Overall
200+ hours. Completed all main quests and side quests. This is a comment too long for a game too big.
Boiling down to one question if playing this game gave me an enjoyable experience. I would say no. It is a pizza too big. For a large chunk of my playtime, instead of playing, I was working to have it completed.
The gameplay is smooth and I didn’t encounter many technical glitches. (I do encounter a bug in a side quest so I cannot finish that quest.) The sea, and the fluid dynamics, is beautiful. Kassandra is very charming. She is beautiful, strong, confident. I enjoyed watching her in every cut-scene. Yet after hundreds of hours, the awe faded but the annoyance did not. I have had fun time, but I have also been confused and stressful, and was put-off by some narrations and stories.
The game feels like a sandbox or a platform where various teams throw different content into it. These contents vary in quality. Some of them are nice and intriguing, while some plain and boring.
Quest-lines
There are very good quest-lines, with intriguing introduction (eg. flying blade and Spartan temper from the Silver Island questline) and natural interchange between you and these characters. The stories unfold at a right pace. They are real people and you would care about what would happen to them.
There are also dull quest-lines. You found some damsel-in-distress in predicament. An NPCs then stood there, read you a long paragraph of background and gave you tasks. You did those tasks and saved the day. (No. I am not talking about those Timed Side Quests or Contract Quests which are just for XP or loots.)
The quest objectives are the most monotonous ever, looting and killing. All quests can be complete by killing everyone in the mission location. You need not worry about losing a tailing target, getting detected, mystery solving, shooting a war elephant while on a moving chariot. Basically there is only one way to fail a quest (die).
There is an enormous amount of repeated looting and killing you have to do. These repetitive tasks can only be turned into purposeful missions by proper narrations. Purpose of adding another quest should be to enrich the game, not merely lengthen the gameplay time. I could not help but wonder how the game could have glowed if the quest is halved. Keep only the better half with more time and effort to polish them up.
Sidenote
The Silver Island quest line is very well-done in many aspects. Read from reddit that it was made for pre-release review. It made me angry. Hey Ubisoft, you are actually able to make very high quality content if you want to. Why are there so few of them?
Sidenote again
Quests from the free DLC “The Lost Tales of Greece” are generally better than those in the main game. Rushed the main game development maybe?
The choice system
The choice system has given me traumas.
Throughout a questline you have to make dozens of decisions. While most of them affect only the conversation. Hidden in that dozens of choices, there are a few choices that do affect the outcome. Problem is that there are “good” or “bad” outcome (eg. people getting killed or saved, people like you or not). So instead of “see how things go” it is more like “see how well you’ve done”. The results would tell if you have correctly checked all the boxes. There are unpredictable twists so there is no way to guess how things would go. Occasionally you will find out someone is dead because you have stepped on a mine (subtle choice that matters) a few quests ago. It is like exams but they don’t tell how marks are given. There is no fun, just shock and frustration.
I will say good choices are those with foreseeable consequences, that you know what you are choosing. Say in the Silver Island quest line, when you choose to side with and befriend a character, you change your relations with them. Another very good one would be the breast Slayer ending quest. The quest giver told you her rules and value, told you how you will be treated. At time of choice, the choice is very heavy emotionally. And its consequence follows. Although the loots were the same, this choice is hard and it does matter. These choices are rare.
Supernatural stealth
This depends which play-style you enjoy.
Half way through the game you would gain some superpower ability. You can slow time, turn invisible, make corpses vanish, teleport and chain assassin 5 people. (It is called “rush”, but by the fact you can “rush” to the 2nd floor or to another roof, I can only call it teleport.) When someone spots you, time will be slowed and time is more than enough to walk towards him and assassinate. So if you need to Infiltrate a fort, not much prior scouting or planning is needed. You walk in right from the main gate and start a fast-paced killing spree, and corpses will clean themselves up after you. Other guards would simply take over his guarding post. I found the handling cartoon-ish. “Hey. Didn’t you notice your pal is missing!!??”
The stealth thing is no more a strategic puzzle but a fast-paced action stunt with supernatural ability. It makes you feel powerful and it is fun. But it is totally a different thing than previous games or even earlier phases of the same game. It is more of a personal preference. For me, I miss the strategic gameplay.
Overwhelmingly Big
I suppose this is a personal problem. After Athens, the game world suddenly expanded so big that I got lost. There are too many places, too many quest-lines. It is overwhelming. It feels like I have to do a project too big and I have no idea where to start. I found out some quests will expire if another story-line got too far forward. I began to research, plan my way forward, and calculate how many hours I have to put into the game. It is mentally stressful.
Blank Villains
I am confused about the hatred and motivation to go after some villains. Twice in the main quest line, when my Kassandra is tracing down an important (aka more airtime) cultist, I was like “hey, why are you so angry? I don’t hate them that much.”
When going after the remaining cultists, I unveil them then go after them. I don’t know them and it feels like going after innocents. What has he done? What if there is another Lagos (a reluctant cultist)?
Sometimes the game did not make me feel “this guy has to go” before giving me the task to kill the villains. On these occasions, the tasks to kill are just tasks. The sheer number of cultists is padding.
Cities
Most of the areas feel the same, with the exception of a few (eg. Athens, Sparta and Lalaia). If you are not looking at the names, it is difficult to tell in which city you are roaming. As with the number of quests, I think it would be better to lessen the number of places and put more effort into enriching those remains.
For example, Korinth was described in conversation as a lawless city. But there is no way to feel the lawlessness of it. It is much like every other city. Maybe it could be fixed by someone yelling “thief” or drunk in the street, or adding a quest about pickpockets like the one in Olympia.
