Making a game that has steep hardware requirements isn't normally a good way to sell lots of copies, but with each release Ubisoft manages to make Assassin's Creed even more demanding. Assassin's Creed Odyssey is the latest in a long string dating back to 2007, and the eleventh 'primary' game in the series—and that's not counting numerous console-only releases and spinoffs for mobile platforms. The last couple of games have made some welcome improvements to the series, however, and easily rank as some of the better installments.

That's the good news. The bad news? Odyssey is easily one of the most demanding games to come out this year. You'll need a potent graphics card to have any hope of breaking 60fps at 1080p high or above, and if you're hoping to max out a 144Hz gaming panel, you can pretty much forget about that. Even at 1080p low, running on the fastest CPU and GPU currently available, I came up a bit short of that mark, with inconsistent framerates helping to mar the experience. Fire up the game on a modest midrange PC with a GTX 1060 or RX 580 and you'll be dropping down to medium/high settings just to get close to 60fps.

You also need a potent CPU this round if you're after high framerates, though many CPUs can hit 60fps. 1080p low typically needs more than a 4-core/8-thread CPU to hit triple digits, while only the i7-8700K and i9-9900K can break 100fps at 1080p high (and that's only with an RTX 2080 Ti).

But don't let those numbers scare you off, as 60fps certainly isn't required to enjoy embarking on this Odyssey, and even medium quality (or high with a few judicious tweaks) at 1080p gets pretty close to a stable 60fps on popular hardware like the GTX 970 and above. We've also got some results using extreme budget graphics solutions, like Intel's HD Graphics 630. You're not going to get pretty visuals out of Odyssey at anything close to reasonable framerates, but it's still sort of possible to play the game.

Let's talk features quickly. Assassin's Creed Odyssey offers up most of the things we like to see, and the only missing link is mod support. A few reshade mods exist, along with some other minor tweaks, but with no official mod support you shouldn't expect a wide variety of game-altering tweaks.

Besides that omission, the game runs fine in widescreen, ultrawide, and even doublewide aspect ratios—as well as everything else I tried. You can adjust the FOV, though the range is limited to 85-115 percent. Keymappings and buttons are fully customizable, controllers work fine (though I prefer mouse and keyboard), and if you want to run with a locked framerate, that's supported—along with fully unlocked framerates.

Why would you want to run with a locked framerate? Because unless you have a G-Sync or FreeSync setup, Assassin's Creed Odyssey has inconsistent framerates that can cause microstuttering. I noticed this at launch and hoped patches and updated drivers would smooth things out. So far, that hasn't happened, which means even though average framerates may be okay, minimum framerates can fluctuate quite a bit. If you're bothered by microstutter, consider locking the framerate to see if that helps.

Assassin's Creed Odyssey system requirements

Here's what Ubisoft lists as the minimum and recommended system requirements for Assassin's Creed Odyssey.

MINIMUM – 720p low 30fpsOS: Windows 7/8.1/10 (64-bit only)Processor: Intel Core i5-2400 (4C/4T 3.1-3.4GHz) or AMD FX-6300 (6C/6T 3.5-3.8GHz)Memory: 8GB RAMGraphics card: Nvidia GeForce GTX 660 or AMD Radeon R9 285 (2GB VRAM)DirectX: Version 11Storage: 46GB available space

RECOMMENDED – 1080p high 30fpsOS: Windows 7/8.1/10 (64-bit only)Processor: Intel Core i7-3770 (4C/8T 3.4-3.9GHz), AMD FX-8350 (8C/8T 4.0-4.2GHz), or AMD Ryzen 5 1400 (4C/8T 3.2-3.4GHz)Memory: 8GB RAMGraphics card: Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 or AMD Radeon R9 290 (4GB VRAM)DirectX: Version 11Storage: 46GB available space

RECOMMENDED 4K – 4k high 30fpsOS: Windows 10 (64-bit only)Processor: Intel Core i7-7700 (4C/8T 4.2-4.5GHz) or AMD Ryzen 7 1700X (8C/16T 3.4-3.8GHz)Memory: 16GB RAMGraphics card: AMD Vega 64, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 (8GB VRAM)DirectX: Version 11Storage: 46GB available space

It's telling—and honestly sad—that so many major publishers continue to push 30fps at "recommended" settings on PC. As a minimum threshold, sure, I get that, but I strongly recommend aiming for 60fps, or at least closer to 45fps, if you want an optimal gaming experience in Assassin's Creed Odyssey. I do appreciate that Ubisoft doesn't suggest the latest CPUs and GPUs are required for the minimum settings at least, and you can certainly go below the above recommendations if you want. But in general, you'll want a fairly capable gaming PC to handle Odyssey.

Assassin's Creed Odyssey settings overview

Assassin's Creed Odyssey offers up 14 graphics settings, along with five presets (low, low, medium, high, very high, and ultra), plus other display elements like resolution, FOV, and aspect ratio. The list seems pretty comprehensive, but as I've seen with many other games of late, many of the settings cause almost no change in performance, at least on the hardware I tested. In fact, there's only one setting that will boost performance about 20-25 percent relative to the ultra preset, and a few more that can give a 2-5 percent increase.

The game includes a built-in benchmark that provides a good idea of real-world performance based on my testing. I ran the full test for each setting using the ultra preset, but with the setting in question on minimum. Odyssey does carry AMD Radeon/Ryzen branding, but it doesn't appear to matter much, as Nvidia GPUs tend to hold a substantial lead over their AMD counterparts.

Here's the short summary of settings and how they affect performance, using two midrange GPUs, the AMD RX 580 8GB and the Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB. These are running on an otherwise high-end PC (Core i7-8700K—see boxout below), but the GPU is the primary bottleneck with these cards at 1080p.

It's worth noting that Assassin's Creed Odyssey will use up to around 6GB of VRAM at maximum quality (the ultra preset), and slightly more at higher resolutions. You can basically double performance on the 1060 6GB and RX 580 8GB by dropping from ultra to low quality, and cards with 4GB or less VRAM should stick with the high preset for textures, or performance takes a dive.

Let's quickly go through the individual settings. There's a caveat here, and it's that the combined settings (via the presets) apparently have a greater impact than any single setting change. If you run the 1060 6GB at the low preset as an example, it's twice as fast as the ultra preset. But benchmarking with the 14 individual settings at minimum and calculating their product only gives a theoretical 60 percent improvement.

The 580 is similar, with the low preset running nearly twice as fast, but the product of the individual settings suggests only a 35 percent potential improvement. It's probably a bug, but just be warned that fine tuning the settings may not work quite as expected.

Anti-Aliasing (<1 percent): There's no indication what form of AA is used, but based on the negligible performance hit it's safe to assume it's either FXAA or a lightweight form of TAA.

Shadows (5 percent): Affects the quality of shadow maps, including soft shadows and the distance at which shadows become visible.

Environment Details (3 percent): Improves the quality of the environment. Lowering this setting can make pop-in of higher quality models very apparent, so I recommend leaving this turned up if possible.

Environment Texture Detail (<2 percent): Uses higher resolution textures for the environment, which requires more VRAM, though 6GB is enough for ultra.

Terrain (1 percent): Adjusts terrain details, including LOD scaling. Doesn't appear to affect performance much if at all.

Clutter (2 percent): Increases the amount of 'clutter'—more grass clumps, small rocks, etc.

Fog (3 percent): Adjusts the amount of fog, which also affects things like god rays.

Water (-3 percent?): This is supposed to affect the detail of water, but turning it down consistently improved performance on both the test GPUs.

Screen Space Reflections (4 percent): Changes the quality of screen space reflections on wet surfaces and reflective objects.

Volumetric Clouds (20-25 percent): The single big setting that causes the biggest drop in performance, this only affects the quality of the sky and clouds. The clouds do look nice, but you can turn this down without missing out on too much.

Character Texture Detail (1 percent): Uses higher resolution textures for characters, which requires more VRAM. Not quite as demanding as increasing environment texture quality, however.

Character (<1 percent): Adjusts the detail level on characters, with a minimal impact on performance.

Ambient Occlusion (4 percent): Adjusts self-shadowing of objects, but there appears to be a bug with AMD as turning this down reduced performance (though the AO shadows did go away).

Depth of Field (1 percent): Enabling this causes distant areas to appear slightly blurry, while setting it to off makes all areas in focus. Another minimal drop in performance.

Assassin's Creed Odyssey requires a restart for most settings changes, and the dynamic weather makes it hard to capture meaningful comparison screenshots. The weather—specifically, the clouds and sunlight—can also impact performance quite a bit, even in the built-in benchmark.

