By: Jack Almond
Assassin's Creed Odyssey is the eleventh installment to the extremely successful Assassin's Creed series. Assassin's Creed Odyssey is an action roleplaying game developed and published in 2018 by Ubisoft. Odyssey follows a single-player story while also providing a massive open world to explore. You begin the game in a cutscene where King Leonidas of Sparta is discussing the upcoming Battle of Thermplyai and fishing with the spartan Dienekes. After this discussion, Leonidas speaks in front of the Spartan army, giving a compelling speech before leading them into a bloody battle against the Persians. After completing this exciting battle/walkthrough you are introduced to Layla Hassan who finds Leonidas' spear head, extracts the DNA of his grandchildren and quickly loads into the Animus to travel back to retrieve the Staff of Hermes Trismegistus. At this time you are prompted to choose between the two grandchildren that you will use throughout the game, Alexios the male protagonist or Kassandra the female protagonist. After some research, I learned that Kassandra had the superior voice acting throughout the game, so I chose her for my playthrough.
Throughout my limited gameplay of Assassin's Creed Odyssey, primarily due to my lack of experience with the AC franchise and ego preventing me from turning down the difficulty, I still felt like I received the full game experience. Early on I understood that it was more of an role play, open world game that follows a strong story, rather than a solely story based game. I quickly learned that levels were extremely important, a strategy must be developed for my skill tree and I must focus on gearing my character - it reminded me somewhat of the early days of doing PVE in World of Warcraft. I progressed fairly quickly through the early story of the game and particularly fell in love with the stealth missions, as my combat mechanics were lackluster. Although I did not exactly master this game in ways I wished I would have, one thing I did master was navigation and exploration. In the later hours of my gameplay, I fell in love with riding my horse Phobos or hopping on a small wooden sail boat and just exploring the lands and waters of ancient Greece. The landscapes were absolutely gorgeous, with the map seeming never ending at such a large scale with its rolling mountains, wineries, farms, markets, and so much more. The beauty of it reminded me of the first time exploring the massive map of Grand Theft Auto 5 - I was in the same awe.
As for the historic accuracy of this game and franchise in general, it is to be questioned, but not completely written off. It can be summarized from the readings in class as not an exact historic learning tool, but rather a historic playground to be explored and used to spark interest in learning further. An accurate explanation of Odyssey role in teaching history is described by combining two quotes from the teenage boys interviewed by Lisa Gilbert, a lecturer at Washington University in St. Louis, for Theory and Research in Social Education "It’s not like you’re learning about history, you're experiencing it". I think that this explanation best correlates my feeling, and many other's while playing Assassin's Creed Odyssey. I knew it was a video game, I knew it couldn't all be historically accurate, but rather I was able to experience a glimpse of the day-to-day lives of people around 400 BC. I watched the women weaving baskets and retrieving water, I examined the winery workers as they picked grapes, I saw the merchants bargaining in the markets - it was all extremely intriguing as it showed a side to history you don't exactly see in a book. Although the conquest battles, combat, and various other aspects of the story may be historically inaccurate, I believe that since it is in the end a video game, there must be an understanding that it's about the entire experience as a whole, rather than the exact details.
One of the similarities between Assassin's Creed Odyssey and business marketing, my current major, was most definitely the "abilities" section or skill tree. Although at first glance you might not be able to compare the two, after analyzing and noticing the way my brain was working, they are quite comparable. The first thing I noticed after levelling a few times and randomly assigning points to traits I thought were cool, I realized I would need to take a step back and develop a strategy for where I wanted to lead my character. This is similar to a marketing manager or an entire marketing team developing a long term marketing plan to help their promotions succeed and have outlooks for the future. I determined I would like to focus on keeping Kassandra evenly distributed as not to fall behind in a certain category, but focusing a bit heavier in the assassin section since majority of my early missions were stealth related and I was more skilled at sneaking around rather than combat. I understood this as understanding my target market (future quests and missions) and focusing on my competitive advantages (I'm better at stealth, so put a few more points into the assassin section). My strategic marketing brain in the end allowed me to put into place a solid plan for success that also ended up making the gameplay more enjoyable for me.
Assassins Creed Odyssey was a very fun and interesting change up from my normal rotation of shooter games I regularly play, although I will definitely need to work on my mechanics. The historic accuracy was shaky at times, but not detrimental to the overall historic experience of the game. I absolutely loved the open world aspect and will definitely be returning to explore further locations of the map.
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