Living and Dying With the Choices You Make in Assassins Creed Odyssey!

Assassins Creed Odyssey’s release date of October 5^th (or October 2^nd depending on which of the many editions you decide to purchase) is quickly approaching us! The franchise is usually more comfortable with a late October release, but with Red Dead Redemption 2 showing up it’s really wrecking everyone’s plans. Like that drunk uncle that always shows up late for Thanksgiving dinner. Ubisoft Quebec has decided to steer clear of such a situation and release Odyssey a little bit earlier in the month.

Since the game’s announcement at E3, Ubisoft Quebec has surprisingly gone semi-radio silent on what we can expect to see in what is perhaps their most ambitious title to date. This time last year, we had already been swamped with every delicious detail Origins had to offer, including IGN even hosting a handful of their IGN FIRST videos surrounding the combat, environment, and anything else you can imagine. When it comes to Odyssey, Ubisoft seems intent on starving us out.

However, now that July has passed, and we are exactly two months away from release it seems as if we are starting to get a slow drip of information from Ubisoft Quebec (which are handling and creating Odyssey). After the bombshell reveal of Assassins Creed Odyssey full-on skinny dipping into the RPG Lake, we finally have dialogue choices! Let’s face it, from the beginning Assassins Creed was built to be an RPG, and it has been a long and winding road to get here. In the video above we get a taste of some of the choices that we will have to make while traversing through a beautiful set of islands. The original title, which released way back in November of 2007, was slated as a quasi-action-adventure stealth game. The much loved Xbox 360 and the much hated Playstation 3 were just not able to handle such memory requirements that the 8^th generations of consoles are capable of.

An Assassin game without Assassins?:

Layla Hassan, the modern day hero who made her debut in Assassins Creed Origins, will indeed be returning. We got to see a brief still of her at E3, which confirmed her involvement in the modern day storyline in Odyssey. Speaking of the Modern Day segments, apparently that will be the only time that the Assassin Brotherhood will be mentioned. Origins was set in and around 48-47 B.C.E, and the events of that game culminated into the main precursor to the Brotherhood, except Bayek and his gang of silent sleuths referred to themselves as “The Hidden Ones.” Origins took us farther back in time than any other Assassins Creed game had before. One year later Ubisoft seems intent on breaking their own record again, with Odyssey taking place around 431 B.C.E – a full 400 years prior to the events of Origins. With that said we are also 400 years away from the formation of The Hidden Ones. Therefore it is not possible for your character to be an Assassin.

Two to Tango:

On the subject of the playable character comes our first major choice for Odyssey, who do we play as! Well that is a difficult question because the choice is literally yours to make. You can pick the Chiseled walking slab of marble, Alexios! Or the stunning, graceful Kassandra! Now this choice WILL NOT affect the story in any way, besides the change of pro-nouns used in dialogue while in game. This choice builds off of Assassins Creed Syndicate’s terrible twins, Jacob and Evie Frye. Except where in Syndicate you could switch back and forth between the two, once you choose one or the other at the beginning of Odyssey that is who you will be for the duration of the story. To read up more on this subject click here to check out our article on the first “choose-able” female protagonist in a main title!

Tongue Tied:

The biggest change to possibly ever happen to the Assassins Creed franchise is the introduction of dialogue choices while interacting with various NPC’s, including being able to have a true philosophical debate with the king of debates, Socrates himself! A real twist to this feature is that the lines of dialogue aren’t just random words that mean little to nothing. You can lie, love, and loathe all the while setting up or turning down new quests and it can grant the ability to gain some pretty cool loot. So basically your choice of words with certain characters can either have a minimal or major influence on the game, story, and the world around you! For example: defeating mercenaries, but refraining from delivering the killing blow will open up the chance for them to join your crew and even show up on your ship for the duration of your play-through.

For Love or Glory:

While traversing the world and discovering new locations you may notice the territory being outlined with a blue or red streak that encompasses the said territory. While some main and side quests will ask you to fight against and liberate the territory for either the nation of Sparta (red) or the Athens Owls (blue), you have the choice of fighting for who you want and killing who you please. Since the game is set during the Peloponnesian War we already know the outcome and winner, but its still one hell of a time fighting your way through it! Your character is Spartan by birth so you can choose to avenge your family and prove your worth to Sparta, or take revenge against what happened to you as a child and destroy the Spartan army! Your choices during these missions will shape out how your particular game ends.

The Tree’s of knowledge:

The skill trees from Origins make a return, but this time with a facelift, and a selection of basic skills that fit into the three paths of Hunter, Warrior, and Assassin. The Hunter is similar to the Seer tree from Origins, giving you the ability to use gadgets and even tame wolves. The Warrior is pretty straightforward and deals with combat and different ways to use your very own First Civilization artifact, The Broken Spear of Leonidas. Leonidas being your grandfather on your maternal side and also being the same character Gerald Butler played in 300. See now all of those Sparta Kicks make sense. Finally, the Assassin allows you to boost your stealth skill, and eventually resurrects the ability to turn invisible for a short duration of time. This is a skill that was mastered and patented by Evie Frye.

To the point!:

E3 was a place for big reveals, if you count out the fact that 70% of the games were leaked prior to the event. We already knew that Odyssey was coming so when Ubisoft brought it to their stage as their last reveal, they announced some big news. Basically all of the news I have spoken about came from E3. Ubisoft is so commited to choices in Asassin’s Creed Odyssey that they are offering a mind puzzling NINE(9) different and unique editions; with some being retailer exclusives like the Kassandra addition at Game Stop, others being Ubi Store exclusives like the Spartan and Pantheon editions, and even a couple being region-specific like the awesome looking Medusa edition and the Omega edition (which are only available in EU regions). Regardless of which edition you choose to shell out your money for, (me personally I have pre-ordered the Spartan Edition for $159.99 in the USA), we are just around the corner from the release date. It seems as if during the month of August and September, Ubisoft Quebec are going to ramp up their media departments and let us in on some more game play from the beautiful Greece setting that they unveiled just over a month ago. With all of these changes coming to the series and the full-on plunge into the RPG genre, I am beyond excited to see what cool features Ubisoft decides to reveal next. As soon as we get more news and/or more game play trailers, look to Gamer Professionals to get you the news first and fast!