The character who sent me to kill the bear
was a smuggler, too – something she
didn’t tell me at the start of the quest.
Confronting her, I choose to blackmail her
with what I’ve discovered about her illegal
activities. Rather than pay up, she angrily
draws her sword, and I kill her pretty
quickly. If I’d responded with, “This stays
between us,” rather than, “This stays
between us... for a price,” the quest
would’ve ended with no fight, and this
NPC would still be alive.
Dialogue choices and consequences
are well-worn territory for RPGs, but it’s
new to Assassin’s Creed, and it’s a great fit
based on my time with the game’s E3
demo. It’s set on the two islands of Delos
and Mykonos, a self-contained episode
away from the game’s larger world. During
my hands-on, I gift wine to a character I
want to romance. I get to choose whether
to pick a head-on military strategy or a
more careful one. I choose to be a dick to
every character I can, just to provoke
heated responses. It’s an exciting wrinkle
that makes me more engaged with the
goings on in an Assassin’s Creed cutscene
than I usually am.
GREEK TRAGEDY
That idea of choice even extends to which
character you take the journey with in
Odyssey. You’ve got male and female
protagonists – Alexios, who’s
unmistakably voiced by Elias Toufexis of
Adam Jensen fame, and Kassandra, who I
choose to play as in this demo. The setting
is Ancient Greece in 431 BCE, during the
Peloponnesian War between Sparta and
Athens. Ubisoft highlights it as a defining
period for art, science and politics.
You’re the descendant of the Spartan
king Leonidas, and you carry his spear as
a secondary weapon in Odyssey. Both
Alexios’ and Kassandra’s stories play out
similarly. It’s described by Ubisoft as an
epic Greek tragedy – the hero’s family is
shattered, they’re thrown off a mountain
and left for dead, and the story then picks
up 17 years later.
“When we look at the game, there’s
short-term, medium-term and long-term
goals,” creative director Jonathan Dumont
tells me when I ask how granular the
choices are. “The long-term can pan out
over, I don’t know, 70 hours – ’Oh, that
was the result of that, holy crap!’ And what
you’ve played in the E3 demo, was much
more medium-term. If you get to the
ending of the island, that’s medium-term.
And then short-term is, someone will ask
you, ‘I want you to deal with this guy.’ Do
you kill him? Do you talk to him? Do you
beat him up? You’ll get some of these
options. And then when you come back,
that’ll have a repercussion on your reward
and your relationship with that character.
“I’ll give you an example: we have a
quest where you’re asked to find a
weapon,” Dumont continues. “Someone
asks, ‘Can you find my sword?’ You find
the sword, and you can come back, lie and
keep it for yourself. These are choices that
have an immediate impact. And then
there’s an accumulation of things that you
can build up towards – bigger things.
There are definite major choices in the
game, which I won’t spoil, but that really
spin the story in a different direction.”
Despite having Spartan roots, you’re
playing as a mercenary in Odyssey, and
you will make choices that shape the warI
just killed a bear on a beach. It took me a
few attempts – mostly because I find
dodging animals attacks fraught in
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, much like I did
in Origins – but I finally shot the thing with enough
fire arrows that it went down. While I normally
wouldn’t expect a game to justify the logic of a boss
battle with a bear, an investigation of a nearby
shipwreck, strewn with bodies, reveals the reason
it’s there. The bear was being transported by shady
smugglers, until the boat crashed.
BioWare-style choices bring the
game’s story to life
ASSASSIN’S
CREED ODYSSEY
CHOOSE WHETHER TO PICK A
HEAD-ON MILITARY STRATEGY
OR A MORE CAREFUL ONERELEASE
October 2018
DEVELOPER
Ubisoft QuebecPUBLISHER
UbisoftLINK
http://www.assassinscreed.comNEED TO KNOW
PLAYED
ITPREVIEW
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey