When Assassin's Creed: Odyssey was unveiled at this year's E3 during the Ubisoft press conference, one of the things that the company tried driving home repeatedly was that this was no longer the Assassin's Creed that you grew up with a decade ago, where it was just about parkour, stealth assassinations, and jumping into haystacks. The new game is more choice-oriented and the story will evolve and unfold based entirely around the decisions made by the player, and Ubisoft's designers recently explained how the game will handle some of the moral choices that players will encounter.
Speaking with Gamespot at this year's E3 event, Ubisoft game director Scott Philips did a breakdown of how the team will be handling the moral choices in Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, and what sort of impact they'll have on the story and outcome of the gameplay based on the player's decisions, saying...
Making the game morally gray and not black-and-white was important to us. We didn't want it to be like past games where you're not forced to not kill civilians, as a simple example. The Creed doesn't exist for your player character in terms of restricting you from doing that. That's your choice. But we're going to impact the player, we're going to show you that it means something in the game world. And it's going to give you feedback, you're going to feel those choices you've made in small-scale and in these large-scale choices across the game.
So what Philips is talking about here are both the mechanical choices players will make as well as the actual RPG-style dialogue choices that players will make that will affect the overall world of Assassin's Creed: Odyssey.
For instance, in past games you were prohibited from killing civilians during the Animus simulations. The reason for this was because oftentimes you were playing as a member of the Assassin's Brotherhood Order. The Order had a very specific Assassin's Creed about not killing the innocent, so you would be oftentimes punished in the previous games whenever you intentionally or haphazardly killed civilians during your escapades.
Due to the puppeteer combat controls, it wasn't particularly easy to kill civilians due to the way you would have to engage people, but you could mistakenly kill people while in stealth mode, especially when you were using the hidden blades and walking through a crowd of people with the intent on killing a specific target.
The games were slightly forgiving if you made mistakes, though. For instance, if you were scaling a rooftop, aiming to take out some enemies who were in a crowd of people, and you leaped from the top of a building down below and used the dual hidden blades to kill your target and maybe an innocent civilian who was standing beside him, the missions wouldn't always end instantly. Sometimes you would encounter some screen fuzz and a warning. Repeatedly killing civilians, however, would desynchronize the mission.
With Assassin's Creed: Odyssey it sounds like the game will have fewer boundaries keeping players in check when it comes to the choices they make since this takes place hundreds of years before theAssassin's Order was established. So it will be interesting to see how the world reacts to those decisions and what the outcomes will be like across different playthroughs. You can look for Assassin's Creed: Odyssey to launch this fall for Xbox One, PS4, and PC.
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