on the team really notices the power of not overstaying your welcome.

Assassin's Creed Japan

 

I'm sure there are many out there who heard about the recent announcement, paid a little glance over the shoulder at it and faintly smiled in the dreamy way we acknowledge that old wayward car tire lodged in the gnarled body of the park's local tree that has been there since childhood. An ugly thing objectively, overdue for correction, but some halcyon sliver of the thing we call 'Nostalgia' confines errant respect for the thing that reminds us of simpler, uncluttered days. Not many out there have been tuned in on the barking and cawing the creative suction well that represents Ubisoft studio to see what this actually says about the Assassin's Creed brand- because for whatever dark reason it is the words of the Ubisoft from yester year haunt the recess' of my mind like the knell of the dead clocking ever closer with each fraught night. With the announcement of this game, confirmed beyond a shadow by the reveal trailer, Ubisoft have finally admitted that they are out of ideas.

Yeah, I know what you're thinking. "Ubisoft are out of ideas? What was your first clue- did you even play the 100+ hour sleepwalk that was Valhalla?" But I've been tracking their decent into mediocrity much longer than that, seeing their collapse into the mid masters that now defines modern Ubisoft so spectacularly that it is a common sight to see any member of the community with any amount of investment in the industry scoff at the sight of their name. Just look at the like/to dislike ratio sitting under any of their YouTube announcements, the tide has turned- Ubisoft are being recognised for the backwards dinosaurs they dedicated the past decade congealing into. Now their entire business model is to serve as blackened coal fuelling the most most lazy and derivative aspects of the industry so slavishly that they were the first big studio to actively posit their dreams of throwing AI into the mix to do the devs jobs for them. (As if Watch_Dogs Legion didn't prove their games are soulless enough with active developers!)

You see, I remember all the way back in the halcyon, and long buried, days of Assassin's Creed 2 when we still used to think this was a franchise with direction and purpose worth speculating about. Do you remember that? When the creators still had grand plans about what the franchise represented, how it would explore itself going forward and what fans could expect. Yves even claimed the franchise had an expiry date, like the liar he's always been, implying that ever entry would serve as a stepping stone on an ultimate journey to completion. In that I remember very clearly an easter egg placed within the game by the developers hinting at directions they wouldn't take the franchise because they would be 'too obvious', and I'm sure you can see where this is going.

First off they've been very clear about how they don't want to go to any era in history overstuffed with Guns. Rebecca famously spouts how boring shooting is, and in the brief moments throughout the franchise we've dabbled in World War 1 and 2, the player has never been strapped up to the nines. Cars are also a no-no, as explained in some diatribe about how the trance-state of driving interferes with the animus data recall process of some other such trite- they don't want to get to modern, is what I'm getting at. And what else? Well they don't want to go to any time period that has been done to death such as- Feudal Japan. Because that would be a sign that this series which is based around exploring the wonders of history with a fantastical story stitched atop it- is losing it's touch and going for the low hanging fruit. Whelp- Ubisoft meet fruit.

Assassin's Creed codename red was revealed as 'Assassins Creed Shadows' in a CG trailer that I just can't bring myself to watch. Ubisoft stopped making interesting trailers around about the time of Unity, they've been wastes of time ever since. The point of the matter is it's going to star the Blue Eyed Black Samurai, as featured in the recent anime of that name, and a Kunoichi- because Kunoichi are awesome. (Unsure how historically accurate they are, but since when has Modern AC dev teams ever cared about 'historical accuracy'?) And you can bet your bottom dollar this reveal came with another patented Ubisoft collectors edition worth over a £100 because Yves hates us all and he wants us to know it. (Don't worry man, the feeling is mutual.) And needless to say, I have some thoughts.

First off, I couldn't care less to even engage with the miniscule outrage about the depiction of a black samurai- I've seen a tiny smidge of people even commenting on that and those who feed that nothing of a minority are actually doing more harm than they are even capable of when just ignored. Besides, such discourse distracts from the real concerns, such as- is this an actual game this time? I have to ask because the last such title, Valhalla, was a exercise in virtual torture stretched across over a 100 torturous hours of mind numbing nothingness. There was about 5 hours of narrative sprinkled across that disastrously bloated corpse of a game, and that was supposed to be the teams response to people's grumbles about how overstuffed Odyssey was! This one might just kill me off! (If I even get around to it. Don't even know if I can stomach this crap anymore, to be honest.)

And on a more nuanced note- splitting up the combat and the stealth gameplay between two protagonists is a mightily ambitious move for a team that historically struggle to make any single play style feel substantive even when they come as a package. The last time they tried this, for Syndicate, both Evie and Jacob ended playing near identically to one another aside from functionally arbitrary weapon restriction. What has transpired within the development of then to now that they feel comfortable trying it all again? I don't trust them. Unless they've brought their systems so far up to scratch we're looking at Phantom Blood level of AI advancement- I can already taste the half-assed disappointment.

Some part of me took solace in the quiet between Mirage and now, hoping that the franchise had finally given up and we'd get a few years off at the very least. Of course that wouldn't be the case. Of course Shadows is out later this year. Of course it comes with prototypical Ubisoft nickle and diming. Of course it's going to be a disappointment. Only this time around this game has plenty of competition to contend with in it's genre so we can contrast and compare all the ways this feudal Japan will feel wanting. Ghost of Tsushima, Rise of the Ronin, hell- even Like a Dragon Ishin! I'll eat my hat if Ubisoft's Japan is anywhere close to as detailed as those that came before.

Assassin's Creed Valhalla Review

AAAAARG! 

Years after the fact, and when the topic has been put to the grave by so many before me, I'm finally rocking around to sum up my time playing through what is known as 'the mythology trilogy' of Assassin's Creed games, which for me has been a steady spiral downwards for all the least innovative and interesting directions that an originally deeply evocative and unique franchise could take. I've not been reserved in my feelings towards this particular cut of new Assassin's Creed games so far, and I honestly had the spectre of public perceptions around Valhalla hanging over my head the entire time whilst playing Odyssey. Staring at my ballooning hours of gradually more tedious and upsetting playtime whilst trying to envision how it was the direct sequel which earned the reputation of being 'too long' whilst those same fans laud Odyssey as being 'perfectly paced'. I expected the absolute worst of the worst, and we'll see how right we with this, rather exhaustive, review.

My first thought was one of absolute disgust as I learned that, to my great chagrin, Layla has returned as the player's avatar throughout this adventure. To touch on that wound once again, I utterly despise the character of Layla for her abrasively pretentious attitude, her effortlessly 'instant-expert at everything from riddles, to assassinations to one-on-one combat' depiction and the frustrating fact that key aspects of her story are told through ancillary material that is vaguely referenced throughout each game as though we are all collecting Ubisoft comics in our spare time. She spent significant screen time in Odyssey whining about the death of a character who had never been rendered off a comic page, and Valhalla just kicks off with her paling around with Shawn Hastings and Rebecca Chambers of Assassin's Creed 2- 3 fame! Albeit, slightly melted-faces looking versions of them but it's been 10 years, I can hardly hold the rigors of time against them. At the very least, I can say the team were gracious enough not to have us spend too long with Layla this time, and even kept her online correspondence mercifully brief. (I still have nightmares about the hour of ancillary Layla lore in Origins kept entirely in her optional laptop that I begrudgingly poured through to form any basic idea of what was going on.) From there, was the actual game.

Assassin's Creed Valhalla puts us in the shoes of Eivor, a Viking who's gender Ubisoft will give you full reign to select only to belittle your choice if you don't pick their chosen canon, sometimes during the same game. In Odyssey, those who played as Alexios like myself were essentially told they were wrong in hindsight by the game explicitly referring to that character by the female name 'Kassandra'. (And even having a crossover with just her at one point.) In Valhalla, male Eivors don't even get to pretend they are canon throughout their own game, as one of the most pivotal cutscenes at the end of the game rips away that illusion by shoving the female avatar in the scene for literally no reason. Again, I don't care that the character is canonically this other iteration, I just don't understand why Ubisoft even bothers to offer a choice if they're just going to invalidate the users playthrough. It's the very same reason why a TV adaptation of any RPG game is a tricky proposition wherein you risk conflicting with the user's specific journey of events by just throwing up your hands and going 'nuh uh'! That's something any serious RPG developer knows going into development, it's literally a touchstone for every aspect of RPG development from narrative development (writing stories that react to the players choices) to gameplay consistency. (design gameplay challenges that can feasibly be tackled through any reasonable player build) Tripping up here so often reveals just how performative and toothless Assassin Creed's 'RPG' aspirations are.

And on a much more specific note, I'm quite tickled at the fact that Ubisoft offered it's new game plus difficulties as default options to new players. When I saw the highest difficulty setting made the enemies 60 levels above you at all times, I gulped but I figured it would be no more difficult than the highest level of any previous Assassin's Creed game. I didn't realise what they meant was the game would be impossible unless you started at near max level. Most over developers would avoid that by gating off such difficulties for New Game + playthroughs- but this is Ubisoft. Can't expect basic self-awareness out of them, now can you? Also, the game wouldn't allow me to change the difficulty during the tutorial chapter, which is... horrendously dumb. That is literally what a tutorial is for. I had to restart the game. Great job Ubisoft.

One specific note of praise that I can actually raise Valhalla's way is a much improved combat suite compared to both Origins and Odyssey. There is a bizarre modern day perception that old school (as in AC 2-Black Flag) era Assassin's Creed games had 'mediocre' combat because they didn't play like a Dark Souls parody but instead catered to an entirely different power fantasy altogether. Personally I think it's an asinine rewriting of history to try and justify the frankly godawful combat systems of the past two games that have inspired 'defenders' on account of it being 'difficult' now. Because yes, janky laden floating swings that carry either no impact or totally stun lock an enemy is certainly difficult to get to terms with- and painfully exhausting after the 100th hour putting up with it. It has only been now, in Valhalla, that the team finally managed to wiggle something acceptable out of the foundations.

Valhalla's combat is hitbox based once again, but with a newfound weightiness and impact between each attack which makes fights feel less like foam-spear jousting. Enemies are fitted with stagger bars that can be knocked down with well timed parries (which all weapons have no, thankfully) and when you destroy all that stagger there's even a 'finisher' you can activate which is typically strong enough to outright kill most small enemies. It adds a bit of a ebb and flow to combat that feels leagues more intentionally designed with a gameplay philosophy behind it, similar to the combat of the oldschool Assassin's Creed's, over the rest of the RPG era with their 'basic hitbox gameplay works, doesn't it?' 

Additionally, gear score has finally been axed because that system which was already well known not to fit well with long-form single player RPGs unless a lot of effort is dedicated into refining the loot-grabber cycle such as with ARPGs- yeah, turns out it doesn't fit Assassin's Creed so well! Only took Ubisoft ruining their last game with that in order to learn! Now you find unique pieces of gear scattered across the world, usually in chests that are dumbed mindlessly across England, and combine them with magic runes (because the cohesiveness of the brand dies as soon as the gameplay team get their hands on the material) in order to create weapons and builds. 

There are also gear-combo buffs but I never found any of these to be truly gameplay defining. What truly does offer a surprising amount of gear building variety, to a degree that I would even somewhat call it: innovative- (In my Ubisoft game? Never!) is the dual wielding system. Valhalla will allow to wield any two weapons together. You can even go around with two shields, for what that's worth. (It's not as useless as it sounds.) Combos allow you to take advantage of how two different weapons feel to field with one another, like the speed of a dagger with the reach of a spear, but also to build each weapon with runes that compliment unique build types. Such as the dual heal-on-crit dagger combo I equipped all throughout Ireland which made me near invincible in crowds. Or the late-game Gae-Bolg/Excalibur combo I had which essentially melted all comers by destroying stamina bars in the game, stacking stun proccing and blinding flashes. You can get really creative with the way you fight, which we've never been able to do in this franchise... ever before. And trust me, making combat fun is a necessity in this game, because the bare basic gameplay of a combat encounter is all that these designers have to fall back on.

Whenever you hear discourse about Assassin's Creed Valhalla people will immediately resort to the assertion that the game is "too long". But personally I find this to be a ridiculously unsubstantive take given the fact that Odyssey was also too long- far outliving the enjoyability of it's gameplay and the variety of it's world as the story meandered on for somewhere close to seventy hours. (Admittedly in a completionist playthrough.) But what is it that makes Assassin's Creed Valhalla so much more noticeably unbearable even for the bizarre fans of Odyssey who simply just don't like the outside world. Odyssey dragged, sure- but Valhalla tortured me- to the extent that even before I was hitting those 100 hour playtime marks I was considering ripping out my eyes.  I actually think the problem is a bit more specific than the game dragging itself out with a story that is too long- the problem is that Assassin's Creed Valhalla has no story.

Now let me be clear, I'm not saying that this is an Overwatch or one of those 'Sandbox RPGs' where they throw you into a world and give you not drive. What I mean is thus: You start Valhalla with the trappings of a narrative that you think will guide you across your adventure, but the second after you hit England after the prolonged Norway intro chapter- that story entirely disappears. The story straight up abandons you to partake in side quest- lines. That isn't just a side quest- that is a side quest line. I defined a side quest in this game by the lack of memorable characters, no progression of core plot objectives, ignoring any potential for central character development and overall feeling like giant wastes of time. These side questlines make up the vast majority of Valhalla's story- whereas the curated core quest cheekily peeks in for four or five missions throughout that slog- ultimately achieving very little in the doing. 

