Eurogamer has just published an article detailing their experience with the first eight hours of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. In addition, YouTuber JoRaptor shared a video discussing important information about the present day segment of the game as well as other crucial info. Below is a summary of the most important information of the article and the video. Please beware that the article will be rich in spoilers. Proceed with caution.

Odyssey begins with a flashback to your grandfather King Leonidas’ famous battle. You play as Leonidas as he leads his troops into a chest-kicking, pec rippling face-off. The action and time period shifts forward a family generation to a young Kassandra and Alexios, albeit via a brief explanatory scene with modern day protagonist Layla. Leonidas’ story explains where Kassandra/Alexios came from – he is her bloodline, and the previous owner of her handy First Civilisation speartip weapon. Kassandra is by the far the most captivating to watch and by this point you have already made your choice, and what follows next has an awful, doomed sense of inevitability regarding the sibling you did not pick – even if it doesn’t play out exactly as expected. The story of your family begins the game and runs throughout – as you uncover more about your bloodline and try to reconnect with your past – but then intersects with the other two other strands, which are better rooted into existing Assassin’s Creed lore. There’s the Cult of Kosmos storyline, which so far has been hinted to be a kind of moody proto-Templar organisation with similarities to Origins’ baddies, the Order of Ancients. There’s the First Civ storyline, which enables mystical elements like your speartip and that Medusa fight to take place in Ubisoft’s version of Ancient Greece, all of which Layla is investigating in the modern day. Ubisoft Quebec senior producer Marc-Alexis Côté stated: “There are three storylines but for most people ‘finishing’ the game would be completing the family storyline. It is an epic game – to use the Greek word – but we try and make every minute you spend in it valuable and growing [you] as a character. I think people will like that it has a variety of tones,” he continued, “you can choose to make it funny, it has made me cry – this game has a way of creating emotions depending on the choices you make which makes my time playing it feel valuable. I hope it will be the same for you.” The game begins strongly with its introductory region of Kephallonia, an island where you have a sort-of family to look after in your role as a struggling, failing mercenary, and where you get caught up in the machinations of local thug, a one-eyed lump nicknamed The Cyclops – there’s a hilarious scene with a goat – before you travel by boat to Megaris, the first properly big region, to hunt the first big target of the game. Megaris is the first of many regions where you arrive with instructions to sap the strength of its leader. “We’ve got 20,000 [dialogue] lines for the procedural system,” Côté states. “We try to monitor what the player is doing and provide you with a quest that could compliment what you are doing or what you have done. These quests are sometimes very useful to level up – they appear constantly, but we always try and signal them through the HUD [via] a different icon.” The introductory present day sequence at shows Layla in a small warehouse with Victoria Bibeau (from the comics) where Layla will have just found the Book of Herodotus and the broken Spear of Leonidas underneath, and decides to get into the Animus. Victoria mentions that she made a few alterations to the Animus since the last time Layla used it. Eventually Layla gets into the Animus for fear that Abstergo reaches the artifacts first, even though they both aren’t sure if the Spear and the book are legitimate. According to Victoria Bibeau, the reason why players choose between Alexios and Kassandra is because the Book is in rough conditions. She states that the DNA found on the Spear has identified two strands for two individuals, so it’s up to Layla to choose which strand to pursue. Layla (and the player) chooses the character, stating that she doesn’t want Abstergo to get their hands on the artifact and that she can find it in Ancient Greece, so Assassins can rise again. Moving on to the historical segment, after ending up on Kephallonia at the beginning of the game, young Alexios / Kassandra is taken care of by someone named Markos, a “business man” who usually lets other people take care of his problems. The protagonist (Alexios/Kassandra) is one of them. The game begins with a tutorial set in the island of Kephallonia at the beginning of the game and players will witness flashbacks focusing on Alexios & Kassandra’s past, as well as a fully playable segment as Leonidas, their grandfather. The ruins of Odysseus Palace -from Homer’s Odyssey- will be explored at the beginning of the game.Similarly to Origins, after a set of quests in Kephallonia, a larger quest requires the protagonist to sail away from the island and explore Greece. When in the process of performing quests where the player needs to steal something stealthily, if the protagonist is spotted, the enemies will know the quest giver requested that they steal said object, so they’ll attempt to attack the quest giver and the protagonist will be required to rescue him/her. Among the three narrative threads; the family arc, the Cult of Kosmos arc and the First Civilization arc, the family arc will be the most branched narrative and therefore, it’s the one with the biggest influence on the ending. The First Civilization arc will intertwine with the family plot-like, and will get more intricate towards the end.

For the original article, please click here. To watch the footage by YouTuber JoRaptor, please click here.