Origins on the other hand did a better job at creating a different atmosphere for different cities. The cities are unique, Siwa, Alexandria, Memphis, and of course Cyrene.
Memorable Buildings
In Origin I vividly remember places like the Great Library of Alexandria, Lighthouse of Alexandria, and Temple of Hatshepsut. But in Odyssey, the same few temples and houses pop up everywhere. The statues in temples are found repeated in the street. Murals are repeated too frequently.
I thoroughly explored Akropolis of Athens only in a very late quest in the main quest-line. If it happened earlier in the game, maybe it will be more impressive. (What I remember most about Athens buildings is that I cannot find the f-ing staircase in Perikles residence and I am in that stupid Athenian robes so I cannot climb.)
I was looking forward to taking some good pictures for the Statue of Zeus at Olympia. Turned out it was a low-poly model pumped too big. It is seven wonders and I expected better.
Puzzle and Maze
I think there are more locations in Origin that are designed to be a puzzle that make my head tilted. It could be some temples with only a few openings forcing you to study the guards’ patrol pattern, some tomb puzzles like the huge one under Sphinx, or climbing puzzles like the Lighthouse of Alexandria.
The tombs in Odyssey are significantly easier to explore than the pyramids in Origin. There are no puzzle elements in the forts. Thrown yourself in and you will find plenty of bushes to hide in. As game progress, the forts grow bigger in size with more guards, but not more complicated. I felt I am too full for that in the later phrase in the game.
Characters
There are a number of interesting characters, such as Alkibiades, Kyra, Agapios, Phoibe. Good characters and good quests usually go together. As both of them happen when the writing is good. I like the feeling of having friends all around Greece. It is nice to bump into them for another quest. Alkibiades is fun and dramatic while at the same time historically accurate. However much a party animal he is, one should never take him lightly as a capable and ambitious politician.
Society
There are interesting individuals, but do not tell much about the place and the community. On the streets many people are mindlessly wandering at the same pace. They are like models randomly placed without much consideration. I think building a society is not something of concern in this game.
I love that there is a flooded slum in Athens. As the characters we met in Athens are all social elites, I was excited to see another side of Athens. Hoping to see some social dynamics, we just went there for one mission (the snake dealer). I think it is a wasted potential.
Origins did a remarkable job of crafting a believable Ptolemaic Egypt. As a player born in colonial Hong Kong, I can totally relate the “Greek elites” vs “Egyptian commoners” tension. Social class dynamics are presented, such as some rituals are only respected by Egyptian. All these describe the empire to me. The scripts were written with a social background in mind and it transcends through all characters and places. It shows attention to a bigger picture and efforts to align everyone working in different parts of the game.
Besides, in Origin when Bayek is in Siwa, other villagers will yell “thanks god you’re back”. Immediately you know people missed the protagonist. And only after the social fabric is laid we would understand why he is welcomed.
The lack of narration of community or society also explains why the cities are bland. Because something very important is not there. If the background society is not well established, there is nowhere to put the characters in and there is nowhere for the players to immerse in.
Modern days are drag
After I finish killing the last creature boss, I thought I am on my way to the DLC. Then I was met with long paragraphs of messages that I cannot skip, mirror puzzles which are mundane, tomb explorations which do not count as tomb completions. Why is the Atlantis hall so big and why do I walk slower in it? Basically two hours of walk there, listen to that, walk there, watch cutscenes and walk… with lots of long loading time in between. It was an audiobook that requires manually turning pages. I was literally angry, feeling I have wasted my free afternoon for nothing.
Also, Layla is a horrible person. I am pissed off by the fact that the character I love had to endure millennia just to keep an item safe for the character I hate.
First Blade DLC
Poor writing and disrespect the main game. Throughout the game, you finish quests in an area then you move to the next. There is no reason to “go back” to a house in Dyme and suddenly feel so clingy and lonely. I have no connection with that place, and all my crews and families are on Adrestia waiting for me. The DLC assumes you have lost your family and was alone. But this assumption is plain wrong.
My character in the first few encounters shows a loving gaze towards the would-be-partner. I have dozens of hours with my character and just met this new character. You cannot make my character fall for him before make me at least like him. In fact most romance options in the main game have better foreshadow than this. I understand that, for lineage sake, the relationship has to be there. But that flowery romance is forced upon the players unnecessarily.
At worst, my character feels incoherent with the one who I have been familiar with in the main game. Not only for the romance, in general in this DLC my character is much softer and self-doubting and it feels like a different character. Am I still playing the same game?
Atlantis DLC
Poor story writing. It tries to demonstrate the problem of supreme ruling in Elysium, and the problem of chaos in Underworld. Yet, in Elysium I see no sign of authoritarian ruling. In Underworld, the ferryman complains about the chaos while the dead are queuing up right next to him in an orderly manner. Elysium has a moody ruler. Underworld is busy. Both are just fine. You will find more authoritarian ruling under the coronavirus lock-down and more chaos in the toilet roll craze.
In the afterlife, a Spartan general, whom I assume has killed many in his life, thought that he has fallen from grace because he had once indirectly caused a miscarriage. (!?)
In Atlantis I met some good and lovely Isu (I like the one with geekspeak). Then I found a lab where some bad Isu are doing bad things. So I think Isu is beyond saving and decided to destroy the whole Atlantis and kill them all. (!!??)
In Elysium and Underworld, to proceed, the main quest requires you to tackle three forts, find four guards, and find three tablets… They are not even embarrassed to tell me I have to repeat the same thing multiple times.
Panta rhei 