Assassin’s Creed Odyssey Story and Settings Complete Guide
Here’s all you need to know about Assassin’s Creed Odyssey game’s story and setting. We also do addition info on the chronological order of the games.
Assassin’s Creed is one of the largest modern video game series and the main brand of Ubisoft: for 13 years, the company has already released 12 parts (not counting spin-offs), and total sales have exceeded 155 million copies. Among the game franchises, Assassin is one of the few that can live as long as Call of Duty. That is eternity.
| Release Date: | October 2, 2018 |
|---|---|
| Platforms: | PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X|S, Microsoft Windows, Stadia |
| Developer: | Ubisoft Quebec; Ubisoft Montreal, Ubisoft Bucharest, Ubisoft Singapore, Ubisoft Montpellier, Ubisoft Kiev, Ubisoft Shanghai |
| Publisher: | Ubisoft |
| Genre: | Action, adventure, RPG |
All parts of the history of the Assassin’s Creed series
- Assassin’s Creed (2007).
- Assassin’s Creed 2.
- Assassin’s Creed 3.
- Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag and Rogue.
- Assassin’s Creed Unity.
- Assassin’s Creed Syndicate.
- Assassin’s Creed Origins.
- Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
The main feature of the “Odyssey” is the grandiose scope of everything
Throughout our series about Assassin’s Creed, it has been repeatedly mentioned that Ubisoft has enormous human resources and uses them to develop specific projects, perhaps better than anyone. With Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, this feature manifested itself even more strongly: the game was created in parallel by as many as 7 studios – almost 1000 people, of which 200-300 worked on art.
The result is a game map of truly terrifying proportions. Odyssey shows Ancient Greece during the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC), its area is approximately 256 km² (of which about 15 km² are inaccessible for research). The world of the game is almost 6 times larger than the map The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, although thousands of times smaller than the real territory of the islands of Greece. About the same scale was in Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag, but there are much more of the map was occupied by water bodies. In addition, Odyssey has an amazing level of detail for such a giant world.
Here, as in Origins, there is a Discovery mode designed to explore Ancient Greece for educational purposes – without game threats and other distractions. So Ubisoft has not only an impressive RPG (Origins and Odyssey have a common gameplay formula), but also an amazing interactive tutorial. Someone during the passage learns for the first time that most Greek statues once had hands and a coating of colored enamel!
Cassandra is the first main character in the main series.
The first female protagonist in the series was Avelina de Grandpré from Assassin’s Creed 3: Liberation for PS Vita, and they wanted to devote a full-fledged part of Assassin’s Creed Origins to the mercenary Aya, but due to the intervention of one Ubisoft executive (now fired), she was pushed to the background. At Odyssey, the developers have taken an important step towards representation: here you can finally play as a woman. True, this is only an optional option, but quite equal.
At the beginning of the game, you need to choose who will become the protagonist of the future story: Alexios or his sister Cassandra. Depending on the decision, the plot will change: one child goes to odyssey, and the other takes the opposite role. At the same time, Alexios is emblazoned on the main cover (the physical edition can be turned sideways with Cassandra), but it was his sister who would later be recognized as canon – for example, in the official novelization of the game.
After the release, Ubisoft shared statistics: approximately two-thirds of Odyssey players chose Alexios for the main role. So far, gamers are indeed more likely to prefer to play for men.
Even less Assassin’s Creed and more RPGs
In general, the very successful Origins was criticized by some fans for its main advantage – the game was very different from the usual Assassin’s Creed. The hidden blade became much less useful, the combat system was ironically limited by the level of the character, and the very theme of the assassins was revealed only in the finale. But even against the backdrop of the already radical changes in Origins, “Odyssey” looked wild – so much so that Assassin’s Creed looks out of place in the title.
