Sharrukin's Palace

In this iteration of my blog, I’m not in the habit of reviewing things – it’s mostly about my own writing and other creative projects. However, once in a while, something is going to come along and blow me away to such an extent that I have to make an exception.

Case in point, the new video game, Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, which just came out about a week ago.

The premise behind the Assassin’s Creed series is that there’s an ages-old “secret history” of the world. Unknown to most humans, opposed conspiracies driven by advanced “precursor” technology have been fighting for thousands of years to either enslave humanity, or to protect humanity’s freedom. In most of the games of the series, the protagonist is an Assassin, fighting to defend humanity from its would-be enslavers by surgically removing their human pawns. The “Creed” that the title refers to is that an Assassin will never engage in indiscriminate violence. Instead, he uses stealth and misdirection to reach his target, applying violence only with great precision.

Okay, I’m a sucker for that kind of “secret history” premise. I’ve often used it in my tabletop games and my other writing. Also, of course, it was an idea characteristic of GURPS and other Steve Jackson Games products, back when I was writing and editing for them. So, years ago, I gave the original Assassin’s Creed a try. Unfortunately, I bounced hard. I simply could not figure out the control scheme, and when I hit the end of the tutorial chapter I found myself flatly unable to progress further. I dropped the game and never looked back.

Ten games and eleven years later, I’ve come back to the franchise, and oh my what a difference a decade of polish and development makes.

Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey is interesting in that it’s set in the same “secret history” timeline, but before the Brotherhood of Assassins was established. So, uniquely so far in the series, the protagonist is not an Assassin and isn’t subject to the Creed. As a result, the game is less dominated by stealth mechanics, and big combat scenes are more frequent. But then, that makes sense, because in this case the historical setting is . . .

Classical Greece, specifically in the first years of the Second Peloponnesian War.

Well. Anyone who knows me, or my creative history, knows that classical Greek history is kind of my catnip. The first book I ever wrote for Steve Jackson Games was a GURPS sourcebook covering ancient Hellenic civilization. I’ve spent thousands of hours since then, reading about and researching that era. I’ve even taken a stab at writing original fiction set in the period, and probably will again.

I love the ancient Greeks. Look closely at them, and all the idealization of later centuries drops away. They were hard-scrabble poor, resourceful, hard-working, earthy, short-sighted, quarrelsome, cruel and violent. The great empires and civilizations of the time tended to look down on them, poverty-stricken barbarians clinging to barren islands and promontories on the outer fringes of the true world. Yet in their time, despite their all-too-human nature, they accomplished miracles. It’s no exaggeration to say that our modern civilization is built, in part, upon the foundations that the Greeks put down.

Media adaptations of classical Greek history are vanishingly rare. There are novels by Mary Renault, Harry Turtledove, and others. There’s a fair amount of visual art. On the other hand, most films, video games, and other media have concentrated on mythological stories, or on the time of Alexander and his successors. The classical era, roughly from about 600 BCE to about 360 BCE, has been almost entirely ignored.

Until now.

I bought Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey almost on a whim. I remembered the bad experience I had with the original game. Still, the chance to experience Greece in that era, even under the distorting lens of a video game, was irresistible. I’ll be honest, that was the best gamble I’ve taken in a long time. I’ve been enjoying this game more than any other RPG since Mass Effect.

The gameplay is still oriented toward stealth mechanics and personal combat, although there seem to be more RPG elements than I remember from the original. The protagonist acquires a wide variety of armor, weapons, and gear, and can upgrade those to support several fighting styles. Open combat is much more frequent, and the protagonist can optionally participate in field battles between Athenian and Spartan forces. Sea combat is another integral part of the game; the protagonist gains command of a pentekonter early on, and can engage pirates, merchant ships, or Athenian or Spartan warships.

This is all quite well done. Combat feels smooth and fluid, you get plenty of chances to make tactical decisions, and the whole experience gives you the power-fantasy sense of being slightly superhuman. Fights can also be rather unforgiving, but you never lose more than the time since your last save point (and auto-saves are frequent even if you don’t use the quick-save function).

I really appreciate the quality-of-life features that have become common in games of this kind. For example, every object you can interact with gets a small marker in the interface, and as you approach you’ll get a subtle on-screen prompt as to which key to use. Enemy combatants provide visual cues telling you when to parry or dodge. Another feature I appreciate is that it’s easy to pause gameplay to review the map, rearrange your combat abilities, or just get reminders as to which keystroke does what! All of this is vastly improved over the original game, and it really helps one gain immersion rather than spending all our time struggling with the interface.

