in favour of Sparta or Athens, and who
gets to control areas of the map. Exactly
how this works isn’t made particularly
clear by my time with the demo. The goal
is to remove the Athenians and their
leader, Podarkes the Cruel, so the
Spartans, led by a soldier called Thaletas
and a resistance leader called Kyra, can
muscle in. I spend most of the demo
reducing a bar that represented the
Athenians’ control by murdering their
soldiers and clearing out occupied areas- there’s no option to switch sides, for
example. It feels like the Athenians are
meant to be the bad guys in the demo, so I
ask creative director Jonathan Dumont
how much this represents the full game’s
conflict between them.
“For this specific mission and island,
yes, but the Athenians aren’t always going
to be bad, or anything like that. You’ll do
the opposite in the game, too – you’ll help
Athenians fight Spartans. They’re hiring
you as a mercenary. Sometimes it’s going
to be an Athenian who hires you,
sometimes a Spartan. [You’re] not fighting
on the Spartan side, even though [you]
have more of a history with Sparta. As
you’re exploring the world with your
character, you’ll be in all sorts of
situations. If you go into a region that is
owned by Sparta, for example, you can do
contracts to take it away from Sparta and
put the Athenians there based on the
rewards you want. So that’s how it works.
It’s not ‘good guys are Spartans, bad
guys are Athenians’, it’s much more
complex than that.”
The Athenians are marked as blue and
the Spartans as red on the map – at one
point I see their ships battling in the
waters surrounding the islands, which is a
surprising and cool dynamic event. I hope
there’s a lot more like that in the finished
game, since it sells the sense of a war
going on around your character.
With a promised 30 hours of
interactive storytelling, I ask Dumont how
much the story will branch. “You have
some big choices that will influence what’s
coming next, and the ending you can get
down the road,” he says. “Without
promising millions of endings – that’s not
the case at all – we are catering to your
choices and how you play it.”
LOVE ISLAND
In the demo, it’s possible to romance both
Thaletas and Kyra. I pick up some wine at
one point while exploring, and when I next
chat to Kyra, an extra dialogue option
comes up with a heart next to it if I want to
gift it to her. Romances are dalliances in
Odyssey – it’s not like you can go full Fable
and have three husbands. “You go from an
island or a new place in the world, and
you’ll romance a character there, but it’s
not like ‘I found the love of my world and
I’m keeping that character’,” says Dumont.
“It’s much more casual, a spur-of-the-
moment type of romance.”
Ubisoft Quebec seems committed to
letting you make decisions at key
moments, then, but it’s not Odyssey’s
only headline feature. To play, it feels a lot
like a direct sequel to Origins: the
platforming is the same, the
environment’s layout is pretty similar and
you still use an eagle to scout the
environment for enemies and objectives.
The combat has undergone the most
change, though. You have no shield this
time around, meaning you can’t really
block in the same way you could with
Origins. Since you’re carrying Leonidas’
spear instead, you can only parry when
you’re carrying a one-handed weapon.
The window for parrying isn’t long either,
so you feel a bit exposed.
To compensate, you’re given more
aggressive abilities. These are divided up
by hunter (bow), warrior (melee) and
assassin (stealth). and you map them
yourself. On an Xbox controller (I can’t
speak for mouse and keyboard, since the
demo was running on an Xbox), you hold
LB or LT to pick the ability class and then
press one of the four face buttons to pick
the ability itself. You can only map four
ranged abilities and four melee abilities at
a time, so there’s an element of mix-and-
match depending on the enemy.
Spartan kick is the one you can’t miss- it’s great fun to boot an enemy off the
edge of a cliff in stealth. Another sets a
weapon on fire for extra damage, then
another grants 25% of the character’s
health back. There’s one that lets you
throw the spear to instantly kill an enemy
while in stealth, and an essential move
that can instantly disarm an enemy’s
shield when upgraded. Each one costs a
certain portion of your character’s
adrenaline bar to use in a fight.
They’re unlocked via a grid not too
dissimilar to the one in Origins, except
abilities can be upgraded two more times
for extra effects. Some of Alexios’ or
IT’S NOT LIKE YOU CAN
GO FULL FABLE AND HAVE
THREE HUSBANDSAssassin’s Creed Odyssey
PREVIEW
Naval combat returns, although it doesn’t
sound like a huge part of the game.Get ready for more numbers
in your inventory.