Hey chums, I hope you're all doing well?

I'm a little concerned that I'm not going to finish this game. I played for...4/5 hours a day, EVERY DAY for about a week. I haven't been into a game like this for a LONG time, probably since Persona 5 actually. I did EVERY LITTLE ? on EVERY place I went to, did all the forts, as many sidequests as I could, and...I think I've burnt something out in my brain? (I'm about 33 hours in)

Main story wise, I just got to Perikles in Athens. I did a few of his little farting about missions, and I'm now hunting my mother across 3 hugely different areas.

Unfortunately, I think I'm a little...I dunno...done with the game?

I've really enjoyed the story, especially the Cult of Kosmos which is easily the high point of the game for me: I love sailing around, finding them and killing them, getting the next part of that story from the kill.

This happened to me with Divinity: Original Sin 2 also. I got really far(50 hours in, up to the Nameless Isle) and then just got totally disinterested in actually finishing the game off.

Can anyone inspire me to finish it off? Does the story reach a satisfying conclusion? Is the Cult meaningful? Do the later game areas inspire?

I'm sick of starting games and not finishing them!

I have fallen into the same rut, also with AC: Odyssey right now. Got really into it, then slowly meandered away, my Kassandra is about level 24 and also just about to head over to finr Perikles.

Did the same with Spider-Man, kind of fell right off at the first Mary-Jane "stealth" sequence, notably because the idea of this female reporter caught by a group of criminal bikers really hit home for some reason (too much True Detective I think).

I think you both just have to stop doing every little thing and be more quest focused. I’ve mostly been doing main and gold side quests and I’m much less burnt out on it.

It's an open-world Ubisoft game. Go figure.

Friendly sarcasm aside, I'm taking a break from the game as well from roughly the same part of the game because I have more important things to do that don't involve video games, specifically painting assignments which often don't leave me with much time for games, especially ones of the 50+ hour open-world variety. And also because doing the same thing over an extended period of time just gets boring after a while, which can be said about a lot of things outside of Ubisoft's homogenized game design.

So, I think it's just more of a matter of just doing something else for a bit and just make a note to get back to it later. It's not like the game is going to become randsomware just because you don't play it for a week or two.

Yeah, the largeness of that game, combined with the meaninglessness of most of your actions, was one of the reasons I fell off it pretty hard, despite really liking Origins.

I mean, what's the point of the whole territory control thing if it just resets everyday? I get that they need to maintain some minimal level of historical accuracy vis-a-vis the Pelopennesian War, but it makes everything you do feel so pointless. I also really don't like the level scaling system - it makes all my levels and skills feel virtually meaningless, and leaves me with no sense of real progression for all the hiking around I'm doing.

I've been finding myself comparing it to the Division 2 a lot the last couple of days. Both of them have the UbiSoft "Big Open World Map With Icons" going on, but the Division manages to make that feel a lot more meaningful to do rather than just being a checklist of stuff.

Odyssey definitely suffers from "Ubisoft open world syndrome", which was disappointing since I didn't feel that with Origins (maybe the year break and overall refresh helped there).

I did the same, wandered the map and finding all the ?'s I could. This is a recipe for burnout in this game, it's just so jam packed with STUFF and little has any meaning.

Excellent video on the boringness of Ubisoft games. Its fine as a game, except for the awful level scaling, but I mainly play AC games on PC as an ancient world simulator and use a cheat engine for XP boosts and money and stuff to avoid the grind

I finished the game but kind of had my fill of it by the end. I actually went back and bough the DLC (expensive!) but so far I've been wrapped up in Far Cry New Dawn and The Division 2. So I guess Ubisoft has free rent in my brain, etc.

That doesn't change the fact that this was my clear GOTY last year, though. I had a fantastic time with it and I'm still hoping to hit the DLC at some point. Only so many hours in the day, though.

I loved it, and I'd be surprised if it didn't wind up being at the top of my best-of-what-I-played list, but I definitely get that the grind is a bit much. If I had to do it again, I'd blow through the main story first and foremost. So much of that game feels like you "need" to do something, like taking over territories, when it's mostly just kind of adjuvant ways to fill the game out without any real reward.

I've tried to play it twice today, and I think I'm entirely done.

I lasted about 5 minutes moving about the world and was so bored of it. I couldn't be arsed moving from place to place, and completely had ZERO interest to play. Now I just need to find a new game to play...

Sounds like you had a great time and got more than your money’s worth. Walking away isn’t a bad option.

