Assassin's Creed Series, Where Parkour Meets Murderhobos Options

[SubRosa]

So I started playing Assassin's Creed Odyssey a few nights ago. It has been a love/hate relationship. For starters the beginning of this game is insanely difficult, even on Easy. Once past the sort of tutorial with King Leonidas, the game gave me two thugs to kill. That was no problem. So I thought ok, I can do this.

Then I was out walking admiring the scenery and a wolf attacked me. Ok, no big deal. Pretty much RPG 101 is fighting either rats, or wolves. The next thing I knew I was dead. The wolf hit me once, and I lost 90% of my health. I hit it about 4-5 times, which took it down to about 60% of its health. Then it hit me again, and it was over. I reloaded, thinking maybe it was a fluke. It was not. I tried it about 6 times, and died in two hits every time.

*sigh*

So I went back to an older save, and avoided that area with that particular wolf. I killed some bandits, no sweat. A few hours later I almost paniced when I ran into several wolves. But I killed them all. So I figured, ok, this is getting better.

Then the game says a bounty hunter is after me, named Talos (maybe he was looking for his Stormcrown?). I ran into him shortly after, and it was the same story. He hits me twice and I am dead. I hit him a dozen times, and it barely moves his health bar. So I reloaded from an older save, and avoided him. Hours later I try attacking him again, and again, I die about a dozen times. Hours later I figured out that I was doing a lot more damage with a bow. So I tried that against him, and died about a dozen times. So reload to earlier again, and hours later tried for a fourth series of times. After about the 4th time I was able to kill him using just the bow. My guess is that he had about 30 - 40 times my health.

*sigh*

I have no idea if this is indicative of the entire game or not. What makes it more difficult is that there is no command console, and no mods aside from reshades and graphics tweaks. Ubisoft - the game company - is one of those rabid microtransaction lovers. They want you to spend tons of money in their game store to avoid grinding your toon. So they cut off any way of them losing money by making modding or using the console impossible.

Normally this would be a no-brainer for me. I would just delete the game and forget it. But the truth is the game world is just beautiful. I love just walking around and looking at things. I am also deeply impressed with the lengths they went to in order to accurately depict Ancient Greece. This is the real deal. Statues and temples are not pristine white edifices. They are painted in bright colors. People wear the right outfits, down to the wide brim hats. The homes, the lamps, the amphorae, it is all right.

So I am plodding along, hoping these weird lopsided combats are not common. I have had a lot of fights that worked out just fine. Others not so. The sharks in a sunken temple were another insanely frustrating experience. But enough about that.

Edit: After playing a few days, I can definitely say that the game gets a lot easier once you get past Talos, and reach 5th level or so. You can take on packs of enemies the same level as you and defeat them so long as you are paying attention and use some tactics, like keep moving so they cannot all gang up on you at once.

Greeking out

A view from up high (atop a statue of Zeus)

Let's go boating!

There are giants beneath the waves

Uh oh, found the edge of the Truman Show

[SubRosa]

Today I tried out The Cheat Engine, which has a plugin/table for AC Odyssey.

I have never used it before. But it worked pretty easily. It is a memory hack. So you start your game, then Alt + Tab back to your desktop and start the Cheat Engine. Then you click on the Select Process To Open button and pick out the game. Then you click on the button right next to that to load the table above.

From there you can edit some things in your game. You can add some item packs, but it looks like not every individual item. I think most of these are micro-dlcs they want you to pay for. You can also edit your crafting supplies to give you however many you want. I used it to give myself more shards of the Spear of Leonidas, and more leather (since I do not like killing animals to get it).

If you want to add multiple items like the shard pieces, you can just click on the box for it, then unclick it, and click it again. As many times as the amount you want.

As this automatically updates the game as it is running, you don't save anything in the Cheat Engine interface. You can just turn it off when you are done. The changes you make will be saved when you save you game as normal.

The reason I was looking for this is tied into how the abilities work. Many of them are capped by the current level of the Spear of Leonidas. It is really just the broken off head of the spear, which you use as an offhand dagger. The only way to upgrade the spear, is to go along the main quest and find and kill Cultists. The Cult of Kosmos are the arch bad guys in the story. They are a secretive cabal manipulating the Greek World from behind the scenes, and it is implied that they engineered the Peloponnesian War, which is taking place during the game. Each Cultist has a shard which you can use to upgrade the spear.

I really found this process clunky. It is a mostly open-world game. You can travel anywhere you want. But each region does have a minimum level listed for it. That is the minimum level of all the foes in the area. So you don't want to go to the places above your current character level. It lists all these on the in game map, which is nice. So unlike Fallout New Vegas the game won't just kill you if you try to walk straight north to Vegas when you start. It at least warns you that you will be in over your head.

But as I was just exploring the open world, I was lagging behind in the main quest. Because I was not searching for Cultists. So I have been getting to points where I had ability points I could not spend, because I had not upgraded the spear high enough. This is why I looked into the Cheat Engine and the Inventory Editor table above. It allowed me to upgrade the spear and spend all those points I could not use, and keep exploring the world at my leisure.