There’s a certain amount of linearity to the plot, but this is made up for by the fact that there are really three interwoven main plots going on, plus a ton of sidequests, plus plenty of sandbox content. You can follow the plots closely, or you can take time off to just wander the map and experience things.

And that’s what makes this game such a delight – the chance to experience the setting.

The over-world includes all of mainland Greece, most of the Aegean islands, and Crete. The major missing areas are the Asian coast, and “Greater Hellas” in the west. The scale is certainly compressed, but within the limitations of the game the level of detail is astonishing. One can find historical and mythological landmarks, even quite obscure ones, all over the place. Terrain features, landmarks, villages, and small towns are all in (more or less) the right places. The bigger cities seem to be laid out with remarkable accuracy. I’ve already spent hours wandering around Athens, for example, and everything matches the maps and descriptions I’ve seen of the city in the Periklean era. All of it is simply gorgeous, doubly so since the lighting is constantly changing with the passage of time and weather.

The map sets the tone, and the rest of the game follows suit. The development team have gone to amazing lengths to do their homework and present an authentic experience.

Wandering through the world, you will hear plenty of ambient dialogue in Greek (albeit in the koiné dialect rather than an ancient one, if I’m not mistaken). Cutscene dialogue is in English, but almost every actor has a Greek accent that’s somewhere between fair and perfect. Greek names and bits of vocabulary in dialogue are pronounced correctly; in fact, I’ve probably learned more from this game about the actual pronunciation of Greek than in years of prior reading. I understand the development team worked hard to assemble a voice-acting cast that was almost entirely either native Greek or at least of Greek descent. No lazy “Received Pronunciation to mark ancient peoples” trope here!

The cultural and historical setting are also surprisingly good. As a well-read layman in the period, I can certainly spot any number of details that are wrong:

• Classical Greek society was profoundly misogynistic, and the possibility of women soldiers, mercenaries, and generally footloose adventurers was just not on the table at the time.
• The very name applied to the region is odd. Everyone in the game keeps calling it “Greece” and the “Greek world,” and the name Hellas simply never shows up.
• The story of the actual Peloponnesian War is generally ignored, in favor of an abstract system by which the protagonist can help either Athens or Sparta to dominate specific territories.
• Land battle scenes are just completely incorrect: wild melees with no organization or formation whatsoever. (Sea battles are somewhat better, although there’s no sign of the authentic tactics there either.)
• In one important scene, the protagonist attends what is billed as a symposion at the home of Perikles in Athens. The actual scene doesn’t look anything like a genuine symposion, more like a modern social gathering with people gathering in little standing clumps for conversation.

I could go on; no media adaptation of the period is ever going to be completely authentic. To be honest, I don’t have too much trouble with any of those. Having done game design myself, I understand that it’s sometimes necessary to over-simplify or allow some failures of authenticity, in favor of producing a playable and compelling game.

Besides, it’s abundantly clear that the development team knew better in any case. For every detail that isn’t correct, there’s one that they got right. Individual historical figures look like real-people versions of the idealized statuary we have of them. They behave as we know they did from the surviving documents of the time. Even their dialogue seems authentic – characters who later appear in Plato’s or Xenophon’s dialogues sound as they would in a good English translation. (Sokrates is just as insightful, and just as infuriating, as he was reported to be in the primary sources.)

Some of the authenticity reaches down to the level of very obscure details. Every temple or shrine in Hellas has its worshipers, presenting their prayers to the gods in exactly the manner that was used at the time (very different from the way modern people pray). Visit the symposion at the house of Perikles, and you’ll spot a few revelers playing kottabos in the corner; take a moment to watch and everything will look right, down to the way the players are holding their wine-cups. Meet the young Alkibiades in Athens, and some of his dialogue is supremely ironic, given what we know about his future career. Anyone who knows the milieu well will appreciate the eye for detail – not to mention the numerous historical in-jokes!

In short, this is probably the best media adaptation ever done for this specific period of history. Playing the game is certainly no substitute for studying primary sources, but for anyone who has even a passing interest in the reality of the Hellenic world, it’s a superb experience.

For most of my life, I’ve had the hopeless wish to one day walk on the Athenian akropolis, seeing not the haggard ghost surrounded by tourist traps that we have today, but what it was in its time of glory. Now, in a sense, I’ve been there. Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey is highly recommended for any video-game player who has an interest in the era of classical Greece.