5 Interesting Facts About Assassin's Creed Odyssey's Features and Gameplay

You Can Toggle Your Helmet for Function and Fashion

Games where players can wear armor, particularly helmets, occasionally have an option to toggle the headwear on or off so that players can benefit from the armor's bonuses while still seeing their character. When it comes to spending time building a character that players want to keep looking at, the helmets often get in the way of this, though they're hard to pass on due to the benefits.

Assassin's Creed Odyssey works around this by giving players the option to toggle the helmet on or off to get the best that it has to offer in terms of function and fashion.

You can toggle the headgear, so even if you're wearing headgear you still get the bonuses even if you don't see it," narrative director Melissa MacCoubrey told Game Informer.

Healing Items and Other Consumables Have Changed

The healing items in Assassin's Creed Odyssey and the rest of the consumables also work a bit different compared to past games. Players can now map different abilities to buttons with those effects having cooldowns, a change that'll free up players' funds to spend elsewhere.

"Healing, we wanted it to be a little more upgradable and the smoke bomb felt better on an ability," creative director Jonathan Dumont said. "There are a lot of places where you can spend money on in our game, and rather than spending it on consumables or looting them it felt better to have it in your toolbox."

Enemies Scale With Player Level

Improving on a problem that Assassin's Creed Origins had, players won't have to worry about revisiting an area that they've previously cleared and encountering enemies that are far beneath their new levels. While doing so allows you to breeze through these levels once again to get whatever you came for, it's almost a nuisance having to take out the enemies that are so much weaker but still are hard to ignore.

To fix that, Ubisoft has made enemy levels in these areas scale with players' levels. This means that they'll always be near the player level, something that Ubisoft said was a direct improvement from Assassin's Creed Origins, though the levels of enemies in previous levels will never fully catch up with the player.

History Buffs Can Expect Faithful Recreations of Events

Because of Assassin's Creed Odyssey's setting, much of what will happen and who players will encounter has already been recorded in history. Philosophers like Sokrates and certain historical events will be features that some players and many history buffs will already be familiar with, something that Ubisoft said it's tried to recreate as faithfully as possible.

"We did a lot of research as to how historical events played out, and those events are depicted as accurately as we can find out," MacCoubrey told Game Informer. "It was very important for us to keep them that way. An example would be the plague of Athens happens during our time period. We do a lot of research about what happened during the plague, how the plague started, who was there in Athens at that time, what were the rumors about it, that kind of thing, and then depicted it that way."

Expect to Parry Often

While other Assassin's Creed games have allowed for different defensive strategies by way of rolling around, scaling walls to escape, or defending yourself with a shield, Odyssey will put an emphasis on parrying. This is due to the fact that the player wields the Spear of Leonidas artifact that allows players to parry, and as game director Scott Phillips says, "you're going to be parrying much more often."

That's not to say that other strategies won't work though with Phillips explaining that you'll still be dodging and rolling around like normal during combat. He added that the combat moves at a quicker pace, so players will have to remain active during fights to succeed.