Identity Crisis Assassin's Creed Odyssey
A quick search on VGChartz reveals Black Flag has sold the better part of fourteen million copies across six platforms, the PS3, PS4, XBox 360, XBox One, PC and WiiU. Meanwhile the second most recent entry, Origins, has yet to break four million. I cannot help but ask myself regularly what has happened to this franchise, that came from such humble beginnings as an almost unknown action game set in the Crusades to one of gaming's biggest franchises but one that just cannot seem to recapture past glory.
I think in part the blame can be laid at the feet of Ubisoft's over-ambitious plan to grow the series with annual releases. The first of these was Assassin's Creed Unity which was heavily criticized for rampant bugs and lack of polish. The game took the series in an interesting direction with online cooperative gameplay, which the series has yet to repeat. Perhaps if Unity had been delayed its release by six months for polish and refinement it would rank as one of the best entries in the series, but alas that did not happen and what gamers received when Unity dropped in 2014 was a buggy mess. Despite the problems Ubisoft assured fans that the company was listening to feedback and would not repeat past mistakes but when Syndicate was released in 2015 it failed to give the series the booster shot of enthusiasm it needed. All things considered I think the format and style of the series had just become too formulaic and boring. The grapple-gun from Syndicate did not so much as enhance the free-running and climbing mechanics as render them irrelevant and left the Frye twins sailing across the city more like Batman than Assassins. After Syndicate met with only mild success Ubisoft promised to put their yearly releases on hold to put greater effort and polish into their next release and so the next entry in the series did not come until 2017 with the release of Assassins Creed Origins.
Assassin's Creed Origins promised big changes for the franchise. The game was set centuries before the formation of the Assassins during the Crusades in around 1090 ACE. Instead players would take control of a member of the Medjay order around 50 BCE, well over a thousand years before the setting of the first game. Not only was this the first time the series had made a significant backwards leap in time-period but the player was no longer even actually an assassin, instead the game promised to depict the formation of an order that would eventually become what we know of as the Assassins. Players would still get a hood and a hidden blade, eventually, but the setting was not the only major change. Origins also featured a leveling mechanic, more action-oriented combat, bow and new and improved mounted-combat as well as a modified version of the naval combat mechanics from AC III and IV. Despite some of these changes meeting with a positive reception, including many preferring the action combat system over the previous mechanics of the series other features were not so positive. The level-gating of content as part of the progression was a major source of contention and the addition of a form of loot-boxes and microtransactions was also heavily criticized.
Now finally we come to Odyssey, the most recent entry in the series released just a couple weeks ago. Developed by Ubisoft Quebec instead of Ubisoft Montreal this most recent entry takes the changes made in Origins and goes even further. Instead of a handful of missions featuring naval combat the player has their own trireme and sails the seas of ancient Greece. Odyssey takes the timeline even further back than Origins, going all the way to the Peloponnesian War around 430 BCE, some four centuries earlier than the time of Bayek and the Medjay. Odyssey features an RPG progression system, loot, microtransactions and various purchasable content packs.
From the moment the first trailers dropped I found myself concerned. The character selection and dialogue option mechanics both effectively break the lore of the animus and what it does, somehow we are supposed to believe this machine can tell us conversations and events that occurred hundreds, or thousands of years ago but it can't tell us the sex of the person these memories belong to? This was just not a good start. I liked being able to switch between Jacob and Evie, I would have liked it if Aya had been a more central character in Origins, why we couldn't see something similar in Odyssey I just don't know. But once you move past these issues there is so much else to consider, perhaps most notably, and vocally, expressed so far is the leveling mechanic.
Within days of Odyssey being released the internet was awash with articles and videos talking about the severe level-gating of content, the enormous hours long grind to progress from mission to mission, and the vast bloat of side-content. Normally I love big-expansive games that I can spend hours exploring but I must admit that Odyssey broke me. For pretty much the first time in my gaming life I just could not take the time to explore and loot everywhere I went and completely clear an area before moving on. After about thirty hours in the game without progressing past Athens I just had to move on and started going from place to place with the minimum of interaction. Now even with well over a hundred hours into the game there are whole islands I have barely touched, huge sections of map still black and unexplored and scores of locations uncleared and unlooted. By about level thirty-five I finally just could not stand the level-gating and started grinding to push to level 50 as fast as I could and start finishing sets of legendary gear and weapons.