That Cassandra, that Alexios do not belong to the assassins at all – even indirectly or ideologically. The protagonist of the game is (not quite) an ordinary mercenary who travels freely through ancient Greece and pursues his own goals. Instead of the iconic hood, a military helmet, and instead of a hidden blade – a fragment of Leonid’s spear (as it turned out, an artifact of the ancient Isu race). Eagle vision here, as in Origins, is literal: Cassandra or Alexios can summon a personal eagle, just like Bayek, to view the terrain from above.
The combat system was refreshed again: while the battles in the Origins felt heavy and emphasized the use of the shield, in the Odyssey the movements were more acrobatic, swift, and tied to dodging and maneuvering. It’s hard to say which is better: the difference is extremely subjective, as between the combat choreography in the prequel trilogy and the Star Wars sequel trilogy.
The developers, however, clearly liked the mechanics of the battles. It was emphasized by the abundance of mass battles of armies – a type of side activity in which the protagonist fights on the side of Athens or Sparta to choose from. And, of course, in Assassin’s Creed Origins there are several boss fights: there you have to use suitable cold weapons, shoot a bow, and use active skills.
And let Odyssey is connected with Assassin’s Creed only by the storyline in the present (already familiar to fans Leila continues to help assassins), but here there was a non-linearity. Now in the dialogues, you can often choose replicas – rarely with global plot consequences, but allowing you to play a role within the framework of a pre-prescribed image of the hero. The authors really broke away from the novels: in Odyssey you can sleep with more than a dozen characters, and with some, you can also build relationships.
There are also same-sex novels in The Odyssey. They are associated with one unpleasant scandal: in the DLC “The Legacy of the First Blade”, the events of which unfold after the main plot, Cassandra or Alexios (spoiler!) find themselves in a heterosexual relationship and give birth to a child. This greatly upset the fans, who all the games held same-sex relationships – it turned out that the developers forced their heroes to “come to their senses” and start a hetero-family. Ubisoft had to apologize.
The Return of Naval Battles
A small but important point: odyssey has returned the mechanics for which Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag was loved. A heroine or hero can summon her own ship to moor, upgrade it, appoint it captain, explore Greece by swimming, and fight other ships with arrows (instead of cannons). In general, the authors did not come up with anything new, but the chosen setting required the return of naval battles.
“Odyssey” in every sense – the game is full of content
No sooner had fans moved away from the duration of Assassin’s Creed Origins – twice as many as the previous parts – than Ubisoft again jumped above its head. “Odyssey” is almost exhaustingly long: the minimum passage of the main chain of quests at best will take 42 hours. And besides her, there are dozens of sidelines with hundreds of tasks, the same number of places of interest on the map, endless randomly generated contracts on land and at sea (an easy way to pump), sea battles, seizure of territories, mercenaries of different ranks patrolling the regions … In general, there are so many things that it will take more than 130 hours and exceptional perseverance to completely clean up the game.
But that’s not all – in the odyssey, Ubisoft successfully combined the models of an initially holistic game at the start and a service game. In addition to the relatively small (10 hours) story DLC “Legacy of the First Blade” and “Forgotten Legends of Greece” for the game released an add-on about Atlantis in as many as 3 parts. This is almost an independent game with its own storyline and a new location – the incredibly beautiful Atlantis. To see everything that the mythical city offers the hero, it will take about 30 hours.
By the way, if someone thinks this is not enough, Odyssey has a built-in quest editor. With it, you can create your own mini-stories and share them with other players, or pass other people’s ones indefinitely.
Despite the indignation of some players that the series is moving further away from its essence, the financial indicators of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey show the unequivocal rightness of Ubisoft. The game sold more than 10 million copies, and player engagement increased by about 90% compared to Origins – that is, the average gaming gamer spent more time in the game and spent more real money on microtransactions and the purchase of DLC.
Critics liked Odyssey too: the average score of the game on Metacritic varies from 83 to 87 out of 100 depending on the platform.
It seems that with the release of “Origins” and “Odyssey” in the history of Assassin’s Creed, the white streak began again, but at the same time the “Assassin” was rapidly losing its own identity. Ubisoft will try to slightly adjust its course in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla – we will talk about it in the final part of the series of articles.
