Assassin's Creed

The fort battles didn't let you snipe soldiers with cannon balls either. The soldiers only spawned when you docked and most of them where inside walls that would protect them from cannon fires since the fortifications broke in pre-programmed way.

Since we were discussing shooting soldiers with boat weapons.

Edited by Ghilz on Oct 16th 2018 at 12:41:27 PM

I'm a little spoiled by GTA Online where everything can interact with everything else. Back in the days of rowing ships, if you had a ship, you had to have an army. And if you have an army, you really shouldn't need to be sneaking into forts to steal arrows just to make ends meet. :(

Yeah, that's the right one. I, uh, I kind of made a royal hash of that whole questline. Oh well.

Zero Punctuation has finally done an Assassin's Creed: Odyssey review. Enjoy.

I have found the most terrifying of Alpha Animals on one of the Islands near Mykkanos. Truly a beast to behold and one of the trickiest fights ever:

A chicken.

Finished Delos and Mikkanos - my wife and I had VERY different experiences of the island and there's a fair amount of the Devs writing for all contingencies.

Only one quest has really disappointed as I think it didn't explore the concept of the choice mechanism well enough: the quest where you can free a slave from a Cult of Kosmos member... but it's really arbitrary and shows the limitations of binary game choices.

Yeah, that wasn't great. That said, I had an experience later that made up for it a bit. I found a random citizen named Phaidon in Athens a while later. I like to think he made it out after I speared that Cultist bastard through the skull.

The hit boxes of these boars are all wrong. I just can't seem to hit them with arrows half the time.

Their hit boxes is super wide. I am not sure how you can even miss then X_X. It's what makes them hard to dodge.

Not for arrows, I mean. Their hit box is wide enough when they hit YOU.

I also notice frustrating limitations to what you can do with arrows. For instance, you cannot use ghost arrows to kill animals in locked cages. Also, sometimes enemies don't take damage because you are outside their combat range or something, so you hit them but they do not take any damage. It is a bit artificial at times.

Yah that last one happens a lot with the Bonus Bosses. Who become immune to all damage if you're not inside their arena.

One thing I don't really like about this game: it autosaves every goddamn 20 seconds. God forbid you learn after the fact that there was another way to finish the quest you're on; it saved twice while you were being lectured about doing the bad thing the quest told you to do, and your last manual save was five hours ago.

It gives you like, five autosaves though.

Yeah, but when I did the quest in question (The Sokratic Method on Delos, for reference), I saved the guy, escorted him out of the hostile zone, and walked with him to a point like 50m away, then I was told to go talk to Sokrates.

By the time I reached Sokrates, the autosave list was full. It had saved 1) when the prisoner attached himself to me, 2) when we left the hostile zone, 3) when we reached his rendezvous point, 4) when I talked to him afterward, and 5) when I was sent to go talk to Sokrates. All five autosaves were used within about 30 seconds, none before the point I actually wanted to change.

I guess the message here is, get in the habit of saving when you accept a quest, but even so.

It's worse, actually. Even when you DO have an autosave from before the mission, the game just flat out REFUSES to actually reset the mission. It will reload the world to a point before the mission, but the mission will still be completed, WITH all it's consequences.

This happened to me in the theatre mission where you are forced to pick between two parents. I picked the third option, thinking that Kass would save them, but nope... But I couldn't even reload the mission.

I'm also annoyed by just how little light torches and other light sources give off in tombs. And these tombs all look the same. The exact same wall textures, floors and stairs. That one crashed over pillar again and again. There are a few with creative puzzles, but most are of the "dodge the spike traps and kill snakes" variety.

Gamers: I want it to matter when I make a choice.// Also gamers: I don’t like that choice I made. Let me do it again.

Well, then they should not have allowed us to reload saves. They didn't in previous games, I don't know when they suddenly allow it now.

Are characters like Alkibiades supposed to be blond? He looks grey to me. A LOT of people seem to have grey hair, come to think of it.

If you're asking what his hair color was historically, I don't think we know.

Our Useful Notes page says he was a war profiteer. That might be spoilers for him to suddenly turn villain.

No, I mean in game. His hair looks more grayish than blonde to me.

Well, he's certainly profiteering off the player, so maybe not so much of a spoiler. The guy is a master at manipulating you into doing his dirty work.

Edited by Redmess on Oct 18th 2018 at 2:06:50 PM

Yeah, I've noticed that too (about the hair colors). In general, people's hair tends to look stringier than you would think.

In any case, a choice can matter in the narrative without penalizing you for taking choices you didn't know you were taking. As a similar example, the questline about the man in the cage in Lokris was broken for me because I ran into a particular NPC out in the world before I spoke to the questgiver, which is apparently a known bug. I hadn't been saving manually, because I was just running across the countryside as one does, and when I found out about the glitch the game had already autosaved three times on my way into town and again after talking to the questgiver.

I understand that it would be difficult to provide fixed autosave save points, especially since the average player is going to accept a quest, forget about it, then get to it 45 minutes later when Ikaros looks at something. That would be too difficult to manage. But as it stands now, it's set to save too often to actually be useful.

I'm getting a bit annoyed by these side quests and how rote they can be. I was just in Attika finishing up some quest from Kreon to clear out some Spartan camps, and then found another quest, which is basically to do the same thing all over again, in the same camps. I mean, how many times can I murder the same handful of captains before it counts?

Some quests are nice about it when you have already done the thing they ask you to do and just complete the quest right then and there, but some others just make you do it all over again for no good reason.

Edited by Redmess on Oct 19th 2018 at 1:10:33 PM

It's always been new captains for me. And the Polemarch murder missions don't care which camps you raid to do it. Demosthenes' plan of having you stalk off to some nowheresville island and murder the Polemarch there to influence the war doesn't make much sense.

Do Ghost Arrows count as a game breaker? They go through everything in the level, you can multihit several enemies if they overlap visually, and the enemies have NO clue where to look for where they came from. They are utterly helpless. And at that point, your normal arrows don't run out, and your first adrenaline bar auto-refreshes, so you can totally cheese your way through an entire camp with these things.

Also, I was right about the pigs having weird hitboxes. Try aiming a ghost arrow at one through a piece of scenery, you'll see that only parts of them seem to have hitboxes. I think only their legs have hitboxes, their bodies seem to have none. No wonder they are such a pain to hit!

Edited by Redmess on Oct 20th 2018 at 2:42:52 PM

On the topic of wonky hitboxes, I think the hardest Artemis Hunt boss for me was definitely the Lykaon Wolf - not because of the wolf spawns, though they didn't help, but because the Wolf itself has a really frigging weird hitbox for Hero Strike. Unless the spear hits the Wolf in the face (during, remember, an animation that is meant to sweep the legs out from under a human), it does no damage and still consumes Adrenaline and the cooldown.

I'm finding the farting boar to the be worse (The wolf sucked but thankfully he's super vulnerable to the scatter shot bow skill).

He's got the same wonky hitbox as the first boar. But the fart clouds are persistent, and can easily box you in, making the hard dodges even worse if they send you into poison. And if you leave the arena he heals back at full health. And unlike the wolf he's got a bajillion HP so killing him with three shots of the bow's multi arrow is not gonna happen.

Edited by Ghilz on Oct 20th 2018 at 12:55:16 PM