One of the patches disabled the potential for rain during the benchmark sequence, which helped, but heavier cloud cover still causes a 5-10 percent dip in performance. For all of the benchmarks, I ran them multiple times (sometimes five or more!) just to get a sunny day where performance was 'optimal.' Also, because of the above oddities with tweaking individual settings—the RX 580 performance drops when turning down several options—I stuck with using the presets for the remainder of testing.

MSI provided all the hardware for this testing, including the latest GeForce RTX cards. All of the GPUs come with modest factory overclocks, which in most cases improve performance by around 5 percent over the reference models.

My primary testbed uses the MSI Z390 MEG Godlike motherboard with an overclocked Core i7-8700K processor, and 16GB of DDR4-3200 CL14 memory from G.Skill. I've also added results using other Intel CPUs (running stock clocks), like the Core i9-9900K and Core i5-8400. Ryzen processors use the MSI X470 Gaming M7 AC, also with DDR4-3200 CL14 RAM. The game is run from a Samsung 860 Evo 4TB SATA SSD on desktops, and from the NVMe OS drive on the laptops.

I’m using the latest Nvidia 417.22 and AMD 18.12.1.1 drivers. Considering the game has been out for over two months now, optimizations have had plenty of time to appear, though in general performance hasn't changed much since launch—including unreasonable amounts of microstutter. And despite being an AMD promoted game, Nvidia's cards generally take down their AMD equivalents.

I'm using an Acer Predator X27 display for testing, which includes support for 4k at 144Hz, G-Sync, and HDR output. I've disabled G-Sync for testing, and some older cards don't support all those features, in which case they're run in standard 4k 60Hz mode without HDR. Note that screenshots and videos are captured using the non-HDR mode, as HDR content looks muted on non-HDR displays.

Assassin's Creed Odyssey graphics card benchmarks

For the graphics card benchmarks, I'm using the fastest CPU I have—an overclocked Core i7-8700K running at 5.0GHz. This is to show the maximum possible performance of each GPU, whereas running with a slower CPU in some cases would reduce the gap. I've also run tests with a Core i9-9900K, which is basically the same level of performance. Look down to the CPU testing below and you can see how various CPUs stack up, but in general you'll want at least a 6-core processor to hit the sweet spot with Assassin's Creed Odyssey. Here's how the various graphics cards handle Assassin's Creed Odyssey.

Let's just skip straight to the big bad Hades of Athens, 4k ultra. Can anything hope to run the game at such settings? Well, yes, but not at 60fps. The RTX 2080 Ti takes top honors, naturally, with an average framerate of 54fps. Drop down to high quality and you'll get about a 50 percent boost to performance, which means breaking 60fps is certainly within reach. But even minimum quality won't quite double performance at 4k for most GPUs, which means only the RTX 2070 and above can hit 60fps at this resolution.

It's interesting to see that the GeForce RTX cards in general have a better showing here than in other games, with the 2070 in particular nearly matching the GTX 1080 Ti. 4k also places more of an emphasis on memory bandwidth, which certainly helps the RTX and Vega cards, and in general this is as close as AMD GPUs come to matching or beating their Nvidia counterparts.

1440p ultra allows several cards to break 60fps averages, but we're still looking at only the top-tier $700 and above models, and even then you might want to tweak a few settings to smooth out the sub-60 dips. 1440p high quality generally allows the Vega 56 and above to break 60fps, but cards below that mark aren't likely to provide a stable 60+ fps even at 1440p low.

Even 1080p ultra remains too demanding for many GPUs, with the GTX 1080 being the minimum required to average 60fps in the benchmark sequence. And for the record, there are many areas in the game where performance will dip below these averages (and others where it will be substantially higher), so keep that in mind. Also notice that compared to 1440p ultra, a lot of GPUs don't seem to gain much, indicating geometry or other bottlenecks are present.  Most GPUs see just 30-40 percent higher performance, whereas in other games 50 percent improvements are typical. In other words, Assassin's Creed Odyssey is good at pushing your hardware to its limits.

If you have a good but not extreme graphics card, like a GTX 1070 or similar, I'd suggest aiming for 1080p very high as a better target for smooth performance, or maybe even the high preset. Visually, there's not much difference between the very high and ultra presets, but very high runs about 20-30 percent faster (more on GPUs with less than 6GB VRAM). The drop from very high to high quality is a bit more noticeable, thanks mostly to the increased pop-in you'll see (set Environment Details to max quality if you want to keep pop-in to a minimum), but performance also improves another 10 percent on average.

Even medium and low quality still look pretty good at 1080p, without any resolution modifier. The RX 570 and above break 60fps at last, but quite a few cards—including budget offerings like the GTX 1050 and RX 560—come up short. Assassin's Creed Odyssey can still be played at 20-30 fps in a pinch, but you really want at least 40fps in my opinion to keep things from bogging down.

But what about integrated graphics solutions like Intel's HD Graphics 630 and AMD's Vega 11? 1080p at low quality isn't really viable on either one, though AMD makes a better go at it with a 25fps average. Dropping to 720p gets the Ryzen 5 2400G / Vega 11 into 30fps territory (with periodic dips well below that mark), but Intel struggles to even break into the teens. But there's still hope!

Assassin's Creed Odyssey supports a resolution modifier, which can be set as low as 50 percent within the game. That's still not enough for the HD 630, but you can choose pretty much any fraction you want if you edit the ACOdyssey.ini file in the Documents\Assassin's Creed Odyssey folder and change the PixelDensity setting. I decided to try running with a 25 percent resolution modifier (0.2500), so rendering the game world at 360x180, and then scaling that up to 1280x720.

Thankfully the text and UI overlays still run at 720p, so you can read what's going on, but visuals are rough—really rough. And even at 25 percent, the Intel HD 630 plunks along at a still unacceptable 18fps. It's sort of cool to see it in action, though! (If you want to see the same test on the Vega 11, I did that as well and averaged 46fps.) And you can go even lower if you want, though figuring out what's happening at 10 percent scaling (128x72) is admittedly tough. Those jumbled pixels might be a doorway, a wall, or an enemy—only one way to find out! It's like playing Assassin's Creed Odyssey on some serious psychedelics. Or a crazy sort of reshade mod.

One final note is that while I was technically able to get the game running on Intel's HD Graphics 630 at nearly 20fps, doing so required using a very low rendering resolution, and even with the tweaked INI the game wasn't stable—I routinely crash to the desktop if I try to play using Intel's latest drivers. I'm not sure if it's just my testbed or the new drivers, or if such problems exist in general, but do yourself a favor and don't try playing it on a standard Intel GPU, at least not until the dedicated models arrive next year. Maybe the Iris models do better, or just about any other reasonable GPU should be able to handle 30fps 720p.

Assassin's Creed Odyssey CPU performance

For CPU testing, I've switched to the RTX 2080 Ti this round—it's extremely expensive, but I wanted to see the maximum difference between the various CPUs. Running with a slower graphics card will reduce the performance gap quite a bit—or if you prefer, look at the CPU 4k ultra chart to get an idea of how a midrange GPU like a GTX 1060 would perform at 1080p using the very high preset.

At 1080p, up through the very high preset, the Intel Core i7 and Core i9 results can be up to 20 percent faster than a high-end Ryzen 2700X or 2600X processor. They're also about 20 percent faster than the Core i5-8400. But that's only when we do our best to remove the GPU as a bottleneck.

Even with the 2080 Ti, 1080p ultra starts to hit GPU limitations, and by 1440p with just about any other graphics chip, the CPUs would look about the same. 4k ultra shows modest differences in minimum framerate, and the Ryzen 5 2400G still falls off the pace a bit—possibly the x8 PCIe link is limiting performance, or maybe something else. Anyway, the 2400G is faster than i3-8300 at the other settings but falls behind at 4k.

More critical than the average framerates are the minimum framerates, with the quad-core CPUs struggling to stay consistently above 60fps even at 1080p medium. If you're not hellbent on maintaining 60fps it's not much of an issue—Steven reviewed Odyssey using a GTX 970 running at 40-50 fps and still found plenty to love—but don't expect to run a lot of background tests if you're using an older and/or slower CPU. 6-core processors are definitely recommended for this game.

Assassin's Creed Odyssey notebook performance

Shifting over to laptops, the CPU bottlenecks show up once more—and this time we're looking at far more modest GPUs. We have the mobile non-Max-Q GTX 1060 6GB, 1070, and 1080, with the 1060 and 1070 using a previous gen i7-7700HQ while the 1080 notebook has an i7-7820HK. Power use ends up limiting CPU clocks on the 7700HQ quite a bit, leading to a larger performance gap. Our desktop results use the overclocked i7-8700K CPU, which at times can mean a 25-35 percent clockspeed advantage, plus two additional cores.

