Since you insist that Origins is also shitty historical fiction, what about it, exactly, makes it shitty as historical fiction?
Certainly. The portrayal of the murder of Caesar, the portrayal of Cleopatra, the PC omissions or additions, e.g. omission of infanticides, slavery, prostitution, apartheid, all the good stuff - and the addition of education of women and men in Alexandria. The whole Assassins/Templar as well. Why not just add aliens? But I digress.
No, you're not digressing, you're addressing the question I was asking. Thank you.
I agree with some of that, especially the portrayal of Cleopatra. Slavery we already commented on – it wasn't completely omitted (at least one major NPC was an escaped slave) but certainly downplayed. Prostitution and apartheid
were in, in case you didn't notice – Egyptians are sequestered in their own rather shabby quarter of Alexandria, for example, and there were some quests that took place in a brothel. The assassins/templars, ancient tech etc. are part of the fiction, what the creators need to sell you.
The point is, historical fiction doesn't need to be accurate to be good. It needs to have verisimilitude, and the authors need to sell you the fictional elements while fitting them into the historical framework. Origins does this part pretty well -- certainly by mainstream entertainment standards.
Cleopatra also looks like she's been lifted from the Asterix books.
And if you were really curious, there's been
plenty written on the inaccuracies made in AC:Origins. And that's from a person who *liked* the game.
Inaccuracies alone do not make for bad historical fiction. The question is why the inaccuracies are there, and what the authors do to sell them to you. Again: Origins does a commendable job of this. I don't think it would be possible to have a mainstream entertainment product that would be genuinely historically accurate – it would be too alien, too weird, too shocking, and in many ways too brutal. But you do have to push it some way towards that, to give a taste of the epoch, not just do a wholesale transplantation of modern people and attitudes into a colourful setting. There's always a balance to be struck of course, but in my view Origins strikes a fairly good one.
Since we both agree that Odyssey is shitty historical fiction, what, exactly, is it about it that you like? 'Cuz apart from pretty graphics and tolerable brawling that gets old around the "you've killed 100 enemies with a spear" mark at the latest, I've got squat.
It doesn't take itself seriously, it's got no aspirations to be historically accurate except in the most superficial way (e.g. Ancient Greece existed and had people in it), it changes Greek myths to Greek *facts* which is awesome in my book.
It's just laid-back fun. No grinding needed, but of course for people with OCD, there can be issues. After all there's a warning as the game starts and it's for the people who consider the game grindy. Because it isn't unless you make it so, and stay up for weeks on end, playing 900 hours, collecting every side-quest and finding all locations and complete everything.
The setting is a red-herring. It's not the star of the game. It's just a backdrop. The star of the game is you, playing an RPG in semi-Mythical Ancient Greece, doing very silly things and enjoying the beautiful Mediterranean between quests and the game developers know it. Gone is the pretense of historical accuracy, gone is the low-information player "I fucking love science" crowd claim of "historical porn". Gone is the broseph parkour and non-existent character progression, which was the hallmark of the series.
It's been replaced with a semi-competent BioWare style RPG circa 2009. That's what I like about the game.
Thank you for sharing your opinion. A lot of this is subjective so it can't really be argued about. I do disagree on several points.
First off, I do not find it to be "laid-back fun" at all, and there
definitely is grinding. I gave up at the point where my CL is 13 and next MQ quest is 15, so I would be forced to make a detour to run errands for people I don't care about for reasons that don't interest me, or else face fighting enemies two levels higher which means chip, chip, chip away at hitpoints for minutes on end for each and every one of an army of mooks. Face it, the gameplay is pretty monotonous and the quests are really repetitive, NVM the procedural ones (which Origins didn't have). In fact this is another way where Odyssey is far behind Origins: in Origins, many (not most or all, sadly) side quests were interestingly written, and even if what you
did in them got more and more repetitive over time, there was enough story motivation there to keep things interesting for at least the first two-thirds of the game.
As to character progression, I would in fact prefer that there was
no character progression, rather than this form of MMO-grind progression, where combat feels
exactly the same at level 1 as at level 40, as long as you're fighting enemies of the same level. All the "progression" does is give you a couple of nice moves of which you can use 4 at a time (and you have that filled up by level 4, or 8 at the latest!) and funnel you through the level-gated areas in a particular order. This by the way is
markedly different from BioWare games of any generation: they at least had legitimately open worlds where you could tackle things in any order you chose, and some (like DA:O for example) had at least a few interesting NPCs and deep, broad, and frequent C&C.
But sure, if that's the kind of thing you enjoy, then I can't argue with that. However, I don't. I would want at least two of
- genuinely interesting gameplay that keeps developing qualitatively as you level up (like in TES: Morrowind)
- a genuinely interesting setting (like in Witcher 3, TES: Morrowind or AC:Origins)
- genuinely interesting characters (PC and/or NPCs) (like Bayek in AC:Origins, Geralt, Yennefer, Bloody Baron etc etc in Witcher 3)
- a genuinely interesting story or stories (like in Witcher 3)
From where I'm at, Odyssey doesn't deliver
even one of these. The gameplay is repetitive and goes nowhere as you develop your character, the setting is boring and predictable, the characters are flat, and the story is really abysmally stupid.
But eh, I guess I'm the one with low standards for historical fiction here.