Eivor is attempting to colonise England with his Viking Clan, which means travelling out to the various boroughs and partaking in the same rough frame-work of quests with each respective leader in order to 'gain their allegiance' and further Viking control of the country. This will be a prolonged introductory quest wherein the writers will do their best to endear you to characters with about as much personality as burnt toast- curious to glance at, if for the mistake, but unappealing to dig into-; a second quest in which you are usually told to do one active activity (raid this camp, save these prisoners, escort this character. ETC.) and then the third quest which branches into multiple quests which are all open world activities disguised as quests. (Clear this location on the map. Etc.) The finale for nearly all of these side questlines is a siege on a fortified location, which is a fun enough spectacle the first couple of times, but a predictable slugfest all the remaining thirteen times made all the more headache inducing by the fact that they lack autosaves, so if you die at anypoint during the siege you have to start from the beginning. That will probably eat up five to six hours, depending on how much riding across nothing the game expects you to do between each quest.

There is the offering of the odd choice here and there throughout the various questlines, wherein the fate of certain characters are left up to Eivor's predilection. Unfortunately, as these victims are almost always pertaining to these side quest lines- and are thus all universally forgettable and boring, these consequences feel utterly uninteresting to a universal degree. Even the main quest 'consequences' which mirror the exact same ongoing decision evaluation that Odyssey pulled off, lacks all impact for the fact that since you spend so little time around the core cast- none of them are made endearing. I could care less if one of the main cast doesn't like me and chooses not to be my friend anymore- I can't even see them as a real person, how can I value their fabrication of an opinion on my supposed actions? So yes, even Odyssey's overly played-out family drama, stretched to a newts-width across the Peloponnesian war, (itself a vast step down from Origin's half-decent character-respecting revenge conspiracy) is more engaging than Valhalla's... nothing of a narrative. I shudder to think what the script outline looked like. (Half scribbled notes on the back of a napkin?)

In excessively broad terms (I'm talking the width of an albatross' wings- broad) Valhalla has some mildly not-pathetic concepts that it wants to explore- but the execution is simply pitiful. One such being the particularly interesting conversion of the Assassin's great enemies, The Order of Ancients, a secular cabal of tyrants, into The Templar Order, a religious order... of Tyrants. That's an interesting dichotomy- which the writers relegate to a post-game text dump room which is so optional they don't even provide a quest marker to go track it down- that's how little they care. There's also another recontextualising on the resurrection technology, pretty much the only remaining ongoing plotpoint ever since perfect princess Layla took down hardened mercenary overall bad guy Otso Berg on a mad whim last game. That goes on for impressively long for a plotpoint which, oh look- doesn't achieve anything! We already know Juno's boytoy who keeps being born again throughout history- teaching us why through the hazy lens of their unintelligent mythological weave that these storytellers hide desperately behind confers literally nothing new on the topic.

The only push that this game makes in the overall storytelling is in the last three minutes of the main game, and they infuriate me to a painful degree too. But at least something happens during them! I can actually nod my head and acknowledge that the events that occur will have consequences branching beyond the game that I'm playing, and though I'm far beyond invested enough to wonder what might become of these plotpoints in the future, those less broken by this franchise can at least grapple onto something. Overwise this entire game has been an exercise in all the worst writing practices that Ubisoft has built up over the years ballooned to comical proportions.

When you're not engaging with the story, you can feel free to mess around with the new Homestead system which carries a slight lineage with Assassin's Creed 3's town builder only, you know, with tons more grind piled ontop. Whereas in AC3 you slowly built up a close family of friends through personalised quests as you invite them into town, in Valhalla you are expected to go raiding all the way up and down England for supplies in order to meet the nonsensically scaling requirements for the Chicken House. Because the Chickens are eating the wood or something, so you need to dump half a forests worth in that shelter to keep them satiated! This, along with a great many of the ongoing objectives that define Valhalla, are part of the quiet design shift Ubisoft pulled without telling anyone towards making this game a Live Service. In all but the inclusion of a Battle Pass and always online connectivity- that's exactly what this game is.

Valhalla wants you to grind for building materials, for upgrade materials, for rarity ascension materials, (although those are thankfully not so bad) for silver and, of course, for the premium currency in order to buy their entire side-games worth of premium asset packs that contain literally end-game level weapons and Armor you can just buy to trivialise the otherwise half decent combat laid out. They expected to keep this up over the course of months, and so the grind requirements start to get ridiculous by the late game. The amount of materials you need to max out the upgrades for a single piece of gear is such an insane time commitment it's literally not worth investing in for the 2 extra Armor points it provides. (Just learn how to dodge a bit better, seriously.) Those that played Valhalla during it's release window were encouraged to come back seasonally for the special holiday events that rolled out regularly, creating the illusion of a living world. Of course, these insanely simple events were all manually run, so rather than just making them automatic like a real game developer would- Assassin's Creed Valhalla's team just disabled all of them when they moved on from active maintenance. (Modern Game development, folks!)

All this ties into the various side activities that Valhalla tries to utilise in order to make the game feel more like a living world. We get a simple dice rolling minigame with a little bit of perfunctory tactics and progression sprinkled on which all get quickly overshadowed by the clear superiority of the damage dealing totems. The 'Flyting' which is just a game of 'click on the rhyme that sounds a bit less than stupid'. (I found it boring and largely avoided them.) and... oh there's the rhythm based drinking minigame which isn't half bad! I always enjoyed doing that one, even if it wasn't particularly complicated. There's more work than went into Odyssey to give players ways to immerse themselves in the small things of the world- and for that I can at least commend the team for trying. Is it decent? In the modern world where Like a Dragon is considered AAA? Nah- but it's a start.

Of course the meat of any Ubisoft game is the various collectibles which are mindlessly scattered across the world for players to robotically hoover up across dozens of mind numbing extra hours scrambling up the forgotten corners of their lovingly rendered map. The worst of the worst of open world content, perfected by the masters of bad design practices themselves! However- egads; Ubisoft actually did something a little different this time around? (Say it ain't so!) I mean, there's still not an inkling of creative thought that goes into why these collectables are scattered everywhere, but for the first time ever the level designers have been tasked with actually providing exploration challenges! I know- it only took them a little over fifteen years to figure out that engaging players during exploration might make that vector of the game design less pathetic!

Rock up to the points of interest on your map and you might just happen upon basic puzzles, such as finding a key, exploding a wall, (So much easier once you unlock the explosive arrows power) tracking down the not-so-obvious broken wall to enter a closed off building- it's not great content- but for a first time open world developer it's not half bad! For a developer that has been making exclusively open world games their entire career- it's embarrassingly pathetic- but I'm taking the slop I'm given and working with it, okay? Of course, I would be remiss not to mention the fact that chests now contain unique pieces of gear, which can be collected to cater towards certain builds that fit your playstyle, and even the reward for exploration isn't half bad- what is going on here? Unfortunately, the volume of open world fluff is still insane, which means that when you go into maintenance mode and try to clear the map, only to find certain treasures blocked off in a two minute puzzle or trapped underground where you don't know how to get down there- it's just that extra step too far making this inane content frustrating. There we go- back to what I expect from Ubisoft open worlds!

Returning is the 'Order' system from Odyssey which turned the act of dismantling the Order of the Ancients into an open world activity- cleverly allowing the narrative to instead focus on the personal journey of the hero whilst the actual business work is left up to the player. This doesn't work out so well in Valhalla given that there is no main story, and threading these ancillary order members back into the core narrative would have provided some basic structure to keep us hooked on to something, in place of the nothing we currently have to feast upon. This time around certain members of the Order require the completion of some open world activities in order to unlock a clue to their location, which is a novel idea to force open world interaction if nothing else.

But I've gone all this time only talking about two thirds of this game, not mentioning the actual narrative driven story section- the Asgard chapters- and there is a reason for that. The Asgard chapters follow Eivor taking drugs in order to enter the dreams of the spirit of Odin which occupies their mind. This essentially means another round of the mythology-dream sections from Odyssey with the exception that Valhalla basically retells some of the later stories of the Poetic Edda just before Ragnarok beat for beat- within the confines of their lore. Which means all those stories about wrestling old age, drinking the ocean, and that lot- those obvious fables with morals- are supposed to be real events that happened in the Isu past. Once again, only the surface amount of narrative thought is put into the existence of these chapters as an excuse to go 'full mythology' and it leads to a event rich but context poor experience that I find deeply unsatisfying.

Asgard chapters in particular follow a largely lethargic and unengaging formula for anyone with even a passing knowledge of Norse myth, given that the team seemed strangely interested in depicting these past events in their entirety in pursuit of nothing. The faux moral they toss in at the end as a supposed lesson to Eivor is so generic and minuscule I can only imagine it was a late-development throw in line as an attempt to retroactively justify a significant chunk of their development budget. The fact they took the throwaway story of 'Asgard's wall' and used that to frame the entire first half of this narrative astounded me! And bored me. Mostly the later. The Jotunhiem chapter, on the otherhand, portrays a much looser event with mere heavy references to other Poetic Edda stories, allowing for a cohesive narrative tied back to the actual fate of Odin, and served as probably the most engaged I was during my entire playthrough of vanilla Valhalla. (Though I still rushed it to be done as soon as possible. So take that for what it's worth.)

I singled out 'Vanilla' Valhalla, because the DLC present actually gave me a much better time. Focusing on actual storytelling and committing themselves to much tighter world spaces- all of Valhalla DLCs provided at least decent play experiences in stark contrast to the base games increasingly painful slog. And in a telling way it was the smaller DLC that ended up being the most fun, whilst the longer one's outstayed their welcome a little too much. Although in comparison to the base game, it would take an absolute travesty of moronic and uninteresting design to reflect worse than the scars the main story left upon my soul. 

'Dawn of Ragnarok' was the worst, taking a really cool sounding concept and whittling it down into another overly sparse open world space with a thin narrative spread across it. There was a new special powers system, which is worth fiddling about with for a few minutes- and a decent set piece or two nearer to the end, but largely that final DLC was a large let down admist the community and to me. (I was actually excited for the thing, fool that I am.)

The Siege of Paris sounds much more exciting than it ends up being, probably because I had memories of the Paris from Unity, because I'm being reminded that Ubisoft decided to pick an era in which non of the modern marvels which give these famous locales their identity exist yet. Black box assassination missions are teased once again, but the 'freeform' assassination concept seems a tad perfunctory when slammed into a gameplay system with minimal stealth potential and a heavy open combat focus. Good in intention, rough in execution. Also, I'm offended that they presented Charles the Fat as a legitimate boss fight. Sod off, Ubisoft.

And finally 'Wrath of the Druids' is actually a genuinely good chunk of content I was mightily impressed to receive. Like a man stumbling across a genuine fountain in the middle of an otherwise barren desert- Wrath of the Druids feels like a real game in every aspect. The world is neat and easily covered, the narrative covers a small cast of characters well enough to care, there are three acts- developments, stakes and pay-offs. Sure, everything is a little bit cliche from a writing angle, you would have to be totally new to all these character archetypes to not know where everyone was going to end up after your first or second meeting with them- but I enjoyed my visit to Ireland and came away smiling, which is more than I can say for every other questline in this entire game which otherwise had me sighing "Finally!" when they were done.

If everything I've already said about Valhalla has felt like I'm angry and dissatisfied with the game- just wait because I think the ending is the game at it's worst. The resolution to the main plot comes out of nowhere, before you've actually taken all of England. (There is actually no resolution to taking over all of England- that aspect of the story just stops- this was meant to be it's climax. Because that's how storytelling works- climax several hours before the end. Good job, morons.) You are dragged away into a half decent story segment that slowly ruins itself the further it goes on for. They desperately try to throw in the same sort of moment in Odyssey, wherein you confront Kassandra (or Alexios as it's canonically supposed to be) and reflect on all your important choices throughout the campaign in order to guide her back from the brink. But whereas some actual stakes existed there, Valhalla's equivalence in a joke.

Sigurd is intended to be your close compatriot whom you care enough about to try and win over- but the game does a laughable job of establishing that. Sigurd is vapourised out of the story for it's vast majority and is presented as a pretentious jerk in most of the moments before and a deranged melomaniac upon his return. Even during the confrontation scene, the sorts of choices the game examines are moments like "You didn't like it when I sentenced a man to financial destitution for accidentally using a piece of material he thought was left out as scrap" or "You hooked up with my estranged bride with whom I shared no affection probably largely due to the arranged nature of our relationship". And I supposed to care that he finds issue there? I was secretly hoping that the final boss fight would involve killing him, whereas in Odyssey I was searching for a way to pull Kassandra back to the family even in the most dire moments. There couldn't be a greater divide between these extremes.

Of course, I have glided right past the final boss of Valhalla which was such a mistake of execution I couldn't believe what I was playing. Thank god for Dawn of Ragnarök for at least giving an entertaining, if not particularly complex and challenging, final boss because if >redacted spoiler< was my final memory of a boss fight this game had to offer I would honestly deduct an extra grade from my final score. For a while I held Syndicate's final boss as the worst this franchise had to offer for how utterly inane and simply sad it was. Offering little more than crossing a room three times. >redacted spoiler< is so much worse.

>Redacted Spoiler< is presented with no health bar, which gives the player no frame of reference to progression and robs the intensity of feedback from the player. He is also a speed-focused enemy with complete control over his attacks, which robs a lot of the gameplay utility Valhalla offers, considering the game largely caters to abilities that allows the player to seize control of enemy movement to chain together powerful combos. And worst of all? >Redacted Spoiler< spams the same move incessantly. Fighting him is a chore of blocking the exact same attack, hitting him twice, and then waiting for him to disappear, run around the rim of the arena and do it again. With no feedback from a health bar telling you if any progress is happening, no boss fight stages to add some depth to the battle cycle, and no solid music cues to fill the void of insanity. What's worse than an insanely straight forward final encounter that takes twenty seconds? How about an insanely straight forward final encounter that drags on for five excruciating minutes? Welcome to the finale of Valhalla, the perfect microcosm of every wrong with the game as a whole!

