History VideoGame / AssassinsCreedOrigins

* ButNotTooBlack:
** Bayek himself is noticeably a dark-skinned North African, and the only really light-skinned characters are people of Greek or Roman descent. His wife Aya, the other player character, plays this straight, being that she is half-Greek.
** An in-universe example can be found in Krokodilopolis, with an Egyptian mother-to-be praying to Sobek her child will look more like his Greek father.

* SelectiveCondemnation: There is a quest where Bayek is outraged and considers it blasphemy that someone is slaughtering crocodiles in Krokodilopolis, the town containing a large temple to crocodile-headed god Sobek. Another quest involves freeing a large albino crocodile captured by hunters. While this happens, Bayek is able to slaughter random crocodiles for crafting materials to his heart's content and with no penalty at all. It has been pointed out, though, that only albino crocodiles were considered sacred. Bayek also routinely condemns grave robbers, and several time righteously points out that he ''isn't'' one... even though the game allows you to walk through a number of tombs, picking up bits and pieces of treasure.

** [[spoiler:The Order of the Ancients have two big time, grade-A Jerkasses: Flavius Metellus (the Lion) and Berenike (the Crocodile). Both are PoliticallyIncorrectVillains that have no qualms about murdering children (Khemu and Shadya) if it means advancing the goals of the Order and have an outright dislike of Egyptian culture and society since they are from Europe. The latter in particular uses an Apple of Eden for his amusement to causes great pain throughout Cyrene from forcing innocents to murder each other to forcing him to worship him as a god]].

Paid story DLC became available in 2018. The first DLC, ''The Hidden Ones'' takes place 4 years after the base game. The people of the Sinai are revolting against the Roman occupation, with the assistance of the Hidden Ones led by Tahira. However when two of the Hidden Ones die in a massacre, Tahira contacts Bayek, pleading for the mentor of their order to join them to rebuild the Sinai branch of the Hidden Ones and throw off the Roman occupation.

** Chat with the Oracle of Apollo, and she gives brief hints of things to come, including ''Curse of the Pharoahs'', the Jackal's death, [[spoiler:Aya becoming Amunet, "the Hidden One"]].

* BloodierAndGorier: Compared to the games before it, ''Origins'' is a bit further up the violence scale in terms of blood and gore. Unlike the games before ''Unity'', which only had blood, and ''Unity'' itself, whose gore was mainly just decapitated heads, some of ''Origins''' environments have scattered limbs and dismembered bodies. ''Origins'' also has the same amount of blood in combat as ''3'' and ''Unity'', with blood splattering the environment and also having bloody wounds. The game even has a cutscene that shows the DeathofaChild onscreen, only not showing the actual stabbing.

* BittersweetEnding: [[spoiler:Bayek and Aya kill the last two members of the Order, avenging their son. Bayek lets go of his grief over Khemu's death, but however, Egypt is done for; with Rome turning on Cleopatra, there's no hope of restoration for Egypt to its golden days. Bayek notes that Greece and Egypt are already falling to chaos, and students of history know a civil war awaits Rome, and then the rule of Emperors. Lastly, Bayek and Aya's marriage does not endure the events of the game, both of them realizing they cannot continue as a couple. And fans of the franchise know the Order of Ancients isn't finished and will eventually become the Templar Order. On a more positive note, Bayek and the Hidden Ones of Egypt continue to help the poor and oppressed, and the last scene with Bayek is him taking in an orphan after killing a cruel caretaker]]. Also, [[spoiler: while they agree to split up at the end of the main scenario, Layla *does* find that both had been entombed together, with Aya's sarcophagi at one point having been next to Bayek's. Whatever had happened after they split, at some point they reunited at the very least for their last journey.]]

* GreaterScopeVillain: The Pharaoh Smenkhkare serves as one to the game and by extension the entire franchise, by being the founder of the Order of the Ancients, the precursor to the Templar Order, and the one who gave them their mandate to study leftover Isu technology inside a temple, even though he's been dead over a thousand years before Bayek was even born. [[spoiler: Even though you can fight his [[IncestIsRelative relatives / in-laws]] Akhenaten and Tutankhamen, he remains TheUnfought in the Curse of the Pharaohs DLC.]]