Totally. Those 35 or so hours were well worth the £24 I payed. I don't need to finish a game nowadays to enjoy it. For these mechanic dense games, I enjoy existing in their world until I've had my fill of the gameplay!

Yeah I made it to Athens and burnt out as well after consuming everything in its entirety up to that point - ultimately I can say I enjoyed the came, but am left feeling pretty bummed I'll probably never finish the story and see the remaining (overwhelming majority?) of the game.

I do think that is worth some criticism though, the gameplay was fun, the exploration fun, the main story interesting but everything else was just uninteresting along the way.. all the side quest dialog, boring. This is coming from a guy who replays the entire mass effect series every two years and doesn't skip ANY dialog even though I've probably played through ME1 15-18 times by this point?

The older I get, the larger my family becomes, the less time I have; I don't have the time to listen to uninteresting dialog or get bogged down by endless minutia of side objectives. Maybe I missed something but the game required a bit of grinding these out to stay level appropriate for the content too so I couldn't even just mainline the quest.

I think its a detriment to the game and ultimately leaves one with a bit of a bad taste in your mouth when you end it... vs say God of War which ended at just the right time, I wanted to keep playing a bit more but it was over and I was left looking forward to whats next.

I wish more games would follow the Witcher 3 model of open world. Nearly every side quest in that game told an exciting or at least interesting story. That's what a side quest should be, a story that wants to be told.. not a fetch quest gussied up with some cutscene tech.

Same experience I had with Odyssey and Original Sin II. Some games I can finish after playing for over 100 hours (BotW and Persona 5) and feel sad that they are finally over. But games like Odyssey and D: OS2 just feel overly long after just 50 hours. I can't quite put my finger on what it is, because I enjoyed the gameplay of Original Sin 2 more than Persona 5.

Lots of people down on Odyssey! I'll chirp in to say that it's probably my favorite AC game. It's very appropriately named because the game gives me such a great sense of adventure. Its storytelling is definitely weak, especially in its side quests, but the world is so gorgeous that I have felt compelled to hit every question mark on the map and 100% complete every region even as I cross the 90 hour mark. I still have entire regions that I have yet to visit too.

I dropped about 45 hours in that I really enjoyed, but basically just put it down for a while to try and pre-emptively avoid any feeling of burnout. I really like the game and I don't want to end up getting to a place of souring on it and just wanting to finish it and be done, so I think I'll probably have to go through it in a couple of chunks with breaks in between!

I can understand getting burnt out. I just put in 75 hours to see the final cultist and story finished, and just started the DLC a bit. If you focus on the story quests it's probably a lot shorter. There's a ton of decent micro-stories on the islands though, for a bit more variety, although everything seems to turn into hide-stab-repeat in the forts.

I had that same experience with Origins to the point where I can’t even think about starting to play Odyssey. I rather dislike what they did with Assassins Creed, and unfortunately for me this new model is selling really well so they have no reason to go back to the more focused narrative driven AC of days past. I’m not even one of those guys that gets way into the traversal system but I do think they went in the wrong direction here, choosing to focus on expanding combat instead of movement. Now instead of an interesting stealth, platformer it’s just a string of very similar feeling engagements. This I think, among many other smaller reasons, is why the game starts to drag at a certain point.

Sometimes less is more.

Agree with the above poster after remembering what Black Flag felt like: I got the same satisfaction from a pretty environment with lots to explore and sail but I also had a good narrative and a good stealth action game. In Odyssey everything is just OK, it doesn't really do any of the other elements better so it feels bland

I've been mainlining the story, i just miss the days of finding a new town/city in an RPG being a monumental occasion. the game is fun but so routine.

@humanity: But all of that traversal has evolved just as much as the combat. Older games were bad stealth games where it was never worthwhile since it was always faster to just have enemies die attempting to swing at you, and just integrating the context sensitive movement when it's needed removed all of the annoying instances where you would launch off a building in some random direction.

@efesell: I don’t know if I would call it an evolution. It’s the equivalent of introducing auto-combos in fighting games. You eliminate the possibility of messing up the input but you also eliminate player agency to a large degree. Before it definitely wasn’t perfect and I jumped off to my death or missed jumps plenty of times but I still had a lot of agency. When falling next to a wall I could reach out and grab a ledge, I could control if I jump over something or slide on the ground. Now all of this is automated and all you do is hold up - there is absolutely zero nuance to it. I guess that’s evolution in a way but like I said it feels like they went too far with it.