Assassin's Creed Odyssey

• 1. Introduction

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  Assassin's Creed Odyssey, a 2018 action role-playing game from Ubisoft Quebec, begins its family tragedy on the slopes of Mount Taygetos. A Spartan elder is about to throw an infant off the mountain. The Pythia has declared that the child, if allowed to live, will bring either glory or downfall to Sparta. The infant's older sibling tries to stop him, and the elder tumbles to his own death instead. That older sibling grows into a wandering mercenary in the Peloponnesian War, fought between Athens and Sparta from 431 to 422 BCE. Players decide whether this mercenary is Alexios or Kassandra. What happens to a stealth series when it turns into a sprawling role-playing epic? How did a global team rebuild ancient Greece, and where did they choose to bend it? And why did critics praise the result while still arguing about what it cost the series?

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• 2. A Family Torn Apart

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  In 480 BC, King Leonidas holds the pass at the Battle of Thermopylae when a captured enemy brings bad news. The Persians have learned of a mountain path and will surround the Spartans by morning. Leonidas resolves to hold on anyway. That scene opens the game's story, and then the narrative jumps to the modern day.

  In 2018, Layla Hassan recovers the spear of Leonidas. She is an Assassin and former Abstergo researcher who first appeared in Origins. From the spear she extracts the DNA of his grandchildren, Alexios and Kassandra, and feeds it into her portable Animus. Her goal is to find the Staff of Hermes Trismegistus and the lost city of Atlantis. Victoria Bibeau, Kiyoshi Takakura and Alannah Ryan assist her. Whichever sibling the player picked becomes the Eagle Bearer, a legendary mercenary with the eagle Ikaros as a constant companion.

  Punishment for the elder's death comes from the child's own father. Nikolaos, compelled by the Spartan leadership, throws the child from Mount Taygetos as well. The Eagle Bearer survives and ends up with a con man named Markos on Kephallonia, working odd jobs under his direction.

  In 431 BC, a mysterious merchant named Elpenor hires the Eagle Bearer to assassinate the "Wolf of Sparta" in Megaris. Along the way the Eagle Bearer befriends a naval captain named Barnabas and is given command of his ship, the Adrestia. In Megaris comes a shock. Nikolaos is not their biological father, and he has another adopted son named Stentor. Their mother Myrinne left Nikolaos and Sparta soon after the incident on the mountain.

  Phokis is where Elpenor reveals himself as a member of the Cult of Kosmos, a secret organization spanning the Greek world. The Eagle Bearer kills him, takes his mask and robes, and slips into a secret Cult meeting at Delphi. There comes a second shock. The Cult is targeting the family, and the younger sibling survived the fall. The Cult manipulated that sibling into becoming its champion, known as Deimos.

  With Barnabas and Herodotos, the Eagle Bearer then crosses the Greek world on an extended journey. The trail leads to Myrinne, who now goes by the alias Phoenix and is the oligarch of Naxos. She persuades her eldest child to seek the return of their Spartan citizenship and ancestral estate. Together they keep undermining the Cult.

  At the Battle of Pylos, the Eagle Bearer meets Deimos, loses the fight and is captured. In Athens, the Cultist Kleon leads the city-state, popular since the death of his rival Perikles years earlier. Athenian allies help the Eagle Bearer escape and thwart Kleon's plans. At the Battle of Amphipolis, the Eagle Bearer fights beside the Spartan forces of Brasidas against Kleon's Athenian army. Both commanders die, and the first half of the Peloponnesian War ends.

  Back at Mount Taygetos with Myrinne, the Eagle Bearer confronts Deimos. Decisions made at set points in the narrative determine whether Deimos is redeemed or killed. Those choices also decide the fates of extended family members and whether the final family reunion succeeds.

  Delphi holds one last revelation. Beside the Cult's pyramid-shaped artifact stands Aspasia, who admits she was the Cult's original leader. Disgusted by what Deimos' influence made of it, she secretly helps dismantle it, hoping its first ideals of peace through order might survive. The Eagle Bearer touches the artifact, sees visions of future conflicts, destroys it and decides Aspasia's fate. At some point in their long life, the Eagle Bearer also meets their biological father, Pythagoras. He is a descendant of the Isu, the ancient race the series credits with creating humanity. Pythagoras passes on the Staff of Hermes, and biological immortality comes with it.

  In the present day, Layla meets the Eagle Bearer in Atlantis. The warning is that the world needs balance between the ideals of the Assassins and the Templars, because either side winning means doom. Layla learns she is the prophesied one who will balance chaos and order. The Eagle Bearer hands her the Staff before dying, and the expansions later show how heavy that gift becomes.

