Game Diary: The Vast Odyssey

Do you ever get overwhelmed by the sheer size of a game and suffer from indecision about what to do next? That has happened to me with Assassin's Creed: Odyssey this week.  I have been playing it every day since I received it last Friday, but yesterday I needed to take a break.  I have already managed to put 20 hours on the clock though so that's probably understandable.  Things were going well to begin with - the game limits you to the fairly small island of Kephalonia for the first few hours, giving you some freedom to explore and get used to the mechanics of the game.  A lot of it will feel familiar to those who play Origins, but there have been some siginificant changes. Origins took some steps towards becoming a full fledged RPG, and now Odyssey has gone all the way there.  Instead of simple outfits that just changed your appearance, you now have helmets, torso armour, gloves, belts and boots as well.  This has increased the level of enjoyment for me because it means the random loot you find and treasure you pick up is a lot more meaningful.  There are a lot more dialogue options with important decisions to be made that will affect direction of the overall plot, ala Mass Effect or The Witcher 3.

Then there are the multiple levels of side quest. First is the mercenary system, which is quite similar to the nemesis system from the Middle Earth games but a lot less annoying.  While random mercenaries will come after you, they will only do so if you have a bounty on your head, which you can pay off from the map screen at any time, or just wait for your bounty level to drop over time.  These mercs have strengths and weaknesses much like the Uruk Hai of Mordor and there are no less than 9 tiers of them to work your way through.  They don't appear to be randomly generated though, or at least not the early ones. At the end of the starter zone in Kephalonia you will get access to your ship, but you won't really be using it very much as much of the first 15 or so hours takes place on land.  There are vast areas of water to explore further on into the game, but it takes quite a bit of time to get there. Not long after you get your boat, the game reveals the next system: the Cult of Kosmos.  There is a large network of 30 or so targets that need to be taken down, and their identities remain hidden to begin with.  You have to explore the world and find clues before you know who is part of the cult, then you can go and murder them. The higher level the cult member is, the more clues are required, and these high end cultist are level 50 or close to it so you won't be able to finish all of this until the end game or beyond.

In addition to this, I also did an optional quest to kill a legendary boar, which then triggered seven more similar quests to hunt down similar legendary beasts all across the Greek world.  When you add in the daily and weekly notice board quests that can be completed for orichalcum and traded for good weapons and armour, you have quite a lot to be getting on with.  You're looking at a game that will easily take 80 or so hours to finish if you want to do everything, which I do and I was fine with, until I got to Athens.  With the city sprawling in every direction as far as the eye can see, and the map screen littered with question marks, I started to feel like it was getting too much, and that's when I needed to take a break. I have no problem with the massive length of the game, as I can just chip away at it a little bit for months to come.  It's more the sheer number of options of where to go next - just visiting all of those questions marks in Athens will take hours, and it's just one district in the huge land mass of Attika. In addition to this, there are another four or five places on the map that I could go to now that I am level 20.

I think what I have decided to do for now, is to focus on taking out the low end cult members, working my way systematically through them and thoroughly exploring the rest of whatever island they happen to be on as I go.  In between I will play around in Athens for a little bit, but not try and do the entire city in one go. For me the best parts of the recent Assassin's Creed games has not been the densely populated areas, it's been the open countryside and the highly atmospheric tombs, of which there are many to be found in Odyssey too.  I haven't even got to the point where you can fight the mythical creatures like gorgons, minotaurs and so on yet, though I know this is in the game because various streams have shown game play of it.  I will also be taking regular breaks from Odyssey to play other stuff like retro games and Forza Horizon 4.  I am really enjoying my time with Odyssey, but I am wary of burning out and not finishing it.   It wasn't that long ago that I finished the DLC for Origins, after all. Kassandra seems like a really great protagonist from what I've experienced so far, up there with Ezio, Edward Kenway and the Frye twins, so I want to see this game through to the end. I might have another update as I get further in, or I may just wait and write a full review when I'm finished, we'll see!