* RewatchBonus: After finishing the quest, Bayek's first meeting with Tarhaqa looks very different, [[spoiler:when you wonder what would have happened if Bayek had drunk that wine he'd been offered.]]
** Khemu's death scene gains a lot of context when you learn who the other three masked men are. [[spoiler: [[AntiVillain Pothinus]] is clearly trying to defuse the situation and avoid bloodshed, an approach which [[JerkAss Septimius]] is openly contemptuous of, while [[AxCrazy Flavius]] grows increasingly impatient and paranoid until he finally finds an excuse to escalate things.]]

** Second, "Battle of the Nile". [[spoiler:Ptolemy is killed by crocodiles as he tries to escape the carnage of the battle. Meanwhile, it's revealed that Caesar and Cleopatra have been poisoned by the Order of Ancients, and are now protecting the remaining leader, Septimius, in order to secure their empire.]]
** Lastly, "The Aftermath". [[spoiler:Apollodorus is killed, but reveals that there is one more member of the Order that is above even Septimius as he dies; Flavius, the seemingly loyal right-hand to Caesar who has successfully poisoned the minds of Caesar and Cleopatra to advance the Order's grasp for power.]] It's not all doom and gloom, however, [[spoiler: as this mission also shows Bayek realizing that, if there are people who work in the shadows of kings and queens to secure power for themselves, then there must be those who work in the shadows to protect the people from them. Thus, the informal founding of the Brotherhood, consisting of a mere six people.]]

* DissonantSerenity: In Cyrene, [[spoiler:when Flavius has the Apple]], it's possible to see people calmly ''walking into bonfires'', and burning to death without so much as a scream. Equally, the cutscene for reaching the farms shows people calmly getting bound like lifestock and kneeling willingly down to get beheaded with no attempt of resisting. The non-influenced NPCs have to push them multiple times to even make them wander away from the execution shed.

** As revealed in ''VideoGame/AssassinsCreedII'', Cleopatra will eventually be assassinated by the Assassin Amunet for collaborating with the Templars.[[spoiler:In the closing scene, Aya renounces her name, renaming herself Amunet.]]

** The game ends with Aya, alongside Brutus and the Libertores, assassinating Caesar. "The Hidden Ones" confirms that, as in real life, this made them Public Enemy No. 1 in Rome, and led to Brutus' death.

* BodyguardLegacy: Bayek is the last of a long line of Medjay, a group of elite warriors who served as a peace-keeping police force of sorts, protecting Egypt and her people, answering to the Pharaoh. Bayek inherited the role of Medjay from his father Sabu and intended to train his own son, Khemu, to continue the tradition. However, both Sabu and Khemu are killed as a result of tragic betrayals instigated by power-hungry royals. Over the course of the story, Bayek has largely disavowed his oath of protection to the ruling class, but there is an arcing mission that requires him to carry out objectives for Cleopatra and help her get to a hostile location safely. Bayek's need for vengeance and justice for his family and the betrayal by the very leaders he swore to protect leads to the creation of the Hidden Ones, precursors to the Assassin's Brotherhood, a guild that serves more generally as protectors of the common man from the elite rule. Many Assassins are also born and raised in the Brotherhood.

* GreaterScopeVillain: The Pharaoh Smenkhkare serves as one to the game and by extension the entire franchise, by being the founder of the Order of the Ancients, the precursor to the Templar Order, and the one who gave them their mandate to study leftover Isu technology inside a temple, even though he's been dead over a thousand years before Bayek was even born. [[spoiler: Even though you can fight his relatives Akhenaten and Tutankhamyn, and his in-law Nefertiti, he remains TheUnfought in the Curse of the Pharaohs DLC.]]

* ApocalypticLog: Common to a lot of animal lairs is a note nearby with someone remarking on the local wildlife.

* GreaterScopeVillain: The Pharaoh Smenkhkare serves as one to the game and by extension the entire franchise, by being the founder of the Order of the Ancients, the precursor to the Templar Order, and the one who gave them their mandate to study leftover Isu technology inside a temple, even though he's been dead over a thousand years before Bayek was even born.

** n the "The Curse of the Pharaohs" [=DLC=], an undamaged version of the Art/NefertitiBust is found in the queen's tomb.