At 1080p low, the faster desktop CPU allows a GTX 1060 to outpace every single laptop I tested, even though the GT73VR sports a much beefier GTX 1080. The desktop CPU also allows delivers better performance with a 1060 than the mobile 1070, all the way through the very high preset—though at 1080p ultra the charts finally line up as we'd normally expect given the GPU clockspeeds.

All three laptops use 7th Gen 4-core/8-thread CPUs, and I'm curious if the newer 6-core 8th Gen mobile parts would do better. I don't currently have any of those available for testing, unfortunately.

Looking just at the laptops and their individual framerates, the GS63VR only gets a relatively consistent 60fps at minimum quality, still with dips well below that mark thanks to the CPU. The mobile 1070 can mostly handle 1080p medium at 60fps, while the mobile 1080 goes all the way to 1080p very high. Not surprisingly given the earlier desktop results, none of the laptops can do a steady 60fps at 1080p ultra.

Assassin's Creed Odyssey is a great game, but set your performance expectations appropriately low

Thanks once again to MSI for providing the hardware for testing. These results were collected in early December 2018, with the latest graphics drivers available at the time (Nvidia 417.22 and AMD 18.12.1.1—the 18.12.2.1 Adrenalin 2019 drivers arrived after testing was complete). Assassin's Creed Odyssey is also running the latest 1.1.1 update, with the First Blade DLC installed. Each setting was tested at least three times, using the highest result, in an attempt to minimize variance caused by the dynamic weather system.

The level of detail in Assassin's Creed Odyssey is certainly impressive, but I do wonder if the modest improvements are worth the cost. Assassin's Creed Origins also looked very nice, and while 4k ultra was still asking a lot of any graphics card (the 1080 Ti only managed 50fps), in general performance of Origins is about 30-35 percent higher than Odyssey. And let's be clear: Origins was already tough to get running at 60fps, with a 1060 6GB averaging 56fps at 1080p ultra.

Assassin's Creed Odyssey ends up being one of the most demanding games of 2018, at least if you're trying to run it at maximum quality. However, it's still playable on far more modest rigs, provided you're willing to lower the resolution and graphics settings.

Assassin's Creed Odyssey is full of places to go and people who want to kill you. Luckily, it has a pretty in-depth and flexible armor system that gives you lots of ways to mix-and-match your way to some pretty cool old-world fashion. There are a lot of options, though, and that's where our Assassin's Creed Odyssey armor guide comes in.

Just like its weapons, Odyssey has a lot of different styles of armor that come in various levels of quality. Any armor can also be engraved, which gives you skill or stat bonuses—the more rare the armor, the more engravings it can hold at once. At the top of the pile are the Legendary armor sets, special variants of existing armor styles that add extra bonuses for wearing all five pieces at once.

A big part of Odyssey is just looking rad, though, and that's where Odyssey's upgrade system is a real fashion-saver. If you have a favorite helmet or entire suit of gear, you can spend money and resources at a blacksmith to upgrade it all the way up to level 50.

One last thing: There's not really such thing as a best armor in Odyssey. Depending on how you're playing, it might be worth it to have a lower level pieces of armor that offer a useful buff that augments your playstyle.

Stats 

Each piece of gear you find in Assassin's Creed Odyssey has three main stats that you should pay attention to. They are level, rarity, and the main stat.

• Like your character, gear has a level that indicates its overall strength. You always want to try and upgrade or use gear that is close to your level.
• Rarity determines how many traits a piece of equipment can have. Like most RPGs, rarity goes from common (white), rare (blue), epic (purple), and legendary (orange).
• For armor, the main stat is, well, armor. This determines how much damage is mitigated from enemy attacks. For weapons, this stat is DPS or damage per second, and determines how much your attacks hit for.

Engravings 

Engravings are a kind of item that you earn by completing various in-game achievements, quests, acquiring Legendary gear, and killing certain enemies. Each one offers some kind of buff, like increasing your assassination damage or making all arrows poison arrows. There's a lot of them and they come in various tiers of strength with Legendary engravings offering extremely powerful bonuses that augment certain skills.

Just by playing the game, you'll start to amass a large pool of engravings that you can then use to add extra buffs to your armor. The biggest thing to remember is that once you've unlocked an engraving, you can use it as many times as you want and can always change the engravings you added to a piece of gear. Experiment and find the right combinations for you.

Regular armor 

Regular armor is randomly generated with a random rarity rating and selection of engravings. There isn't a rhyme or reason to the engravings: I've found heavy plate armor with bonuses to assassination damage and flimsy cloth robes with bonuses to warrior skills. Though you can't change or remove the these inherent engravings, you can always add more and change the ones you add.

These types of armor don't offer a bonus for wearing a complete set, but they do look nice when they're worn together. You can spot armor suits by their names: Traveler's armor, Tracker's armor, Athenian armor, Spartan armor, Brawler's armor, etc. 

All of these non-legendary armors show up regularly in loot drops, so keep an eye for a rare one with lots of room for engravings. Since you can always upgrade the level, a good piece of gear with a 10% bonus can stay a 10% bonus from level 5 to level 50.

If you get a piece of armor that you don't want, you can either sell it or dismantle it. Drachmae is in no short supply in Odyssey, so we recommend you dismantle everything you don't want (aside from Legendary pieces) so you always have an ample supply of materials for upgrading.

Legendary armor 

Spoiler warning: This next section contains light spoilers for Odyssey's story.

Unlike the other types of armor, Legendary armor is one-of-a-kind. It can't be dismantled for parts or sold, so every piece becomes a collector's item sort of by default. Legendary armor has plenty of room for a lot of engravings, and it also comes with a set bonus, an extra buff you get for wearing the entire set.

For the most part, Legendary armor comes from a few key sidequests and primarily from hunting down different branches of the Cult of Kosmos. Each member you kill will award a specific piece of an armor set, but since many cultists are above level 40, it'll take quite a while before you complete a full set and unlock their powerful set bonus.

All you need to know is that when you complete a set of legendary armor, all of the pieces you've collected get upgraded to the level of the last piece you found from the set. So don't waste precious materials upgrading pieces you won't really use until after you've collected the full set.

Without giving away who, what, and why you'll be killing people to collect legendary sets of armor, I've catalogued the names of the suits I've found and the bonuses that come with collecting the entire sets. When you get to the point where you can start hunting them down, this list will give you an idea of which sets you want to look for.

Immortal Set: 20% of your health bar refills when you die (only once every two minutes, so don't die more often than that please).

Obtained from Worshippers of the Bloodline cultists.

Spartan War Hero Set: +15% damage with all warrior abilities.

Obtained from Peloponnesian League cultists.

Agamemnon Set: +50% burning rate.

Obtained from The Silver Vein cultists.

Athenian War Hero Set: All arrows pierce shields.

Obtained from the Delean League cultists.

Snake Set: +10% intoxicated damage and weakening effect.

Obtained from the Eye of Kosmos cultists.

Pirate Set: +15% damage with assassin abilities.

Obtained from Gods of the Aegean Sea cultists.

Amazon Set: 2% damage dealt restored as health.

Obtained from Heroes of the Cult cultists.

Demigod Set: +10% damage with all abilities.

Obtained from the main story quests and the final cultist.

Assassin's Creed Odyssey is a big world full of splendor—and more importantly, lots of stuff to kill. As you chew your way through lions, Spartans, and cultists, you'll find a huge variety of ancient weapons to wield in battle. Knowing which weapon to use, though, is half of the battle. That's where our Assassin's Creed Odyssey weapon guide comes in.

Once you get a dozen hours into the game, Odyssey throws an ample supply of Legendary-quality weapons your way. And thanks to the flexible upgrade and engraving system, you can always spend resources to upgrade their damage and traits to stay relevant all the way to level 50. So don't worry about finding the one best weapon because it really depends on your playstyle and what traits you engrave into your weapon of choice. The best weapon depends on what kinds of enemies you're facing and what skills you've unlocked. Here, we'll break down each type of weapon, with a few recommendations of what skills complement these weapons.

For all of these weapons, though, we recommend unlocking Overpower Attacks as soon as possible. With the press of a button, your character will spend three stamina bars to unleash a deadly, unblockable combo that changes depending on your weapon while also healing you for a significant amount. It's insanely powerful, and you build adrenaline so quickly in fights that you can make use of this skill several times in prolonged fights.

With that out of the way, here's our Assassin's Creed Odyssey weapons guide.

Bare fists 

With so many swords and spears to use, you might overlook the value in bare knuckle boxing your opponent into submission. Your character in Odyssey is pretty handy with a punch, and damage from fists won't kill characters but instead knock them unconscious. If you want to recruit an enemy for your ship, tame an animal, or have a quest from a character who doesn't want you to kill anyone, going unarmed is always a good option. 

