The least interesting thing about Assassin’s Creed Odyssey is its October 2018 release date, but the timing of another massive game in the series just 12 months after Assassin’s Creed Origins will generate headlines regardless. Origins’ success – its brilliant new characters and reworked RPG-lite focus – is something of a double-edged sword: these changes reinvigorated the series, but by taking an extra year of time to bed them in Ubisoft reinforced the feeling each installment could offer the same leaps forward, if only the publisher leant on its biggest franchise a little less. It’s against this backdrop Odyssey has been detailed and its release date confirmed – but I’m confident, after more than three hours of gameplay, this year’s installment answers those immediate questions.
“We started discussing the setting and what we wanted to do even before we were finished with Syndicate,” Odyssey’s creative director Marc-Alexis Côté tells me. It’s a couple of weeks before E3 and I’m speaking to Côté at an event in Paris, attended by numerous developers from Odyssey’s lead studio, Ubisoft Quebec. This is the team behind the London-based Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, the enjoyable 2015 entry which released while the future of the franchise post-Unity was being quietly reworked behind the scenes. “Together with the Origins team [at Ubisoft Montreal] we’ve been busy plotting the course of the franchise, from action adventure to a full-fledged RPG as something to happen over these two games,” he continues. When introducing Odyssey, Côté boasts that it “completes the transition” of the franchise into a “full-scale open world RPG”. Where the team behind Bayek focused on rebooting the series’ combat, navigation and sense of space, Côté and co. have focused on improving the series’ storytelling so you can “finally interact with history”.
As in the full game, my demo – the same on offer this week here at E3 – begins with the choice of Alexios or Kassandra as a playable character. They are individuals – not male or female versions of the same person, or your own avatar – but you can expect the same script for them both. It’s 431BC in Ancient Greece, 400 years before Assassin’s Creed Origins. Sparta and Athens are at war, and it’s been about 50 years since the Gerard Butler’s King Leonidas fought the famous battle in the movie 300. Your player character is a forgotten descendant of Leonidas, kicked off a cliff at a young age for having done something which brought great shame on your family. 17 in-game years later and about the same number of hours into the game’s story, the demo opens with you well on the path to becoming a mercenary of renown.
Source: Eurogamer Three hours with Assassin's Creed Odyssey