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How Assassin’s Creed Odyssey’s combat will bring out your inner Spartan
One of the more contentious systems in Assassin’s Creed Origins was combat. Odyssey, however, antes up – game director Scott Phillips explains how it's been improved.
At Gamescom recently, I got to go hands-on with a very polished, near-complete build of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. What was wholly unique about this opportunity was that I had both 90-minutes with it, and was dropped into the game-world at level 50 with all Legendary gear.
So I took the bull (or is that ‘Minotaur’) by the horns as Spartan princess Kassandra, feeling over-confident because I’d played all the way through Origins on Nightmare and came out the other side somewhat elite at being Bayek. So, you know, Odyssey should have been a walk in the park. How wrong I was.
Combat and customisation
So what we wanted to do was take the core fight that we improved and took from Origins and then add abilities onto that to add in a mix and customisation...
But first, Odyssey game director Scott Phillips explained to us how Ubisoft have improved the combat.
“I think over the course of the game, you ease yourself into the abilities because you start off with no abilities,” he explained. “You start off with the core – light attacks, heavy attacks, parry, and dodge. And then you move into [other areas], where you can have charge attacks; for example [the] Sparta kick.
"So what we wanted to do was take the core fight that we improved and took from Origins and then add abilities onto that to add in a mix and customisation -- the way that you fight is probably going to be totally different than the way that I fight with my abilities. Or how I even approach a situation – if I want to be more stealth, [whereas] you might want to be more of a ranged, or [a more melee] fighter.”
What Scott is explaining to us is that the game will ease you into a complex set of abilities over its course of play, but that right now we’re just stuck with being that level 50 Spartan and having to learn how to move on from Origins’ combat, because in Odyssey, there’s a greater sense of ownership over how you intend to play the game. And we did struggle.
This week on Ancient Greek Shark Week... SHARKS
© Ubisoft
Largely the issue was getting around how you combine these abilities during regular action inputs. On top of the aforementioned “light attacks, heavy attacks, parry, and dodge”, players can map eight other abilities from a larger manifest of invested actions. Each has a cooldown and most require you to have built up Adrenalin to ‘purchase’ them. And so on top of the requisite cooldown, you also need to gain -- and then regain -- Adrenalin in order for you to put your best tactical Spartan foot forward.
I can imagine jumping right into it is a challenge
“It was about giving the player a lot of options and letting them customise the fight to the way that they wanted to play on top of that core, base fight,” Phillips adds. “And you need to use that core fight in order to build up Adrenalin which you then use to unleash abilities.
"So if you look at it as how you may have used the Overpower attacks in Origins where you had to build up quite a bit in order to unleash it, and then it was a very powerful attack. If you sort of compress that loop down much shorter, that's more of the loop of Odyssey where it's “get in several hits, use the ability; get in several more hits, use the ability.” And so it's a much faster combat economy -- you're making these choices and we feel it's a really good step forward and very enjoyable once you get into the flow of it, but yeah, I can imagine jumping right into it is a challenge.“
Battling with bears
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Playing with mythology
We did get the hang of it, and Phillips is correct. Working your head around the inputs system and learning how best to manage and spend your Adrenalin adds a tactical layer the series has never known. But even wrapping my head around this didn’t wholly prepare me for the biggest surprise of this hands-on with the game – a boss fight with one mythical Greek monster in Medusa. You know, the lady with snakes for hair whose mere glance can turn you into stone.
It’s a bit of a first for the series to have a more outlandish level of mythology baked into the base product. Assassin’s Creed has always been about more historically ‘accurate’ poetic license, but Phillips is quick to defend her inclusion while also hinting at the idea she won’t be the only ancient Greek ‘guardian’ we’ll come across.
“Well I think the mythology is within the science-fiction spectrum because it's, for us, the first civilisation [that we’re focusing on] here,” he explains. “It's not as if Zeus lived in the clouds and changed into a bird and stuff like that. That's not Assassin's Creed Odyssey. What it is, is that Zeus was most likely a first civilisation person as were the other first civilisation gods, like Juno and all those, and humans interpreted [them] in a certain way. They interpret it, the mythology of Medusa, as “oh she's some terrible person that” ... I don't actually know the full origin story of Medusa, but that she had these powers to turn people to stone, and it was this terrible monster that was finally slain by a Greek hero.
Wolf versus fire... sorry, Wolfie but fur is flammable
© Ubisoft
“So for us, the idea is that did happen, but that it was because of a first civilisation artifact that was corrupting people. So at the end, when you kill [Medusa], you grab this artifact, which is one of the snakes, and it's trying to corrupt you. It's trying to turn you into Medusa essentially. And so you, because of your DNA, because of the Spear of Leonidas, you're able to counter it and that turns it into an Apple of Eden. So it becomes one of those artifacts and you can clearly see, like, 'oh, ok. This is connected to the first civilisation'.”
When he puts it all into the context of Assassin’s Creed’s history, it does make sense. And hey, their story is set 400 years even before the events of Origins. And Assassin’s Creed has always played into the fantasy of hidden powers in the shadows; of puppeteers behind the scenes, and when you consider that side of it all, it’s not so much of a stretch to entertain the concepts that the team is putting forward here.
“So I think it's maybe a different aspect, and maybe without the full picture of what the game is and how we introduce it, I can see how it would stand out,” Phillips concludes. “But I think if you look at how mythology or conspiracy theories or all of those sorts of things have fit into Assassin's Creed lore in the past, it's exactly the same, just like how they would in Assassin's Creed 2 – there might be the Illuminati and oh, there were paintings and they had hidden symbols in them and things. Ok, yeah maybe that was real”.
Either way, challenging combat, ancient Greece and mythological creatures await us in Odyssey. And we can’t wait to Spartan kick our way through it.
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