Swords 

Everyone starts out with a sword, and for good reason: it's the most versatile, flexible weapon in the Assassin's Creed Odyssey arsenal. Sword attacks in Odyssey are most effective at targeting a single enemy and they're also one of the faster weapons, which makes them useful for fighting higher-level enemies. When an enemy uses an unblockable attack, dodge to get behind them and then unleash hell.

Best skills for swords:

Sparta Kick: The shorter reach of the sword and dagger make them a good fit for the Sparta Kick. Since you'll already be in close, assigning the Sparta Kick to a melee hotkey is an easy way to finish off a combo with a brutal kick to the face. Don't forget that kicking enemies off of ledges is a great way to kill higher-level opponents.

Hero Strike: Your character's assassin damage is insanely high, but you can only use it when you're being sneaky. Hero Strike takes that high damage level and lets you use it in the middle of a melee.

Shield Breaker: Enemies with shields are a huge pain for swords. Heavy attacks will work, but they're slow. Get in close with the Shield Breaker to tear the shield off your enemy and fling it away. 

Daggers 

Daggers specialize in speed and getting up close. Focus on one enemy at a time and use the rapid-fire combos to kill them before they can respond. If you're facing a heavy-hitter like a brute, dagger attacks will carve them up while they're working on their big, slow attacks. When you do have to dodge or block, daggers are the fastest weapon to resume your attacks.

The downside is that you need to get real close to an enemy, which is dangerous. And their single-target style makes them especially bad choices for Conquest battles, where you'll always be fighting three or four people at once.

Best skills for daggers:

Flaming Attack/Venomous Attack: Both the fire and poison skill upgrades take a few hits to start doing extra damage. That's why they're perfect for daggers: you're already landing a dozen strikes a second anyway, so you can light people on fire or poison them fast.

Vanish: This skill blinds nearby enemies so you can escape, but dagger users can employ it offensively to distract groups of enemies so they can focus them down one at a time. Just know that any enemy you hit will become unstunned, so be careful to only damage one target at a time.

Call to Arms: You can't use this ability while in combat, but if you're about to take on a pack of bad guys, use Call to Arms to summon an ally to distract them while you get in behind with your daggers and carve up enemies one by one. 

Spears and Staffs 

Fighting multiple opponents is almost a certainty, which makes staffs and spears very handy. The long reach and wide swinging style of Odyssey's combos make them great for crowd control. Spears are usually better for getting the longest reach and staffs are better for fighting while surrounded, but they're very close to identical.

Generally, spears do more damage while staffs have more knockback power. Which one you prefer will probably come down to the situation: If you're fighting a few enemies on top of a building, the staff will send them flying to their deaths. If you're fighting an angry lion or a mercenary with a poisoned dagger, the longer reach of the spear will keep you from getting punctured.

Best skills for spears and staffs:

Flaming Attack/Venomous Attack: Staffs and spears don't hit as fast as daggers, so it will take a little more time to get a fire or poison bonus going. On the other hand, adding a bonus to staff or spear attacks gives you the unique ability to light everyone in the room on fire at once. 

Charged Heavy Attack: If you get a moment to breathe, charging up a heavy attack will give you a huge damage bonus and a big, sweeping target area. Use the staff and spear's range to get some distance, then swing for the fences.

Ring of Chaos: If you're already surrounded anyway, the Ring of Chaos skill lets you stun everyone within a few meters of you. This skill is mostly wasted in one-on-one fights, which makes it a good crowd control companion for staff and spear users. 

Heavy Bladed and Heavy Blunt 

These two-handed monsters are huge, slow, and powerful. You won't have to worry about enemies with shields, since these attacks will stagger anyone with a shield. That said, heavy maces and axes are the hardest weapons to use, and they seem to be a good fit only in the rarest of occasions. Their long, slow wind-up makes it hard to get hits in without also taking damage from faster enemy attacks. If you can stun or trick an enemy long enough to get swinging, though, there's almost nothing in the game that can do more damage.

Best skills for heavy bladed and heavy blunt:

Bull Rush: Charging through enemies and dealing a lot of damage is somewhat wasted on the other weapons, but for the heavy hitters it's a great way to get in close, stun your opponent, and leave yourself free to demolish the opposition.

Charged Heavy Attack: If you can see an attacker coming but they haven't gotten to you yet, using the charged heavy attack is one hell of a way to say "hello." The heavy attack also has a big throwback bonus, so if you use it with a heavy mace, you might fling enemies farther than even the best Sparta Kick.

Ring of Chaos: Even if you're not surrounded, the Ring of Chaos can reliably stun anyone nearby. For heavy weapons, time is the most precious commodity. Use the area stun and then flatten any nearby enemies before they can get themselves back together. 

Bows 

I'm not going to lie, the entire hunter skill tree feels like a bit of a waste of time. I've had great success specializing in both the warrior and the assassin skill trees, but the hunter skills are comparatively weak—too weak to make them worth focusing all your ability points in, anyway. Instead, hunter skills are good companions to the other, better skill trees.

Bows also get short shrift in the design department because they all handle the same way, and they're a terrible option if you're being attacked up close. That means they're often used outside of combat to snipe unsuspecting enemies or soften a target before going in for the kill.

Best skills for bows:

Sixth Sense: This skill slows time and auto-locks onto an enemy's torso any time they spot you while in stealth. Rather than letting that one guard blow the whistle, you have a chance to take him out fast and keep sneaking.

Rain of Destruction: Launches a massive flight of arrows straight up and straight down onto the heads of anyone in the targeted area. Upgrade it to use explosive arrows and then unleash carpet bombings on groups of enemies.

Overpower Strike: Overpower Strike is like shooting cruise missile with fletching. Unlike a lot of the other shots, the overpowered shot is strong enough and big enough to successfully assassinate a high-level target from a distance.

Tom: Assassin's Creed Odyssey is really good. Steven called it "a remarkably massive RPG held together by a web of satisfying pursuits" in our Assassin's Creed Odyssey review. We have found one sticking point that's worthy of more discussion, however. If you head into the 'Time Savers' section of the in-game store, you can find a permanent 50 percent XP boost that lets you progress through the story faster without having to complete as many of the game's side activities. It costs 1000 Helix credits. A pack containing 1050 Helix credits costs $10/£9. You also get some free credits during the game. 

Samuel and I both bought it, and for me it solves the biggest problem I have with the game. I played eight hours of Odyssey at a preview event. I noted my struggles to hit the level gate at the end of the demo. Now I'm going through the game again with the XP boost active, and it's a much smoother, more enjoyable experience. I love the story, but I only enjoy some of the sidequests and side activities. In another RPG, like The Witcher 3, the levelling curve is forgiving enough to let me progress at my own pace and pick and choose what I want to do. In Assassin's Creed Odyssey I feel like I can only do that with the permanent 50 percent XP boost. 

I haven't paid for an asset or a mission. It's ten bucks to tweak a number value. It's the sort of change you might expect to see in a balance patch.

I paid for it, so I guess I'm part of the problem, but it feels like a few years ago paying ten bucks for an XP boost in a singleplayer RPG would cause a lot more uproar. That's not to say most people aren't happy with the game's default XP tuning, but it's the kind of microtransaction we're used to seeing in free-to-play MMOs and multiplayer games being slotted into a game that already costs £50. That seems… not cool?

Samuel: I agree. Me and Tom both bought this independently of each other when the game launched last week, and for me it's partly in response to Origins, which introduced aggressive level-gating that nudged you towards side activities. By the end of that game I was so done with grinding—I completed the final section under-levelled and in stealth, struggling to take on a single enemy face-to-face, because I wasn't prepared to give the game any more of my time in reaching the recommended level. I otherwise loved Origins, but I felt like I limped to its finale. 

There's another reason I paid for the XP booster in Odyssey. On PC, you can pay for a temporary 25% XP booster with 10 uPlay coins (the free currency you unlock for completing achievements in Ubisoft games) through the Club rewards option of the menu. I put this on for two hours, and immediately noticed the difference. But you can only use it once. 

I could breeze through the opening islands without wasting time on as many side activities, focusing on what I believe are higher-quality side quests and main missions. Seven hours into the game, with the paid XP booster, I'm only ticking off the activities I want to do, and having no problem with the level curve. I've generally avoided the mercenary boards and limited time quests. This is the way I want to play. It costs $10/£9 extra. 

In discussing its issues with the boost last week, Polygon noted "Odyssey feels more like an Assassin's Creed game with this option purchased than it does without". I'm not sure I entirely agree—but the existence of the booster has made me think long and hard about Ubisoft's approach to level-gating. 

Tom: I don't think the default levelling curve was designed in bad faith; I'm sure the devs would like players to explore all of the activities they have made. But in an open world RPG I value the freedom to not do things I find tedious. The presence of the XP boost does encourage conspiratorial thinking though—is the XP curve tuned to be irritating enough to push people into XP boosts? 