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• 3. Playing Both Sides

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  Odyssey offers two ways to find an objective. Guided mode marks every location with waypoints right away. Exploration mode gives only brief clues from NPCs, and the player must work out the place alone. Either way, Greece can be crossed on foot or on horseback.

  Athens and Sparta each control parts of the map. A region weakens when the player assassinates its nation leader, defeats members of its army, burns its war supplies or pillages its nation chests. A weakened region can host a conquest battle, where the player helps either the attackers or the defenders. Winners earn loot, gear and experience points. Joining the attackers is the harder choice, but it offers more benefits.

  Stealing, or hurting an innocent bystander in public, puts a bounty on the player character. NPCs called Mercenaries then arrive to hunt the player down. The player can kill the mercenary, pay the bounty, or assassinate whoever placed it.

  Each region carries a recommended level, and arriving too early can leave a player easily overpowered. Even so, the game scales its difficulty to the player's level. Side missions come from NPCs, and players can clear fortresses and camps, explore tombs and shipwrecks, and collect hidden treasures. A gladiatorial arena and time-limited bounties and contracts add more variety. Landmark synchronization points double as fast travel points. Exploration and hunting wildlife supply iron ore, wood, leather, metal and precious gems for crafting.

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• 4. Combat on Land and Sea

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  Melee fighting in Odyssey comes in two forms. Light attacks are fast but weak, while heavy attacks are slow but strong. Players can also dodge or parry. Spears, heavy blunt weapons, daggers, swords and bows are all available. Each weapon and piece of armour has its own statistics, and rarer gear is stronger. Engraving adds extra benefits, and upgrade costs rise with an item's level.

  Three skill trees shape a character: hunter, warrior and assassin. Hunter focuses on ranged attacks with a bow, warrior on weapon combat, and assassin on stealth and silent takedowns. The Spartan Kick knocks an enemy back, and Rush Assassination throws Leonidas' spear from afar. Some skills have a cooldown, while others need a full adrenaline bar. Inflicting damage, dodging and parrying all fill that bar.

  Stealth and open combat are equally viable. Leonidas' spear can silently assassinate an enemy, or the player can knock enemies out and recruit them to the crew. Bodies of incapacitated enemies can be hidden. Ikaros, the golden eagle, scouts an area by highlighting enemies and objects, and a whistle can draw an enemy's attention. As in other series entries, the character climbs nearly every structure.

  On the Aegean Sea, the player commands the warship Adrestia. Arrows and javelins fly at hostile ships, the ship can cleave into opponents directly, and the crew can brace when attacked. When an enemy ship's health runs low, the player can begin a boarding action. Success brings extra resources and restores the Adrestia's health. Upgrades strengthen the hull and boost the rowers' stamina, and the crew can be customized. Alpha ships, essentially enemy bosses, roam the water, and mercenaries appear when the player's bounty is high enough.

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• 5. Rebuilding Ancient Greece

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  Work at Ubisoft Quebec began shortly after the release of Assassin's Creed Syndicate in 2015. Origins, built by the long-time series developers at Ubisoft Montreal, came out a year earlier. That gap let the Quebec team adjust Odyssey after listening to players. Studios in Montreal, Bucharest, Montpellier, Singapore, Shanghai, Chengdu, Kyiv and Pune co-developed the game. Spearsoft and Technicolor also helped. The game was declared gold on the 14th of September 2018, meaning it was being prepared for duplication.

  Ancient Greece was one of the regions fans requested most. The Peloponnesian War era let the team include well-known figures such as Socrates, Leonidas and Hippocrates. The works of Herodotus, considered the first historian of the Western world, became a foundation for the world and story. Designers first studied mainstream depictions in films, paintings and video games. Then came a ten-day field trip to Sparta, Delphi, Olympia and Athens. Three scouting groups, accompanied by historians, took more than 13,000 photos and videos. Back home, the team also used Google Street View to study Greek ruins.

  The art style turned away from the desaturated, monochrome look common in depictions of ancient Greece. Each region instead got a rich and distinct visual character. A world design team pursued historical accuracy, while a level design team pursued what players would enjoy most. Stéphanie-Anne Ruatta, an in-house historian at Ubisoft, guided both. The team also consulted historians in the UK, Canada and Greece.