Of course, the cherry on top of the cake is having to deal with Layla again immediately after all that. She isn't around nearly as much as she was for the end of Odyssey however, and if I'm reading events of the game right she might not even be appearing too much in future games from this point on. (Woohoo!) But she finds a way to stick in one last jab at bad character writing at the end there. It falls apart upon meeting up with a supercomputer intelligence which is not explicitly named but sounds exactly like Nolan North so I assume is meant to be the preserved consciousness of Desmond Miles, in fact, (Welcome back to the franchise dude, it's all gone down hill since you've been gone.) This superintelligence appears to have been searching across time ever since the first game, analysing untold quantities of data though it's immense mind- and what happens when Layla walks in? She takes one look around and says "How about you try this obvious thing?" To which she is praised as being 'brilliant' for simple existing. God I hate unbearably perfect characters who don't deserve it, I don't who know inserted themselves into the franchise courtesy of Layla Hassan but I'm so glad their part has been downsized from here on in. Good god!

What else is there that I can really say about this game? The UI is a eyesore to sift through- the game's moral choices are painfully black and white, Layla is the worst modern day protagonist this franchise has ever suffered, (I've said it before but it bears repeating) the attempt to revive Black Box missions just highlights how far behind Assassin's Creed mission design is in a world that permits Hitman to grave on by. Oh, and I simply must say that this is literally the third Assassin's Creed game in which I've witnessed a book burning zealot who is confronted by a dissenter to which they utter some variation of the line "You love your books so much; then burn for them!" before pushing them ontop of the fire. They introduced a book burning bad guy in the EXACT same way THREE TIMES- all in this SAME FRANCHISE! You could call it a reference back to the original, but I'm half certain the second 'reference' was during the Mythology Trilogy, so I'm more inclined to call it a pathetic lack of creativity.

If I had to squeeze out some positives for the sake of my immortal soul, I might actually offer a point of benefit to those annoying boring 'Valhalla' sections the game forces upon you. Havi, Odin himself, is actually a more dynamic and interesting character than the well-performed but blandly written Eivor. (I'm told that female Eivor's performance is as bland as the material- but I cannot comment. If it's true, however, that is a funny reverse of the Odyssey situation.)  Odin is a sociopath in the Poetic Edda and the team preserved that surprisingly faithfully in his adaptation here, and it makes for actually entertaining interactions that punctuate the otherwise completely bland events of the Valhalla missions. Watching Odin play with cards and never quite knowing if he's playing a con, out of his depth or simply totally uncaring about those that might be hurt if he's wrong- it encourages tension! He'll just watching a close fellow god be horribly maimed in front of him and do nothing about it, not because of bad writing as is typically the Ubisoft MO, but because he actually doesn't care. (Although, given that this is Ubisoft- I did have to wait until the game itself recognised this because knowing that it was, in fact, intentional.) Havi's character might just be the most interesting this game has to offer. 

Last and least? It's sad that for the cross-over DLC between Kassandra and Eivor their entire fight is a self-indulgent cinematic. Sure the animation is great and the chorography is solid- but I thought I was playing a game, not playing Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days in the HD collection again. (Those who know, know.) Oh, and the goodbye DLC is just a procession of cutscenes where the team demonstrate just how bad of a job they did telling the history of this time period, when they used to be so good. King Aelfred's inexplicable disposition and even more inexplicable reinstatement could have really done with a bit of exploration. Maybe a codex entry? Remember those? Nah- who cares! This is Assassin's Creed- we care more about mythological monsters than relaying cool parts of real history! We've got not clue what the heart of this franchise even is anymore!

 

Conclusion

That's it. I'm done. I can't write about this god-damn game anymore. I'm totally numb. 143 hours- hell. At the very least Valhalla didn't stretch itself out with an eye-wateringly dull finale like Odyssey did- but I would have liked some justification for the story stretching itself out like Odyssey at least attempted. Instead I was left with a hollow finale- which summed up a largely hollow game, full of hollow characters playing out a hollow narrative across a hollow world. The combat was solid, Eivor's sounded like he was alive now and then. And I guess I liked 'Wrath of the Druids'. Ciara was really hot. What else... There really is nothing else, is there? 143 hours of game and nothing to show for it. If Ubisoft hadn't released Watch_Dogs Legion merely a year later I would call this one of the lowest points of the AAA industry- but hey- this is better than Watch_Dogs Legion! I'll even go so far as to say that from a gameplay level- this is better than Odyssey! If only the scope of the project matched the depth of the team's creativity. So what's the grade? 'C' simply for the Ireland DLC. D without it. Wish I could say I'm done with this franchise for good but you know me- I'm doom driven; these games will be the death of me, won't they?

Why is Yakuza so much better than Assassin's Creed?

 

With the release, and critical success, of Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth the disparity between the western content farm franchises and the eastern content farm franchises is reaching a point of frank parody. How can it possibly be that the ludicrously over saturated Like a Dragon games are somehow increasing in quality despite being shot quicker than your average 100 Meter sprinter? In an industry filthy with production hang-ups and bloat, resulting in ever longer slogs between major releases that disappoint more and more often- to such a point where some superstar developers are having to weigh up the time they have left on this planet with what they want to work on next. (I'm pretty sure Kojima's next stealth-game after Death Stranding 2 is probably going to be his last, or penultimate, game. As sad as that is to say.) In this industry, what right does a AAA franchise like 'Like a Dragon' have to go on gallivanting like it's still the 2010's?

Especially when you compare this franchise to likes of the biggest perpetrator of 'diminishing returns' such as (Give me a second to riffle through my catalogue of dead horses real quick...) Ubisoft! Can you believe that Assassin's Creed is actually two years younger than the Yakuza franchise? That's right, the first Yakuza launched back in 2005! And do you know what? I think Assassin's Creed's first outing actually holds up better! It's still dated and clunky, but the core of what the franchise would become is spelled out there, whereas Yakuza was just kind of messy in execution at it's start- there's a reason why Yakuza took so long to get it's footing. But Assassin's Creed is increasingly becoming a symbol of everything wrong with modern game design, whilst Like a Dragon is becoming a paragon of all that can go right- so where's the disconnect?

First off I think the mistake that the production of Assassin's Creed makes is in their desperate search for 'relevancy'. What Assassin's Creed currently has in the modern age that is unique to it can only be it's history-jumping setting that promises to take players on a journey to new locations. I've always praised the Ubisoft asset designers because they've never not delivered the top-most possible content, even when recycling assets they never deliver a low-effort outing. However what else does Assassin's Creed offer as a USP? It's unique blend of visually appealing power-fantasy combat? Stealth based stalking mechanics? Robust metagames? All gone. They used to have a place in this franchise, and were probably brought together at their best in Brotherhood, but since then they've fallen for the Ubisoft plague of trying what everyone else is doing in hopes of leaching off of their success.

Yakuza (or 'Like a Dragon'), on the otherhand, knows exactly what it's niches are. Like a Dragon is a franchise that celebrates Japanese culture, leans on romanticised mobster-movie aesthetics and cliches and provides ever-improving combo-based combat schemes. The difference between knowing your strengths and fruitlessly searching for them is clear- RGG can hone on what they're good at and improve rapidly with each outing, whereas Assassin's Creed is stuck dipping their toes into different fields praying one pops off for them enough to warrant sticking around. Origin's slightly positive reception doomed the next two games (at least) to pathetically undercooked RPG-light gameplay which has bloated each entry worse and worse. They're not sharping their toolset, they're blunting their instruments and perfecting their flaws.

Assassin's Creed also suffers narratively thanks to the conceit of their own concept. Hopping to new time periods and characters with each games makes this something of a anthology franchise with only the modern day story to connect elements. Unfortunately, Ubisoft have absolutely no interest in championing narrative in their core franchise to such a degree that the audience often feels disrespected or ignored. Modern Assassin's Creed narratives consist of a couple of set-pieces that are built up to by comics and books released between games read only by die hard fans. Let me remind you that I used to replay the entire franchise before every release like a madman, and I still am not diehard enough to put up with Ubisoft's slop writing for the most basic amount of context. Which means I don't ever get character motivations or relationships presented appropriately to me, which means I end up either not caring or actively hating the cast. (Layla deservers that hate, to be fair. She's awful.)

And what about the assassin's themselves? Well, despite having 100 hour long games now, remember that Ubisoft have turned these into RPGs which translates to- character writing is too hard now. Seriously, their last two major protagonists after Bayek have a grand total of one motive at the beginning of the story and a couple of character traits that usually add up to variations of 'sarcastic' and 'begrudgingly virtuous'. These traits and motivations so rarely come into play that they don't really feel like building blocks of a character but rather bullet points that the script writers need to keep reminding themselves. Most of the time events just kind of happen around them and these characters react, usually by killing the people in front of them, and then they're shuffled off towards the next task. Sure, RPG options means we get to make a choice every now and then- but consequences for said choices are typically either immediate or ephemeral- essentially making them meaningless choices to being with.

Like a Dragon, on the otherhand, never fails to tell character/action hybrid narratives, introduce vibrant fore and background characters, moves the needle in some significant fashion and wows with substantive growth and spectacle by the end. Who could forget the four way duel at the end of Yakuza 4? And who can remember what the finale of Assassin's Creed Origins was? (It couldn't have just been the Caesar assassination, could it? The one that low-key broke the lore of the franchise because we didn't get to see Brutus in the assassin gear we know he owned from Brotherhood.) It's hard to tell stories with characters iconic and static like Kiryu, and RGG have been doing that for nearly 20 years at this point. They're just better at telling stories, to be honest.

All that Assassin's Creed has at this point is legacy. No one sticks to those games for their quality, but because they're comfort food. But the problem with comfort food is that it does start to bore after a while, and all it takes it for anything with a bit of flavour to waft across your way and you drop the comfort food in an instant. Yakuza is like a plate of Pasta al Nero di Seppia. Your brain tells you that is a weird dish of inky noodles your going to be spitting out in a couple of hours, but then you've finished 6 plates, stuck into your seventh with another ahead of you and the spin-off plates piled around that. (Think that analogy got away a bit, but you see where I'm going with this.) The moral of the story is- I'm hungry.

Oh, so Assassin's Creed is current gen now?

 Forgive my scepticism.

It is only natural that with the progression of society, technology and the world- everyone needs to pack up and move themselves along just that little bit in order to ensure they don't end up being forgotten about in the ceaseless march that is the coming future. Because as every techno-futurist bad guy cackles in the final act of every near future dystopia film- "Progress waits for no man!" And they're right. There's no putting the genie back in the bottle once AI art starts taking over and people find it some much easier than sitting down and making art for themselves. You can't just crawl back into the caves and relive the stone age all over again, unless you recreate the end of the original Deus Ex and literally EMP the entire world like the world's most paradoxically technologically savvy luddite. Which is all my way of saying that there's is no reason on the surface that any one should be surprised with the fact that Assassin's Creed Red is launching this year entirely on current gen consoles.

At least, most seem to think that 2024 is a likely release date for the game given how little we know about the title apart from the fact that it is Japan-set and thus the team are just waiting for the world designers to create a beautiful looking landscape so that the system designers can squander it all with the same heartless checklist content that Assassin's Creed cut it's teeth on all those years ago. Yes, you shouldn't worry. The world will lack character, the people personality and the story a script. Hell, if Valhalla turns out to be an indication on the direction of their writing, they may not even remember how to make storylines that guide the events of their scenarios anymore! But all that is exactly what we expect from the sheer mediocrity that is the modern Ubisoft development front- what I'm kicking the ball about today is 'innovation' What is it, how much of it does Assassin's Creed boast?

Because here's the rub- Assassin's Creed hasn't really innovated in about... ten years give or take. The technology that went behind making Black Flag what is was, with dynamic surfaces that generated real-time, was ingenious. I can't recall another Assassin's Creed which brought anything that took advantage of modern tech to that degree. Unity boasted some ascendant crowd tech that could produce emergent behaviour when stressed but... well... that never made it to the finished product. Since then all the games have been able to boast is ever bigger open worlds for the team to squander because they no idea what to fill them with. At least 'Watch Dogs Legion' has a really cool idea. The game was an unforgivably boring mess-of-a tech demo- but someone was trying at somepoint. I'm not sure that outside the work of the world artists, that can praise can be replicated for modern Assassin's Creed.

Every few years the team will change the way that the game's climbing works, jiggle about with the combat, throw in a half-baked RPG system- and the Assassin's Creed fanbase will claim without any hint of irony that this slightly differently packaged meal is the best the game has ever tasted. (Except for free running, I'm pretty sure we're all on the same page about free running feeling utterly depth-less in modern iterations.) The Ubisoft team have never had to break down the fundamentals of the franchise and figure out how to innovate and what to leave behind. You might compare this with the Bethesda rut of design which has become a topic of much discussion recently, but I'd argue Assassin's Creed is even more enclosed than even that. These games are echoes of one another, lacking that spark of individuality we pray for in franchise games. Even Yakuza have changed their games more than AC have!

And yet Assassin's Creed Red is said to be the first game so transcendent in it's ideas that past gen consoles just can't run the thing- and I struggle to understand why. I mean, first guess is probably that the team are creating all textures in native 4k- easy guess there, but what about everything else that makes a game- tick? Well, I guess they could try and up the density of their crowds (Valhalla was surprisingly reserved on that front- which I guess matches the time period. But then, even Odyssey wasn't mind blowing in that regard.) Maybe we'll be able to ride horses through cities, something that hasn't been possible since Brotherhood, but now with an SSD being a requirement that seems like something of a no-brainer. But do either of those sound worthy of a next gen jump to you? What actually would?

Personally, I would want an Assassin's Creed that pushes the gameplay systems further than they've even been before. Sprawling stealth levels, dynamic AI characters who surprise and overwhelm, dense streets packed with character and activity, giant set pieces that don't just create an illusion of scale presented in tightly conducted hallways of action. (Valhalla knows what I mean there with it's endless 'siege battles') And most of all, I want to see the current gen taken advantage of in a way I'm not expecting. This is the age of experimentation with the current gen, of pulling of things we never even considered being plausible. I don't want all that potential squandered in favour of 'ray tracing on characters eyes'- which is exactly what I already know the team are going for.