The problem is that level disparities in both Origins and Odyssey are so punishing that being even one level below your opponents makes the game worse—and I don't mean difficult, I mean it makes the game less fun. It's not hard to press on through a one level deficit, it's just annoying. Enemies take a lot more hits to go down. The pace of the game becomes gruelling. 

Samuel: This, I think, is the problem: a difference of a few levels in Assassin's Creed doesn't mean an interesting combat challenge like it might in another third-person game. It means a gruelling encounter with skull-labelled enemies who take very little damage, while two of their hits will kill Alexios/Kassandra. Level-gating rules everything in Odyssey. I tried completing one of the larger-scale battles while under-levelled, and I couldn't kill the captains fast enough with my attacks to make the bar go down. I'm good enough at the game to avoid taking damage and survive, but the numbers and the timer dictate my success there, not how good I am at countering or using my abilities. It's this collision of flawed level-gating and microtransactions that inevitably leaves a bit of a sour taste. 

I'm otherwise really enjoying Odyssey, but it would be with some caveats if I was playing it at Origins' pace. If the XP booster didn't exist, maybe I wouldn't be thinking about the pacing of the game so much. Maybe I'd just get on with the grind without complaining. I've written before about games that do and don't respect your time—the PC release of Final Fantasy 12 includes a fast-forward function that lets you grind through enemies at a crazy speed, and it makes the game tons better than its original PS2 version. But Square Enix didn't charge you extra for it. 

I spend a lot of time worrying about how much games demand of my time now. This might not be the case for everyone, though: if Odyssey is the one big game you buy this year, maybe the gentle levelling curve represents value for money. It just doesn't to me. I'd rather have those hours back. We discussed Origins' problem with bloat earlier this year, and the thing that solves that issue in Odyssey...is extra money. 

Tom: A cursory Google of Origins or Odyssey turns up a bunch of ‘how to grind XP' guide pieces, and for me grind shouldn't be a part of a modern singleplayer RPG. My days of farming Cactuar for rare drops are over, and it's a shame to lock off the world behind XP gates and then charge players to access it faster.

Peak concurrent players for Assassin's Creed Odyssey reached nearly 62,000 on Steam yesterday, making a considerable gain (about 33%) over last year’s Assassin’s Creed Origins, which reached a peak of just over 41,000 concurrent users in October 2017. Origins, which released last year, was a big success for Ubisoft—and a bit of a gamble, seeing as they’d taken a year off AC’s release schedule in 2016. Critical reception to Odyssey has been very strong, with many noting that it feels like a more mature, refined version of Origins.

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey follows the journey of Alexios and Kassandra, two proto-assassins during the ancient war between Athens and Sparta in roughly 420 BC. It’s notable for letting you choose between a male or female protagonist and for its huge, free-roaming map that sees the return of popular naval mechanics from Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. Odyssey also has romance storylines, and wouldn't you know it, we've got a guide for them here.

Thanks, GytHyp.

Following "a series of DDoS attacks" on the day of Assassin's Creed Odyssey's launch, Ubisoft is continuing to experience issues with its online services.

Yesterday, Ubisoft announced via its official forum it was "currently experiencing a series of DDoS attacks, which unfortunately are a common occurrence for almost all online service providers". 

Acknowledging it "may impact connections to our games as well as server latency" the publisher took "steps to mitigate this issue" and after several hours, reported the issues as resolved.

However, Ubisoft acknowledges some connectivity issues persist today, and offered the following statement via its official Twitter account and forums: 

Replies to the message from @UbisoftSupport intimate that some players are continuing to struggle to connect, regardless of whether they're playing on PC or console.

"Hi, I still have problem to connect on AC Odyssey (bought it via steam, I have played it yesterday night, can't play it right now)," said KarlD__. "Any suggestion, I found it very boring to pay and can't play."

"Can't login to my account uplay please resolve the issue," said another player.

At the time of writing, Ubisoft confirmed that assassinscreed.ubisoft.com  tomclancy-thedivision.ubisoft.com  starlink.ubisoft.com  should now all be working properly, but "are still investigating issues" with ubisoft.com.

It's worth persisting with the issues, though; in our Assassin's Creed Odyssey review, Steven said: "Assassin's Creed Odyssey is enormous and beautiful, and it effortlessly ties action, stealth, sailing, faction control systems, mercenaries, and cultist hunting together into one cohesive game that, even after 50 hours, I want to keep playing.

"Odyssey is a lot more than just another Assassin’s Creed, it’s an RPG of unparalleled scale supplemented by satisfyingly layered and deep progression systems that each play their part in bringing ancient Greece to life."

Assassin's Creed Odyssey won a lot of praise from Steven this week, and it's undoubtedly the highlight of a series that's had a pretty up-and-down history. Ancient Greece proved to be a great creative choice by Ubisoft Quebec, but where should the series be set next? That's the subject of this weekend's PCG Q&A. Let us know your answers in the comments below.

Phil Savage: Three Kingdoms-era China 

If Dynasty Warriors 9 taught us anything, it's that there's great potential in an open world game set in China during the 2nd and 3rd century. If Dynasty Warriors 9 taught us a second a thing, it's that Dynasty Warriors 9 is a terrible open world game set in China during the 2nd and 3rd century. It's an exciting period of history, though: full of heroes and betrayals and epic facial hair. There's loads here for developers to draw on. While both the aforementioned Dynasty Warriors series and the upcoming Total War: Three Kingdoms are set during the period, both tend to focus on large-scale conflicts.

This era would be fertile ground for a more linear, directed story centered on specific characters, and I'd love to see areas of historical China recreated with Ubisoft's polish and production values. It would also benefit the Assassin's Creed series generally. So far, the main games in the series have tended to focus on more recognisably Western regions. We're long overdue something a bit different.

Philippa Warr: The far future 

If Abstergo can figure out how to make digital time ghosts who make friends with birds or possibly sometimes are birds while also trying to read or possibly break or invent the Da Vinci Code, then they can make an educated guess about the future. Or at least run digital simulations of possible futures. Also, isn't their whole thing about technological superiority? I feel like they'd love an Animus thingummy that lets them predict future tech, get people from now to user test it  and then invent it, thus pre-empting and cornering the market. 

Alternatively, if we're talking about where it should be set so that I definitely end up playing it, they should go with something like Atlantis. 100% underwater. Assassinating clown fish or something. Wait. Maybe I don't want to play that after all.

Andy Kelly: Scotland 

Scotland during the First War of Scottish Independence. Y'know, when Braveheart was set. I love the idea of roaming the glens and highlands as a Scottish rebel, slipping into English encampments and castles, dismantling Longshanks' army piece by piece. Odyssey proves that Ubisoft are capable of making dramatic open worlds made up of mountains and valleys, and the bleaker, colder climate of Scotland would be a nice counterpoint to the colourful and lavish Greece.

There are a lot of characters you could meet. William Wallace, Robert the Bruce, Longshanks himself. And Ubisoft can be sure that every patriotic Scot will buy the game, just to stick it to the English. Virtually, of course. We love them really. The game would also be a chance to show this period of history through a (slightly) more accurate lens, because Braveheart is, as we say in Scotland, historically speaking, a load of pish. Please, though, if you do make this game for whatever reason, hire Scottish people as voice actors. Whenever I hear a Scottish accent in a videogame it's always terrible and embarrassing.

Steven Messner: Just somewhere different 

Part of the potential appeal of Assassin's Creed is the way it brings history to life, but I always thought it was a shame how the series stuck with western European cultures that are well-tread ground for videogames. I love Phil's idea of doing China, but I'd love to see Assassin's Creed really go deep and do something that hasn't gotten a lot of screen time in mainstream media. I'd love to see something like Assassin's Creed Sumeria, Africa, or Mesoamerica. These are all critically important areas of history that aren't necessarily influenced by the Western world, and it'd be awesome to see that culture brought to life in a videogame. 

Samuel Roberts: Russia, or maybe the Wild West

While there's an Assassin's Creed Chronicles spin-off game set in Russia after the October Revolution, which I'll never have time to play because Ubisoft releases main installments all the damn time, I would be interested in playing a proper 3D entry set in an early 20th century timeframe. Will Assassin's Creed ever be ready for proper gunplay, though? I think Ubisoft sees melee combat as one of its USPs, and making the series into a third-person shooter might lose the mix of that a bit. 

Alternatively, what would Ubisoft's version of the American frontier be like? It has the blend of real-life big characters and social change that would make a good backdrop to Assassin's Creed, picking up a little later than the not-very-good third game.

