Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and polish

So after watching yesterday's livestream of the game and then watching a few more videos on YouTube I can't help but notice how unpolished this game looks. Cringy voice acting, janky running animations, lots of clipping, inconsistencies such as backstabbing a soldier with his shield on his back and a lot more. Don't get me wrong, I very much like the premise of the game and I'd love to play it since it's probably the only large-scale representation of ancient Greece. I just wanted to know what you guys think. Is this normal for an AC game now? I haven't played Origins yet but as far as I remember the older games were really polished when it came to animations, combat, etc. (with the exclusion of Unity).

I haven't watched any Odyssey footage, so can't comment on that directly, but...you may be misremembering the older games.

@gooddoggy: Hahaha wow, I'd forgotten about that clip. Maybe you're right, I've skipped AC4.

Eh... AC has always been a function over fashion series. Not that it doesn't have style, but it's never been above clipping or snapping animations etc.

When you put dialogue choices and female/male playable characters into it you've gotta pay the Bioware jank tax.

(Kidding, kidding! I do not remember AC 2 and 4 being particularly polished games, they're open world games. Quantity over quality is the name of the game. At one point in AC 4 I fell through a ship and was stuck inside it, swimming around in the sea)

Oh my god, @gooddoggy.

My time with the Assassin's Creed franchise has always been served with a healthy dollop of jank. Origins felt like the first in the series to have a good-to-great level of technical polish. But any open world affair is going to have issues, what with so many unpredictable elements colliding at all times.

With Origins last year there was a hilarious glitch in Jim Sterling's initial impressions video where one of the ships was rolling all over the place. I never saw any issues like that and I assume that there'll be a day one patch to clean a lot of things up.

Yeah there are some bugs in AC games usually, they're not like crazy game breaking or anything but it can result in some silly glitches. That said, maybe it depends on a person, I don't see anything unpolished or super janky about Odyssey, and I like the voice acting (#TeamKassandra). Clipping and stuff happens in every game and it's a problem every dev struggles with.

To play devil's advocate, You gotta remember that these are incredibly huge open worlds, especially in case of Origins and Odyssey and overall in any open world game you gonna see some bugs. That said, post launch support for Ubi titles is usually very good and they patch stuff/add requested QoL improvements fairly fast, that was the case with Origins and they already announced a roadmap of free events/content + paid stuff for Odyssey. I think having literally around 1000 people from like 8 studios working on 1 title wil result in some bugs as well.

And contrary to some weird popular belief, these games are not made in 1 year just because they are coming out almost every year, Origins and Odyssey were developed almost parallel to each other throughout 3-4 years by a variety of teams working together so that's why you can definitely see some similarities like the UI or gameplay features.

I feel like this might come off as a fan trying to excuse their favorite games/company but despite that there definitely can be some bugs on release, nothing too terrible and they usually fix it fast. I think with time and each title they have less bugs on release. Origins was definitely polished more than usual AC games, while AC Unity which was the first AC game entirely for this gen, gained notoriety for being extremely buggy.

@gooddoggy:

Oh wow that clip is a riot. I have never seen that before. I fell off this series hard after AC3, but it might be time for me to get back on that horse.

@gooddoggy: Man, this is the best thing I've seen glitch-wise since the screaming soldier from ME2.

@sethmode: I had never heard of that one, and had to look it up. You just made my week :D

"AAAaaaaaaaaaaaUUUUUUuuaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAhhhHHH"

- Blue Suns Trooper

The older games were polished? Are you insane?

People...

These games are getting bigger and bigger and bigger by demand and are made by human beings. They're going to have bugs. They're going to have jank. A 100 hour game with as many systems as this is gonna fuck up at some point.

Signed,

A human.

AC3 and Unity were buggy as all get-out. Unity's people bugs are great, but AC3's dirt paths were often just annoyingly broken, and not in a fun way. Having to chase down one of the villains in the late game on horseback while stuff went boom all around me led to me giving up on that game because there was so much debris in the way stopping my horse every few seconds.

I wish all of Ubisoft's games took place in the Animus so they could just call the bugs a feature that add to the immersion.

Bugs aside this game just looks like more Origins, which I dont think i'm up for.

@csl316: I always wondered how prevalent those bugs actually were in Unity. They became the calling card for that game, and everyone always posts that same screenshot, but throughout my entire playthrough of Unity I never once encountered anything like it. Plenty of annoying AI issues, scripting, and a TON of performance issues making lockpicking almost impossible, but nothing like weird skulls and stuff which is what everyone always posts.

