Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey — Historical accuracy
First post here and I have to start somewhere, so why not with a narrative analysis of one of the games I’m currently playing. For those who who have been living under a rock: the Assassin’s Creed series is tells the story of shadowy organisations who have influenced humanity through the ages. There is a “present” time where characters have the ability to access the lives of their ancestors and the majority of the games are set in the past. Each game focuses on one ancestor and thus one time period. In the case of Odyssey, this means rither Kassandra or Alexos during the Greek punic wars.
The franchise has never pretended to be fully historically accurate, but has rather focused on making it feel correct. They used to have a 30 second rule, meaning if something could be disproven in 30 seconds on Wikipedia, it was out, otherwise it’s in if it’s cool enough. Given this, there’s a lot of historical accuracy in the games and I’m sure they’ve inspired many to learn more about real world history!
There are a few things I really want to commend the writers on AC:O on — especially how they treat religion! There is no judgement and no modernist or postmodernist ideas of imposing beliefs. Instead, people worship different gods depending on who they are and what they want at the time. Sacrifices to them is as reasonable a way to achieve something as anything else.
One thing that I do want to question is the treatment of the war between Athens and Sparta itself. In the game, it is portrayed as active combat raging across the Greek world. In reality, the war was extremely one-sided, albeit in two ways. First of all, Sparta didn’t have a fleet. They had allies with a few ships, but calling it a navy would be a joke. In contrast, Athens was the greatest naval power in the Mediterranean. On the other hand, Spartan soldiers were legendary while Athens could hardly muster much of an army at all. Thus, Sparta raided the countryside and Atheneans hid in the city until the attackers went away because they lost in any open battle. But Athens could freely get supplies by sea since there was no way for Sparta to counter them there.
In the game, you get a lot of missions from both sides that more or less mirror each other. Both sides have forts to infiltrate, leaders to assassinate, and ships to sink. Messing up a region up enough can trigger a conquest battle where you can help one side win over the other. This makes a lot of sense for game mechanics as you can reuse the same logic for both sides. But imagine what would happen if naval combat was only against Athens and pirates and taking out war camps was just targeted against Sparta. Instead, each side could hire you, an outside expert, to deal blows they could not. This would stay true to history and could provide even more interesting play. The current game often seems a bit repetitive, but if missions varied between infiltrating a ship through both stealth and naval cunning, and infiltrating camps with some very skilled Spartans, that could make it better!
I’m sure there were considerations in these directions during development, and sometimes it’s just too much to provide truly asymmetric but balanced conflicts. That said, I wish the narrative could have been allowed to create more variation. I’ll go back to taking out Athenian polemarchs now.
