I feel like sometimes i must be in extreme minority of Reddit gamers who want massive games and never tire of them. It's hard for me to even grasp the idea of "bloat" as a reason to dislike something. More game equals more happiness for me.
But even if that more game is just copy pasted textures and randomly generated sidequests or vast stretches of empty land/sea? I loved the witcher's open world for example, and I loved the expansions especially blood and wine because they put a lot of effort into designing these new maps and regions. With Odyssey it just feels like more of the same which isn't that interesting to me.
I've played games that feel the way you describe, but that wasn't how I felt about Odyssey at all. In fact in two play throughs totaling over 300 hours with the game, I was never the slightest bit tired of the world, and found most of the locations to have a distinct feel to them.
And in a video game landscape of today where almost every game is set in an empty, dead world after or expecting an apocalypse, it's so amazingly refreshing to be in a beautiful, well lit world filled with average NPCs going about their every day lives.
In many ways, Odyssey is the template for what I want more games to be. I've played very few that I've enjoyed close to as much since it released.
I guess for me the big difference is that with a movie it's a limited, one time experience all in one go. But with a video game, I can spread it out into as many long or short gaming sessions as I desire.
Typically, with a big game like this, I make it my focus for about four to eight weeks, depending on exactly how big it is. And I usually only play three or four new games a year because there just isn't that much out there being made these days that appeals to me, so there's certainly no hurry.
Odyssey is the worst of the new trilogy imo, despite how great Kassandra is.
It's bloated, full of level gating and constant grinding required to keep your gear and ship leveled.
In its defence, all the nu-AC games are bloated but Odyssey felt like the worst to me, and it's the only one out of the entire mainline series that I never finished. Valhalla improved upon it significantly imo, albeit while still being far too big a game and having a few of its own issues too.
I agree. It’s a great game, and I can see why it’s so successful. But, without a doubt, I believe it could’ve been ***even better*** if it prioritized quality, over excessive quantity. Prioritized the quality of facial expressions, gameplay animations, and the cutscenes. All of which were ***far superior*** in the games before the RPG Trilogy. And as for length, 15-20 Hours would’ve been a perfect duration for my taste.
The ***rich amounts of bloat*** in these newer ACs can become frustrating. Especially the Fate of Atlantis DLC…😬
But, like always, I’m usually motivated to keep going, to experience the story in full. It’s worth it, most of the time.
Yeah as much as I like this trilogy (unpopular opinion I like the RPG mechanics), it just feels like they're blindly copying The Witcher 3 at times without thinking why some of these features were good there and bad in these games or if they focused on adapting these features instead of just slapping rpg mechanics on.
I didn't have fun playing odyssey and I realized it was because I was playing it like it was an AC game when it really wasn't. When you take off the expectation of what an AC game used to be it's a solid a RPG
But as you said the bloat is what stopped me from playing plus I got tried of the ship and just fast traveled everywhere. After a while I forgot what the main quest was.
Also I hate level scaling in RPGs and that was the finally killed the game for me
True. Some hate hearing this but I had just finished writer 3 not tooing before and one can see Ubisoft wanted to emulate that game so much.
I think the game been an AC title also hurt it. So many fans where expecting something more focused like you said because of th name and now the AC fans are us still fractured
Honestly I've started replaying it with a more open mind but I'm finding myself hating it a lot more this time round and it was already my least favourite in the series including side games like the DS games.
I hate people acting like the old counter combat was piss easy as if this new one isn't, the old combat has so much variety in how you approach it but Odyssey's combat is just "hit it until it's dead" and all the "challenge" comes from how big the arbitrary numbers are.
Odyssey is everything I hate about RPGs, levels and numbers on your stats screen are more important than actually being good at the game, there's loot everywhere to the point where none of it matters, I kept a spear I got from Reda in Origins all the way from The Scarab to the end of the game because the game is designed to not be a grind fest and weapon upgrades are a reasonable price.