* ArtisticLicenseHistory:
** You play a Medjay during the reign of Cleopatra. The Medjay had seemingly disappeared well before Alexander's conquest of Egypt, let alone Cleopatra's reign which is the very end of the Ptolemaic era, though this is [[JustifiedTrope justified]] in the game by virtue of Bayek being TheLastOfHisKind and the fact that we don't know whether the Medjay were reformed or abolished after the 20th Dynasty.
** Many of the Greek/Ptolemaic Egyptian soldiers are seen wearing Corinthian helmets, even though they were largely replaced by the Thracian and Chalcidian helmets centuries prior.
** Similarly, the Roman soldiers depicted in the game come across as cartoony and "Hollywood Roman". Not only do they have archers in bright red robes (at this time the only archers in the Roman armed forces would be non-citizen auxiliaries), they also have a greater variety of equipment than is historical (some run around with long spears, others are giants with large clubs).
** Bayek uses a ''khopesh'' more than 1,000 years after they were replaced with straight swords among the Egyptians. He also uses a Roman ''spatha'', which wouldn't see widespread use for at least a century after the birth of Christ; legionaries were using the gladius during the Late Republic period.
** The game has Cleopatra speaking with an English accent to emphasize her Greek origins as AccentAdaptation. Similar to ''VideoGame/AssassinsCreedUnity'' and Napoleon's lack of Corsican-tinged French, this ends up neglecting a crucial aspect of a historical figure, namely that one of the few very well-known facts about Cleopatra was that she was the only known member of her family to speak Egyptian fluently and communicated in it, appealing more to the people than her brother Ptolemy XIII (who only spoke Greek), so [[RuleOfPerception she should ideally]] sound the same to players as Bayek and Aya.
** Their half-sister Arsinoe IV (captured by Caesar and put under house arrest at the temple of Artemis in Ephesus until murdered by order of Mark Anthony some years later) and their younger brother Ptolemy XIV (installed as co-ruler with Cleopatra after XIII's death, died not long after Caesar's assassination in 44 BCE) are not mentioned at all. Ptolemy XV Caesarion (offspring of Cleopatra and Caesar) has a brief appearance at the end of the game, but looks much older than the slightly less than three years old he would be at the time.
** The finale of the game [[spoiler:is set in Rome during the Ides of March, and Caesar's assassination. The meeting convened is explicitly about Caesar asking the Senate to confirm him as King and tyrant. In actual fact, Caesar at the time of his assassination was en route to Parthia to avenge UsefulNotes/MarcusLiciniusCrassus and the Senate meeting was in his eyes, a minor call-to-order of no importance whatsoever. Likewise, the assassination is shown to be quite clean and smooth, when in actual fact multiple senators tripped and injured themselves as they ganged up on Caesar, and Caesar himself used a stylus to vainly try and defend himself. The actual assassination was a far more tawdry and pathetic affair than what you see here]].
** Both Alexandria and [[spoiler:Rome]] were cities in the Ancient World that had large populations, a million people each and as such both of them should have [=NPCs=] on the level of UsefulNotes/{{Paris}} in ''VideoGame/AssassinsCreedUnity'', but the game greatly limits the number of foot-traffic in both on the scale of the first two medieval-Renaissance games. One of the reasons both cities fascinated historians and authors is that after the fall of UsefulNotes/TheRomanEmpire, it would take more than a millennium for cities of that size and scale to rise again. [[spoiler:The Roman Forum we see in the finale is empty of crowds and shown as a militarized zone that Aya moves through but it should be packed full of people and [=NPCs=] since Caesar's assassination was an immediate public event]].
** Cleopatra is shown [[spoiler:to have attempted to court an alliance with Pompey first, and then turn to Caesar. There is no record of her attempt to court Pompey's favor at all. The game also dramatizes her famous meeting with Caesar (being rolled into a carpet) by Apollodorus the Sicilian, as Plutarch described, but Plutarch describes that happening privately while in the game it happens in the presence of her own brother. She also immediately offers a marriage proposal to Caesar, when in reality, their relationship was controversial because Caesar was already married, and it would be hard to convince the Republic to accept Cleopatra, a foreigner, as a wife over a Roman woman of patrician stock (as Caesar's wife was at that time), and Cleopatra at the time of Caesar's death was anxious about getting her child with Caesar, Caesarion, Roman citizenship, which even Caesar, after becoming ''dictator perpetuo'', found it hard to do and too controversial to support, and in any case, his will listed his nephew Octavian, the future UsefulNotes/{{Augustus}}, as his heir]].
** [[spoiler:Tutankhamun's ghost (or whatever it's supposed to be) is shown to be a large, physically imposing bruiser who can and ''will'' kill even a fully levelled up Bayek. As opposed to the real life Tut, who was only eighteen when he died, and was lame and sickly to boot.]]
** The Great Synagogue in Alexandria has a Star of David above its door centuries before it was used as a religious symbol by Judaism.[[note]]Beforehand, it was the menorah.[[/note]]

* BornInTheWrongCentury: Mara, the assistant to Pasharempta's wife, tries assuring her it's not her fault she's failed to carry several babies to term (due to poisoning), and that this is a load of sexist crap. Sadly, her common sense falls on deaf ears. In this time and place, [[DeliberateValuesDisonnance medical knowledge blames the mom for everything that goes wrong.]]

