There’s been a lot of talk lately about how long Assassin’s Creed Odyssey is – more than 100 hours, its developers say – and it’s been interesting to see the response. Time was, you’d ask how long your £40 was expected to last, hear a large amount of hours and think, great – the longer the better. But for me, anyway, having less time to play games these days is certainly a thing. And I think the games we all play are more demanding of the time we have to spend with them. Perhaps demanding is the wrong word, but more and more, I feel like each game I enjoy playing is trying to be the only game I enjoy playing, with little time to play anything else.
So maybe that 100 hours number sounds great – or maybe, like me, you still have side-missions from last year’s Origins sitting around to mop up. Will it really take 100 hours to finish Odyssey’s core campaign? It’s something I had in mind while playing the game’s first eight hours at a lengthy preview session last week. It was really only just enough time to get properly bedded into Odyssey’s various gameplay loops, but more than long enough for the game’s brilliant story to deliver its first couple of gut punches.
Odyssey delivers some of the best writing in the series by a country mile, evident from the three hours of mid-campaign missions I played just prior to E3, but noticeable too even in the brief lead-up to the Medusa boss fight on offer at gamescom. I’ve been impressed by the nuance and dry humour present in Odyssey’s storytelling, and in particular I’ve been blown away by the delivery from Kassandra’s voice actor Melissanthi Mahut, who puts in a passionate performance which easily rivals that of previous franchise bests. There’s a lot to work with here – Odyssey definitely lives up to its name – and I’ve been hugely curious to see how the game kicks off. These first few hours deal with that series-first choice of being able to pick between siblings Alexios and Kassandra to play as throughout the rest of Odyssey, and lay out the family-related drama this latest Assassin’s Creed protagonist is set to deal with. The following paragraph discusses some of these events – so skip over this if you want to remain completely unspoiled.
Source: Eurogamer Assassin's Creed Odyssey: the first eight of 100s of hours