Assassin’s Creed Odyssey: Players Will Experience Greek Tragedy
Who would have thought the Assassin’s Creed series would undergo the metamorphosis it has? Over the years, worlds have only grown more open, combat has been increasingly refined, and visuals have improved to near photo-realistic detail. The biggest changes took place over the last year when Ubisoft established a greater emphasis on RPG mechanics and branching narratives, with the forthcoming entry Assassin’s Creed Odyssey taking the deepest delve into storytelling yet.
Speaking with Official Xbox Magazine (via Wccftech), Odyssey’s creative director Jonathan Dumont unveiled a number of details about what players can expect woven throughout their next journey. Dumont went into the adventure-altering stakes of making choices, the regret felt from poor decisions, and the elements of an ancient Greek tragedy felt in the overall narrative.
We try to say that there are no wrong choices. They’re all choices that you make and they’re all valid. They’ll give you what you are looking for I guess, but I think most of the time people try to be nice. I hope. It’s okay to decide depending on the situations – we have multiple storylines, but we have a main storyline that has quite a bit of it inspired by a Greek tragedy so we try to put you into situations where choices will be tough – not necessarily what the impact will be but they’re very emotional. When they make a choice after that in the world we also give you options so you can lie, romance, or decide to attack people in the dialogue as well so those will have immediate consequences.”
You sort of know where you want to guide things, and sometimes lying to somebody can be beneficial, sometimes it won’t be – it’s up to you to explore. We don’t try to punish players, play your story and it will all pan out in the end I’m sure! But really each situation we try to make you make some decision, either short term, long term or medium term decisions or building up relationships with characters. It’s not about being good or bad, it’s more like, do what you feel you should do here, and you get different results from different players.”
It’s more: here’s a big storyline and a storyline about making personal choices and those choices will have an impact down the road, or immediately. It’s not about influencing a faction necessarily or having an effect on the main storyline, it is much more about your personal journey. We tried to look at it as what would happen in this Greek tragedy if the main character had decided to do this instead, so we were looking at it more from a classical storytelling point of view, rather than into a system point of view, to feel more natural. Or at least we think it feels natural.”
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey seems to be putting meaningful choices and stakes above all time around, a fact well-illustrated by its wealth of well-researched content and complicated boss battles for players to overcome. Just how far this notion of Greek tragedy will go is unknown at this moment, but considering the game’s war-torn setting might present a worthwhile hint at the heartbreak ahead of us. Assassin’s Creed Odyssey releases for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One on October 5th.
What do you think? Are you appreciative that the Assassin’s Creed Odyssey story is pulling from its ancient Greek roots? Let us know in the comments below and be sure to follow Don’t Feed the Gamers on Twitter and Facebook to be informed of the latest gaming and entertainment news 24 hours a day! For more recent features from Ubisoft, check out these next few news stories:
Eric Hall2712 Posts
Phone-browsing Wikipedia in one hand and clutching his trusty controller in the other, the legendary Eric Hall spreads his wealth of knowledge as a writer for Don't Feed the Gamers. Be sure to catch his biweekly "Throwback Thursday" segment for a nostalgic look at trivia from the past.
