Assassin’s Creed Odyssey
While Assassin’s Creed Origins is where the franchise first embraced the open-world, action-RPG design popularized by The Witcher 3, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey is the game that decided to bloat it as much as humanly possible. Random side quests with abysmal writing and boring objectives like “Go kill X”, outposts that felt very similar, the world design that completely disincentivized stealth (forget any parkour)… let’s not forget the ship management, daily quests, loot grinding and other assorted time sinks.
All this couldn’t diminish Odyssey’s best aspects – the story-telling and characters, the visuals and music, the actual good side quests or how solid the combat felt sometimes. Still, if Ubisoft Montreal had trimmed the scope and focused on quality content, like more memorable side quests, the world could have been truly exceptional.