This is why I consider the coming abandonment of last gen consoles to be smokescreen and illusion. It's a headline designed to convince the world that something substantive is being conjured up in the mines of the Ubisoft content factory, when in truth their slathering new make-up brands on the same desiccated corpse of a product and praying no can peek through the layers of foundation at the flaking enamel beneath. But I've been through this enough to know, Ubisoft doesn't change. They never change! As much as I want to have hope for them, for their many franchises that I once loved, I can't just bury my head in the sand and pretend I don't see the exact same crap from them that I've seen for the past ten years. And the worst part of it all? They're successful. They sell millions each game. Which means no matter how bad things get, they'll always keep their lamentable quality standards.

What will it take to change things at Ubisoft? A rude awakening, no doubt. When that bizarre project manager quit, upon whose shoulders the blame for the repetition of Ubisoft products where placed, I knew the culture wouldn't change. The roots were set too deep, his cronies has already changed the kind of developer that Ubisoft was. That is why removing any head here or there isn't going to reboot the company any more than jumping to a new set of hardware is going to automatically revolutionise their game. No they're going to need a shock to the system. A trauma. Something they'll never recover from. They need to have a financial failure! Of course, such a failure would immediately be used an an excuse to axe 25% of the workforce, so I can't even advocate for that either. It's just a lose-lose with Assassin's Creed and Ubisoft, isn't it?

How to be difficult

 

Difficulty in video games is such an interesting topic balance in challenge versus reward which demands the highest level of empathetic awareness, careful balancing and ultimate understanding of one's games systems to master. And yet it's so often tossed out the door as the last-thought mechanic hardly ever given more than the slightest modicum of attention as though it doesn't even matter. And gamers are no real help in this matter. Half demand that a game bend over backwards to accommodate their unwillingness to struggle, the other half want the very prospect of 'tutorials' to be abolished in a fire. I think there are degrees of medium, as always, but there are also developers who muddy their waters by having absolutely no understanding of what a 'challenge' even means, as if they've never picked up a game in their lives. (And recently I'm starting to wonder.)

Having recently picked up Assassin's Creed Valhalla, expecting it to be a bit more engaging than Far Cry 6 which I'm struggling to care about, I've come across my first gigantic hurdle right away- Ubisoft don't know what difficulty is. That is to say, they seem not to understand how balance works to increase danger without reducing fun- the two key most parameters of balance in gaming. Ever since some utter ass told the AC devs that their game would make a half decent RPG, the franchise has been deadset on proving that wrong with dreadful RPG after dreadful RPG fed to an audience so battered and abused they starting to accept the gruel and believe it's caviar. And nowhere is this more painfully apparent than in they way they designed their 'difficulty' levels. Would it shock you to learn that it's entirely damage and parry timing sliders? You know- the single laziest possible way anyone could handle difficulty balancing whatsoever? Laziness? From Ubisoft? I'm shocked!

Valhalla has two metrics. One which balloons up damage received and taken and another which... wait, breaks the level scaling so that enemies are always 30-60 levels above the player? Wait- How can Ubisoft be this- what is the point of level scaling? It's supposed to be an artificial gate blocking players off from areas of the map they aren't ready for, at least that's the function in open world games. It should also provide a feeling of subtly and steady curving difficulty as the game progresses. Keeping it constantly higher than the player totally erases all semblance of balancing. And the fact that Assassin's Creed offers several options to handle level scaling that can be switched at any time tells me the team had no idea how to handle it themselves and simply asked the player to balance the game for them. Shameful User Experience, is what it is. Simply shameful.

Baldur's Gate 3, on the otherhand, has a more clever approach to difficulty. There are a few blanket 'number increases'. Certain checks get bonuses and others get negatives depending on your difficulty scale, but the real point of note is the clever reworking of certain arenas to be more dangerous on higher difficulties. A fight on even ground on one difficulty will feature strategic archers in another difficulty. A basic brawl will find itself smothered with explosive barrels in higher modes. This is an excessively careful and thoughtful design into exactly what it is that makes difficulty and stoking it individually for each encounter, this is the kind of design dedication that most teams couldn't dream of replicating simply for how much content they need to manage. Still, Baldur's Gate 3 sets an example for how difficulty modes should be treated.

The Souls Games lack any difficulty modes whatsoever, because the game allows the player to decide when they feel ready to take on the game's challenges. A diligent grinder can feasibly go away and come back with the levels to trivialise any fight in the games, but even someone who faces each challenge as they come won't ever be overwhelmed by a one-hit kill enemy unless they actively try to underpower themselves because of the intelligent curve in difficulty present in the games. That's partially why the 'cry' for an easy mode is largely redundant in the Souls game's case, they're every bit as easy as you're willing to make them. Apart from Sekiro, that really is just a challenge no matter what you want out of it.

Bethesda titles lean towards the lazier end of difficulty modes, relying entirely on 'sliders' that buff up damage received and reduce damage dealt; usually to perplexingly bad results. Legendary-difficulty fights in Skyrim are dances of dodging for 5 minutes and taking miniscule slashes of damage before hiding and healing. There's never any flow of gameplay and every enemy turns into a relentless bullet sponge because these games are never designed with higher difficulties in mind but just mindlessly scaled up on the way towards production wrap up. Oblivion's was so bad that a starting dungeon rat would be more powerful than the final boss of the game on hardest slider settings. Starfield has been the only game with a less than awful hard mode so far, which is perhaps that game's only gratis over all the other Bethesda properties.

MMOs have a very interesting approach when it comes to it's bigger difficulty Raid dungeons, all of course inspired by the approach that World of Warcraft popularised. Tiered difficulty options with scaled rewards- players are incentivised to push themselves to the higher tiers, making lower levels something of 'practice difficulties'. In this case you'll still see sliding scale difficulties, but for a genuine design reason rather than just rank laziness. Players are meant to train on how to avoid damage, how to counter arena effects, when to start performing burst damage, all so that they can be effective and reliable for the gear that matters, on the real difficulties where the really good loot is on the line. It's a winning formula that has been recycled time and time again.

Being 'Difficult' does not need to be such a dirty and despised concept. Difficulty is just a manner of enriching a game to feel rewarding and substantive rather than just vapid and fantasy fulfilling. Creating achievement through strife will always feel more real than what's simply given to you. which is why games of ultimate carnage like Just Cause have such little shelf life, the brainless appeal of watching digitised explosions go off can only excite you so many times before it becomes trite and overdone. Difficulty needs to be thought about in a new light, and developers need to start taking it into account as a valid part of the development process. When that starts becoming the norm, maybe then we can put to rest all the stupid arguments about nothing this topic engenders.

I guess I hate Assassin's Creed

 What happened to us?

Obsession and regression

 Thy name is: Ubisoft

Assassin's Creed Red: Where this crazy train ends

 For now.

Games need to end

 The unspoken rule.

Assassin's Creed Odyssey review

...And a mercenary!?

It's been a very long time since I last gave any of my time to the vulture known as the Assassin's Creed franchise, a series of games that has increadibly managed to span far further than I think anyone truly expected of it- let alone the creators. Past taste, logic and sense. Assassin's Creed pushed past the boundaries of that original shining vision of a historical assassination tourism game and evolved into the RPG systemed, multimedia touting, narratively confused series that it currently is today, Ubisoft's increasingly out-of-pocket attempt at twist a live service out of a single player framework. It's always a shame when I come to these games, lathered in the high efforts of the high-class world design, the talented scripters, the popular voice talents- only to be disappointed entry after entry by that same stale sense of outdated design direction endemic of the 'Ubisoft' experience. But some part of me just can't let the series go.

Some infantile wisp of my forlorn youth yearns for the days when Assassin's Creed was the highlight of my year, a culmination of cinematic gaming achievement that seemed to mark the pinnacle in ambition, polish and fun. Back in the days when Assassin's Creed felt like it knew what it wanted to present, a power fantasy of being the blade in the shadows, that powerful killer with knowledge of all the angles and approaches, who felt like a practiced and dedicated tactician even though in reality you were just a mad murder monk stumbling into basic set-ups, running around the corner and then, when your back was against the wall, massacring every guard who tried to get in your way. Assassin's Creed was never quite a stealth assassination game in the vein of Splinter Cell or Hitman, it was an action fantasy- a vision of a world in which you stood as the one who cut the powerful's strings.

I felt that vision splutter and waver as the games dragged on and Ubisoft began to run out of ways to rev it back to life each release cycle, to evoke that same glittering buzz out of their jaded player base once again. But it wasn't until 'Assassin's Creed Origins' that I started to lose sight of the series I loved altogether. An 'RPG', apparently- Origins swapped out the unique power-fantasy style stealth-adjacent gameplay for a generic hitbox based combat system which the franchise had flirted with before, but never quite committed to as staunchly as they did this time. That coupled alongside a 'level' and 'power' system which scaled damage outputs to arbitrary 'power numbers' in a manner deeply contrary to the presentation of the experience that Assassin's Creed used to represent and in the face of the spirit of ingenuity as a concept, dragged the once high bar of the franchise down to the depths. Instead of creating a more powerful and complicated enemy archetype to keep players from blasting through an area they weren't supposed to be ready for, Ubisoft just shoved up the general area level and called it a day. Now coming to Odyssey, I had to wonder if those same shortcomings would translate to the second title of what is now known as the 'Mythology Trilogy' within the Assassin's Creed pantheon.

 

Assassin's Creed Odyssey transports the narrative away from Ancient Egypt to the start of the Peloponnesian War in Ancient Greece, roughly 400 years before Origins. A region of complex political webs between embattled nation states, legendary philosophical fathers of modern thought and enough long-lost historical records for the developers to go ham and cheese with how they wanted to depict the era. Don't get me wrong, Assassin's Creed is still a franchise born and bred around the ideals of historical depiction, but the fervour for 'accuracy' and 'true as possible within the narrative' that used to exist, the 'educational' angle which made these games more than just action adventure romps- that's pretty much dead. The database system which we lost for Origins is still missing-in-action, the narrative twists itself to embarrassing extremes to try and justify the odd mythological beast thrown in here and there and there's some aspects that are so historically questionable it makes me wonder if any historians were consulted at all on the topic. On three separate occasions I distinctly recall being given directions by way of a 'Volcano' as a geographical landmark- and I'm pretty certain the generally accepted concept of a 'volcano' wasn't realised until the eruption of Vesuvius. Come on, Ubisoft- this here is basic historical knowledge! Or how about Ubisoft depicting the battle of 300 completely straight-faced without even addressing the several hundred allies Sparta fought alongside during the battle of Thermopylae, further feeding into the 300 myth. Or how about the sword of Odysseus marked with the description "Every good Odyssey starts with a sword" despite the fact that Odysseus is best known for his skills with his bow and in fact only draws his blade once during the entire of the Odyssey, to cut a rope that had moored his ship during a moment of haste. I could go on- but you get the message. 

Of course the vehicle through which this narrative is broached is through the latest protagonist of the ever-meandering 'modern day' portions of the Assassin's Creed narrative- Layla: a character that feels like Ubisoft's active attempt to try and make as unlikeable of a character as humanely possible. Painfully 'millennial' in her idiosyncrasies over supplemental in-universe chat logs and in her ceaselessly tone-deaf flippancy, contrived in her 'over achieving' affectations which paints her as a genius whizz kid foremost expert on practically everything she puts her efforts to from one-woman archaeology to hacking to even combat (I'll touch on that last one later) and bizarrely, even after three full games ostensibly starring her, inexplicably non-fleshed out so that her impulsive flights of obsession feel less like curious quirks of a distinct character and more like the overly obvious penmanship of a writer desperate to drag this ill-fitting character across all the plotpoints on his unbendable mandate. In summary, Layla is a supremely annoying protagonist, and not in the intentional 'well conceived character purpose' kind of way like Micah Bell from Red Dead Redemption 2 was; but in a 'everything this character represents and stands for falls so flat that with every painful plea to make me like her I despise her more' sort of way, à la Frey from Forspoken.

What makes her extra insufferable coming around for Odyssey, as well as the general modern narrative as a whole, is the fact that now Ubisoft have decided to forgo all narrative subtly and just blindly mandate all the plethora of ancillary reading material mandatory for even a basic comprehension of modern day events. (If you didn't know, Assassin's Creed also consists of a Comic run and several books.) Multimedia franchises need to understand that each branch of storytelling must be able to stand independently from one another so that together they fill out the corners of the world. Throwing in explicit mentions to scenes from the book, or identifying extreme shifts in character motivations based on events of a comic- is just utterly disrespectful to the core audience, the gaming audience, with which this franchise started. I shouldn't have had to skim three wikia pages to understand why Layla is suddenly driven by a passionate desire for revenge against the current 'Abstergo' bad guy character 'Otso Berg'. If I don't get to experience those events, I won't feel the emotion and that's just one more way in which Layla's motivations veer away from my own.

But thankfully Assassin's Creed isn't really about the modern narrative and we get to escape into an Assassin's Creed quite unlike any beforehand. Why? Because this Assassin's Creed features perhaps one of the least accurate Animus machines so far in the franchise. A genetic memory reader so pitifully terrible that it can't differentiate between which brother and sister is which- forcing the machine to just guess and make things up, and the machine doesn't even really know what decisions those character's made during their day requiring Layla to pick one on the fly. Of course, this is all just a thinly veiled lore explanation for why Assassin's Creed has choice-based RPG mechanics now, but I find it strange they felt the need to justify it within their canon at all. Just don't. Problem solved. Also: I know some of the 'Assassin's Creed defence force' try to drown out any conversation about the franchises' short comings with lore vomits, but I'm just as well versed in the lore as they are and shall try to combat their fire with my own ice. For example, people try to justify the crazy inaccuracy of this game's Animus by arguing that this is the furthest back the Animus has ever had to reach, and we know that the genetic memories get weaker with time. Which is fair enough, until you remember the fact that the 2.0 Animus built by Rebecca was capable of reliably, if with bad lens flair editing, reconstructing a genetic memory of the first children of man: Adam and Eve- countless tens of thousands of years before Odyssey is set and, incidentally, before the Isu even had a name within the lore! Yeah, I still remember that side-plot from Assassin's Creed 2! Don't try to defend the new Animus' shortcomings, it's just a bad and ill-thought out plot point.