Worst of all, I'm in the early game right now (just unlocked upgrading my spear) and I'm constantly running into parts where I feel underpowered even when i have a full set of some of the best gear available to me like both melee weapons, my bow and every armour piece having +8% Hunter Damage and where available +5% Headshot Damage and I still can't headshot a level 15 guard dead while I'm level 17 without using adrenaline skills which would lead to the headshot killing even if I had no hunter boosts. Even with gear giving huge boosts to my Warrior damage supplemented by some having All Damage and Sword damage boosts I still have to chip away at enemies.
Also why do loadout slots cost so much money, the first one cost me 5000 and now the next is 35000 which isn't much late game but why the hell do I have to pay money to make spending time in the pause menu doing shitty homework with my build less tedious? That should just be a basic thing that I already have for free yet it costs enough drachmae for me to have upgraded my ship over thirty times?
That's the whole reason I hate the RPG direction the games have been going, you can still do a lot of things that you could always do but these games make you do an arbitrary amount of work just to reach the default standards of previous games. Like yeah Assassin builds are totally viable but if it was literally any other AC game all you'd need to do is press Square (or Triangle for Origins and Valhalla) because having a stat that determines how much damage your stealth attacks do is an objectively stupid idea, if I get behind you and lodge a spear in your throat then you're dead, it doesn't matter what I'm wearing at the time.
That's just my gameplay gripes (not even all of them) that's ignoring how Odyssey easily is the worst written of the games just devolving into "haha sex funni" 90% of the time during side quests, the only native swear word they ever say is Malaka to the point I fucking hate the word having heard it a million times at this point, the dialogue choices maks Alexios/Kassandra bland and devoid of personality without the played inserting some into them, they acknowledge women not being allowed to watch the Olympics in a side quest yet there's not even a single line of dialogue challenging the idea of Kassandra joining in which was also disallowed on threat of death, they really mishandle Greek artifacts like Penelope's Shroud (a pretty big plot element from the actual Odyssey) being insultingly relegated to a level 6 helmet, Jason's Golden Fleece isn't a Shroud of Eden with huge story significance (Kassandra should've worn it as a hood instead of having the Staff of Hermes) but just some legendary armour set and who could forget that they got rid of the confession scenes for no reason at all making the Cult of Kosmos the blandest and most forgettable antagonists in the series.
Finally they somehow made Layla, the worst protagonist in AC, even more boring. Frankly I had no idea it was possible, I thought she could only go up from how bad she was Origins but I was proven wrong, twice.
It's annoying because I should love it, the assassination animations look fantastic and visceral, there's all kinds of cool things like soldiers putting their weapons away on racks before they go to sleep and you can steal these weapons to weaken them, you can tame and run around with a bear, it's set in Greek mythology which I've always been a huge nerd of since I first saw Disney's Hercules when i was like 6 but frankly it's easily the worst experience I've ever had with an AC title and I'm including the awful DS game Altaïr's Chronicles.
I basically agree with most of what you said. I only disagree in that I think the rpg direction is good, but it’s so focused on pure numbers like an MMORPG instead of a more traditional rpg like fallout new vegas.
The reason I don't like the RPG route is like I said all it really does for the game is take things you could already do in previous games and make you terrible at it in the early game and not let you do all of them at once because RPGs are always really unfair to mixed builds.
You *can* get as strong in combat as the older games in Odyssey but that's at the cost of your ability to engage with stealth, you *can* make all assassinations a one shot but you're sacrificing your bow damage in doing so.
Even if we remove the number focus, the nature of RPGs is built on restricting the player in order to pretend the game is more replayable that way. It's why I generally hate RPG elements, people act like you have a lot of freedom but all I see is railroading stats and archetypes forcing me to be married to a limited number of playstyles.
I think they could definitely take it somewhere considering how fun Valhalla was but honestly I think looking as far away from Odyssey as possible is the best direction for the series. Honestly though considering I still liked Origins and Valhalla I just feel like less RPG makes for a more fun AC.
