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  1. #1

    Finished AC Origins

    I return to the forums with another completed game under my belt, this time it was AC Origins which I started when it came out but lost my xbox account (and my digital copy of the game). It was my interest in restarting and finally finishing this game last year that inspired me to replay the entire series and it was so worth it. Having played all the games back to back I picked up on lots of references to previous games that I missed in my original attempt at the game. It was interesting at the end when the final boss Septimus said "Caesar is the father of understanding" and i paused the game and was like wait whaaaaa thats not what the templars say, they say "May the father of understanding guide us" so Caesar is apparantly the first Templar grandmaster? :O

    FYI, I do have the DLC but havnt played yet, just finished the campaign so I'll be doing those next, may update post if anything happens in them.

    1) Loved the regular callbacks to previous games.

    2) First ac game i gave a 10/10 to. Granted it is my favourite setting so far but oof the music was awesome, the graphics really couldnt ask for more improvement, the characters and story were super interesting and above all else memorable! i was revisiting areas and recalling the npc's and quests I had done there. Then there is the gameplay, this might be the single greastest change between any of the games. It's like they took everything we already had and either overhauled it or improved it so that it actually felt like a fresh game and not the same as previous games some tighening of mechanics.

    3) Apologies, this point is long so bear with me!!
    I think the weakest point of the game was Aya, there were some other minor annoyances in the game but they were ignorable, Aya though I was unfortunately forced to play and it made these weaknesses blaringly obvious. As a character I thought Aya was interesting, at first she seemed cool, I was excited to try her I really was but over the course of the game i got the impression that she was a broken woman, she was just too weak to face the death of her son and she chose to focus 100% on work to push off and delay the grieving process to the point that it wore down her marriage.
    Bayek too dont get me wrong the man was also pretty damaged, you saw it in his reactions anytime a kid was in danger or he met someone he thought had been involved in his sons death but Bayek was noticably trying to get back to a good place in life mentally. He was working hard to protect people to make sure no one else would ever go through what he went through again and he had that stone circle mission where he looked at the stars and remembered times he was teaching his son about the gods and then when you visited them all he had an 'at peace' moment where he returned to siwa and completed Khemu's dream. It was a touching moment that showed how Bayek was always remembering and trying to do right by his son while giving some closure to his trauma. Bayek as a whole was just a great character, loyal to his wife, happy and social with kind people, angry and vengeful to people he perceived to be in the wrong and he even showed annoyance in that quest where a wife asks you to find her drunk husband and the whole time you escort him home he is talking about all the women he sleeps with until bayek tells him to shut up.
    Now to bring it back to Aya, she very much had one personality the whole game, she showed some joy when with Bayek but other than that it was very much mission orientated. She seemed to avoid discussing her son to avoid the pain, she pushed away her husband emotionally and reguarly went seperate ways with him for extended periods, I don't remember any closure missions she was involved in at all, she completely closed off her heart to love and seems to have caused more hurt for both herself and Bayak without making any attempt to get back to a healthy mental state.
    Then the game ended with her narrating a letter she sent to bayak and the camera showing her vanishing into the crowd before it returned to Bayak for post campaign gameplay and this felt..... weird? The person we played the entire game was Bayak and then he wasnt the focal point of the end it was his wife who we played maybe 4 times in the whole campaign, it is like if ezio did all of ac 2 and then we switched to his uncle for the final mission in rome to take down rodrigo, it would be like what? why? No harm done i guess just an interesting way to close it out.

    Everything above was all just my thoughts on Bayek/Aya personalities and why Bayek was great but Aya was sort of stuck in a bad place, now for the actual gameplay problems with Aya that really cemented her as the weakest link in the game (in my opinion). Why the heck does she have no menu options? what the hell. When I play Aya there is no map to guide me, there is no abilities screen to get stronger and above all else there is no gear screen ! like whyyyyyy. It's hard enough that Aya doesn't have the eagle to help scout a location for enemies but she doesn't even have a map to look at the environment? Then the abilities, all my progress with bayak undone when I use her, now sure making a whole new tree for her would be more work but i definitely would have appreciated if his abilities (or some of them) carried over to her, it was frustrating being unable to look at what she had available in combat. Now the third thing, why couldnt she be equipped? Bayak sitting there with 1000 weapons he has looted from all over Egypt and he doesn't offer his wife her pick of his inventory? Im loaded with legendary gear and poor aya is going into combat with blue quality bows and it just felt painful. So Painful. Granted the enemies were lower level with Aya fought them so that she stood a chance but when with the final boss being 7 levels lower than he was when Bayak fought him it went from me winning in 1 attempt to needing like 20 attempts because Aya did sooooo little damage I had to perfectly dodge the boss for like 20 minutes straight while slowly wittling his health bar. EDIT: Adding this on, playing aya felt like playing desmond miles. It was always weird cause you lost features you had when in the animus and gameplay was boring without it. I get that aya's dna was syncing but still weird.

    None of these things made me hate the game, as I said still 10/10, it's just that her limited gameplay options made it such a chore to use her on land and watching her push Bayek away when he tried to help also made me sad until they finally (and inevitably) broke up.