In actuality, Assassin's Creed just wanted to add the option of playing a female protagonist in their new RPG direction for the franchise, with this female protagonist hopefully having more of a personality than their last attempt. (Rest in Peace, Aveline, along with the worst game in the franchise.) Odyssey brings choice based narrative deviations, varying character relationships, romance options and for the very first time in Assassin's Creed history: multiple endings! Of course merely boasting about any of these is no great victory on it's own in this modern age where every RPG boasts such things, this is merely Assassin's Creed catching up to the rest of the class now that their corporate mandate for sales has dictated that this needs to be an RPG franchise now. What really matters is how the team managed to bring it together. And I'll be sure to take that into account as we go along.

Obviously, Assassin's Creed Odyssey takes place in the throes of Ancient Greece across the beginning decade of the Peloponnesian War, and true to the standards of Ubisoft's world builders- the landmass looks magnificent. Impressive Greek colossi dot verdant green hills poking out from the sparkling blue of the Aegean- each island an emerald jewel you have the freedom to explore in exacting detail. You can stand atop the Parthenon and gawk over the sprawling majesty of Athens, delve through the mythical ruins of lost Ithaca (Which in this game is literally a tiny island right next to the one you start on. Mystery solved, I guess.) and step upon the harsh lands of glorious Sparta. Visually this game is a marvel through and through. Of course I was playing on the Series X enhanced version which improved the rate at which textures loaded in, but I still noticed some slight pop in in the distance- which became much more noticeable whenever I bumped into the game's rather obvious memory leak issue. (The map literally just stops re-rendering itself if you have the game on for too long- it's quite surprising Ubisoft never addressed that.) Still, once again Ubisoft have recreated an era in time to startling vivacity and Odyssey's Greece feels like another vacation wrapped up in a game. (Albeit with a few borrowed assets from Origins that I might not have noticed if this game wasn't literally over a hundred hours long.)

Of course, if you've any familiarity with the origins of the Assassin's Creed franchise you might think you have a decent idea of where the story could be going already just by me reading the setting. Afterall: Peloponnesian war- political powder keg rife with perfectly fertile hotspots for a historical drama narrative to insert some clandestine Assassin action. But you would be thinking in the mindset of the old Assassin's Creed, back when Ubisoft still cared. No, this Assassin's Creed uses the war, and Greece in general, as a backdrop for a familial revenge story which makes use of it's setting more as a thematic background to justify an adventure on the scale of a historical epic like Homer's 'Odyssey'. Of course, it seems somewhere along the way Ubisoft forgot the fact that such epics starred larger than life protagonists who displayed some of those iconic epic characteristics that made such beings virtues rather than people. The star of Assassin's Creed Odyssey, on the otherhand, isn't really even an Assassin, let alone an epic hero.

Our Odysseus

That's right, Alexios (I picked the male protagonist, the female is Kassandra) isn't an Assassin. Either in vocation or deed. He is a 'misthios', or mercenary, and the game exploits that plot to the very letter. Like true chaos incarnate, Alexios lives his life giving loyalties to no one, joining up any side of the war he feels like and somehow coming out with the accolades of a hero instead of a war profiteering ass with literally no moral boundaries. And to that end I suppose his personality does help some what. As with every Assassin, Alexios displays that curiously Ubisoftian character blend of laconic affability. He lacks any strong compulsions that could be defined as personality quirks aside from the bare basic 'good guy' drives so that he can be understood and 'perspectively occupied' by a modern audience. He acknowledges the gods of the age, but he doesn't seem devout and verges on secularism at times. He'll kill anyone he's paid to, but he also has hypocritical typical views on the ideals of 'murder'. And he jumps from side to side of the war like a passing breeze, but he's nice to children- and to people he wants to sleep with. That's pretty much exclusively Alexios.

I must endeavour to say that I'm not trying to say that Alexios is boring, so to speak- just that he's lazily characterised and a kind of generic; cookie-cutter protagonist. Like how one of those overly syndicated superhero shows on the CW end up morphing all of their characters to act like. Classically heroic with all identifiable characteristics watered down to be nearly non existent so that they can exist to fit a role rather than be a human with a journey. Bayek, (the protagonist of Origins) on the otherhand, was staunchly moralistic thanks to his role as the last Medjay of Egypt- he assumes the role of the last symbol of justice in a country ripped apart by corruption and that very much shapes who he is and where he evolves throughout the story. Alexios' strongest compulsions is his desire to bring his torn apart family back together, which isn't in itself boring, but as far as 'overarching character motivations' go, that does kind of sound like one of the default options. Like a character pre-set in a customizer menu that you can't be bothered to add anything to.

I think the reason why Alexios is so close to being bland (I think some decent writers and the solid performance just about save him from being boring.) is because Ubisoft mistakenly believed they had to go the blank slate route in order to have the character be malleable enough for the player to put themselves within him. And to be fair that is a genuine proven way to write characters like this, but more so in proper role playing games like Bethesda open world titles or CRPGs- where the player's agency is the utmost king. Alexios is still very much a slave to the whims of the Ubisoft narrative, and even with the slight inputs from the player here and there, he's never going to turn into a mass murdering villain who plots to destroy all of Greece. (Trust me, I know. I struggled to figure out some way to assassinate Pericles for hours!) Ubisoft could have followed the model of more fully fleshed RPG protagonists such as Geralt for The Witcher or even, and I know this isn't really an RPG but the way we interact with the character's journey has some definite parallels here, Arthur Morgan in Red Dead Redemption 2. It's actually somewhat a shame that Alexios doesn't have that much to him, because I remember being quite impressed with the presentation of his history in the beginning few hours. Stretching out snippets of his past across the prologue, tying in the events of the past with who he is today- if only there was more to say with those blossom moments- that could have been a fantastic storytelling tool! Alas...

Becoming the Misthios

One victim of this modern age of Assassin's Creed is the continued gutting of it's stealth system, once the absolute backbone of the franchise. Like Origins, Odyssey employs a hitbox based action combat system that it expects to hold up the backbone of the entire game on- and I'll be honest, it just doesn't cut it. The combat is simple, light and heavy attacks, parry and a dodge. (Slightly sullied by the fact that parrying requires the pressing of two buttons simultaneously for seemingly no reason. I imagine someone played Dark Souls, suffered a stroke, and tried to piece together and replicate it's systems whilst on the hospital bed.)  The basic kit is really all you need to form the ground level of any game like this to be fair, because the variety in gameplay should come in the archetypes of your enemies and how you use your intrinsic tools to overcome them. But then you learn that Assassin's Creed Odyssey has about 5 variations of basic enemy, and about 4 to 5 variations of 'boss' enemies. Fair enough for a twenty hour game, kind of sparse for a thirty hour game. Assassin's Creed Odyssey is a one hundred plus hour game. This combat system is nowhere near engaging enough to survive that playtime without making the player lose the will to live.

Skills are Odyssey's new component to the combat to try and liven things up. Unlockable and slot-able special attacks that are typically activated by building up 'adrenaline' from attacking and then spending them in bursts of violence. These are pretty fun to play around with and keep action feeling interesting up until Level 35 where you have your loadout set and you've spent the past 40 hours upgrading all the skills to max so you aren't really going to switch things up for the other skills anytime soon. Then the combat slips back into monotony again. They are a tool for personalising the playstyle at least, which adds just that sliver of replayability if you somehow aren't sick of every corner of this game by the end of your incarceration with it. Except, of course, for Second Wind which appears to be a non-negotiable necessity for all playstyles given that in the vanilla game I think it, and 'Overpower attacks' (Which is more of a late-game unlock) are the only ways to heal mid combat. Which is insane.

Oh, but don't worry; because Ubisoft have their idea for how to keep the game challenging and it's the same sad disgrace of a progression model that all modern action titles seem to be falling to. Level gating systems. (Urgh.) In Assassin's Creed Odyssey you have a level, and so does your armour, and your weapons, and not really your ship but there's an expectation of power creep to the point your ship might as well be levelled, as well as the land you're exploring on and the enemies you're facing. The higher the level, the more damage things do or the more defence things get, and if an enemy is a higher level than you the player can expect to see a total drop off of damage to such a decree that stealthy spear stabs to the back of the head don't remove more than a crumb of the health bar. And if you are a higher level than the enemy then their damage is ludicrously nerfed to the point where these powerful men swinging giant axes barely scratch your impervious skin. It's deeply antithetical to the concept of what Assassin's Creed used to be about and pretty immersion shattering to be honest.

Whatsmore items that you get will quickly need to be replaced as you level up and out of them, and though there is an upgrade path to keep items you like, (Which you'll want to for the uniquely propertied 'Legendary items'. Yes, there are item rarities as well.) the price for upgrading quickly becomes ludicrously expensive to keep up with- you'll probably end up ignoring it until your average cookie cutter enemy is taking 30 odd hits to kill whilst you go down in two swipes. (I wish I could say those figures were an exaggeration, but that's literally the way I lived for a lot of the endgame until I found a new set of armour to don.) To keep some vague interest alive in the content I was playing, I felt drawn to play the game at a difficulty which would level scale content to my base- so that exploring around would never make a corner of the world utterly pointless to traverse because I out levelled it.

What this revealed for me was how the levelling system and how it scales damage and defence seems to scale on something of a perfectly angled bell curve, meaning that fighting an enemy at level 5 whilst you are level 5 is exactly the same as fighting a level 67 enemy whilst you are 67- making this system largely redundant for anything except level gating certain areas of the map, which is a lazy way of funnelling players through the world anyway. And even the level gating is done pretty shoddily. The Island of Lesbos is one of the highest levelled area in the game despite the island containing literally no story quests and only a few brief side quests to it's name. Assassin's Creed Odyssey adopts all the worst parts of a level scaling system and adapts literally nothing good from it.

The effect is a weakening of the core gameplay which is such a shame because the loot aspect of the game isn't a total wash. In fact, I think the idea of legendary armour sets and how they were implemented really works! Grinding for the poison buff set and then building my character to dish out stacking poison damage with his dual daggers felt like so much fun and really breathed life back into a combat system that had grown stale ages ago. Plus, when the combat lost all charm and life entirely I even found a way to fix that using gear by building a rush assassination loadout which essentially allowed me to, when stealth was an option, crit stab everyone for several hundred thousands points of damage each- essentially bringing back the inst-kill assassinations the franchise had done away with, whilst adding an OP teleportation chain kill mechanic right out of Far Cry which essentially allowed me to skip open combat entirely, quite the relief because open combat was just that boring.

Crumbling foundations

I think the increadibly average, barely serviceable, combat is something of a reflection on the larger identity of Assassin's Creed Odyssey. One core pillar of the franchise, stealth, was gutted and tossed in favour of a by-the-numbers combat system which lacks the distinct identity the series was known for. Another, free running, follows suit, now just a 'climb anything' system where the protagonist is capable of scrambling up sheer flat surfaces without any handholds whatsoever, removing the level of thought and subtle reflex required to fluently climb or escape in a chase for the Assassin's Creed of yore. Even the world feels a little devoid of intelligent composition outside of pure aesthetic beauty. Several times I would find myself on the direct path to an objective, such as the Oracle of Delphi, and find myself stumbling into a dungeon, like the Snake Temple, which I then cleared only to find out that was the place I was going to be sent on for the next quest. (A smart world designer would, therefore, not place that quest location literally on the path to get to the quest!)

Naval gameplay has returned once again and this time in an actual substantive and fleshed out fashion in contrast to the scant few 'set piece moment' cameos it had in Origins. Of course, now that we're riding a Tirime and making use of Ancient Greek sea warfare materials, it doesn't really fair up to the scale of spectacle or even optional diversity that Black Flag had back in 2013- but it isn't a terrible downgrade. There's a new 'crew mate' system which allows you to assign people you find throughout the game into service throughout your ship, which really just lets their personality-less model appear on the ship. (It would have been nice if they had the odd in-character quip every now and then to bring some life to ship journeying.) I mostly tried to avoid sea warfare when possible- another slice of the gameplay loop that came back salty. 

Investigations are a brief minigame that this game comes back to time and time again, wherein you're expected to patrol a small area for 'clues' you can find that will lead to some sort of conclusion or guide you towards a target location. Problem is, these clues are always tiny and the search areas are always cluttered messes clearly not designed to provide quality visual storytelling opportunities. Nine times out of Ten these snippets turn into frustrating roadblocks to progression that has the player running around desperately combing a too-large search area (The confines of which are, bizarrely, not shown on the map.) waiting for some errant rock hidden in a bush to be useful. And of course, nothing progresses until you've found every clue, even when some clues clearly explain the next objective parameters in terms even a toddler could parse.

Crafting too has returned to the franchise with it's own complications. Just as with all truly lacklustre crafting systems in modern games, components are split into esoteric 'catch all' categories that aren't really individually relevant. 'Leather' encompasses all animal hides, 'Wood' ignores the type of tree you take it from- and so on. These crafting materials are then used for every upgrade in the game beyond skill point levelling. Upgrading gear level to match you current level? A heinous amount of expensive supplies are needed. Upgrading your Trireme? Just as bad. The game even forces you to craft your own arrows instead of just looting them like any sensible assassin would naturally do. If you go and loot an arrow rack it will reward you with the raw materials for arrow crafting instead of the arrows themselves all to force you to use a crafting system that has no reason to exist in the first place. Miss hunting the hides of legendary animals on distant islands for that one perfect upgrade? So do I.