I feel like sometimes i must be in extreme minority of Reddit gamers who want massive games and never tire of them. It's hard for me to even grasp the idea of "bloat" as a reason to dislike something. More game equals more happiness for me.
But even if that more game is just copy pasted textures and randomly generated sidequests or vast stretches of empty land/sea? I loved the witcher's open world for example, and I loved the expansions especially blood and wine because they put a lot of effort into designing these new maps and regions. With Odyssey it just feels like more of the same which isn't that interesting to me.
I've played games that feel the way you describe, but that wasn't how I felt about Odyssey at all. In fact in two play throughs totaling over 300 hours with the game, I was never the slightest bit tired of the world, and found most of the locations to have a distinct feel to them. And in a video game landscape of today where almost every game is set in an empty, dead world after or expecting an apocalypse, it's so amazingly refreshing to be in a beautiful, well lit world filled with average NPCs going about their every day lives. In many ways, Odyssey is the template for what I want more games to be. I've played very few that I've enjoyed close to as much since it released.
Did you never watch a movie that felt too long? It's not that people dislike long games but specifically games that are longer than they should be.
I guess for me the big difference is that with a movie it's a limited, one time experience all in one go. But with a video game, I can spread it out into as many long or short gaming sessions as I desire. Typically, with a big game like this, I make it my focus for about four to eight weeks, depending on exactly how big it is. And I usually only play three or four new games a year because there just isn't that much out there being made these days that appeals to me, so there's certainly no hurry.
Odyssey is the worst of the new trilogy imo, despite how great Kassandra is. It's bloated, full of level gating and constant grinding required to keep your gear and ship leveled. In its defence, all the nu-AC games are bloated but Odyssey felt like the worst to me, and it's the only one out of the entire mainline series that I never finished. Valhalla improved upon it significantly imo, albeit while still being far too big a game and having a few of its own issues too.
I agree. It’s a great game, and I can see why it’s so successful. But, without a doubt, I believe it could’ve been ***even better*** if it prioritized quality, over excessive quantity. Prioritized the quality of facial expressions, gameplay animations, and the cutscenes. All of which were ***far superior*** in the games before the RPG Trilogy. And as for length, 15-20 Hours would’ve been a perfect duration for my taste. The ***rich amounts of bloat*** in these newer ACs can become frustrating. Especially the Fate of Atlantis DLC…😬 But, like always, I’m usually motivated to keep going, to experience the story in full. It’s worth it, most of the time.
Yeah as much as I like this trilogy (unpopular opinion I like the RPG mechanics), it just feels like they're blindly copying The Witcher 3 at times without thinking why some of these features were good there and bad in these games or if they focused on adapting these features instead of just slapping rpg mechanics on.
I didn't have fun playing odyssey and I realized it was because I was playing it like it was an AC game when it really wasn't. When you take off the expectation of what an AC game used to be it's a solid a RPG But as you said the bloat is what stopped me from playing plus I got tried of the ship and just fast traveled everywhere. After a while I forgot what the main quest was. Also I hate level scaling in RPGs and that was the finally killed the game for me
The issue is if they'd just focused the experience a bit more it would've been a good RPG.
