I’ve been a huge fan of the Assassin’s Creed games since the beggining. I loved exploring big city replicas, the plot, the life in their environments. But the last few games have supposed a change in the game’s philosophy: they moved to an RPG approach and completely ditched any hint of realism.

AC has never been a realistic game. Every game’s ending used to go crazy with gods and ancient civilations, but it’s never gone over a certain “threshold” of plausability. Yeah, there were crazy stuff but you didn’t feel like it was physically impossible for these things to have happened in the Renaissance Italy, it was just extremelly unlikely. On the newer games though, you have superpowers, ancient magic weapons with levels, huge unmissable anachronisms…

As someone who used to enjoy the first games, these changes are simply unbearable. In my opinion it’s been a huge mistake from Ubisoft to do this. It just doesn’t matter if the games are good or not, you are delivering something so different to the expectations that all your player base is going to feel weird about it. When I played Assassin’s Creed Origins I loved the environment but hated the weapons, the RPG grinding and the plot (which was pretty terrible to be honest, specially the ending).

The games really have all the ingredients of a game I would enjoy playing, but I’m not doing so because in that specific moment I wanted to play… an Assassin’s Creed.

So a couple days ago I decided to retake Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and give it an opportunity. But I also decided to completely ignore that I was playing an Assassin’s Creed, I’m going to pretend it’s a completely different thing with a completely different name. And surprise, I’m actually having lots of fun with it. The game is unnecessarily huge but as I said before, it has all the ingredients for a game that I would like. Also, I didn’t expect it to have ship battle mechanics like in Assassin’s Creed Pirates, which I loved; and the plot doesn’t suck, apparently (let’s see how it ends).

So really suprised and happy to be able to put aside my feelings and enjoy something for what it is. I’m definitely going to put some tens of hours in this game and who knows, maybe I give an opportunity to the newer Vikings game too. This said, I’m still excited about the announcement for the new AC game, which promises a return to its root. Even though I’m having fun with Odyssey there’s a little unfilled hole left by the AC saga in me.