And you might be wondering why all of this is. Why are there so many crafting recipies requiring tedious-to-collect and non-specific materials in varying degrees of severity? In order to hit the top most level of upgrades on the Adrestia, (your ship in the game) the game demands several weeks worth of crafting material and money. That's real world weeks, mind you. These guys think they're running a live service! And for a while, they kind of were. Assassin's Creed Odyssey has weekly and daily quests you can accept anywhere which reward you a pittance in money and materials but also with a ridiculously rare material called 'Orichalcum'. That is the premium currency which is used to buy the instore aesthetics, time saver packs and, lookie there, giant bundles of resources! Of course, these quests are limited to weekly and daily load-in rates and Orichalcum is so rarely mined in the main game that I found about 8 raw deposits in my exhaustive playthrough of the entire game. For context, the cheapest item on the store costs about 150 Orichalcum. And of course if you don't want to wait the time for quest timers to reset, you can always just buy some Orichalcum with real-world money! Yep, that's the reason Assassin's Creed scrapped the structured and sensible upgrade crafts that the series nailed back in, yet again, 2013 with Black Flag: in order to make some dirty microtransaction money. And again, this direction hurts the flow of the game. 

Even the basic design of prevalent gameplay areas leaves my head-scratching. The military forts make up the vast majority of all gameplay locations as an easy place for the main quest or side quests to send you for a simplistic challenge rather than cooking up something unique for each objective. But these forts seem surprisingly basic. A lot of them feature several ways to infiltrate the ramparts despite the fact that their front doors are mostly never guarded, or at best boast about two watchmen who seem oblivious to anything short of an axe to the skull. It's as though the team wanted to pay lip-service to the 'Immersive Sim' creed of "Find an alternative way past that door" without doing the bare basic of locking the door in the first place. Basic game theory lesson Ubisoft devs: players will instinctually take the path of least resistance- if you want alternative pathways to mean something, make the direct pathway at least a slight inconvenience.

Another disappointment? The cutscenes. For some reason, probably time, Ubisoft decided to skimp heavily on the production value of Origins, which featured a whole host of high quality motion captured cutscenes to bring the personality of Bayek to life. The vast majority of Odyssey's cutscenes are done entirely in-engine and thus come off very robotic and stiff compared to the rare bursts of mo-capped highlights which are typically reserved for set-piece moments in the story. Of course, another nitpick I have is that those mo-capped scenes are utterly unskippable, which really starts to grate whenever an extensive one is put before a boss fight and the checkpoint for that fight is placed just before that cutscene began. That's something you'll really start to notice by hour 80 when every boss fight takes twenty minutes to beat and you have to experience these annoyances constantly.

The birthplace of Democracy

As any Assassin's Creed plot worth it's salt is wont to do, Odyssey quickly embroils Alexios in a vast conspiratorial plot against this game's chosen cabal of interconnected masterminds: The Order of Ancients! Oh... we already did that one, didn't we? It seems strange for this prequel game to the one which followed the genesis of the Assassin Order and the fight between their people and the Assassin's to also follow the Order of the Ancients. Even stranger that this order seems more keenly in touch with the route of their plight, knowing of the Isu and the concept of interwoven bloodlines, despite the fact that thousands of years later the Templars seem utterly bewildered by any such idea. Yet another narrative inconsistency in a franchise that has dragged itself on for so long that the entire spine is made up of similar inconsistencies.

Of course, such a journey also transports him through the heart of Attica, during which he runs into literally every single famous theologian, playwright and politician of the age. This is actually something I was starting to miss from my Assassin's Creed stories, as contrived as it usually is. Bumping into Pericles, Herodotus and Sokrates might seem ridiculous for a man who aspires to be little more than a mercenary throughout his entire life journey, but that's what we come to these games for- to have a historical romp through time where famous faces we know pop up and regale us by just being themselves. And to that end, I'm both surprised by how important these famous faces were to Alexios' personal journey and how much we got to know and like a lot of them. I actually came to like Sokrates, which is insane considering I've spent every year since I formally studied the man actually hating his aggravatingly abstract arguments. (You gave me a respect that my Classics teacher never could, Ubisoft. Hmm... actually let's not get ahead of ourselves, we'll call it an 'acceptance' for now.)

A Mercenary appetite

One rung of society that Alexios makes a lot more sense hanging around would be that of his fellow Misthios. Much ado had been made about the 'Mercenary System' which Assassin's Creed Odyssey, itself Ubisoft's own play on the complex and acclaimed 'Nemesis system' from 'Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor'. Essentially this system allowed for enemy NPCs to become reoccurring boss characters who would remember actions the player performed on them and intertwine themselves with a dynamic evolving narrative by their presence. To call this a pale imitation would be an insult to the pale skinned and the imitators of the world- what Ubisoft have implemented is what I can only assume the basic beta concept of what Warner Bros. Nemesis System looked like years before launch.

Mercenaries are a dynamically updating list of boss-tier enemies that represent your 'competition' in the mercenary world. They are spread out by level and tiers and as you kill of one you move up a place in the ranking and a new Mercenary is generated behind you, basic rung climbing. The Mercenaries are generated with their own traits to make them slightly more interesting than your basic grunt. (Alongside their obscene health pools.) You'll find some mercenaries with a resistance to assassination attacks, some wield poison tipped blades and a lot of them travel around with animal companions. These traits don't at all effect their personalities, indeed they have no personalities, and the additional traits don't do a whole lot to effect how you approach them. In fact, I didn't even realise they had any special traits until I was onto my last ten. There's no system in place for them to remember encounters with you, or to return from the dead with scars relating to how you took them out, or really any of the cool stuff which made the Nemesis system feel so alive. And the only 'recruiting' you can do is for extra crew abroad the Adrestia- so the player's part in this system is pretty much limited to just killing them straight up for their loot and the semi-decent tier bonuses you get everytime you go up 5 ranks.

But what really grinds my gears about this system is the way that Mercenaries actually interact with you. You see Odyssey has it's own notoriety system and, say it with me: It's badly designed and implemented! Everytime you do a criminal act that someone else witnesses, you gain notoriety. Encouraging stealth in a game that purposefully removed stealth elements. Because this isn't notoriety as Assassin's Creed 2 understood it, this is notoriety in the fashion of 'you killed an enemy in open combat'= notorious! The punishment for high Notoriety is the summoning of a mercenary to your location at any and all times; and that gets out of hand really fast.

Remember that Mercenaries are essentially supremely tanky minibosses that are slathered in special traits and effects- then try to wrap your head around the fact that everytime you raise an alarm in a fort whilst any levelof notorious- the game's number one open world activity to engage with, you'll get a mercenary spawn into the area. As you fight off the mercenary who has joined the fight alongside the enemy, you'll incur more notoriety, typically crossing another notoriety threshold and summoning up another mercenary as soon as that one was done! Then, the fight might spill onto the streets where civilians will start picking up weapons and trying to kill you because this game's AI makes no sense. Of course, killing civilians shoots up the notoriety bar twice as fast and before you know it another threshold has been crossed and you're dealing with three mercenaries at once. But wait, it doesn't stop there!

Because I'm just talking about what happens if you're careless enough to be spotted in the game explicitly designed for you to fight out in the open rather than sneak through the shadows. But get this- mercenaries can be summoned even if you haven't alerted the guards! Oh yeah. Once you're notorious, Mercenaries will just drop in on forts you happen to be sneaking about in just to join the patrol, but of course it couldn't be that simple. Because even when idling about, mercenaries appear to have a supernatural sixth sense alerting them to your general location at all times, so they'll amble right up to whatever hidey hold you've dug into just to suss you out and drop grief on your head. Causing you to defend yourself which drums up more notoriety which calls another mercenary and on and on and on. And of course, this system has little to no thought put into it, so you can expect mercenaries to also be summoned on top of you when fighting particularly large groups of wild animals too. Didn't know those boars had every mercenary on Greece available on speed dial? Prepare to learn the hard way.

Just as how Origins' forts tended to slip out of control when various patrolling AI routes intersected, Odyssey's forts explode into giant armies thanks to this Mercenary system that piles on grossly over protected bad guys that inhabit the worst of Assassin's Creed Odyssey's combat design. The horrendous enemy spam, the ludicrously inflated health bars, the overly repetitive enemy move-sets: you'll become painfully familiar with all of it as you're forced to slog your way through the mercenary rankings through corpse after corpse; none of them leaving an impression upon you in the way that the orcs of Shadow of Mordor did. To this day, without looking it up, I can tell you now that the bane of my Middle Earth playthrough who haunted me throughout the original and the sequel was called Pushkrimp. I couldn't tell you one mercenary apart from another if you held a gun to my head and told me my life was on the line. The Mercenary system is a lacklustre shadow of the greatest that the Nemesis system achieved, and I hope the comparisons die off once that becomes a bit more obvious to folk.

Cult Culling

But it isn't all Hellstone and lava down in the pits of Assassin's Creed Odyssey. In fact, there is actually one aspect of the game that I think Ubisoft had an increadibly inspired idea for- and that was the entire metagame for the Order of the Ancients. (Or the Cult of Kosmos, as they're known in this game.) Just like every Assassin's Creed since 2, the player is forever aware of the web of orchestrators behind the events of the game thanks to a CSI style menu screen they can address which connects each member of the conspiracy leading up to the top. Where Odyssey differs, however, is in the fact that only a handful of the targets on the board are pertinent to the main narrative. Remember, Alexios has no moral compunction to do anything other than bring his family back together and the eradication of the Cult is ancillary to his mission. As such, the actual task of hunting and killing off these cult members is left entirely to the discretion of the player in one of the most inspired ways to interweave content rewards that I think Ubisoft has ever devised.

Every member of the Cult is adorned with a mask obscuring their identity. Hover over them and you may have a clue for how to 'unmask' them; and if not then you can find such a clue by hunting down any members you've already unmasked. As for discovering the identities of these cultists? That's done by engaging with specific tasks in the open world that they might pertain to. Whether it's by destabilising the region that cultist is operating in (more on that later), or engaging in a specific chain of side quests for which they are the big bad, or looting a specific chest from an influential fort- these activities will unmask a member of the cult. Killing that member will provide a clue to unmasking the identity of that specific cell leader, and killing all the cell leaders will help you unmask the leader of the entire cult. Assuming you didn't figure out who the leader was the moment you met them like I did. (Even in the sporadic throes of this inexplicable burst of ingenuity, Ubisoft can't mask their overly obvious writing cues.)

Essentially you have a free-from conspiracy hunt that drags you all across the game world with purpose and the promise of reward. Many of the Legendary Armour sets that have the potential to significantly change up your playstyle can be gained piece-by-piece from wiping out a specific branch of the cult, encouraging players to actually stick with destroying a single sector in knowledge of the powerful set buff waiting for them. It's one of those perfect sync-ups between what the narrative wants to provide and what the game hopes to; creating a genius idea that I wish Assassin's Creed had adopted before. However even my praise does not come without a caveat, because whilst everything around the cult member metagame is grand- the actual cultist themselves suck.

Remember when I said that stealth and Assassination had been largely deprioritised by the design team? Turns out that extends to the key assassination targets who make up the majority of the conflict throughout the campaign. After engaging with all of these activities to unlock the cultist you might be surprised to learn that they themselves are just random NPCs wandering the world with perhaps a couple of guards around them. (Guards usually donned in the trademark serpentine armour of the Cult. A ludicrously ostentatious garb for a 'secret' cult to own.) They don't have fortresses or thought-out patrol paths: The devs literally shove them down in a part of the world and let their braindead AI loose. I saw one literally walk out of town and into the woods for no other reason then to allow me a chance to kill him unopposed. Some of the cell leaders put up a fight, but those fights are no more special than your average Mercenary duel. Tailored assassination missions, ideally with a free-form approach and execution- was really what this mode needed to be the best it could be. 

War Dogs

But that's not the only new idea that Assassin's Creed has up it's sleeve. There's also the ongoing faction wars between Athens and Sparta which the player, as a Mercenary, can join either side of in a passive or active way. Killing guards, burning supplies in a fort, killing area leaders- all of these count towards breaking the strength of the ruling factions hold over the respective region you're active in. Bring it down far enough and you can engage in a large-scale conflict battle for control of the region for the promise of moderate reward and a shifting of the balance of power. And as you can likely imagine, all this amounts to largely nothing in the grand scheme of things. Banners change colours, and that's about it. I suppose you can't really shift the course of history by making Athens take the Two Kings of Sparta hostage, but it's hard not to shake the impression that this is another solid idea that made it half-way to implementation before the team got bored and moved on to something else. Shame.

In some ways the idea of the war simulation reminds me of Metal Gear Solid 3 and the totally optional way that the player can interact with the Russian forces. It's such a clever and understated system that most people don't even know the first time they play, but Snake can actually sabotage the resources and supplies of nearby units in a manner that has a direct effect on how they react. Discover and blow up the food storage shed and nearby units will get hungry, making their aim less exact and making them more likely to chase after food you leave in their path, even if it's rotten and will make them sick. Blow up their ammo depot and soldiers will be less liberal with their shots in combat as they need to make every bullet count. In comparison, Assassin's Creed Odyssey, being made over a decade later, only has a bar which drains after each action you perform until you win the battle at which point the patrolling NPCs change the colour of their armour from blue to red or vice versa. It's kind of a let down.

The Odyssey

I hinted at it before, but in terms of the main narrative Assassin's Creed really has assumed the role of the entertainment industry's CW. It trundles on for far too long, the core storyline jumps so many sharks that the original spirit of the show feels like a distant memory before too long, plot-threads linger and fester for far longer than they're effective, core returning characters keep re-learning the exact same character lessons over and over- and after a while everything just peters out into a bit of a whimper. Fans are stuck along a ride they swear used to be good under the vain hope that one day the story will snap out of it's funk and become award-winning entertainment once again, and the thing you once loved steadily morphs into something you dread to put on. Playing Assassin's Creed felt like watching the later seasons of Arrow for me, and anyone who has endured that hell can surely sympathise with my self-imposed torture I endured for this review.

