Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey (Ubisoft)

Originally posted 8/5/20.

Let’s talk gaming.  Video games have grown steadily from their birth as novelty entertainment for drunks and stoners in the 1970’s with ‘Pong’. Now, triple A developers will put millions and millions of dollars, and employ hundreds of people into the creation of cutting edge console and PC games as high-end entertainment…for drunks and stoners (games are now ALSO made for more family-friendly audiences in mind).

I really enjoy good storytelling. I love comic books, graphic novels, book-books, films, cartoons, anime and video games. My relationship with gaming is almost a life-long pursuit. I can remember being dazzled as a child by arcades packed floor by floor with cabinet games. Arcade games, even in their infancy, seemed so much more sophisticated and impressive than pinball to me, even with all the bells and whistles. When one of my neighbors got an Atari 2600, it was like a revelation. You could have one of those things in your HOUSE? Crude as early consoles were in translating the exact graphics experience from a cabinet to a small electronic box you connected to your TV, the idea seemed revolutionary to me.

I remember the impetus for my first job was to earn enough to bring home a Sega Genesis, then the top of the line of console gaming. The machine sang to you when you turned it on. “sAAY-Gaaa!” Suddenly, you could have games in your house that practically matched the ones in the arcades when it came to graphic fidelity and narrative immersion.

As time went by, and games grew even more sophisticated, new avenues of storytelling became available to PC’s with enough power. I’d played Doom and several other First Person Shooter games, but at the time, I found it hard to suspend my disbelief due to both the flat graphics and the flat stories. FPS’s have really come a long way, and I’m sure that specific game genre’s evolution is worthy to discuss in a separate thread, but like open world games, I’m going to go in a different direction with this post.

Phenomenal games like Valve’s Half Life or Bioware’s Knights of the Old Republic changed my opinion drastically. Neither were quite what would come to be called, ‘open world’, but Half Life is a game with a seamless and engaging story. It was topped by the stellar sequel, Half Life 2 and the subsequent downloadable content that allowed you to play as Gordon Freeman, a theoretical physicist who has to save the world from an extradimensional excursion or three.  Knights of the Old Republic was the first time I played something that honestly felt like an oldschool, IRL roleplaying game. The game allowed for an extensive player-creation setup, where you could craft your character’s gender, disposition and body-type.

Once constructed, I then played my guy through the lengthy game as I saw fit. It was an astonishing experience, one I sank nearly a hundred hours into. The astonishing plot twist would put Shyamalan to shame.

I had a friend in the late nineties and early aughts (early Ohs? I dunno) who had a brush with fame and as a consequence had a bit of money. His on Park Avenue apartment had twelve foot ceilings. He had a projection TV and just about every console available at the time. We would get appropriately intoxicated and then play HALO: Combat Evolved, or Crimson Skies: The High Road to Revenge or Dead or Alive splashed across his wall in vivid color. He would beat me a lot, taking me to school in games I was learning on the fly

 When my girlfriend at the time asked me what I was doing with my friend for all those hours, I told her but was a bit surprised to hear her answer. “I like video games too,” she said. My friend told me it was ok to bring her, and the next thing I knew, she was beating him up and down the house on pretty much every game he owned.

Clearly, my next move was to get an XBOX.

I got a lot of mileage out of that machine and was very pleased when the opportunity provided itself to upgrade to an XBOX 360, the next console in the cycle. One of the great things about the XBOX is that it has a backwards compatibility component, which allows you to use your older games on the newer system and not lose your library. I’d played some Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, and GTA: San Andreas on PC and on the new machine, but I was truly unprepared for games like Bethesda’s Skyrim or Ubisoft’s  Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, games which broke my perception of how big games could get.

There was no place you couldn’t walk to, no place you couldn’t climb within the map of Skyrim. In AC: Black Flag, that map was the Caribbean Sea. You could sail from Jamaica to South Florida and stop at any of the myriad islands in the nearby waters, commanding your two-masted gunship, the Jackdaw. Then you could dock (or leap into the water and swim to shore) without a cut-scene. The scale of the playable area in that game was stupefying. 

Assassin’s Creed is a long-running game series from Ubisoft Studios. The first game came out in 2007 and there have been over a dozen games on a variety of platforms. AC: Valhalla is out now but I want to talk about the last game in the series, Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey.  AC games are known for dual, dueling plotlines, mixing the present and the past. There is a complicated lore and backstory to the games, involving a long-running battle between two factions, Assassins and Templars. That’s the least appealing part of the games for me.  In Black Flag, the modern-day sequences were tolerable, but they kept yanking you out of the past, ruining the immersion in the rich narrative and stunning visuals of the eighteenth century Caribbean Sea.

