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

Was just playing AC:Odyssey and noticed just how many distinct species of trees there were

And not only that but how well they modeled suckering and interaction between multiple trunks and the differential death of shady-side branches on slopes AND the spindly noodles that grow to replace them low on mature trunks

All of which are things I know well from my yard work but hadn’t seen modeled at all before

Hey Caroline Couture, Environment Artist in charge of vegetation!

Nice work

It’s a funny example of long-term drift in established properties that Assassin’s Creed at this point mostly ignores the Abstergo/ancient aliens frame story, is barely about the Assassin/Templar rivalry or even climbing tall buildings anymore, and is increasingly focused on naval warfare simulation

kontextmaschine:

Assassin’s Creed: This work of fiction was designed, developed, and produced by a multicultural team of various religious faiths and beliefs

Also Assassin’s Creed: lol no one’s gonna terrorism us for blaspheming against the Egyptians, you fight all those wacky animal-head gods as endgame bosses to collect the elite Anubis gear set

I will say Origins really dropped the ball on the serious revisionism they’d been doing, like 3 was “Ben Franklin was a dirty old man and George Washington was an incompetent self-dealing genocidaire who stumbled into something good”, Black Flag/Rogue/the mobile slavery one were “the entire settlement of the Americas was bad guys”, Unity/Syndicate were like “capitalist democracy happened because it became an easier and more comprehensive way for the strong to dominate the weak than feudalism, also the anarchistic freedom this series always idealized is a juvenile ideology counterproductive on its own terms”

Origins was like “pre-capitalist Egyptian society and economy was completely organized around temples run by mostly-hereditary priests who controlled the distribution of goods and prestige under severe tensions and pressures and sometimes they became corrupted towards self-interest on an individual basis, which meant they might be selfishly blasphemous”

Assassin’s Creed: This work of fiction was designed, developed, and produced by a multicultural team of various religious faiths and beliefs

Also Assassin’s Creed: lol no one’s gonna terrorism us for blaspheming against the Egyptians, you fight all those wacky animal-head gods as endgame bosses to collect the elite Anubis gear set

Yeah Assassin’s Creed:Egypt was a better choice than Far Cry:Montana

It does a good job of making you realize the depth of history. Like circa Cleopatra, Ptolemaic Egypt had been around longer than the USA has now, but even then it was an innovation centuries after the Greek Golden Age, and built on the still-grandiose ruins of Old Kingdom Egypt that built the pyramids two millennia earlier, and it was juuust about to become part of the Roman Empire that was only then being born

That Assassin’s Creed: Egypt made its modern frame-story protagonist a probably lesbian keffiyeh-wearing circuitbender, eh

yeah, 2018, she’s still cis tho

that Ubisoft made her a Final Fantasy fangirl with Press-X-to-gaze-upon-this Cactrot and Moogle gear feels radically transgressive

Assassin’s Creed: Egypt is so brilliant (like literally, color-wise) with these jewel tone pastels it makes me wonder if they back-formed it from Miami Deco, or whether that came from some pulse of Egyptomania

Playing through the whole series it’s impressive how they clearly cue a ranking of impressiveness in Great Cities of the World independent of how “modern” they are, like Ptolemaic Alexandria and 1500-era Constantinople are first rank; then you have Revolutionary Paris and Victorian London and Renaissance Rome; then Colonial Philadelphia and Crusader Jerusalem are like what and Kingston, Jamaica is a joke

In the mood for another Ubisoft open world OCD checklist simulator. Should I get Far Cry: Montana or Assassin’s Creed: Egypt?

Wait is Egypt one of the “climbing takes two buttons and you grind out fighting with medicine potions” or one of the “just hold the climb button and run up a wall, fight by maintaining an unbroken combo chain” Creeds?