Once you obtain a few sets of high-end gear and hit level 50 the game really opens up and the freedom is so liberating and refreshing but it also means that pretty much all of the loot you are getting becomes utterly irrelevant. What do I care about a piece of Brawler armor when I have the Arena Champion set? The reality is I just don't care. I found Poseidon's Trident which let me breathe underwater and made exploring sunken wrecks much easier. I realized early on that I could use my bow to kill sharks from my ship before getting in the water significantly reducing the stress and challenge of that content. There is little point bothering with the appearance of stats on most items as I'll just have to switch to my pirate or pilgrim's armor for stealth, and the Armor of Achilles is by far my preferred for stand-up fights so that's what I wind up using every time regardless of whether I like it's appearance or not. For the most part the ship is just something I used to get from place to place, the set pieces and narrative endeavors from Black Flag are simply missing from Odyssey, the handful of missions that even require the ship for more than transport simply boiled down to "sink x number of faction y ships."
I have seen some fans express a preference for the new combat mechanics, and I certainly will admit that the former combat system could be very repetitive. However replacing the visceral, intense and often savage executions of the past games with the button-mashing hack-and-slash of the new system is not exactly a clear improvement. It has some advantages but it also lacks the impact of the previous system. I just hack away with light attacks, using heavy only to break shields or stun, and when I have done the necessary amount of damage the enemy drops dead. Executions only come on the last enemy in a fight and only if they die standing up. It feels kind of lame to slice and dice down officers, elites, bosses and mercenaries and then do some epic execution on an archer who survived last by sheer dint of standing further away and shooting arrows through most of a fight.
At first I was somewhat intrigued that Odyssey seems to include it's own version of the Nemesis System from Shadow of Mordor, and a conquest and battle mechanic similar to those in Shadow of War. However the Mercenaries mechanic very quickly becomes boring, or even annoying. Once I recruited a handful of decent mercenaries the recruitment function became more a matter of collecting interesting NPCs like a twisted version of ancient Greek pokemon than anything useful and otherwise the Mercenaries were just an obstacle to be avoided whenever possible. Dead mercenaries never come back or evolve, soldiers who survive encounters with you never become mercenaries, they never really adapt or improve or are anything more than random attributes and weapons and a randomized name and blurb of fluff text stuffed into a side-scrolling menu of optional bosses that can easily be ignored.
The conquest mechanic quickly proved itself similarly shallow. Going to the effort of weakening a region and initiating a conquest battle does little more than award some experience, a couple of purple items that become irrelevant as soon as you get a single piece of legendary gear and simply swap which type of guards are wandering around. Regions deteriorate and are invaded entirely on their own, a player need not even bother engaging with the system and even if they do it ultimately has no noticeable effect on the world. Aside from a couple of the cultists appearing only in conquest battles there is almost no need for a player to even bother engaging with the system.
Which finally brings me to the cultists, or the Cult of Kosmos, the villains of the game. All things considered I actually liked the Cult of Kosmos a bit better than the Order of Ancients from AC Origins. They actually seemed to have some kind of objective and purpose and a plan that makes at least a little bit of sense. However most of the cultists can be found and killed in the world without any notable quest interaction, dialogue or story. I wound up killing around ten of the cultists just by wandering around and stumbling on them, I killed one without even realizing they were a cultist. In this way most of the cultists, as Odyssey's version of assassination targets, are just uninteresting and quickly forgettable. Those few who actually are involved in some quests are actually interesting and I found myself intrigued and sometimes surprised by the course of the story involving some of these individuals, including one that you do not even have to actually kill. However for the first time in the series assassination targets no longer engage in Memory Corridors when killed, the narrative conversations between target and assassin where some of the most interesting story elements and conflicts of ideology were explained in previous games. Without the Memory Corridors even the more interesting assassination targets just felt unsatisfying when eliminated, a short fight or a quick assassination and that's it, hold a button to confirm the kill, get the loot and that's it. No clash of ideas, no debate of morality or conscience, just nothing.
Lastly I have to bring up the fantasy elements that have now worked their way into the series. Previously the most extreme thing to show up in the series apart from the whole First Civilization elements was the white whale in Black Flag. Then Origins gave us the trials of the gods where Bayek was fighting a giant animus generated Anubis. Odyssey has taken that fantasy element further by putting in universe mythical creatures into the game. Not animus generated artifacts, the Medusa,
Minotaur, Sphinx and Cyclops all exist in the universe of Odyssey as real living creatures you, as either Alexios or Kassandra have to fight and kill to obtain the Apples of Eden powering them and bring them to the Gates of Atlantis, yes Atlantis. I really don't know how to feel about this fantasy element. Some of the encounters were wool and as game-play elements they were interesting, but as part of the now canon universe of Assassin's Creed they felt out of place. At their best the villains in Assassin's Creed were not the stereotypical baby-strangling maniacs typical to many story-lines but were complex characters with their own motivations and moral compasses who made choices that ultimately were not without some validity or sense. When Pitcairn chews out his murderer Connor for failing to consider the consequences of his rash actions he was correct. When Haytham criticizes the Assassins in his conversations with Connor his arguments are not without merit or reason. Since Black Flag however the conflicts and plots of the series have seriously degraded. Unity had a decent conflict with the ill-fated romance between Arno and Elise but by the time we got to Syndicate the plots had really degraded in quality. Jacob and Evie Frye were about as complex as Bart and Lisa Simpson and their enemy was the epitome of a mustache twirling psychopath industry baron who just wanted to live forever. The clash of opposing philosophies that had been the basis of conflict in previous games was just missing.
While I think some fans liked the story in Origins I largely found the Order of Ancients to lack subtlety, depth or motivation to their characters, the Memory Corridor scenes were striking, artistic and well produced by the ideas being expressed within them were more personal to Bayek than they were about ideology or morality. Bayek was wronged, his son killed and he wanted revenge, that was it, and the game really never much moved past that. Just at some point Bayek started going on and on about his creed but we the player never really got to see the evolution or construction of that creed, it just sort of came out of nowhere. When Origins was first announced I was hoping for a game that would take the player through the creed, step by step, line by line with each chapter, each assassination target slain, adding a component of the creed. There is one point in the game where Bayek has to kill a rebel leader he had previously admired and fought with because he discovered that leader was purposefully causing harm to recruit fighters to his cause and Bayek decided that the ends did not justify the means and his new creed could not justify murdering innocents to accomplish it's goals. This was such an interesting component of the creed to outline as it is also the first one that Altair violates in the very beginning of the series with the original 2007 Assassin's Creed. Unfortunately the rest of the creed did not receive similar treatment and I left Origins feeling very let down by the story.
If anything Odyssey suffers this problem even worse. Without even the exposition and explanations of the Memory Corridors the cultist assassinations are just an objective to check off from a long to-do list. They are pieces of wargear to obtain, an objective to fulfill and nothing more. Their motivations and individual characters are irrelevant. This is just unfortunate as when you actually do get into some of the story in Odyssey it's really not bad. I played as Alexios and I largely liked his character, the voice acting was pretty good and some of the story-beats pleasantly surprised me. In the Cult of Kosmos and the family of Leonidas we see the early archetypes of the Assassins and Templars starting to form, and the competing conflict of ideologies, the desire for freedom and expression against order and security. But those story-beats are lost in the great wash of bloat and grind, separated by long hours of relatively empty game-play and fetch-quests and the occasional shark.
I do not think there is any problem with Assassin's Creed evolving beyond hoods and hidden blades, what the series should not abandon however is the clash of opposing philosophies that forms the basis of the conflict in each game of the series. I feel like Odyssey should perhaps have been done in a manner more similar to Watch Dogs, a game that is set in the Assassin's Creed universe but that did not directly involve Assassins and Templars. Instead we saw the conflict of order versus freedom expressed through the hackers and DeadSec versus the security-centered Blume. In this way I almost feel like Watch Dogs was a better Assassin's Creed game than Odyssey, and it also possessed neither hood nor hidden blade. If Assassin's Creed ever wants to recover it's momentum and rise again to the heights of AC IV it needs to return to the quality story-telling and deep conflict of ideology that sat at the heart of the story-lines of each game up through Black Flag. No matter the setting, no matter the characters, no matter if the competing orders call themselves Assassins or Templars, it is that clash of ideas that made the franchise one of the best and most interesting game series of this generation.
In more ways than one Origins and Odyssey have both been games suffering an identity crisis. I do not think Ubisoft knows what they want to do with the franchise or how to put it back on track to surpass the previous heights of AC III and IV. Between the new RPG elements, the hack-and-slash combat, the now pseudo Nemesis and conquest systems AC Odyssey feels more like Shadow of God of War than it does anything I could reasonably call Assassin's Creed, and that is not just because there is little to no actual creed of the Assassins anywhere in the game. Not to mention the level-gating and microtransactions are both toxic and problematic design elements that really are holding the series back at this point. They are a source of conflict and controversy that this series just does not need at this point. Too much good-will was lost with Unity and Syndicate and I do not think Origins or Odyssey have done much to turn that around.
Unfortunately it is probably the case that microtransactions are like the evil released from Pandora's Box, once let-out there is no putting it back. From their start in FIFA the Wilson loot-box has proven itself just too lucrative for triple-A game publishers to ignore. Maybe this is something AC just won't be able to survive, maybe the drive for annual releases and games as a service, microtransaction-heavy design focus will prevent any signiciant return to in-depth, quality story-telling. I just don't know. But until Ubisoft can get to grip with the issues revealed in Origins and Odyssey then I think the Assassin's Creed franchise will remain a series stuck in the mire of an identity crisis, unable to make a clean break and evolve in the way that God of War did in it's newest installment and that is just unfortunate. As a fan of the series I would love nothing more than to see the next Assassin's Creed game surpass all expectations and overtake Black Flag in sales, but realistically, I am not holding my breath.
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