To be fair, there were some early moments when I found myself drawn in by the promise of a story only to run into those prototypical 'video game' road blocks. The very moment that Act 1 starts we're thrown into a genuinely interesting plotpoint of being sent on a mission to kill someone quite significant in our lives. As that task begins, however, we run into the very deliberate way the decisions makers on the design team chose to pad out the game through a mandated run through of side activities forced upon you as an unskippable tutorial on the half-baked 'faction wars' system. As you could imagine, the justification is utterly moronic. You're doing this so that your target will meet with you for congratulations. Huh? Why would I want the guy I'm sent to kill fully aware of who I am and when I'm approaching? It's not like he's hard to track down, the guy lives in a tent prominently displayed above the camp! But logic makes for a poor weapon to wield when no-one but you cares about cohesion.

However, one point of praise I have to raise is the introduction of choice and consequence in distinctly tangible fashions. Of course, it's still very textbook 'just graduated game design class' in it's implementation. "Display a choice then display the consequences no more than thirty minutes later" is literally how it's taught to be done- but there's no arguing with the results. I felt like I had agency in core moments of the narrative. Of course, the agency was always binary and typically morally black and white to boot- but if you allow yourself to be swept up in becoming the character rather than trying to come across as the hero or the villain (God, knows the game doesn't give you enough material to adequately assume the role of either anyway) there can be some decently interesting moments of facing the consequences of your choices. Not nearly enough to warrant replay value, mind- but an okay garnish to the present game.

Honestly it was when engaging with some of the more focused and less drawn out side quests that I found the charm of this game. The quest 'Philosophy with Sokrates' was a fun way of letting players engage with Sokrates' famously infuriating argumentative techniques of questions not for the sake of answers but to draw out further questions. (Although throwing Plato in there was a bit cringe-worthy if I'm being honest.) Alkibiades is always a presence to be around, even if his branch of side quests lean more towards being 'chores' than fun diversions. And the whole Kyra side plot felt like a complete mini-narrative on it's own- complete with choices and consequences, various relationships to build and even a romance option should you choose to pursue it. It's as though this game's development was handed in chunks to various teams with some delivering pockets of succinct quality and others delivering... the Thaos questline.

The level gating of the main quest isn't as large of a problem as I was led to believe, but then again I did engage in as much side activity as I could so that might have kept me at a respectable level whereas those who gun at the main plot exclusively found themselves against a stone wall more than once. I can believe that. What did strike me as astoundingly unprofessional design, however, was the moment in which after a core point in a pivotal arc of the story, the game literally tells you to go off and grind more levels on the surrounding islands. A well designed game should naturally encourage exploration through the clever layout of the world and objectives- not a posted mandate. It should probably also design it's DLC content so as to appear when appropriate, instead of placing the introduction to 'Fate of Atlantis' mid way through the game and activating the literal final wrap-up for the whole game 'Korfu', the moment you start the first act of the game. (Seriously, that was impressively moronic.) At the very least, 'Legacy of the First Hidden Blade' can absolutely make sense being played mid-way through the main story... up to a point, but we'll get there later.

Those final few chapters of Odyssey's narrative play like a crashing together of narrative and historical timeline in the messy fashion that even some of Assassin's Creed's best entries tend to fall victim to. Events jump from battlefield to battlefield for no other reason than "Oh, the hero should probably be present in this fight" or "Well, we can't have this character die here because history says they died at this other battle". At this point some of the characters start to lose their shine. Brasidas sort of becomes a lifeless 'go here and do this' machine and as a result that build up towards the resolution doesn't feel as smooth of an ascension. It's almost as though the protagonist loses control of their personal agency and instead finds themselves becoming a tool in other people's war, which is problematic at what is supposed to be the climax of a supposedly personally driven narrative.

And then there is the finale itself. In a move I was very impressed to learn about, Assassin's Creed Odyssey does actually have a multiple ending situation going on based on some basic decisions you make at key points during the campaign- very impressive and a first for the franchise! Unfortunately, if you happen to have stumbled on the path for the good ending, such as I did, you'll soon discover that your reward is one of the most anticlimactic finales the franchise has ever had, and I'm including Syndicate's joke-of-a-bossfight in that declaration. One of the important factors that should be taken into account when designing multiple endings is to ensure that those endings are all fun and satisfyingly conclude the action, this one ends like a balloon being deflated when you were building all the way up for a pop. At the very least I think that despite itself, the finale did stir up some small modicum of emotion in me. Although maybe that was just a side effect from the flood of relief I got upon realising that I was done with the game.

But then I remembered there's DLC.

Legacy of the First Hidden Blade

Legacy of the First Hidden Blade might go down as one of the funniest controversial DLCs of all time but in order to explain why I'm going to have to touch on spoilers. I'll cover as much as I can without going that direction and mark it when I can't go spoiler free any longer. At least I can start by giving the premise out. Assassin's Creed finally touches on an Assassin we first heard about in AC2 in the famous shrine of Assassins- that of Darius, the killer of Xerxes. I mean, the game doesn't say that it's Darius, but come on- the DLC is literally called 'the First Hidden Blade', that was literally the only thing anyone knew about the guy beyond the dictator he famously killed. This DLC was also the first opportunity that the team had to create new content after finishing up the main game and it does show a little bit.

For one the enemy composition of this DLC is a bit more interesting. Certain Persian enemies have different movesets that challenge the flow of combat a little bit, not enough to revolutionise gameplay but enough to breath a little bit of freshness onto the game. Unfortunately Ubisoft had to spoil it some by buffing the health of these new enemies so that literally all of them are minibosses. (Thank god there aren't nearly as many common Persian enemies as there are of every other kind in the game.) And for two the narrative attempts for the first time to actually address the utterly amoral manner in which Alexios kills for money without recourse, but for some reason they ignore the 'mercenary' aspect of his life altogether and instead paint it as though the act of killing itself is wrong. In the middle of a war. Pretty pathetic as far as 'maybe the bad guy is you' plotlines go.

Funnily enough, the Order of the Ancients- the actual Order, not this 'Cult of Kosmos' derivative- steps into this narrative as the stand-in for the cults, presenting themselves in practically the same way with the optional unmasking objectives followed by hunting them down. Only this time around, thanks to the more intimate length of the narrative, these Ancients are actually wrapped into the narrative more tightly and so the effect of hunting them down feels more personal. They are still absolutely optional, however, and don't have any specific bearing on the actual narrative. You can hunt them down however lazily as you please. Still, these objectives were among Odyssey's better conceptions and I'm glad to see Ubisoft highlighting their successes and coming back to them.

This DLC and it's follow-up are both presented in Episodes, which I think relates to the way they were distributed back during their release window but now-a-days just means that the narrative is cut up into three digestible 'acts' which contributes to making events largely predictable but at least nothing out-stays it's welcome by several tens of hours. It's just a shame that the entirety of 'Legacy' takes place on Greek land that already existed in the base game- no new landmass was developed in the slightest. It makes all the stories feel more like the work of a talented mod team rather than the developers of the primary product themselves, and also means that even though the DLC isn't that long, I still ended up getting bored seeing the same sights I'd walked through thirty hours earlier. At least they figured out a new trick for making Sea combat a lot more fun, that's something.

But moving onto spoilers, I did know of a very controversial plotpoint one of these DLCs had, I just didn't expect it to be this one or for it to fall upon me so suddenly. When you meet Darius, it's with his child, Neema if you play as Alexios or Natakas if you play Kassandra. As you can likely pick up, paring the female with the male MC and the male with the female MC, these side characters are designed to be love interests and the narrative pushes them hard. Up until this point Romantic side plots have been entirely optional and fleetingly passionate. Perhaps the strongest depicted relationship was a side quest hidden one with Kyra or Thaletas, with some pretty interesting alternate endings depending on some choices you make. But the point I'm trying to make is this: Alexios or Kassandra are not the 'settling down' type of hero. They go from job to job and life to love driven by the whims of their unknowable writer. Until this DLC.

Not only are the first two episodes spent flirting incessantly, but the finale of Episode 2 has an ending infamous for it's false choice. Either you let your romantic interest depart with their father for everyone's safety, or plead the case for them to stay just that little bit longer. Whatever you choose the consequence is the same- the story picks up over a year later with Alexios having seemingly settled down and soft-retired with his wife (gender swap where necessary) and son. That's right, surprise son time! What a shock that was for people out there who played a strictly gay Alexios or Kassandra- or for people who just didn't like Natakas or Neema enough to give them a child. Or to give them a year of their life. I cannot understate how crazy that is. What if you partake in this quest midway through the main questline? It unlocks midway through! Does Alexios just give up on his journey to save his sister for an entire year on a whim? Myrrine is just sending letters constantly, thinking her son has tripped and drowned in a ravine somewhere! Speaking of- notice how the family are never brought up by Alexios. I genuinely think Myrrine never met her grandson! What a total bastard, robbing his own mother of the one thing parents long for most- to meet their grandchildren! Unbelievable!

Ultimately the DLC plays out as painfully predictable as you would expect. Neema/Natakas dies a painfully predictable death so contrived it makes my skin crawl to think someone was paid to write it. Alexios gets shocked out of retirement and all is right with the world, sans the year he spent off doing 'me time' for no particular reason. The Mo-cap scenes of this DLC become a lot sloppier, but at least the boss fights get a bit interesting. The Immortals boss fight actually had mechanics and stages and felt like a real definitive brawl! The DLC even ended with a semi-decent final confrontation which ultimately felt tons more satisfying than what the base game had to offer. Although I can't in good conscious not mention the generic "We are the bringers of peace!" rhetoric these idiots spout. Can we have one bad-guy who isn't hopelessly self deluded in these games? All I want is a guy who can order a pointless massacre on a small peaceful village, like he does, and doesn't turn around patting himself on the back drippling vauge gospel about some ephemeral 'greater good' which apparently makes it all okay. Just give me a villain who says "yeah, I'm a psycho- and what?" Overall, a fun diversion from the main game, still could have been so much more.

The Fate of Atlantis

You can tell all the big money went towards Atlantis. Pretty much indivisible from the main game, Ubisoft went the bold route of making this DLC essentially the second half of the main game's narrative- or rather the only half of the story in which the needle of the main plot is progressed at all. It's actually insane when you really think about it, but Alexios' entire personal story of growth bares absolutely no purpose on the modern plotline whatsoever until he starts messing around with Atlantis. Anyone who jumps from the vanilla of Odyssey to Ragnarok must have been scratching their heads wondering what happened. Ubisoft found a way to charge £100 for the complete narrative of their story-based action game: that's what!

This DLC starts off in perhaps the worst possible way that it could- by forcing us to go back in the shoes of Layla for an extended period of exploration. What's worse, it's exploration through a dungeon you literally just navigated as Alexios. Wow, Ubisoft really know how to make me hate being with her in every possible manner, didn't they? It's just impossible for any modern day Assassin's Creed narrative to not be jarring and unwelcome next to the more interesting period drama that is happening all around it, yet Ubisoft insists on doing things in this deeply flawed fashion. It's bewildering! But alas, Layla ruins your day and then, if you're playing this in the year of our lord 2023 or later, you'll be treated to a crash course of all the build-up content that Assassin's Creed dropped for this game in the lead-up to this DLC launching. Fun faux-live service content at the time, kind of annoying roadblock to the content I've paid to play in the now.

But I can't complain too much can I? Not when the lead-up quests are four boss fights (well three and a quiz) against various mythological icons of the ancient world! Yes, this is the moment at which Assassin's Creed chooses to lose it's thin historical façade and go full 'magic' and 'fairies'. To be fair, it's an excuse for four pretty cool boss fights that have stages and arenas and feel better than actually any fight in the main game. They still drag out for an obscene length of time because Ubisoft don't know how to make challenging content without cranking up number sliders, but remembering the highlights of the fights after the fact leave pleasant imprints. And yet the same problems persist. Cutscenes are still unskippable before boss fights, the Gorgon fight relies on the slowest method of killing in the game- the bow- and the Minotaur boss fight features a mid-fight transition cutscene in which the geniuses who made the thing forgot to actually transition the scene. So you go from a large open arena to a tiny constrained one without any cohesive journey from one to the other. This is the jank we pay through the nose for, everybody!

Persist, of course, and you're treated to something truly special at the cusp of the DLC: the worst Layla section yet to exist in the franchise. (I swear to god, Ubisoft hate her as much I do.) And the more time we're forced to hang around her, the clearer her fundamental weaknesses as a protagonist shine forth. As we amble along the game recycling four tombs that already existed in the base game (whoopie) we're really brought face to face with the fact that we're being driven by the whims of a protagonist who we barely interact with throughout the game. Layla is present at the beginning of the narrative and then she vanishes pretty much for good until this DLC, and that just isn't enough time to build any sort of a personality or character with motivations and drives that we can recognise and sympathise with in any real way.

Layla, even more so than Alexios, exists as a tool to springboard the narrative here or there, and it that reflects so poorly on the character that she seems almost neurotic. They have her jump between motives, from studying Alexios for some vague reason to hunting after Atlantis, which she seems to have stumbled upon completely accidentally, to assuming her role as the 'Heir of Memories', a concept that was literally introduced to her a minute before she decided it was the most important thing in the world. Layla focuses her whole being into these goals as they appear totally unquestioning as though each are the single most important task in the world, making her appear like a complete ADHD nutcase with no personal focus or internal life goals. This would serve as an interesting character trait if the narrative gave itself any room to even recognise it; but instead the game throws us around with Layla and along her all-consuming tangents as though we're lockstep with her impulsiveness such that whenever she's challenged by her compatriots we're clearly supposed to be on her side because everyone else can't see the 'bigger picture'.