Assassin's Creed Odyssey is set during the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, but that doesn't mean people from both sides don't want a sexy distraction. I mean, how else are we going to repopulate the Mediterranean after such a catastrophic conflict? Whether you're playing as Kassandra or her brother Alexios, there's almost a dozen characters you can seduce on your travels, and our Assassin's Creed Odyssey romance guide will help you tango with each of them.

Before we get started, it's important to note that Grecian lovers are easy to come by—this isn't like Mass Effect were romance is only found at the end of a long road of quest chains and dialogue choices. In most cases, the option to get it on will be fairly obvious and corresponding dialogue choices are marked with a heart symbol. Just by going out and exploring the world, you'll find characters eager to do the deed with you. That said, the payoff isn't the same either. Unlike The Witcher 3, for example, Odyssey's sex scenes all happen off camera. Still, it's fun to canoodle, so here's every willing participant we've found (so far).

Warning: Story spoilers below.

Odessa - A Small Odyssey 

A few hours into Odyssey's story you'll take a boat from Kephallonia to the nearby island of Ithaka to deal with some pesky enemies. While there, you'll see Odessa caged inside of their hideout and offering a side quest called A Small Odyssey if you free her. Seducing Odessa requires first completing a series of quests for her, starting with this one. Once you've dealt with the bandits, escort her to Odysseus' Palace and then back to her boat. Along the way, you'll have plenty of dialogue options to flirt with her. You know what to do.

Later, in Megaris, you'll find Odessa in the town of Megara with more quests for you. Handle this chain of quests and side with her when you find evidence that maybe she's not as nice as she first appears. After that, you can offer to forget both of your troubles for a bit and get it on.

Auxesia - Age is Just a Number 

Head to the Sanctuary of Delphi in Phokis and you'll find this quest given by Aurexia, an old woman with a voracious appetite for getting it on. The only problem? Her elderly husband can't keep (it) up. Help her out by gathering a bear's scrotum and some deer tongues to make ancient Viagra (don't try this at home). The bears can be found almost exactly north and a little west of the Sanctuary of Delphi near a bear den, but watch out because the alpha bear that protects it is extremely tough. Deer, meanwhile, can be found all throughout the area.

When you bring the ingredients back, Aurexia's husband will still be hesitant, letting you swoop in to take his place instead. They'll both agree that it's for the best, and you'll be treated to a hilarious cutscene as he waits outside while you get it on with his wife. Weird.

Alkibiades - Oil and Love 

You'll first meet Alkibiades while working through the main story quests which take you to a party at Perikles' residence in Athens. When you're free to wander around, go to Alkibiades bedroom and see if he has any information about your missing mother. Before he gives you the intel, he'll ask you to retrieve some oil, which you can find in the kitchen. Return with the oil and Alkibiades will tell you what you need to know but also offer to let you join in on the fun. Of course you should accept.

Alkibiades returns several times throughout the story, and after your first successful tryst he'll make even more advances at you. If you feel like getting it on again, all you'll need to do is agree.

Lykaon - Helping a Healer 

In the Chora of Delphi, found in Phokis, you'll find this side quest from Lykaon, a local healer needing help gathering some herbs—is that what the kids called it back then? Help Lykaon out by gathering the herbs from a nearby stream guarded by wolves. Once done, deliver them to the nearby villagers who need them. Returning to Lykaon will allow you to question him about his motives, revealing that he actually wants to use the leftover herbs to euthanize his grandmother who is a fraudulent oracle. Agree to help him.

From there, you'll have to complete a series of basic quests that involve investigating the grandmother's disappearance and rescuing her from a bandit camp. Once she is safe, Lykaon will appear with the intent of finally ending her life. Intervene, selecting the option "Violence won't solve anything" to persuade Lykaon that ending her life won't restore his family's honor. Once that's done, you'll be free to get nasty.

Kyra - Trouble in Paradise 

During the main story, Barnabas will give you a quest called Trouble in Paradise that requires you to sail to Mykonos to help rebels overthrow their corrupt government. Here you'll meet Kyra, who you can romance after a lengthy quest chain. During this first quest, though, you'll be party to a debate between Kyra and her current lover Thelatos about how to best deal with the corrupt leader of Mykonos. Side with Kyra to open up the option to romance her later.

After doing a series of missions for her, you'll unlock the quest Goddess of the Hunt and can find Kyra at a nearby temple making an offering before trying to kill some nearby wildlife. Join her on the hunt, respond positively when she admits her feelings for you, and before you know it you'll be making out on a beach.

Zopheras - Not My Mother's Daughter 

Much further into the story you'll head to Sparta, in Lakonia, where you can pick up this side quest to help a mother train her daughter to be a better Spartan. Zopheras is a little hesitant to receive training, just flirt with her to change her mind. After both a foot race and a horse race, Zopheras will take you to a secluded spot where the two of you can train much more intimately. 

Kosta - Family Values 

In the village of Red Lake Bay you'll find this quest from a young boy which introduces you to the local blacksmith Kosta. Offer to help Kosta by choosing the option marked "I'll make it worth your while" and then heading out to collect flowers for him. Once you return, you'll be able to let Kosta sweep you up in his rough, weathered hands for a big kiss. 

Aikaterine - An Actor's Life For Me 

Near the end of the main story, Aristophanes needs you to find his star actor who has gone missing. Head to Thespis' house to look for clues and there you'll find an Athenian guard you can coerce into telling you his location. Turns out he's just at a bar being forced to drink to avoid participating in Aristophanes' play. Convince the guards to let him go and carry Thespis home to sleep it off. There he'll ask you to bring him his muse, a nearby courtesan named Aikaterine.

She's not too far away, but Aikaterine won't come unless you kill the local guard captain who is threatening her first. Fortunately, he's next door in his garrison. Dispatch of him, and Aikaterine will offer to pay you back with a heavy discount on her "services."

Roxana - Sparring with Roxana 

On the island of Hydrea you'll find Roxana training to fight in the Battle of One Hundred Hands. It's a big deal, so naturally you should offer to help her. During these subsequent quests, flirt with Roxana at every opportunity. Finally, she'll challenge you to a foot race to a nearby hill. You don't have to beat her, but once you both reach the top the stunning view puts her in the mood to make it one last time before she faces death in the upcoming battle. 

Daphnae - The Daughters of Artemis 

In Phokis, one of the synchronization points you can climb to unlock fast travel locations is the Temple of Artemis. There you'll find Daphnae, a priestess who sets you on a mission to slay all of Greece's legendary animals, like the Nimean Lion. This is quite the involved quest that will require you to travel all over the world and reach level 40. Each time you slay an animal, though, you can return to Daphnae to make out for a bit. Kill every target, though, and she'll give you a prize better than drachmae and experience points. 

Xenia - Birds of a Feather 

You'll first meet this burly pirate while hunting for clues about your missing mother, but later you'll be able to return to Keos and take on the quest Birds of a Feather that eventually lets you get some real booty. This is quite the involved questline, requiring you to solve several tough puzzles, but our friends at GamesRadar have a great walkthrough you can follow. Be sure to flirt with Xenia every chance you get and once you return all of her hidden treasures, she'll show you one of a different sort.

That's every romance we've found so far, but we'll update this guide if we stumble into any more love affairs. If you see one that isn't listed here, let us know in the comments.

Of all the Assassin’s Creed games, Odyssey is the most aptly named. It's a roleplaying game of mythic proportions, a world so vast and intricately detailed I feel lost in it all. This isn’t just Ubisoft’s usual style of open world draped over the Aegean Sea, either. There’s still that familiar scattering of icons that covers each of its 30ish zones, but Odyssey’s various activities weave into a satisfying web of interlocking systems. Previous Assassin's Creed games were full of mundane activities that existed merely to check them off a list, but nearly every pursuit in Odyssey folds back into its overarching quest in some way. Many of Odyssey's zones could host a smaller RPG on their own, but together they form an incomparably large world full of things to do.

Odyssey sheds so much of what Assassin’s Creed is known for to fully embrace the core concepts of a roleplaying game—and it's all the better for it. Even though the story doesn't live up to its initial premise, the additional layer of choice, breathtaking scenery, and colorful sidequests make Odyssey not only the best Assassin's Creed to date, but one of the best RPGs since The Witcher 3.

Choice and consequence 

Unlike previous Assassin's Creeds, dialogue options now let me influence major and minor quests—sometimes with horrific consequences. I refused to intervene when a priest wanted to put a plagued family to death, incited more than one rebellion, and even spared a shamed general from what should have been a very satisfying dish of stone-cold revenge. And, yes, I've also bumped uglies with quite a few willing characters.