* DissonantSerenity: In Cyrene, [[spoiler:when Flavius has the Apple]], it's possible to see people calmly ''walking into bonfires'', and burning to death without so much as a scream.

* CrossOver: The sidequest, "A Gift from the Gods" features one with ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyXV''. In addition to a brief cameo from the game's antagonist [[spoiler:Ardyn Izunia]], the player receives the Ultima Blade sword, the Ziedrich shield and a Chocobo-like camel called Kweh upon completing the quest.

* BittersweetEnding: [[spoiler:Bayek and Aya kill the last two members of the Order, avenging their son. Bayek lets go of his grief over Khemu's death, but however, Egypt is done for; with Rome turning on Cleopatra, there's no hope of restoration for Egypt to its golden days. Bayek notes that Greece and Egypt are already falling to chaos, and students of history know a civil war awaits Rome, and then the rule of Emperors. Lastly, Bayek and Aya's marriage does not endure the events of the game, both of them realizing they cannot continue as a couple. And fans of the franchise know the Order of Ancients isn't finished and will eventually become the Templar Order. On a more positive note, Bayek and the Hidden Ones of Egypt continue to help the poor and oppressed, and the last scene with Bayek is him taking in an orphan after killing a cruel caretaker]].

** Many of the achievement names are either puns or shout-outs, like [[Franchise/MortalKombat "Fatality!"]], [[VideoGame/TombRaider Raider of the Lost Tomb]] or [[VideoGame/AssassinsCreedIVBlackFlag Where's my black flag?]].

-->'''Aya:''' [[spoiler:[[MeaningfulRename I have renounced Aya.]] [[ThatManIsDead I have killed Aya.]] [[LegendaryInTheSequel I am now the Hidden One]] [[CanonCharacterAllAlong known as Amunet.]]]]

-->'''Aya:''' [[spoiler:[[MeaningfulRename I have renounced Aya.]] [[ThatManIsDead I have killed Aya.]] [[LegendaryInTheSequel I am now the Hidden One known as Amunet.]]]]

* SeldomSeenSpecies: Among the hyenas seen in the game are striped hyenas, which are seen much more rarely than their spotted cousins.

* SurprisinglyRealisticOutcome:
** [[spoiler:The loss of their only child combined with the fact both Aya and Bayek bury themselves in their work as the Assassins' founders results in the crumbling of their marriage. The game teases that getting their revenge and finding a new purpose would bring them back together but it's not to be. The fact that Aya chooses to be buried with her husband, at least, implies they never stopped loving one another and possibly might've reconciled some time after the game's events]].
** In ''The Hidden Ones'', the group's habit of being HighlyVisibleNinja bites them in the ass when, thanks to operating in broad daylight, the Roman army finds one of their bureaus and burns it to the ground.

*** The Master skills of each tree offer minuscule boosts of 1% per point. While they can be bought over and over, [[UpToEleven even past a +100% bonus if you keep at it]], the experience needed per point at mid-to-endgame makes them fit only for those who have acquired all other skills already.

* EmptyRoomPsych: Taken UpToEleven with the White Desert and Great Sand Sea regions. There's absolutely ''nothing'' there - no (side) quests, no marked locations, often not even distinctive landmarks. It's just you, your mount, your inevitable heat stroke hallucinations, and a whole lotta sand and stone. Exploring these areas can get very creepy very fast simply because of the extreme contrast to the bustling rest of the world, although many players report it as a strangely serene and calming experience instead.

* {{Multishot}}: Bayek can shoot up to ''[[UpToEleven five]]'' arrows at once while using a certain type of bow. Unlike the [[NeverTrustATrailer promotional material]], however, he doesn't target multiple simultaneous enemies, instead loosing them all at a single target, buckshot-style.

* AnachronismStew: Cyrene has a gladiatorial arena in it, when it shouldn't. The Historical Tour even admits it shouldn't be there, but was added because of RuleOfCool.

* CrowsNestCartography: Starting with this game, climbing to the top of tall towers and trees unlocks [[WarpWhistle fast travel]] to areas in addition revealing collectibles and missions on your in-game map.