It makes Layla seem petulant and irresponsible. Even more for the giant pieces of important information she just doesn't share for seemingly no reason whatsoever. Like, oh I don't know, how about the fact that Otso Berg has her email and is literally sending her taunting messages over the internal net. You think she would mention that at all. But she doesn't and her team get ambushed by Otso where they're taking completely by surprise- although now I think about it, even Layla appears shocked. That actually leaves me wondering... is this a case of the development teams creating their aspects of the narrative entirely separately from one another? Surely that's the only way to explain such a plot-flaw? And in fact... that would track with a lot of problems with this DLC's bizarre narrative structure. Let's file that theory away in the back of our heads for what's to come, shall we?

The basic premise of the DLC is of this random new Isu who is apparently one of the good ones, Aletheia, challenges Layla to discover how to 'use' the staff of Hermes Trismegistus so she can inherit her new place as the 'Heir of Memories', which is suddenly really important to Layla for some reason despite the fact no one really knows what that means or entails. (Oh, and the staff has increadibly unexplored 'corruption' magic which really grinds against the sci-fi-tech-posing-as-magic angle of the franchise. What is your technological explanation for this tech staff making people crazy?) One particularly bad scene which I feel the need to call attention to is another victim of a narrative that has travelled far past it's prime. In order to solve a puzzle in the early couple of hours, Layla needs to enter the memories of another, decidedly more violent, ancestor for their view of events- Leading to a badly shot scene which totally disregards the established lore of the 'bleeding effect'.

Firstly, the scene attempts to play with the visuals of a torture scene by showing the instigator switching back and forth between Layla and the torturer- but it seems they lacked the ability to cleverly switch during cuts, so instead they distort the camera into bizarre angles that force objects into the foreground and hide the models popping out and in. It's genuinely first-year film student levels of shoddy at times, it's just a bad scene. Secondly, we're supposed to be watching Layla so overwhelmed by the cruelty in front of her that she, and I quote, 'nearly died'. So first of all; Alexios has tortured people too, just because he's torturing 'the bad' people, that doesn't make the act of drowning a man in a puddle any less brutal. So why didn't that effect Layla? Secondly, we've always been told that 'The Bleeding Effect' is a gradual process of memories and experiences bleeding together over long periods of exposure to a strain of memory. Layla was with Deimos for three minutes. Come on. (Also the 'almost dying' stuff seems hyperbolic, but I guess there always was the allusion to potentially dire consequences for the unprepared.) It's contrived, poorly done, and exists only to spring-board a weak narrative point.

Speaking of contrived- did you really think I'd miss the fact they teleported Alexios inside of the Atlantis throne room which Layla had to go puzzle solving all across Greece for and simply waved away his magical entry by saying that he 'paid the blood price'? I know, I'm nitpicking- but you've got to bear in mind that I was nearly 90 hours into my playthrough of a game that had driven me nigh on insane by hour 50- ranting about this stuff is cathartic for me. At this point we discover the purpose of the DLC as it is justified in the narrative and I have to be honest, this is about as narratively sound as your average Eroge VN. You need to experience a procession of simulations in order to become 'attuned' to the Staff because they will... you see the staff... just shut up and play the DLC- is the tone they set. How is this any different from bad Eroge plotlines where the protagonist needs to capture a harem because each love interest he claims makes him vaguely stronger in some unclear manner? It's the same level of contrived story telling!

Of course it's at this point that I noticed something else painful about the DLC, and this is another thing only a man driven beyond the limits of his sanity is going to pick up on. The surroundings of sunken Atlantis that are the backdrop for the throne room? Yeah, they're PNGs. Really obvious flat texture PNGs that are shoved right up against the glass. No wonder the game attempts to keep you in the Throne Room as little as possible, the designers couldn't be bothered to throw up empty 3D pre-fabs for the sake of the viewer. Maybe it's less noticeable on a HD screen, but somehow I doubt it. At moments like these I can't help but wonder if this DLC was a rush job slapped together by the skeleton crew remaining on the Odyssey project whilst the core team jumped to the actual work of creating the next full game. Which would be sad if true considering that this DLC was supposed to essentially resolve the hanging plot threads of Odyssey.

The First Episode takes place in Elysium, land of the honoured dead. I have to be honest, I actually really didn't like this act. The visuals of Elysium seemed to lack any identifiable unique personality to it, without the incredible visual of the 'Field of Reeds' from Origins to base itself off, Ubisoft instead went for this generic otherworldly fantasy visual of jutting monolithic land masses sticking out of ground. It's an initially arresting landscape, in comparison to the more sensible world you're been travelling. But it's an ephemeral wonder that dissipates once you realise there really is nothing behind it. To be fair every Ubisoft open world is like this, but they do such a good job simulating the lives of the people who live there that you tend to forget about it. Elysium is mostly barren apart from small pockets of largely just wandering NPCs, highlighting just how lifeless this apparent land of the dead actually is. (Although, of course, it isn't actually a land of the dead but rather a simulation of an Isu settlement... although the various people you meet are named after mythological or dead people... but then that can just be chalked about to Alexios' interpretaiton of the simulation... look the DLC storyline is bad, there's no point trying to justify or decipher it.)

Elysium does, however, mark a new type of enemy being introduced to the game through the Isu soldiers, most of whom are an utter terror to fight. Teleporting, shooting lasers, elongating their weapons with light magic enhancements- the challenge that the rest of the game was lacking is definitely waiting here and if the gameplay itself were a little more interesting I'd find this all a breath of fresh air instead of yet another rung on the ladder of tedium. At least each of these DLCs add new augmentation abilities that change already purchased abilities in significant and interesting ways, such as by turning the smoke bomb escape skill into a catapult launch into the air that allows you to snipe people on your way down, or a new variation of the arrow rain that stuns everyone caught in it and opens them up to crit hits. They're all actually rather clever new powers, carrying new effects and drawbacks to make each one a balance. Messing around with these systems led to the first time the combat of the game started to feel adequate to have some fun within- just a shame it took 80 hours to get there.

In story Elysium is actually pretty promising, presenting a political public uprising against the tyrannical Isu 'god' Persephone who rules like a bit of a lost tyrant. The story actually allows you to work for both sides and learn from each in a manner that seems to imply branching choices, only to snatch that away and force you to the same static end in order to facilitate the next DLC chapter. It's actually a bit of a shame there's not more nuance here because I think a pretty decent job was done fleshing out both sides of the conflict, so that even the 'tyrant' had a gimmer of hope that might have been nurtured. Perhaps there's a lesson about inevitability written there, but I don't think Ubisoft ever meant to make it intentionally. This is more just the consequence of rushed deadlines and it really does show for how messily each errant thread of plot just kind of ends, forcing you to resort to being the revolutionary. 

The Hades chapter was a lot more interesting, and perhaps my favourite time of the entire game. Lean and focused, Hades presents exactly what the player needs to do in order to progress and offers some properly presented and decent side quests to keep you busy in the meanwhile. Hades himself is actually one of my favourite side characters, menacing yet bureaucratic, I always felt like he hardly had time to deal with me and I felt that frustration deeply in my soul as I crossed the 100 hour mark with this endless game. Also, the land of the dead curiously felt more alive than Elysium did, and the inhospitable chunks of chaos felt far more appropriate there rather than in the apparent paradise that the last area was supposed to be. There's still that inherent disconnect between the world that Alexios is seeing and the simulation, which makes all the relationships and personal revelations you make feel largely insubstantial when you know they're fake. (One particularly emotional side quest loses all of it's strength under that fact.)

And then we have Atlantis itself. The final location of the 'Fate' DLC probably stands out as one of the most majestic in the game; I was simply blown away by Atlantis itself and exploring up and down it's streets was a wonder all in itself. I often wondered if Ubisoft would be able to translate their talent for world creation onto a canvass with no real world basis to draw from, and though Atlantis clearly draws from Greek influence here and there, by and large the landmass is unique, original, futuristic and bristling with life. It's actually something of a shame that we only have a relatively small DLC to explore a place I would have loved to spend a whole game going around. Meeting it's people, distinguishing it's districts and bringing life to the myth and legend of the lost city.

In narrative Atlantis has the most progression across the core plot points- showing the last cross-populated city of Humans and Isu. There's no faux-underworld veil over this world confusing events that are occurring, just a true-to-life simulation of Aletheia's own experience, modulated to fit Alexios. It's still disconnecting to see events transpire that aren't really happening, but at least these events happened at some point. It's kind of like experiencing an animus inside of an animus, I can get to grips with this story much easier. And given that the world events of Atlantis are more tightly connected to the core narrative of the DLC, better cohesion for one is better cohesion for all. I came away satisfied and empowered through the new abilities to finally feel like the Demigod the DLC was designed to make me.

Unfortunately, around and after these decent blocks of Alexios content we're forced to deal with the absolute pits of Layla storytelling in which any commendable and admirable character traits of our protagonist is stripped away in a flurry of rushed beats that make an annoying character utterly detestable. That esoteric idea of the 'corruption of the Staff' flies in the face of established narrative and good writing practices. Previous known owners were 'corrupted' by the potential of the power, drawn by their own greed heightened by the ability to seize it, just as the case was with the Apple of Eden back in Assassin's Creed 2. Changing that idea into some invisible menacing 'evil' just comes across as a lazy way to justify wild personality shifts in our characters whilst making irredeemable childish acts of irreversibility into blameless 'the staff made me do it' gaffes- robbing all agency of the characters and ruining the purpose of personal investment.

It's utterly laughable how we have Layla bounce around from obsession to obsession driven by an unwavering conviction that she is always unerring right in whatever she decides to do and a childish obstinance that makes her an infuriating focal point. The fact that we can have her literally slip up and do something utterly immoral and then half a scene later depict her whooping for joy exclaiming "Oh my god, thank you- you won't regret this!" Seems almost intentionally whiplash inducing. Almost. Because then we're right back to the contrived 'brilliance' of Layla the world expert, as she defeats a running series protagonist in single combat because 'bleeding effect- I dunno'. Oh, so the Bleeding Effect doesn't just link up your experiences, it also moulds your body to make you as physically imposing as an ancient mercenary who spent their entire lives sculpting their body to the standards of a statue? Yeah, I thought not. The way this game treats the bleeding effect makes me wonder why Abstergo doesn't just sell Animus sessions to the military to turn every solider into an unkillable murder machine over the space of an afternoon. 

The Final Adventure

But at least Layla's story is good and buried until Valhalla; the gods were kind enough to eclipse her with the end of that DLC so that the final update, the Korfu adventure, could be experience totally free of her ruining presence. And with that the Korfu storyline is- fine. It's a wrap up of Alexios' adventure but treated with a irreverence that makes it feel somewhat insincere. For a 'goodbye' tour of this character, there should have been a little more gravitas expended; or at least Ubisoft could have shelled out to bring  member of Alexios' family into this final expansion, rather than just Barnabas and Herodotus. (Especially since Herodotus had, by that time, already departed from the Adrestia- making his presence a confusing edition altogether.)

Korfu also performed the unforgivable sin of stripping Alexios of his powers, thus his abilities, plunging a combat system that was just beginning to become decent into the depths of irredeemability. I hated every encounter in that DLC, due to the fact that I couldn't use any of my specially designed builds, couldn't buff, couldn't poison, couldn't escape, couldn't use crit bonuses- and I couldn't heal. For a challenge island this would be... well it would still suck, but it would be fine. Korfu makes it permanent. You're crippled for the entire story and it makes the gameplay miserable. The only saving grace of it all was the fact that the questline isn't that long- other than that the 'send off' DLC left me on about the worst note it possible could. After that, ending on a sizzle reel for Valhalla and then dumping me on the buy page for the next game (seriously, they tried to make me buy a £100 game after spitting in my face) was almost enough to make me rage quit from the entire franchise right there and then.

Summary

There are people who quite like the RPG face of Assassin's Creed, and those who particularly laud the effort of Odyssey and call it a, quote, "pretty cool game". For those people I implore: Please play any other game. Because I think that's what the problem is. People play only Assassin's Creed titles and from the very narrow lens of this franchise Assassin's Creed Odyssey feels like a pretty alright game, a little long-toothed perhaps but a decent time. Develop your tastes for what incredible gaming experience can feel like, fully immersive worlds found in titles like Red Dead, fantastic combat systems in franchises like DMC or even just tight narrative swan songs in small games like Hollow Knight. See these games that specialise in their areas and do the best that they can- and then turn back around to Assassin's Creed. With that renewed context you will see a game that stretches itself so far and excels nowhere. Dipped in a pool of mediocrity it slithers out from, but becomes pulled back into time and time again.

But even all that said I have to acknowledge that the raw game itself is not terrible. It's serviceable, average, nothing special and nothing terrible. But time is the killer. Dragging on for so very long, squeezing play time out of systems that could never keep themselves interesting for that amount of time, meandering and recycling when the game is already paper thin- that alone drags the product far further down than it needs to be. This is not a game as fundamentally flawed as Watch_Dogs Legion; not even close. But it's a AA quality game convinced it can don the accoutrements and vestiges of a AAA experience and get away with spanning out to the size (and price point) of an epic. It doesn't work. The game doesn't come together like it wants to and it's price point, for the full game, is downright scandalous. Grading this one, even with my arbitrary system for doing so, was a nightmare to decide on. The quality of the game, how it places and presents itself, is fully deserving of a C Grade, but the diminishing returns of endlessly drawn-out fluff and inanity drags the product further down and makes the experience worse than the sum of it's parts. Ultimately, I'm falling down two marks to a D + Grade, barely held up by those sparks of quality when the game narrows it's focus down, such as in the Fate of Atlantis DLC. I can't recommend this game, even long time series fans like myself are better off reading a synopsis or buying at a steep discount. And even with all those provisions let me promise you- enduring the 100 plus hour content as it slowly degrades in quality and care just isn't worth your time. This, unfortunately, would be better off being a skip of a game.