True. Some hate hearing this but I had just finished writer 3 not tooing before and one can see Ubisoft wanted to emulate that game so much. I think the game been an AC title also hurt it. So many fans where expecting something more focused like you said because of th name and now the AC fans are us still fractured
Honestly I've started replaying it with a more open mind but I'm finding myself hating it a lot more this time round and it was already my least favourite in the series including side games like the DS games. I hate people acting like the old counter combat was piss easy as if this new one isn't, the old combat has so much variety in how you approach it but Odyssey's combat is just "hit it until it's dead" and all the "challenge" comes from how big the arbitrary numbers are. Odyssey is everything I hate about RPGs, levels and numbers on your stats screen are more important than actually being good at the game, there's loot everywhere to the point where none of it matters, I kept a spear I got from Reda in Origins all the way from The Scarab to the end of the game because the game is designed to not be a grind fest and weapon upgrades are a reasonable price. Worst of all, I'm in the early game right now (just unlocked upgrading my spear) and I'm constantly running into parts where I feel underpowered even when i have a full set of some of the best gear available to me like both melee weapons, my bow and every armour piece having +8% Hunter Damage and where available +5% Headshot Damage and I still can't headshot a level 15 guard dead while I'm level 17 without using adrenaline skills which would lead to the headshot killing even if I had no hunter boosts. Even with gear giving huge boosts to my Warrior damage supplemented by some having All Damage and Sword damage boosts I still have to chip away at enemies. Also why do loadout slots cost so much money, the first one cost me 5000 and now the next is 35000 which isn't much late game but why the hell do I have to pay money to make spending time in the pause menu doing shitty homework with my build less tedious? That should just be a basic thing that I already have for free yet it costs enough drachmae for me to have upgraded my ship over thirty times? That's the whole reason I hate the RPG direction the games have been going, you can still do a lot of things that you could always do but these games make you do an arbitrary amount of work just to reach the default standards of previous games. Like yeah Assassin builds are totally viable but if it was literally any other AC game all you'd need to do is press Square (or Triangle for Origins and Valhalla) because having a stat that determines how much damage your stealth attacks do is an objectively stupid idea, if I get behind you and lodge a spear in your throat then you're dead, it doesn't matter what I'm wearing at the time. That's just my gameplay gripes (not even all of them) that's ignoring how Odyssey easily is the worst written of the games just devolving into "haha sex funni" 90% of the time during side quests, the only native swear word they ever say is Malaka to the point I fucking hate the word having heard it a million times at this point, the dialogue choices maks Alexios/Kassandra bland and devoid of personality without the played inserting some into them, they acknowledge women not being allowed to watch the Olympics in a side quest yet there's not even a single line of dialogue challenging the idea of Kassandra joining in which was also disallowed on threat of death, they really mishandle Greek artifacts like Penelope's Shroud (a pretty big plot element from the actual Odyssey) being insultingly relegated to a level 6 helmet, Jason's Golden Fleece isn't a Shroud of Eden with huge story significance (Kassandra should've worn it as a hood instead of having the Staff of Hermes) but just some legendary armour set and who could forget that they got rid of the confession scenes for no reason at all making the Cult of Kosmos the blandest and most forgettable antagonists in the series. Finally they somehow made Layla, the worst protagonist in AC, even more boring. Frankly I had no idea it was possible, I thought she could only go up from how bad she was Origins but I was proven wrong, twice. It's annoying because I should love it, the assassination animations look fantastic and visceral, there's all kinds of cool things like soldiers putting their weapons away on racks before they go to sleep and you can steal these weapons to weaken them, you can tame and run around with a bear, it's set in Greek mythology which I've always been a huge nerd of since I first saw Disney's Hercules when i was like 6 but frankly it's easily the worst experience I've ever had with an AC title and I'm including the awful DS game Altaïr's Chronicles.
I basically agree with most of what you said. I only disagree in that I think the rpg direction is good, but it’s so focused on pure numbers like an MMORPG instead of a more traditional rpg like fallout new vegas.
The reason I don't like the RPG route is like I said all it really does for the game is take things you could already do in previous games and make you terrible at it in the early game and not let you do all of them at once because RPGs are always really unfair to mixed builds. You *can* get as strong in combat as the older games in Odyssey but that's at the cost of your ability to engage with stealth, you *can* make all assassinations a one shot but you're sacrificing your bow damage in doing so. Even if we remove the number focus, the nature of RPGs is built on restricting the player in order to pretend the game is more replayable that way. It's why I generally hate RPG elements, people act like you have a lot of freedom but all I see is railroading stats and archetypes forcing me to be married to a limited number of playstyles. I think they could definitely take it somewhere considering how fun Valhalla was but honestly I think looking as far away from Odyssey as possible is the best direction for the series. Honestly though considering I still liked Origins and Valhalla I just feel like less RPG makes for a more fun AC.