I think the femshep numbers back when were actually a good bit worse than that, so
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This is so bizarrely alien to my experience
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Most of the people who played the game are guys, all else being equal most will pick the same player character gender as themselves… so it being as high as 1/3 should be a clear sign that there was a substantial shift in Kassandra’s direction.
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Oh boy, I gotta meet up with a character named Testikles and I’m only half sarcastic when I say I can’t wait to see how they play up that one.
Oh yeah god I’m still playing this. Decided to more or less mainline the story and leave all these other quests for later, or when I need a break from the main game.
Anyway sounds like there’s some real fuckery in the DLC that the creative leads have had to come out and apologize for. I won’t spoil it here, but seeing as every Ubisoft game has started with that whole “our game is made by a crew of varying races, orientations, etc.” card, uh, maybe they didn’t consult members of that crew before going where they did with the story there.
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They’ve not fully reconciled the difference between RPG and directed narrative game. Or rather, they hadn’t yet experienced the blowback of the modern internet when they screw up player expectations.
They’ve started copying BioWare and are starting to get BioWare-level fan freakouts.
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Yeah, I think their first (and very quickly amended) statement was something along the lines of “we thought you guys would have understood, from a story perspective!”
It’ll be interesting to see how (or even if) they try to make good with the closing chapter of that particular DLC. I dunno how you beef it more than forcing your fiercely independent, (canonically, as far as I’m concerned) gay woman protagonist to carry a child to term - but, y’know, for story reasons!
Just…woof, if you’re gonna offer players freedom of choice in a game, especially as far as sexuality goes, I can’t imagine a worse railroaded “choice.”
Seems like a reasonable accident between their internal view of her as they thought they wrote her, within systemic shifts, and a strong interpretation a portion of the playerbase grew to see that character in since launch, several months after the script for this expansion was locked.
Within that interpretation, yeah, it’s wrong and tonedeaf and insulting, but I am not surprised that they didn’t think that was an endpoint for the character. I’m sure it was, ‘hey, it would be easy to remove gender locks on sex, should we do that?’ ‘sounds great!’ And didn’t adjust the silo’d major arc writing plan (and no studio is more efficient at siloing work than Ubisoft).
The way that cultural groups can take ownership of their interpretations of characters and feel their trust has been breached is terrifying on the other side, especially since the internet is vast and endless and there are always conflicting fan groups.
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Ah yeah, I can only imagine. The daggers that have been out over and over again for Overwatch (a game which only gets story from the occasional official YouTube video, and I guess the occasional comic) is proof enough.
what a weird fate to be so good at market-tested character design that you serve as representation for queer futurefolk and manbabies alike
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Hey, turns out if you ignore the side content, this game actually does book at a reasonable pace.
Two endings in and hmmm I dunno. The second ending spoils a big part of the third one, though, which hm guess I better get to killin’ Medusa.
Also to answer the thing I set up earlier - no jokes about Testikles’s name, but a pretty good payoff for such a dumb character.
Also feel safe calling it - Sokrates is the best character in this thing by far.
Update: Medusa pulled an Ares in God of War and locked up my console right as I was about to kill her. Cool cool cool. That wasn’t the longest boss battle this game has thrown at me yet or anything (it was).
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Ending 3 sets up the coolest possible sequel and then kinda blows it, for reasons that make sense but also…dang.
Midway through the game Kassandra’s mother tells her to meet her biological father on a desolate volcanic island in the middle of the Aegean. In peak Forrest Gump-ery, you find out that she and her brother are the children of Greek mathematician Pythagoras, who is several hundred years old and kept alive by one of the game’s artifacts.
Anyway, after killing several mythological creatures around Greece, Kassandra is able to seal away the city of Atlantis (oh yeah, Pythagoras has been chilling out in a cave next to the gate to Atlantis, forgot that detail), but only by taking the staff from her father, who drops dead after handing it over.
Cut to the modern day, where AC Origin’s Layla tries and fails to open the gate to Atlantis. A 2000+ year old Kassandra (in a snappy suit?) walks in, chats with her for a bit, and hands her the staff, before aging like 50 years and dropping dead.
Anyway what I’m saying is you absolutely should be able to play as a 2000+ year old Greek woman in the sequel, and they squandered it.
Still an unholy amount of stuff left to do in this game, even 110+ hours in, but it’s time to give poor Hitman 2 some attention.
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Oh god no by mainlining the story and finishing the Olympics arc I shut myself out of like 10 quests.
What have I done.
(Honestly the side quests are better than the main story, so this is semi-heartbreaking - no way am I gonna re-do like 10 hours of stuff to go back)
(Also I had a save right before I finished that quest line so I just played them all so I could see them, crisis averted.)
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When I read this was possible I decided to play the game the way I usually play, which is by putting off whatever main quest I’m on until I’ve completed everything in the particular area it takes place in, rather than trying to see the ending in a particular time frame. I tend to get overleveled fairly early but I have no regrets since the combat isn’t really what I’m playing these games for.
