Assassin's Creed Odyssey: Classical Greece Re-imagined

Very few games have attempted to recreate the ancient world with such immense scope or attention to detail as Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. Odyssey lives up to its Homeric namesake in creating an open-world experience bursting with life and culture in keeping with classical Greece. This behemoth of a game attempts to tell a story intensely tied to the history of the Peloponnesian wars, whilst also guiding the player on an expansive journey touching upon all aspects of ancient Greece. This case study will attempt to demonstrate some of the ways in which the game allows players to experience the cultures and beliefs of classical Greece, highlighting its areas of great success, as well as the areas in which it changes reality in an attempt to improve gameplay. Overall however, as will be shown throughout, this game allows players to experience ancient cultures and beliefs to a level of success seen in very few historical games.

TOPOGRAPHY: THE WEIGHT OF THE WORLD

While the map of Assassin's Creed Odyssey is ambitious in providing the full Greek world for the player to explore, many geographical distances have been stretched or shrunk in order to allow the player to traverse these vast distances in a reasonable amount of time. Because of this the scale of Greece is not accurate, however, the weighting of the more condensed world is nuanced with its approach, retaining the essence of 5th century Greek topography and the cultures and beliefs that arose because of it. For example, Athens dominates the landmass of Attica on the game’s map, much in the same vein as it dominated Attican society through its hegemony in the classical world. Moreover, the game creates a convincing sense of how layered the Greek world was, presenting different ancient cultures that stretched back further than simply the classical period. This is achieved by allowing the player to find and explore sunken Minoan ruins around Crete or tombs of ancient Mycenaean heroes in the Argolid peninsula. Crucially, these ruins have their own unique style that is separate to more contemporary classical buildings such as the Parthenon. By adding these structures within a game that is set during the first years of the Peloponnesian war, this allows the player to experience the previous archaic cultures such as the Minoans or Mycenaeans and by depicting them as ancient ruins, demonstrates how their unique beliefs and practices faded across the centuries.

The game offers an impressive ‘Discovery Tour’ mode, which allows the player to focus purely on education by presenting the world as a virtual museum, removing any other combat mechanics. This mode allows the player to solely focus on another important factor in how Odyssey’s world visualises classical Greek culture, which is its unique representation of each Polis. The game puts great focus on distinguishing each city state’s design so that the player obtains a better sense of firstly, what values and beliefs were important to said polis, and secondly, how these values and beliefs were specific to each of them. Athens, for example, is adjourned in marble and splendour, distinguishing its districts between the affluent areas, the acropolis and the poorer wooden-built suburbs for peasants and craftsmen. This style adequately demonstrates the lavish and abundant culture brought on by the philosophy, art and democracy found within the Athenian golden age. Contrary to Athens’ affluence, Megara is presented in complete ruins, as it was the epicentre of the early conflict after Athens’ economic sanctions in 432 BC crippled the city, which presents the harsher side of the geopolitical culture at the time. Moreover, Sparta is relatively small when compared to Athens, which accurately represents Sparta’s beliefs in austerity and modesty. As was true in reality according to Plutarch, Odyssey’s Sparta lacks defensive outer walls, however much less accurately, the city is adorned with a large amount of stone buildings and statues, making it far more aggrandised than the Sparta of reality. This is arguably done to present the two warring faction’s equal political status in a more visually succinct fashion, however in doing so, some of the beliefs which are reflected in how one's city is constructed are lost in the case of Sparta by making its city structure more generic.

COMBAT: FUNCTIONALITY OVER IDEOLOGY

In Odyssey, its naval battles are far more authentic to reality than its land battles, as it puts great emphasis on ramming and boarding with triremes, adhering to how the majority of naval battles in classical Greece would have been fought. However, it breaks with realism on some level, as many spearmen and archers stand on the deck in an attempt to provide long-range capabilities for the player. In reality, triremes were created to sit high on the water’s surface, to create minimal drag for maximum speed, so by having a large amount of the player's forces on the deck weighing the ship down, Odyssey breaks away from an accurate experience. The biggest issue with how naval combat is presented however, is the fact that Sparta has a sizable navy in the first place. This is obviously a decision made to keep the game’s conquest system balanced, however we once again lose a sense of the individual cultures and beliefs of Athens and Sparta, as during the Peloponnesian war, Sparta held supremacy over land combat, while Athens’ naval strength was unmatched. This coupled with the fact that the game opts for large-scale brawls, with not a phalanx to speak of, shows that the game’s greatest weakness in accurately presenting Greek culture lies in its combat. We as players get no real sense of what made Greek combat unique, or for that matter the true ideological differences between these two states and why they were at war for such a long period. In reality, Thucydides’ tells us that both poleis believed that if they waited long enough the war would end in their favour, with the Spartans deducing that they could starve the Athenians out from their walls, while the Athenians believed they could wait for Sparta to lose motivation rather than attempt to conquer all of their holdings across the Aegean. Because militarily, the two sides are presented as almost identical in the game, it loses a great sense of the ideological differences between their two cultures and belief systems, thus falling short of allowing the player to truly experience these differences in the process.

KASSANDRA: THE WOMAN WARRIOR

Perhaps the game's most controversial aspect historically is its use of female characters in its world. The idea of playing a mercenary for hire, that changes allegiances during the war with ease, is itself inaccurate as according to Thucydides, only entire groups of mercenaries were enlisted by both sides during the war, not individuals. Nevertheless, that is not where much of today’s debates are focused, as although the player is free to choose either sex, the canonical main character of the story is Kassandra, a female mercenary and thus the game quite intentionally disregards the historical record in presenting this. Women of the classical Greek world were largely hidden away on the second story of most houses, lacking basic rights of citizenship and thus the idea of one becoming a mercenary and fighting within this period is in no way accurate. However, there is much modern debate as to whether greater representation for today’s players is more important than realism in order to allow all people to resonate with the characters they play. Thus whether developers should change history to adhere to this principle is still a hotly contested topic. However, as with tales such as the Amazonians, the thought of women warriors was not unheard of in the classical period, and as all aspects of Greek mythology, including gods and monsters, play some part in this game, it is reasonable for a fearsome female warrior to also be presented in this world. Therefore, although it does not encapsulate the culture and beliefs of the classical Greek period in this regard, it can be argued that the issue of representation is more important for the experience of today’s players.

CONCLUSIONS:

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey’s greatest strength in allowing a player to experience classical Greek culture and beliefs lies in its world and topography. From its unique poleis designs to its ancient ruins, the world is dripping with historically authentic personality, which allows the player to immerse themselves in Greek culture to an extent unseen in any other video game. However, in terms of its other aspects, be it the game’s story or combat, it falls short of presenting the Peloponnesian war as accurately as possible in an attempt to make the gameplay more intuitive and enjoyable, as well as make the game’s representation more all-encompassing for a modern audience. Nevertheless, despite these historical faults, the game successfully provides an authentic world that allows the player to experience classical Greek culture and beliefs.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:
SECONDARY SCHOLARSHIP:

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PRIMARY SOURCES:

Plutarch, Morealia, The Ancient Customs of the Spartans.

Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War.