More AC:Odyssey thoughts:

they do a good job of painting, and draping, and landscaping the temples to make you grok like that one building plan you see all the time in bare ruins really would’ve been experienced distinctively different

in general they do a lot to show how the same layout (of houses, buildings, amphitheaters) done in different material and different detailing comes off as a really different experience, which is both a history and a level design win

which feeds into something - where in previous games it felt like a competition for most glorious historical city, this time around even Athens and Sparta are meh (can’t go that high or that hard until someone invents the arch), they make Ancient Greece feel like the rival of any others by how complete the towns are, each one compact but with theaters and temples and statues built for centuries

There was some scoffing at Ubisoft apologizing for forcing a hetero relationship but no that kinda is a failure, AAA games are all one genre that steals from each other and this cycle Ubisoft went for stealing BioWare-style character work

And that’s not just sleeping with everything that moves as your sex of choice (which you totally can, this game loves wallowing in Dionysian decadence), it’s well-written dialogue trees with positive/negative/lie options where it’s not intuitively obvious what the minmaxing option is so you may as well inhabit the role

The “mercenary” mechanic is lifted from the LOTR orc warlords but not as good.

The animals-in-cages in the outposts really make clear how much Ubisoft is cannibalizing Far Cry for AC these days