  Some departures from history were deliberate. Real Spartans led minimalist lives, but the designers added landmarks and decorations to Spartan cities to make them grander and more warrior-like, matching what players expected. Some buildings had already been destroyed in real life, so the designers created them from scratch. The setting lies farther in the past than most series entries, so there was less material to draw on and more original characters were needed.

  Greek mythology took centre stage. The monsters Heracles met in his adventures became the template for the game's creatures, and the Sphinx, the Cyclops, the Minotaur and Medusa were chosen as bosses because the team thought them the best known. Ruatta explained that Greece's reputation as the birthplace of democracy and philosophy was set against landmarks based on gods and mystical figures. That contrast mirrors the series theme of chaos and order.

  The Flight, the duo of Joe Henson and Alexis Smith, composed the music. They had earlier scored the multiplayer portion of Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag in 2013. Short on time, they called the job intimidating. They listened to Greek and Mediterranean folk music, bought dulcimers, lyres, panpipes and a bouzouki, and gave each region its own style. Athens, for instance, uses homophonic melodies for a stately, dignified mood. The main theme, "Legend of the Eagle Bearer," took about an hour to compose, while battle tracks such as "On The Battlefield" took far longer.

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• 6. Choices and Voices

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  More than 30 hours of interactive cutscenes sit at the heart of Odyssey's attempt to give players agency. The team drew on open-world role-playing games such as The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Fallout. These choices shape only the hero's journey. Larger events, such as the Plague of Athens, happen regardless of what the player does. Homer's Odyssey inspired the overall journey, and the dialogues of Plato inspired the conversation system.

  Setting the game 400 years before Origins was itself a design decision. The player character cannot stumble into the founding of the Assassin's Creed order, which gave the team freedom to let players deal with factions as they pleased. The world also reacts to behaviour. Hurting innocent NPCs no longer causes the player to desynchronize. Instead, powerful mercenaries come hunting, each with a routine, strengths and weaknesses, in a system similar to the nemesis system of Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor in 2014.

  The game never announces that a choice is important, and consequences may arrive late. An early plan let players compare their decisions with the rest of the player base. That feature was scrapped. Player feedback on Origins led to difficulty scaling, and shields were removed so that players would fight more aggressively with the blade of Leonidas. A procedural quest system drew on 20,000 recorded dialogue lines. Naval combat needed a substantial redesign from Origins so that moving from land to sea felt seamless.

  Mel MacCoubrey, the world director, called the game an "epic Greek tragedy" about "a family that has been torn apart." She described Alexios and Kassandra as "compassionate," "strong-willed" and "passionate." Michael Antonakos and Melissanthi Mahut play the two leads. Antonakos was cast first, and the pair met in Quebec City to discuss how each saw the Greek world and their family ties. Casting sought Greek actors or actors of Greek ancestry.

  Elias Toufexis was chosen to play both Leonidas and Nikolaos. At his audition he was asked to read a script from The Godfather in a Greek accent, so the real script could not leak early.

  In 2020, a Bloomberg report alleged that plans for leading female characters in several Assassin's Creed games were scrapped or reduced, because of a perception that games would not sell without a strong male lead. Odyssey's team had pushed for Kassandra to be the only lead, but was told that was not an option.

  Romance was added too. Creative director Jonathan Dumont said it is optional and light-hearted, and any character can be romanced regardless of the player character's gender. Whether to pursue a relationship is left to the player.

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• 7. Life After Launch

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  A keychain began the leak. In May 2018, the French site JeuxVideoLive received one bearing the name Assassin's Creed Odyssey. The game was officially announced at E3 2018. Google partnered with Ubisoft to promote its streaming service Stadia, then codenamed Project Stream, and players who playtested Odyssey there for an hour received a free PC copy.

  Odyssey reached PlayStation 4, Windows and Xbox One on the 5th of October 2018. A cloud-based Nintendo Switch version, announced during the Japanese September 2018 Nintendo Direct, launched the same day in Japan only. Reversible cover art lets players show either Alexios or Kassandra. Gordon Doherty wrote a novelization starring Kassandra alone, released the same day. In May 2019, Ubisoft opened Beyond Medusa's Gate, a location-based virtual reality experience in 100 locations in Europe and North America.

  Despite being a single-player game, Odyssey followed a game-as-a-service model. One team handled quality-of-life changes, another made free additions, and a third built the two paid story expansions. For Honor, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege and Tom Clancy's The Division inspired the schedule. The season pass also included remastered editions of Assassin's Creed III and Assassin's Creed Liberation.

  From December 2018 to March 2019, Legacy of the First Blade arrived in three episodes. It runs alongside the main campaign, with the Order of the Ancients hunting the Eagle Bearer to end a bloodline it considers too powerful. The Order is the precursor to the Templars, first introduced in Origins. Darius, a character first mentioned in Assassin's Creed II, helps the Eagle Bearer because the Order pursues him too. The episodes explore the history of the first Hidden Blade, and the Eagle Bearer longs to settle down and start a family.

  The Fate of Atlantis ran from April to July 2019, also in three episodes. In 422 BC, the Isu Aletheia, whose consciousness lives inside the Staff, explains that the Eagle Bearer must find three tombs so the Heir of Memories can open the gate to Atlantis. In Elysium, the Eagle Bearer is drawn into a rebellion led by Adonis against the ruler Persephone. In the Underworld, the Eagle Bearer defeats Cerberus, and Hades later betrays them. Poseidon then names the Eagle Bearer his Dikastes, or second-in-command, in Atlantis.

  There the Eagle Bearer discovers Project Olympos, a genetic engineering program led by Juno and Aita that merges abducted humans with Isu artifacts. After defeating their latest creation, the Hecatoncheires, the Eagle Bearer decides the city cannot be saved and sinks it with Poseidon. In the present, the Templar Juhani Otso Berg tracks down the Assassins, and Layla fights him off with the Staff. Its influence grows so dark that she accidentally kills Victoria in a fit of rage.

  Free additions kept coming. The Lost Tales of Greece were new story missions. Visual Customization arrived on the 14th of November 2018, and New Game Plus followed on the 26th of February 2019. Costumes and ship lieutenants based on earlier heroes such as Ezio Auditore, Evie Frye and Bayek were free. A story creator mode followed in June 2019. In September 2019, Discovery Tour: Ancient Greece let players roam the ancient world or follow tours curated by historians. In August 2021, a patch lifted the framerate to 60fps on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.

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• 8. Reception and Legacy

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  Metacritic summed up the critical response as "generally favorable." Most critics agreed that Odyssey was a successful transformation from stealth games into an action role-playing series. Sam Loveridge of GamesRadar applauded the design of Greece and called the side quests a significant improvement, some so polished that they felt like main quests. Alessandro Fillari of GameSpot praised the attention to detail and the reactive world, though he found conquest battles underdeveloped. Tom Phillips of Eurogamer compared the scale favourably to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and his colleague Stephanie Clark felt the campaign lived up to its Homeric inspiration.

  Brandin Tyrrel of IGN called Greece "a stunning series of picturesque locales" and liked the weapon variety. Joe Juba of Game Informer named the combat his favourite in the series, praising abilities that convey "a dynamic and godlike sense of power." Yet he found the constant mercenary interruptions annoying and the experience overly predictable. Steven Messner of PC Gamer thought the levelling system forced grinding and the artificial intelligence was inconsistent.

  Dissent was sharper elsewhere. Alex Navarro of Giant Bomb found the game repetitive and bloated. Andrew Webster of The Verge argued that the abundance of systems diluted the experience and made Odyssey indistinguishable from other open-world games. Pacing drew common criticism, because players often must complete side quests to advance the main story. Critics also objected to Ubisoft selling experience boosts through microtransactions. Kassandra, meanwhile, was widely singled out as one of the series' best protagonists.

  In its release week, physical sales were down 25% compared with Origins. Ubisoft said digital sales were 45% of the total, up 10 percentage points on the previous year. The company also said Odyssey had the best launch-week sales in the franchise's history for the eighth console generation. In the United States, it was the third best-selling game of October 2018, behind Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 and Red Dead Redemption II. More than 10 million copies had sold by March 2020. Microtransaction revenue was 170% higher than for Origins.

  Award listings for the game include The Game Awards 2018, the D.I.C.E. Awards, the 15th British Academy Games Awards and the Ivor Novello Awards. Its positive reception also prompted Ubisoft to greenlight Immortals Fenyx Rising, which features gods and monsters from Greek mythology.

  Assassin's Creed Valhalla followed in November 2020, set during the Viking expansion across Europe, and it concludes Layla's story arc. A free update on the 14th of December 2021 added "Those Who Are Treasured" to Odyssey. In 421 BC, the Eagle Bearer retires to the island of Korfu, then finds an Apple of Eden that corrupts Barnabas. Afterward the Eagle Bearer leaves Greece, and centuries later places a scroll from Herodotos in the Library of Alexandria. A companion mission in Valhalla, "A Fated Encounter," ties Eivor Varinsdottir to Kassandra as the canonical Eagle Bearer.

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