These frequently wonderful side quests are spread out over a world that is almost incomprehensibly large for a singleplayer RPG. Normally size doesn't matter, but the sheer scale of Odyssey's ancient Greece is to its benefit, especially because each area feels so distinct and detailed. It's a vast world that I want to explore, and each zone has a subtle aesthetic that makes it unique, from the arid badlands of Crete to the verdant plains of Arkadia. This isn't just Ubisoft's biggest game ever, it's also it's most beautiful.

The new 'exploration' mode makes exploring that world a lot more immersive. Enabled by default, this turns off most of the quest markers and instead provides me with vague directions to objectives, like saying it's located north of the agora in Athens, leaving me to suss out the exact location on my own. Sometimes that's as simple as using my eagle, Ikaros, to scout out the location from above, but other times it means speaking with characters or taking on extra quests to get more information. When I failed several subquests to discern the location of an assassination target, I had no choice but to ride around Boetia using my own faculties to find his campsite. If you have the patience for it, it's a system that makes exploring more involved and satisfying.

If there's one casualty of Odyssey's massive world, though, it's the main story. No matter which of two siblings you pick, Kassandra or Alexios, there's a lot of heart in their journey to reunite their family. True to Assassin's Creed, Odyssey tries to tell a story that sees Kassandra rub elbows with all of the biggest names in ancient Greece, but the end result is a story that has charm but often feels disjointed and confusing. It simply tries to do too much, whisking you from the backwater island of Kephalonnia to heights of Athenian society and then to audiences with Spartan Kings.

This frantic pacing doesn't leave much time to really know or appreciate these characters, and the reasons I was pulled from one area to the next sometimes felt paper thin. It's still an enjoyable tale, but The Witcher 3 this is not. That's pretty standard for Assassin's Creed, but having agency in the story has done wonders for making me more attached to Kassandra’s journey. Even if certain revelations left me confused or rolling my eyes, I felt invested in what was happening.

One thing worth mentioning is that Odyssey's story features some pretty stiff level gaps that have to be overcome by diverting time to complete side quests and other activities. I didn't mind it, since all of those experiences are fun, but it will be annoying to anyone who wants to just focus on the main quest.

I don't really mind that the story doesn't always work because Odyssey is an RPG that thrives thanks to its diverse and excellent activities. Black Flag’s ship combat makes a return as a central feature, though it's slightly simplified to be less of a grind. I love the feeling of boarding the Adrestia and sailing the open waters, cleaving pirate triremes in half or pulling alongside to battle them hand to hand. 

Then there’s the new Mercenary system, which is inspired by Origin’s Phylakes but, again, is bigger and better. Instead of just 10 ultra-tough enemies wandering the world trying to skewer me, there are 39 partially-procedural mercenaries who wander about and, if I cause too much trouble, will try to collect the bounty on my head. These mercenaries remind me of Shadow of Mordor’s nemesis system, albeit without personalities that evolve with each encounter I have with them. But they do have distinct looks and a way of showing up when I’m already vulnerable, like Skiron, "The Crazy Lover," who had a sixth sense for sabotaging my stealthy infiltrations and getting me killed until I put an arrow through his weiner. Now he's just Skiron, The Crazy.

Odyssey retains the same MMO-style leveling system of Origins, meaning enemies who outrank me by even a few levels will be practically invincible no matter how well I fight. That’s still annoying—especially when I want to take on a new story quest but discover its level is beyond mine—but in the case of mercenaries I like how it establishes a food chain. When I saw Exekias the Legend, a level 50 merc, roaming around Delphi with his pet bear, I felt like I bumped into a celebrity.

The mercenary pecking order is just one of half a dozen secondary progression systems in Odyssey. It might sound like feature bloat, as if Ubisoft's open world games needed even more things to do, but each of these systems overlaps and influences the others in a way that makes Odyssey a lively and dynamic world. 

Tides of war 

Across most of the zones, for example, Spartan and Athenian armies clash for control of territory. When one faction controls a zone, I can destabilize its grip on the region by killing soldiers, or burning and stealing supplies found in their heavily-guarded camps. When a faction’s control of a region is all but lost, a Conquest Battle opens up and I can enlist to fight on either side in exchange for powerful gear.

In these set-piece battles, hundreds of soldiers take the field at once in an all-out fray to see which side is the last standing. It's a serious challenge made even more brutal if the opposing faction enlists a mercenary to ambush me. It’s in these moments that Odyssey’s combat system really shines. It’s functionally the same system from Origins, which means it can sometimes feel a little mushy and unresponsive, but new abilities that slot into an action bar give me so many cool tools to use in combat that it doesn't get on my nerves nearly as much. 

Normal attacks build generous amounts of adrenaline, which can then be spent unleashing any one of these four abilities, like the Spartan Kick. It’s an even cooler Fus-Ro-Dah from Skyrim as Kassandra launches a foe backwards with a detonative kick. There's some clever combinations too, like using Rain of Destruction with explosive arrows to unleash an Ancient Grecian carpet bombing. Even if the combat system could still be more responsive, I like that Odyssey embraces combat over stealth more than any other Assassin’s Creed, because these new abilities make me feel like a god of war.

My favorite punching bag are the Cult of Kosmos, the conspirators who tore my family apart. . It's a lot of leg work hunting down these 44 cultists across Odyssey's big map, but it's a testament to how well Odyssey's systems talk to each other that this is one of the best parts of the game. Many cultists are unmasked as part of the main story, but the rest require scouring the world for clues to their identity. Sometimes I might have to complete an out of the way sidequest, while others require reading stolen letters to deduce their location.

One cultist was hiding in a bear den in Malis, which required setting out to explore the countryside using my eagle, Ikaros, to try and spot likely locations. Another required weakening Athenian control over a pair of islands to draw them into a naval Conquest battle. Others might be easier to actually find but then require a stealthy infiltration into a labyrinthian fort full of guards.

Fans of older Assassin's Creed games can rest easy knowing that stealth is still big part of Odyssey. Sneaking into heavily guarded forts and estates is how I’ve spent a good half of my time, but the system remains largely unchanged from previous games. I still use my eagle to mark enemies and various objectives, and there’s still that familiar tension of trying to slink through an enemy camp unseen.

My only problem with stealth is that it too often reveals how dumb and inconsistent Odyssey’s AI is. More than once I’ve had guards get stuck on objects while patrolling or have had to sit back and watch as they run around in a panic seemingly caused by nothing. And nothing ruins the immersion of a leisurely horse ride through Athens like civilians desperately diving out of the way like they just dodged an incoming train. So while Odyssey is easily the best Assassin’s Creed I have ever played, and a damn good RPG to boot, there's still some fundamental parts that could've been improved.

When I look back on all the fun I’ve had, these complaints feel minor. Assassin's Creed Odyssey is enormous and beautiful, and it effortlessly ties action, stealth, sailing, faction control systems, mercenaries, and cultist hunting together into one cohesive game that, even after 50 hours, I want to keep playing. Odyssey is a lot more than just another Assassin’s Creed, it’s an RPG of unparalleled scale supplemented by satisfyingly layered and deep progression systems that each play their part in bringing ancient Greece to life. 

Despite being another entry in Ubisoft's nearly annual series, Assassin's Creed Odyssey has enough new systems and stuff to confuse new and veteran players. The big open world is open enough that I accidentally wandered into a few situations before the game had explained how to handle them. To help you avoid the same issue, here's eight general Assassin's Creed Odyssey tips that I wish I'd known from the beginning of my Odyssey.

1 Choose Exploration mode instead of Guided mode

In Origins, the rash of unsightly, overlapping map icons had been reduced by quite a bit, and in Odyssey it's gone entirely. Instead, the game offers you a choice right at the beginning: do you want to play in "Exploration" mode or "Guided" mode? Guided mode is the Assassin's Creed maps as you've always known them, while Exploration strips away almost every icon, leaving a beautiful, clear map suitable for famous map activities like navigation. Instead, map icons are replaced with directions: the bandit camp is on the eastern coast of Kephallonia; the Spartan fortress is north of Mount Geranaia.

To be honest, unraveling these clues isn't hard. Sometimes there's only one unknown location, marked with a question mark, on the entire eastern coast. This mystery isn't exactly the Murder on the Orient Express, is what I'm saying. Still, when icons appear on a rotating compass in a game, I tend to get tunnel vision and spend more time eyeballing the compass than the beautiful handcrafted world around me. All I needed was a little bit of an excuse to keep my brain plugged into the physical world to get really lost in it.

That said, the world of ancient Greece is big—really big. Every mode of transportation has some sort of auto-run feature that really comes in handy. On horseback or on foot, pressing Z will get your character running so you can take your hands off the keyboard, while Space Bar does the same thing for boats. Horses in particular are good for this: hold Z for a moment and then press E, and your horse will auto-follow roads to navigate straight to a map marker.

