AC: Odyssey is a full-fledged RPG...cool!

Make them mine?? Is that done by following their quest? I started that back when I was level 12 or some such and got destroyed very quickly. Haven't been back yet. (Piranha Bytes has left me with a deep seated fear of video-game boars.

Yes, you need to complete the whole hunting overpowered animals side story. The one that starts with the pig from hell. A pig that's most probably the hardest boss in vanilla.

Was playing this yesterday. I tried to kill a bird for target practice, some kind of large bird that looked like a crane. It had a symbol next to it, like it was a champion or a boss bird! I hit it with an arrow, which took only a tiny fraction of its health. It flew away like any other bird. I guess it was a super-animal of some sort.

I never found a kill animals quest. I'm only level 10, and I feel like I've been playing a long time. This is an incredibly long game.

"Is that the best you can do Mistihos??"

Screamed by a polemarch as he fell after I kicked him off a high cliff. Those Spartans are tough!

"Old Flames Burn Brighter" - the 11th "Lost Tales of Greece" mission showed up yesterday. There's one more set to come out next month involving Sokrates. That should be it for in-game content, though there will be a "tour" mode like Origins had that will let you wander around with no combat and learn the history of the various areas of the game.

28 hours in and I'm level 15. A long game indeed. Met a famous historian, which is cool. I do wish there were more things to just discover versus "areas to clear" but the game is growing on me more and more as I play it. Wish I could find a good spear or staff, though. I've been using a legendary sword and I'm kind of bored of it. Some of the mini-side quests are silly-easy and give lots of XP for some reason. I delivered a family keepsake to a soldier in Delphi... I literally had to cross to the other side of town and deliver it for 2,000 XP. They definitely went for quantity here.

Yeah, as Joxer said earlier, those quests on the boards are pretty pointless. Difficulty is all over the place and none are at all interesting. The only use I know is if you see something in the oracalcum (sp?) store that you want to get. You can find o-nodes all over the map, too, but they only show up one at a time. (Hint: they like to put them on mountain tops and under bridges.)

The gold icon quests and main quests are the way to go. Lost Tales quests are pretty good, too.

Have you gotten to the point where you upgrade your spear/dagger thing yet? Upgrading the spearhead also adds to your adrenaline points, which really helps. I actually stopped doing the main quest right before that point to do a ton of exploring and side quests. Not a good plan.

No, have not upgraded the dagger/spear. More adrenaline sounds good!

Discovery mode has been added. It's a nice little addition where you can run the game without any fighting or quests. Instead, you can go on tours of a few of the cities and battlefields to learn a little of their history. You can wander the world, too, and safely take screenshots without fear of getting eaten by a bear.

With that, all planned gameplay has been released.

With that, all planned gameplay has been released.

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I'm sure there'll be some new feature, update, mod, video or whatever you can bump the thread with each month for the next couple of years until the next one comes out. A sort of 'live service' posting routine.

FINISHED it! Quick review (posted on Steam):

Pro’s

• Big. Really big! It took me about 235 hours to get through the whole game plus DLC.
• Good stories, and lots of them! It’s definitely not Witcher 3 quality stories but there’s a truck load of good ones and a few real gems in there as well.
• Sites may be exaggerated more than a little (is that the Acropolis or Masada!?) but it’s still ancient Greece! Discovery mode does a nice job of explaining what you’re seeing, too.
• Love those sea shanties! Switch between male and female crew to change the voices.
• Superb save system. Auto-saves are in good spots, multiple quick-save slots, and manual saves. Would have been nice to name those saves but this’ll do very nicely. (And Discovery mode has a completely different set of them.)
• Set the level scaling how you like it. Pillars of Eternity 2 did this as well – I hope the feature gets popular.
• Beautiful graphics and wonderful sunsets! There’s a photo mode to help out, too, though it limits the camera a bit much. Here’s a horseback ride over the land area to give a sense of size and spectacle.

