Assassin's Creed Odyssey is venturing into territory the Assassin's Creed franchise has never fully immersed itself in before in an attempt to fully honor the premise of making history your playground. Explaining this new creative direction as "putting choice at the core" of the Odyssey experience, Ubisoft's new Assassin's Creed is going to be incorporating romance options into the gameplay. The two playable characters, Alexios and Kassandra, will have a wealth of romance-able characters, a decision narrative design director Mel MacCoubrey says will help personalize the experience for each player.

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"With our focus on relatedness between the player and the game, we wanted a story that would impact people, so we wanted to tell a personal story. In Assassin's Creed Odyssey, we're telling a story of a family that has been torn apart and a family tragedy," she told IGN during a group interview at a Ubisoft press event at E3 2018. "We thought it would be better to place those romances in the world, to have their own stories to be able to develop those stories further, instead of forcing an opinion on you as a player."MacCoubrey was emphatic that all the choices made in Odyssey are "gray," where the outcomes of doing something bad like lying won't inherently be bad, and the outcome of bring friendly won't necessarily be positive. For romance, that means that there won't be obvious courtships: "Just because you're clicking the heart doesn't mean you're going to get it.""It is a selfish experience, and we wanted you to be engaged in how you're talking to people and how they're going to respond to you, and romance is a part of that," MacCoubrey said.That also means players can define their romantic experience in Assassin's Creed Odyssey by courting either male or female characters, regardless of their main character's gender. The Assassin's Creed Odyssey narrative team went to recorded ancient Greek history to draw direct inspiration for how romance and sexual tension was portrayed in the famous Greek texts."It is totally up to you how you want to play those options, and they're available to anybody," said MacCoubrey, citing comedies like Aristophanes's Lysistrata and Herodotus's Histories as texts that are "rife with sexual tension." "Almost all of the stories in ancient Greece touch on this in some way. ... We definitely had to do our research, and it was liberating for the team as well, I think, to be able to look at romance through that lens."Alexios and Kassandra were created as a strong base personality character that is "very compassionate," "strong-willed," and "passionate." Though both of their base stories are the same, MacCoubrey finds herself playing each of the characters as different people while Odyssey is in development. She expects players will have a similar experience, where the choices they make playing Alexios or Kassandra will help send them on unique journeys that will make them feel distinct as different characters.Assassin's Creed Odyssey will be released on October 5. You can preorder it right now in Standard Gold Steelbook , and Ultimate Editions For more on Assassin's Creed Odyssey, learn about how the RPG focus redefines the series . Additionally, here's 20 minutes of gameplay:

Terri Schwartz is Editorial Manager of Entertainment at IGN. Talk to her on Twitter at @Terri_Schwartz