AC Origins - Kinda rushed through the last section and mostly just did the MSQ collecting all the sidequests to do after the ending. Beat the main story and maaaannnn that took a long time. Went on and on and on.
Pretty good story for an AC game. The last bit is definitely rushed with tons happening and targets getting killed left and right and having the same problem as every.single.AC.game at being terrible at showing the passage of time (so like you're buddies with someone and the next cutscene they're trying to kill you because it's like 2 years later), but I enjoyed it. The origins of the Assassin Creed stuff was fine and works. I liked Bayek a lot. Aya was alright too. And some of the side characters were good.
I feel like the game has the most writing/character development of all the AC games for Bayek simply because there's like 125 quests in the game for him to interact with people and do stuff with. That's a lot! Game is very long. Could have problem used some trimming to cut it down by 1/4th or something. I still have 19 sidequests left to finish up now + 4 elephant battles.
Egypt was cool to explore, combat was pretty solid and way better than any of the past games. Game still struggles with stealth a bit and never manages to be able to have good recovery from mistakes so you just end up fighting a bunch of people. When you do get a perfect stealth run in on a 3-star fort it's pretty satisfying. Did that for the last boss guy in Cyrene and that was fun. The star maps were good, the pulley weight puzzles in tombs were awful, the papyrus riddles were great.
I liked the abilities map, although it's interesting that at lvl.40 with all tombs and stuff done that give AP points outside the 4 elephants (so +4 more points) I'm still nowhere close to getting all the abilities. Guessing you gotta play through the DLCs to have enough AP to unlock everything which is ok but feels a little weird that you're still missing some abilities at the end of the main game. Most of the abilities are pretty useless though.
I'm 53 hours now, so yeah after I do the remaining stuff I'll be done in 60 and it looks like the DLCs should be about 5 and 15. I looked up Odyssey and it seems like it's about 20 hours long than Origins so would probably take me about 80 for the main game doing the same amount of stuff. Can't see myself playing Odyssey. I liked this experience but I don't need it again for 80 hours of my life. These games are really easy to get burnt out on because the repetition and general shallowness. I even got pretty burnt out by the end of today playing like 6-7 hours straight. Works better in small doses every few days.
Origins at the end of the day was a good action-rpg adventure. It's not super polished (especially performance on PC, though I only discovered today about Windows 10's GAME MODE which seems to fix the stuttering a lot) and it's bloated and all the systems are kinda shallow but it's a fun world to explore, the quests are generally good, and there's a million forts to stealth through if you ever want to stealth through a fort.
I also liked the callback to AC2 in the ending with it taking place in
spoiler (click to show/hide)
playable Rome.
Also the real world stuff was ok, I thought they were going somewhere with the previous games about Minerva and shit but this didn't seem to go that direction?
So since I'm not going to play Odyssey, is Odyssey about the origins of the Templars/The Order then since Origins is about the origins of the Assassin's? Also what happens in the real world story in Odyssey? Do you play as the character from Origins? I'm still not getting the feeling their setting up a specific ending for the real world stuff post-Desmond. It just sorta is whatever. I forgot which one had the FPS in the Abstergo tower (was that Unity or Black Flag?) but I kinda liked that one. Was at least the most memorable real world section post-AC3.
It's hard to rank the game with the other AC games because it's so looooooooooong and kinda different. Like it's definitely one of the good ones that's worth playing, but like did I like it more than Syndicate? Idk, Syndicate is such a different experience being all totally silly/campy comedy game against circus villians in victorian london with hookshot and carriage racing and stuff. Origins definitely has the better "story" but it's hard to compare them. If I had to, I'd rank the AC games like this so far not having played Rogue or Odyssey or the AC3 DLC because fuck AC3.
AC2 > Black Flag = Origins = Syndicate = AC2 Brotherhood, all for different strengths > AC2 Revelations > AC1 > Unity > Black Flag Expansion > Unity Expansion > Syndicate Expansion > AC3 Liberations > AC3