I went back to Origins the past week or so and platinumed it. I’m going to finish the side quests* and move on the DLC (and Discovery Mode). Why is Discovery Mode so good? I don’t know it just is, I love it. Can’t wait to see it added to Odyssey. One of the things Odyssey does that I love is when you’re on the map and hovering over locations it will pop up a blurb of historical trivia relating to that location, kind of like how the database entries used to work in prior games where they’d pop up as you walked around.
*I should have done these while I was doing the main quest instead of running straight through because now it’s 20some hours later and I have trouble remembering who all these side characters are and what relation they had to where I was in the main quest.
Yeah, typically I do, too. But I’d been in such a long stretch without any side missions vanishing that I figured all would be well.
Even if I don’t get to have the stuff I unlocked from the quests on my main file, I’m glad I was able to circle back and play those quests. There’s one in particular, where you follow a giddy Barnabas around the Olympic village, that’s insanely charming and does a lot to flesh out the friendship between him and Kassandra, as well as his nook of “extremely pious, excitable old man.”
At the end of the day the bulk of the side missions are fetch quests or kill quests, or some combination of both. There’s nothing particularly regarding about actually playing them. But they’re where it feels like the writers are granted the most opportunity to have fun, and really throw some wild swings as far as choice and consequences (the quest with the little girl who makes her own friends out of mud is especially sad if you choose what feels like the most immediately kind answer, and pays off for the best if you handle it callously).
Since you posted this I’ve gone back and cleared all the locations in the main game and The Hidden Ones and started Curse of the Pharaohs over the weekend. As per my comment upthread about not being able to follow the stories in these games due to my sporadic playstyle I completely missed the reference with the not-Phylakes in Hidden Ones. I killed those dudes and was like hmm I think the game expects me to remember this person but whatever.
Maybe I should mainline the main quests before exploring and checking off all the lists? Wouldn’t hurt to change up my playstyle once in a while, especially if it makes the narratives of these huge million hour games more coherent.
But yes you are quite correct Curse of the Pharaohs rules! I haven’t started the story yet but I have found the four afterlife areas and I’ve been exploring those and doing the quests there (and farming up the final resource needed to fully upgrade all my gear). I really like seeing Ubisoft’s take on the Egyptian afterlife and I really like that each Pharaoh has a distinctly different afterlife. Makes me excited to check out the second DLC for Odyssey which takes place in the ancient Greek afterlife.
Some people online were being snarky about the DLCs taking a more fantastical turn with the afterlife areas and mythical creatures and not being super historically accurate (which is the cred the series initially banked on) but I think as long as they stick to stuff that people in those time periods actually believed and thought about in their mythical/religious canon then what’s the harm? You can have your cake and eat it too!
But now I’m hoping the rumors about the next game being Viking/Norse themed is true because I want to see the AssCreed version of the Nine Realms and Valhalla.
Also I think Origins looks better than Odyssey. Maybe it’s just the lighting model or the way the camera is closer to your character so everything has to be slightly more detailed, I don’t know. Probably some combination of art and graphics rendering tech. Origins has a more photorealistic quality to it that I appreciate on a technical level and Odyssey is a bit more ,uh, “painted” looking I guess you’d say. It still looks great but it’s different and up close it’s not as detailed as Origins is up close.
And another thing while I’m on the graphics what happened to the awesome clothing simulations from Unity? The dangly bits of clothing in that game felt True Next-Gen to me and then they just dropped them in the games that came after. I’m sure it was technical reasons like why waste processes on the clothes when you could have further draw distances or whatever but ever since then I’ve been disappointed that the clothes don’t move and fall as realistically as they do in Unity (some of the outfits in Origins come a little close but don’t really approach it).
I think Origins just has a better art team; they’ve got better lighting choices, better scene composition, better animations. But they really struggled to organize their content (yeah that mushword is absolutely how I prefer to refer to it) into a sensible, driving fashion, while the Odyssey team just built meaning into combat and progression and mission flow while the elements themselves look and feel a bit worse.
An interesting tradeoff! (from a distance. I really dislike playing these games)
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I want to read the notes you keep whenever you have to play a game for work.
I finished Origins. The Curse of the Pharaohs was really good. I also did all the guided tours in Discovery Tour. Those were good but I wonder if they couldn’t have gone into more depth. A lot of them were just things you would have seen in a regular Discovery Channel Egypt documentary show. One them takes you through the interior of the Great Pyramid and explains which particular historian’s theories they used to explain its construction. That one was really neat.
I was hoping there would have been a lot more like that but what was there was good. Looking forward to seeing how the same mode in Odyssey stacks up.
Which like, what, Leonardo goddamn Da Vinci is basically Q from the James Bond movies in the Ezio trilogy. They take all kinds of liberties even if you throw out the sci-fi stuff.
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you mean the franchise where I can access ancestral memories encoded in dna to unlock a grainy hand-held video of adam and eve sprinting nude out of alien forerunner/creator race Eden with the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good And Evil isn’t constantly, rigorously historically accurate I am fucking livid I am pissed I am stomping ma
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