    4) The bosses were fun, enemies had different fighting styles that I put effort into learning so i could win against them, the god events, the elephants around the map and then the large soldiers who were bosses in quests. My personal favourite boss was the archer lady, i think she was the hyena, you fought her near the giza pyramids and it was fun playing hide and seek with her in a sandstorm, dodging arrows and following them back to the source to whack her on the nose with my staff. It was just so nice seeing bosses with such unique combat styles so i got to try my skills in multiple situations. This applies to the phylakitai too, them all having different weapons, being mounted or on foot as a preference, it made each bounty hunter different to fight with and it just worked well for me.

    5) Loved the loot, it was enjoyable searching for loot in tombs or on bodies and slowly equipping better until i got to legendary gear then upgading it to my current level as I went to keep the things I wanted relevant. Not as indepth as other games with crafting/upgrading but sometimes simple is better and in this case it was clear what I needed to do but not so grindy that it got boring.

    6) The new combat felt so gooooood!!! So much better than the old "just counter it" from the original games or the super annoying "hack hack hack 34 times" from the ac3,4,rogue combat. It especially felt better than syndicate where you couldnt switch equipped weapon mid combat. it just felt nice to have a gameplay that is simple enough to pickup in like, an hour, but still rewards skill. I hope it keeps getting better in odyssey and valhalla. The different types of bows and melee weapons, the eagle vision from above being able to see the layout of a base and mark enemies all worked together so well for assassinations and open brawls.

    7) Quality of life changes, being able to collect arrows just by running over them instead of looting a body and being able to have your mount follow the path while you went to grab a drink were small but nice improvements :O

    8) Enough gameplay stuff, the music was so nice to listen to, some of it felt nostalgic like older games? but also some was new or felt like it was relevant to egypt. The stories both main and side quests were soooo good, seeing the assassins creed founded was epic, seeing how they got the logo from that eagle skull Bayek dropped in the sand. Meeting random Npc's around the map and remembering their quests like 2 weeks later when i revisited that area showed how much i paid attention, seeing the destruction around the map from the civil was is always interesting and the impact of some of those moments in the game were unexpected. Genuinely unexpected. Shadya's story man, when i read the note that she had taken the ledger and then had a bad feeling for the rest of the quest, the moment I saw the quest marker in the nile i had a sinking feeling, went out there and oof that was an impactful moment. The voice actors and the music really sold it (the mum crying too). When bayak found his best friend in the vault I didnt even see it coming but bayeks yelling NO really sold me on how deeply the loss hurt him. There were just so many moments in this game where i was surprised they took the twist that I had to appreciate how much must have gone into this story telling. It. Was. Awesome.

    9) EDIT: Editing the thread to add this, was it weird to anyone else what happened in the modern times? Youre in a cave presumably in egypt, the you get attacked and kill the 4 attackers, then you just hop back in the animus and next time you wake up desmond's dad is there. Like what happened? Why did abstergo just give up after losing 4 dudes, i guess the assassins could have protected her but it is established they are quite weak and in hiding from abstergo right now so I'm surprised she didnt move her portable animus like they did in ac2. Isnt that the point of a portable animus?

    Gonna spend more time in origins doing the dlc but then it will be on to Odyssey, kind of intimidated by it because I've heard it was massive massive massive. Any tips to avoid burnout in that game?
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  2. #2
    Just returning to origins after a few months break, have not gone to odyssey yet as I was burnt out. I have even more praise since returning to origins. The tours are so interesting, learning about history has never been fun for me but i can say with all honesty if my teachers had access to assassins creed when i was in school I would have paid so much attention as I am a visual learner and seeing the world around me is just far more interesting than a book. Extending off this, if VR is ever introduced into assassins creed games as a gimmick it could legitimately be useful from an educational standpoint. Recreating buildings, cities, events as closely as possible and letting people look around the assassins creed worlds would be so great for history classes.

    Random thoughts aside, bought the dlc for origins and i mean.... i dont think ive ever bought an AC dlc, maybe for brotherhood but no other game had interesint dlc. Ive enjoyed seeing how the creed was formed and exploring the new areas and I just have so much love for this game. I still remember the stories of more than half the targets i killed in the main game like 3+ months ago. Seeing how the creed came about was interesting as always and i just got an AC2 vibe from origins. Considering AC2 was my fave game and ac origins got a 10/10 from me I can honestly say this game is a masterpiece.

    The story and characters were memorable, the location was so detailed, i have no idea how accurate the heiroglyps and artworks are but it all fits the world so I run with it and the more i explore the more i am drawn in. I can look almost anywhere on the map and be like "oh yeah i did that quest over there with those farmers". the only other games I remember to that level of detail are ac2 and ac brotherhood and it comes down to me loving the main character and what i do with him instead of grinding through missions with maybe half my attention on the game.

    Well done with this game!! genuine props to the team even though i am yeaaaaars late. It's one of the games that will stand the test of time just because of how well it was built. Once i get these achievements I'll move on to odyssey finally
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