Con’s

• Enemies should have about a quarter of the hit points they’ve got. (Hint: take the title to heart – assassination is the way to go.)
• Sometimes when climbing you just… stop. Sometimes it makes perfect sense because there’s a smooth portion or an overhang but others seem random.
• I get that I’m a mercenary but being able to weaken an area, kill their leader, and then get hired to defend that same area from the enemy!?
• Meditating to pass the time is good – not being able to pick how long I’ll do so is just annoying.
• Tamed pets have a nasty habit of leaping to their doom.

The main action you’ll be doing in the game is sneaking into guarded areas to fetch something and, most likely, killing everybody. Sometimes the areas are big fortresses, sometimes just little encampments – but if this isn’t something you’re going to enjoy doing over and over again, best steer clear of the game.

While that’s the main thing, it’s certainly not the only thing! There’s also mercenaries to hunt down, some treasure-hunts to deal with, an arena to play around in (though apparently not as full featured as the one in the previous Assassin’s Creed game), and just flat out exploring the huge world.

The First Blade DLC is good but not great. It's essentially just more of the same thing you've been doing the whole game. Fate of Atlantis, however, is superb! You're transported into completely new areas and get to meet some old friends and enemies. NEITHER of them come into play until you're most of the way through the main game, though, so don't feel like you need to buy them right away.

A word on the store – don’t worry about it. It’s VERY ignorable. Pop in real quick to get some free armor and crew members then don’t pay it any mind again. There’s a special in-game store that makes one or two store items available for an in-game currency (oricalcum) that I used a few times but it’s just cosmetics. Save your Ubisoft currency for discounts on Ubisoft games!

I should start soonish maybe in Late Nov. A few short games I want to play before starting this monster.

Agree with lots of the points made by you, Zloth.

I'd probably add that I find the controls suboptimal, especially for combat. Being limited to 4 skills in quick-access. Not to mention that the skills are annoyingly not triggering at some times. Or they "break", because the enemy has a slightly different elevation. And you can't seem to break combat animations, e.g., finishing moves. While you are invincible during those moves, it can be pretty annoying during stealth kills.

Graphically, the whole thing is extremely well done. Very nice landscapes, buildings, etc. Of course stuff gets reused (for some reason most noticably for me: caves), yet ithere's still some variation to it, and its pleasing to look at. Animations are also well done, I'd say. You just have to ignore character + horse animations when riding down / up hills. Hilarious. Or Hillarious? Hah.

In addition:

Zloth said:

[*]Enemies should have about a quarter of the hit points they’ve got. (Hint: take the title to heart – assassination is the way to go.)

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Hm… well, I don't know. Depends on difficulty.
Your evaluation of Assassination may be true for a good chunk of the early game. But once you start being able to access your whole skill tree, and have a decent selection of gear, Warrior damage can be just as effective as Assassination. If you skill/gear for it. And it has the bonus of not locking you out of a good part of your skill set in certain fights (Arena, Boss-fights, Boarding, etc). I still prefer Assassination, but that's just because I like that type of gameplay better in general.

Hunter damage is pretty good from the start. E.g., with predator shot and the right arrows.

you said:

I should start soonish maybe in Late Nov. A few short games I want to play before starting this monster.

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You might want to save one or two of those. It's nice to have something short for a quick break.

Cacheperl said:

I'd probably add that I find the controls suboptimal, especially for combat. Being limited to 4 skills in quick-access.

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Well, sorta. At first you've only got the four in melee but you eventually get to push ` to switch to another set of four. And shoot a bow has yet another set of four. It definitely would have been better for keyboard users to just use all the number keys, though. (And there's another issue: the game is NOT easily modded, which could have fixed that sort of thing.)

Not to mention that the skills are annoyingly not triggering at some times. Or they "break", because the enemy has a slightly different elevation. And you can't seem to break combat animations, e.g., finishing moves. While you are invincible during those moves, it can be pretty annoying during stealth kills.