Though I wouldn't recommend leaving the game unattended while on foot, having the horse drive or setting sail to an island a few thousand meters away gives you a break just long enough to go get a cup of coffee.

2 Upgrade your favorite weapons and armor

Weapons and armor play a huge role in character growth in Odyssey. There are a bunch of different weapon types—including swords, axes, staffs, spears, and daggers—and they all handle a bit differently and have different special attacks. Thankfully, I found that I was pretty much free to pick whatever I thought looked cool, since all of the weapons seem to be equally effective. Heavy maces are huge and slow, for example, but they kill Athenians every bit as dead as a dagger.

In fact, one of the really liberating things about gear in Odyssey is that it's almost absurdly customizable and upgradable. I keenly remember equipping some polka-dotted jester's monstrosity in the Witcher 3 just because it had the best armor stats I could afford at the time. Odyssey avoids that shame by offering an unlimited (though expensive in in-game resources) ability to upgrade any piece of gear to the current player level. Have a favorite sword you've been using since level 10, but it just can't cut it (har har) now that you're at level 15? Pay a blacksmith and boom, your favorite sword is now a level 15 sword.

One thing to keep in mind is that when collecting sets of Legendary Armor the whole set will automatically upgrade to the level of the last piece you collected. For example, I first collected four out of five pieces at the Snake set between levels 15 to 25, but the final piece I collected was at level 27. This automatically upgraded the entire Snake set to level 27, letting me save my precious materials for something else.

Gear isn't purely cosmetic, though. Odyssey has a huge system of engravings that add buffs and bonuses to gear: +10% warrior damage, +5% damage to Spartans, and so on. Common items can only hold a couple of engravings, but rare or legendary loot can hold many more. Legendary loot is definitely the best stuff to use, but I'm thankful that I never have to give up my awesome legendary gear after a few levels. Just upgrade it!

3 Use Sparta Kick to punt high-level enemies off anything tall

Unlike Origins, the world of Odyssey mostly matches the current player level. With a few exceptions, every wolf, bandit, and archer I kill is at my level, plus or minus one or two. This makes the difficulty curve a bit flat. Sometimes, though, an enemy will have an Elite modifier or a poisoned axe or some damn thing that can really make it hard to kill them. I'll cut and stab them all I want, but my individual attacks just don't do much damage. The best thing to do here: kick 'em off a cliff.

One of the first abilities I unlocked was the Sparta Kick, a "legendary kick" that flings enemies backward. Most importantly, the Sparta Kick is incredibly satisfying to use. It's like a Fus Ro Dah force shout from Skyrim, except applied with a boot to the face. Once, I was in a pitched battle in a marble quarry when a high-level, elite Spartan commander came crashing down on me. Desperate, I ran up the workers' scaffolding, teetering dangerously over the chasm of the open quarry pit. When the commander climbed up to kill me, I kicked him off. Sword: 300 damage. Kick: 600 damage. Falling several hundred feet to his death: 20,000 damage.

No matter how good an enemy is, you can always manage to land at least one lucky kick. Make it a strong one and point it toward a cliff.

4 Commit crimes to get a bounty, then level up the mercenary ranks 

The main character is a misthios, a mercenary class widely employed across Greece. Any time someone commits a crime (and let's be honest here, that "someone" is usually you), a cash bounty can be put on your head and a mercenary dispatched to collect it. Being hunted by a merc is thrilling, and some of them have a real talent for charging into the middle of your business while you're trying to be sneaky.

There's a pecking order ranking all the mercenaries of the world, and leveling up that order comes with all kinds of nice bonuses. Here's the trick: killing mercenaries ranked above you is the only way to climb the ladder, but mercenaries' identities are a secret. To knock off the merc above you, you have to first find out who she is.

It would be too easy if you could just commit some crime and then kill the bounty hunter who comes for you, so it doesn't work that way—Mercs who come after you for a bounty are typically ranked below you. That said, you find clues to identify mercs randomly through the loot system, and I had the most consistent success with finding clues when I was killing lower-ranked mercenaries who came to collect my head.

So: do some crimes, kill the bounty hunters, and figure who sits on top of you on the ladder. Then take them out. You are an assassin, after all, and this is your creed, or whatever.

5 Stay neutral in the war to get the best loot 

Odyssey takes place during the Peloponnesian War, when Athens and Sparta were super, duper mad at each other and were really very rude about it. The war engulfs all of Greece, and you can join in that battle in every region you visit.

To trigger a battle, you have to upset the balance of power by taking out the region's national leader. Doing this looks a lot like killing a warlord in Shadow of Mordor: the leader is heavily guarded and very wealthy, and a toe-to-toe fight is going to be impossible. Instead, you have to soften him up by killing his lieutenants, stealing his money, and burning his army's supplies. When you cause enough chaos, the invading faction, whether its Sparta or Athens, will start a battle.

There are two sides to every battle, as my mother always told me, and you're free to join the attacking or defending side. The only difference is that the attackers will have a much tougher battle and much better loot awarded for success. It doesn't matter which side you pick, though—even if you've been assassinating Athenians all day long to stir up trouble, you can offer the Athenians help in the battle you helped cause in order to profit.

6 Use fire for extra damage 

Everything burns. There's a really aggressive fire system at play in Odyssey, and adding fire to your attacks is a wise move. Not only does it add burning damage that stacks up over time, but it's also good crowd control. Some enemies break and run when they're hit with fire, so if you're in the middle of a big fight, lighting everyone on fire can thin out the mob a bit.

Hitting someone with a flaming sword, while cool, won't automatically set them on fire. There's a fire buildup stat that is different from enemy to enemy, and might even depend on what kinds of armor they're wearing—I'm still testing this hypothesis. It takes a few hits of flame to really set someone burning. If you want to get the most out of your fiery attacks, look for engravings or bonuses that increase "fire buildup." The higher your fire buildup stat is, the faster you'll set your targets on fire.

This also goes for ship-to-ship combat. A volley of flaming arrows looks amazing (especially at night), but it won't catch a ship on fire right away. You'll have to send a few shots of flaming arrows or javelins over before the fire catches hold. When it does, a ship can't move or attack until the fire's out, so it's a very effective weapon on the high seas. Again, look for bonuses to your ship's fire buildup stat if you want to be a pirate pyromaniac.

7 Use Ikaros to scout and spot enemies 

Your pet eagle in Odyssey is named Ikaros, and using him as a scout will be familiar to anyone who played Origins. Send Ikaros up and look through his eyes to mark enemies, spot treasure chests, alarm fires, trapped animals, prisoners, etc. Having a real-time map of a camp makes it a lot easier to sneak in, for one thing. For another, spotting enemies in advance can let you know if any of them have bonuses or abilities that would be helpful for your crew. 

Recruiting for your crew is a traditional process—and by "traditional" I mean that you knock people out and kidnap them, forcing them to work for you. (Aw, just how my ancestors used to do it.) Your ship can support up to four lieutenants, special leader characters who give your ship stat bonuses and join you in battle during boardings. Use Ikaros to take a good look at enemy captains and commanders. They'll usually have some sort of command bonus applicable to your ship, and more importantly, they're likely to be real bastards in a fight. If you spot a good candidate with Ikaros, you can make plans to take them alive.

Ikaros's spotting is also useful in underground caverns and tombs, but you can't use him underground. Instead, use him before you enter the cave and have him fly over the top of the mountain. He can still spot things underground (he's quite an eagle), and the map markers will help you find your way to piles of loot in the confusing maze underground.

8 Photo mode is better now

Photo mode is now a staple of the Assassin's Creed games, but Odyssey has refined the mode in a lot of ways. Basically, you can take a picture anytime, anywhere: just hit F3 and the action will freeze. You can adjust, rotate, move around, zoom, and tilt. You can also tinker with photography-nerd details like saturation, exposure, and add noise filters. It's everything you need to fully Instagram your murderous summer spent backpacking across Greece. The kids at school are going to be so jealous when you get back.

Beyond taking the photos, which is effortless, photo mode is still kind of opaque. What if, for example, you're a hardworking games journalist writing on a deadline, and all of your best screenshots were taken with photo mode? Where, you may be screaming, are those damn photos? They're in your computer's My Documents folder. Go to My Documents > Assassin's Creed Odyssey > Photos to find them.

You can also enjoy photos other players have taken by clicking on photo icons on your map—though this is a mixed bag. Some people, frankly, are terrible photographers and their weirdly saturated photo of the back of someone's head isn't really worth your time. Others might be so struck by the beauty of [spoiler redacted] that they snap some shots in photo mode, thereby ruining your surprise of [spoiler redacted].

If you don't want to see other people's photos, you can now turn them off in your map. Hit F3 from the map screen to toggle through seeing no photos, all photos, only your photos, or only your friends' photos.