I love Assassin's Creed but the games occasionally being mad fucked up is as much of a hallmark to the series as climbing towers.

@humanity: When did you play it? I never had the horror stories at launch but it was definitely rough. Whereas if you play it now it's actually kind of hard to think about just how much vitriol that game got.

Assassin's Creed 3 was legitimately one of the buggiest games I've ever played. The stuff in AC Odyssey is not only par for AC, but most large-scale open world games; in the latter case, it probably fares a bit better, honestly.

As long as Odyssey doesn't find a way to top the bullshit I experienced with Connor in 3 - a freeze bug which caused an audio loop of whatever the last "background sound effect" was AND jacked the volume up to what felt like maximum; or one where my ship disappeared, but I was still able to perform all relevant actions meanwhile, I just couldn't see it - I'll call that a victory.

Also, yeah. The no-face stuff in Unity.

Yeah AC3 was really buggy. I consider the stealth in that game basically broken, the ship combat had some amazing bugs when interacting with big waves. Black Flag was much more polished but still had a lot of the mechanical jankiness that was core to the AnvilNext engine.

I would argue that they broke the AI for stealth in AC2 (they would suddenly detect you during the weirdest moments) and didn't really fix it till Syndicate. Black Flag's AI only worked because they tuned it to be extremely dumb and forgiving, and placed bushes everywhere since they were the only reliable stealth mechanic.

With AC:Origins they took an extra year for polish, maybe they could have used another year for Odyssey but what I've seen so far it meets my expectations for modern open-world jank. I mean this game seems so much bigger than Origins in every way so I'm surprised it isn't more broken. I expect some "Ascension of the Jackdaw" levels of great bugs to hit Kotaku's Highlight Reel over the next couple months.

@cybexx: Yup. Agree on pretty much all. I remember being so frustrated in AC2 and Brotherhood with some of the "LITERALLY how did he see me!?" moments. Same with all of them to a certain extent; but yeah, it's been broken for a while.

Of course, having stealth broken hasn't reeeeeally mattered since 3... unless you're an idiot and you decide you want to go for 100% story sync (completing all optional objectives, for those who don't know). God, I swear I encountered half of the bugs I did only because I was replaying sequences SO often and with such a low amount of variety in how I played. "Attempt 23: Oh, failed again. Restart. Try exact same tactic but do better this time -- and my target is gone. Just... gone. Through the floor. And now he's dead and I completed the mission... but I still needed to complete the "kill all bodyguards" optional objective. *sigh* Restart. Ad nauseum."

Personally, I have a very low frequency of getting to experience the "fun" bugs in games. I always feel unlucky and seem to get the freeze, data leak or terrible audio-visual corruption bugs. No flying, spinning ships or faceless models for me. Probably some selection bias here, but whatever.

Having put a few hours into the game now I find it peculiar how there's been basically no talk about the loading in this game. Not that it's filled with too long load screens, but there's a bunch of short ones where they shouldn't be. Bring up the map, wait for it to load. Check your inventory, 3 second load. Start a conversation, 5 second load. Stop using your hawk, 3 second load. They're just all over the place. I didn't really notice it myself watching the QL (since they were usually filling the void with commentary), but when playing it it has quickly become quite tedious to deal with.

Doing a quick comparison to Origins it seems like every small transition load has been increased by like 2-3 seconds, which makes them incredibly much more noticeable.

@ares42: Is this on console? Because I definitely don't have those noticeable loads for the inventory, menus, maps ect. The Eagle can cause a load if it has flown to far away from me but that seems fair since it's rebuilding the world state after having gone too far ahead.

General loading screen load times for me are long but the games also not on my SSD so I give that a pass.

@efesell: On PS4 Pro. Double checked with the QL as well to make sure it wasn't just my console acting up.

@ares42@efesell Not played too much yet but it seems approximately the same as Origins in that regard playing on an Xbox One X at least.

Put about ten hours in - Definitely not as tight as say God of War or Spiderman from this year (But God Of War was a next level game) but nothing approaching what I would considered "unpolished." I've had zero crashes, no observable bugs so far and the only load time I've seen is after you die, which is about 40-60 seconds long.

I heard this one was less buggy then origins. Also remember those creepy turn inside out faces in the paris one...

Also voice acting has always being cheesy in AC "Assasino!"