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The only time I didn't see them trigger was when I was actually getting beat on. If you're doing some kind of "ouchy" animation and hit some skill, it doesn't queue up, it just gets ignored. If the timing is just right, they can even break your attack. That actually works both ways and is really important against some of the nastier bosses.

I think I know what you mean by different elevations but I think I only saw it once or twice. I didn't fight at different elevations very much.

Hunter damage is pretty good from the start. E.g., with predator shot and the right arrows.

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Yeah, predator is great for picking off the peons. Critters that like to face right at you and growl are easy pickings. Using a bow once the fight is going is fairly hard but can be done and its Overpower works great.

Melee worked fine for me (especially once I got the Amazon armor from the Arena - that healing is awesome) but it took FOR EVER! Even with full on warrior buffing and legendary weapon, I couldn't take down a fresh peon with an overpower attack. Hence the HP complaint.

Assassination is death incarnate, though. Not only can you take down a peon in one hit, you can take down 3 or 4 peons and lieutenants at range with Rush Assassinate. Late game, when a weapon perk gave me a 5th, I could hit a boss, kill a peon, back to the boss, kill another peon, and finish off the boss with one skill! Critical Assassinate that I had a reasonably good chance to take down kollosi! So, when I got spotted, I would run off most of the time. I don't know if it was actually faster to just wait out the search but it was certainly safer than dodges and parries.

Of course, that wasn't an option in the arena or the later big boss fights. Warrior and hunter is all you've got in those.

Zloth said:

Well, sorta. At first you've only got the four in melee but you eventually get to push ` to switch to another set of four.

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Yep. As you said, additional buttons would be better. The most obvious case where this goes really wrong: Trying to rush-assassinate when running (not sneaking) before a fight started. By default, you won't see the skill bar in this case, so you do not know which of the two melee skill sets is active. Which means you can easily miss your opportunity to start the fight with a russh assassination.

Zloth said:

The only time I didn't see them trigger was when I was actually getting beat on. If you're doing some kind of "ouchy" animation and hit some skill, it doesn't queue up, it just gets ignored.

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Maybe, that was not always clear to me. At the very least, it sometimes was locked even before my own character had it's "ouch" animation. Maybe it includes enemy status to some extent. A bit strange.

Zloth said:

Melee worked fine for me (especially once I got the Amazon armor from the Arena - that healing is awesome) but it took FOR EVER! Even with full on warrior buffing and legendary weapon, I couldn't take down a fresh peon with an overpower attack. Hence the HP complaint.

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What difficulty did you play on? Hard?

Yeah, hard difficulty. Is that how they did difficulty? Just stack on more hit points??

Zloth said:

Yeah, hard difficulty. Is that how they did difficulty? Just stack on more hit points??

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It's definitely one of the things that are impacted.

I think it's mostly enemy hitpoints, and enemy damage.
Supposedly it also affects the number of enemies, but I never really confirmed that.

I find the bow to be overpowered and kind of boring. Sniping enemies gets old after a while. The melee combat is where this game excels. Lots of very tense fights, and the different enemies really have different attack moves. The fast rogue-types with daggers can really get me still. Partially because they're more rare, and that they move very quickly.

I play on Normal difficulty, as the enemies start feeling like HP sponges on Hard, and small fights go on and on. But it's great that there's options for difficulty and even enemy scaling.

Yeah, I switched to hard at the beginning, since fights felt kinda easy, then changed back to normal again after a while. The hp-sponginess can be annoying.

Notably, AOC had me experience some very interesting character deaths. For instance, getting killed by seemingly harmless animals (including a get-of-my-back-you-bloody-beast lynx and a standard rooster). I've also set myself on fire repeatedly, accidentally. Died from accidental fire once, and once indirectly because I incinerated the underbrush I was hiding in and was not prepared for the guards.

Dodge-roll puts out fire when you're in flames and removes animals from your back, FYI. I do like the fact that there's two different dodges in this game.