Appreciate The Environment: Assassins Creed Odyssey’s Theme Park Greece
Assassins Creed Odyssey is too big, the sheer size of the game world is overwhelming in a way you don’t see often in video games, but that absurd size also rolls back around in the end to create something truly special in the realm of open world.....well, realms. Assassins Creed Origins (and, frankly, Witcher 3) deserves credit for starting Ubisofts trend towards building ridiculously large play spaces for their games to take place, but AC: Odyssey was the one that mastered it, even if as I said, it maybe did it a little too well. Set in ancient Greece during the Peloponnesesian War between Athens and Sparta, AC Odyssey’s open world covers pretty much anything you might associate with Greece. Athens? It’s their, and in just as much detail as Assassins Creed has always afforded to its cities. Sparta? Much smaller and greener than I thought it’d be (I blame God of Wars weird obsession with portraying Greece as a desert wasteland on this one), but it’s there! Hell even the hometown of future military conqueror Alexander The Greats is in there tucked away in the backwater of Macedonia.
What’s impressive about all these cities is they all manage to feel very deliberately crafted and free of the kind of copy and paste methodology of world design when games like this start getting really big. Beyond the cities even there’s a ton of variety in the countryside areas, which are more impressive than ever by the standards of this series. There’s towering mountains, open fields and plains and autumnal forests, and to be fair if you look hard enough you can see patterns start to form. Assets very clearly being re-used, but if you ask me I’d say careful attention was paid to make sure all these places felt and looked different even if they were using the same building blocks. I truly hope those rumors of Nordic based, region spanning Assassins Creed Ragnarok turn out to be true, because if Ubisoft can pull of Greece like this I genuinely can’t wait to see what they can do with Great Britain the surrounding environs just waiting to be viking’d to hell.