My switch to the XBOX One is something of a sad tale. The tray of the 360 had become misaligned, and I would be forced to sit on the floor and pound on the casing for games or dvds to engage. I’d told my partner about it, and she seemed unconcerned. Then one day, she came upon me in the living room, beating on the roof of the 360 like it owed me money. “It’s time to let it go, honey,” she said to me. “It’s time.”

So I got an XBOX One.  I will talk up and down about how Respawn’s Titanfall 2 is one of the greatest games ever made, with one of the greatest single player campaigns I’ve encountered, but that discussion will ALSO go in a FPS post.

After I picked up the One, I found out that there were new Assassin’s Creed games for the next gen consoles. The conceit of the last few Assassin’s Creed games was that each of the past-plots takes place before the last game in the sequence. They had an AC: Origins and AC: Odyssey.

Origins, taking place in ancient Egypt, was (obviously) the origins of the Assassin Order and the Templar-Assassin war, while Odyssey set in Greece of antiquity, was supposed to have NOTHING to do with any of that.

This, of course, intrigued me. That it also had a version of the great sailing mechanic from Black Flag also piqued my interest. Odyssey puts you smack down in the middle of the Peloponnesian War with ALL of the islands and lands of Greece at your disposal to adventure through, from Macedonia to Crete.

While the character creation system in Odyssey isn’t nearly as robust as that of say, KotOR, you DO get to choose your gender. You are given the option to play as Kassandra or her brother Alexios. As it turns out, the voice actress Melissanthi Mahout, who plays Kassandra is more emotive and subtle in her characterization. Alexios sounds like Cookie Monster. The game is festooned with historical accuracy, locations and characters. There is some bending of the geography and the history, most blatantly in that they give Sparta a functional navy and fleets comparable to Athens, but other than that, you really feel like you’re walking the islands of the Mediterranean, thousands of years ago.

And what islands! The grass and flowers blow in the wind. Goats and chickens scamper past as you wander from town to town. Monumental works of architecture surround you, as well as the ruins of the civilizations that have come before.  Whales breach out of the sea as you sail past, while your crew sings into the wind.  Dynamic weather comes upon you. Storms rage and pass, and you can see the Milky Way stretch from horizon to horizon as day turns to night.

I put 363 hours into that game. It was just an addictive experience. My girlfriend, who usually disdains most of the games I play with the exception of the driving and flight simulators, would often sit next to me on the sofa and watch with glee as Kassandra stomped across the Greek world like a giant. I don’t want to give away too much of the plot here, even though it’s an older game. Suffice it to say, you discover early on that though you are a daughter of Sparta, there is far more to you than meets the eye. The main game covers the story of Kassandra learning her personal history and trying to pull together her family, torn apart by the gyre of war. 

There are two available downloadable expansion sets: The Legacy of the First Blade and The Fate of Atlantis.  The former rather clumsily tries to connect the mythological world you’re striding through and the more grounded games that have come before in the series. One of the larger complaints about this game was how it discarded many of the tropes of the long-running series. This innovative approach alienated many fans, but hey, fuck ‘em. Everything evolves. What doesn’t grow, dies.

The second installment, The Fate of Atlantis, explains both the supernatural events that happen throughout the tale as well as your own demi-god-like powers in a logical and satisfactory manner. It made for a wonderful coda to the gaming experience, providing three new maps, each a deep dive into aspects of both Greek mythology and the game’s mythos.

The newest game in the series, AC: Valhalla’, slated for a fall release, brings back several of the earlier gameplay clichés, moving in a different direction than Odyssey.  Valhalla will be abandoning the backwards-time element, and is supposed to have ‘past’ elements that take place in the Ninth century Saxon England as well as Norway.

I’m going now in a completely different direction. I’m enthusiastic about a game that takes place a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away. I’ve just started playing Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, and so far it’s pretty engaging. Are you guys into video games? What are you playing? Any thoughts on Open World gaming? Consoles in general?

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this diversion from the regularly-scheduled awfulness that makes up the news.

https://balloon-juice.com/2020/08/05/medium-cool-with-bginchi-gaming/