10 Essential Assassin's Creed Odyssey Tips
Assassin's Creed Odyssey has arrived, and if the reviews are any indication, you'llprobably want to play it. As the Peloponnesian War begins in earnest, you'll have to discover what happened to your wayward family, unearth the shadowy forces behind the conflict and research the legacy of an ancient First Civilization that shaped all human life on Earth.
In other words, there's a lot to do, and not all of it is easy. While Assassin's Creed Odyssey follows a reasonable difficulty curve, there are still a few things you can do to help streamline your 50-plus-hour trek through Greece. Read on to find a few tips that can take you from the depths of Tartarus to the heights of Mount Olympus.
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Play in Exploration Mode
This might be our first-ever tip that makes the game harder rather than easier, but trust me: Exploration Mode is the way to go in Assassin's Creed Odyssey. When you start the game, you'll have a choice to play in Guided Mode or Exploration Mode. The former is the traditional "get a quest, follow a waypoint marker" setup, and there's nothing wrong with it. But Exploration Mode makes you ask around and get hints about an objective's location, then lets you find it on your own. This helps each quest unfold much more organically, and it's satisfying to feel like you've discovered something, rather than just let the game do all the legwork. Plus, you're almost sure to find something interesting along the way.
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Sync as many viewpoints as possible
As in previous Assassin's Creed games, there are a lot of viewpoints to climb and synchronize. You'll stand atop mountainous peaks, jutting branches, lofty statues and strategic watchtowers, then dive down into leaves, hay, water or anything else that can break your fall. If you're a returning veteran, you know the drill: Viewpoints show you all of the optional objectives in the surrounding area. They also act as fast-travel points. Since Assassin's Creed Odyssey is one of the biggest titles in the series yet, you'll need to zip around the map quite often. Whenever you see a viewpoint, go out of your way to sync it; it'll save you a lot of time in the long run.
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Invest in Assassin skills
Like Assassin's Creed Origins, Odyssey offers three upgradable skill trees to customize your character. Hunter skills improve your ranged attacks; Warrior skills improve your melee attacks; Assassin skills improve your stealth. Even if you plan to be the greatest archer since Robin Hood, or the deftest swordsman since… also Robin Hood, this is still Assassin's Creed, and that means that open combat can be perilous. The best approach to almost any enemy encampment is still to pick off as many enemies as you can stealthily, then engage the last few head-to-head, if you must. As such, you'll want to pick up at least a few Assassin skills, such as Critical Assassination, Stealth Master and Shadow Assassin.
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Keep advancing the story
Like a lot of open-world games, it's easy to get bogged down in the details in Assassin's Creed Odyssey. Every new area comes with a bevy of side quests to undertake, enemy bases to depopulate, caves to explore, viewpoints to sync and more. It may be tempting to complete every single optional objective before you move on, but it's not necessary. Advancing the main story in Odyssey is the easiest way to level up and acquire better equipment. Furthermore, following main and side quests will often take you into unexplored areas anyway, so there's no reason to double your efforts. There'll be plenty of time to hunt down every last trinket on the map later — if you really want to.
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Upgrade the Adrestia
Early on in Assassin's Creed Odyssey, you'll get your very own trireme, the Adrestia. Like Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, Odyssey gives you the opportunity to upgrade your ship. Unlike Black Flag, though, the updates aren't particularly hard to earn. At first, all you'll need is some wood, some metal and some drachmae. (Later on, you'll need all sorts of rare materials, but by then, you should feel much more comfortable with naval combat and exploration anyway.) Since you'll encounter more belligerent Athenian, Spartan and pirate ships the further away from the mainland you go, it's never too early to hop into the Ship menu and upgrade your arrows, javelins, hull strength and more. Wood is in short supply at first; the best way to get it is to sink enemy vessels.
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Pick up Contract missions
Every town has a message board; so does the mast of the Adrestia. Whenever you pass one by, it's to your advantage to grab every single quest it has available. Contract missions aren't story quests; rather, they're simple, one-off assassinations, or ongoing tasks that could take hours to complete (e.g., "kill 20 Spartan soldiers," "sink five pirate ships," etc.). It's not really worth going out of your way to do Contract missions, but they often give you tasks that you'll complete anyway if you're about to assault an enemy base or sail to a new island. As such, they're basically free experience points. And a lot of them expire after a few days, anyway, so if you don't get to them, they'll just fall off your list with no harm done.
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Identify cultists through side quests
Without spoiling too much, one of the main story goals in Assassin's Creed Odyssey is to identify and eliminate more than 40 members of the deadly Cult of Kosmos. Assassinating one cultist will often give you clues about the next one's whereabouts, but these can be maddeningly vague. You'll never find most cultists through simple exploration, though; instead, they'll reveal themselves through side quests. If you're looking for a particular cultist, check his or her profile for a location, then take on every available side quest in that region. Once you find out how to accomplish your main goal in the area, the cultist pulling the strings is usually not far behind.
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Choose your responses carefully
Assassin's Creed Odyssey lets you choose your protagonist; it also lets you choose how you respond to almost any conversation in the game. Alexios or Kassandra can be flippant, or compassionate, or greedy, or anything in-between, and seeing how other characters respond to this is one of the joys in the game. But your responses aren't just about how other characters will perceive you; they'll also have major impacts on how the story unfolds. Characters can live or die depending on your choices, but there are other, subtler effects as well. You could make (or lose) money, or change the difficulty of an upcoming battle. You can even charm certain characters into romantic trysts — or alienate them completely. (Or both.)
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Deal with mercenaries frequently
If you've noticed a little red bar in the lower-right corner of your screen, that's the Mercenaries meter. Like previous Assassin's Creed titles, Odyssey tracks your dangerous behavior (open combat, thievery, trespassing, and so forth) and keeps track of it. Rather than just making guards warier of you, though, this time around, sponsors will hire deadly mercenaries to hound you to the ends of the Greek world. These mercenaries are difficult, relentless, and often show up at the worst possible time (like during a boss fight). Fighting them is good sometimes, since as you advance in the mercenary world, you get rewards like shop discounts. But usually, you'll want to assassinate their sponsor, pay them off or simply wait them out before taking on a big quest or enemy fort.
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Don’t sweat the Conquest Battles
If you've gotten as far as Megaris, you could be forgiven for thinking that Conquest Battles are a frequent part of Assassin's Creed Odyssey. And it's true: You won't be able to complete the game without occasionally ousting or defending Athenian and Spartan forces in huge, open-ended melees. But for the most part, unless a quest specifically tells you to launch a Conquest Battle, you don't really need to worry about them. They require a lot of busywork to unlock (assassinating leaders, killing soldiers and burning supplies), and their rewards are meager — some Epic equipment, which is often outmatched by stuff you get through regular questing. Conquest Battles are fun now and then, but they're also time-consuming and often not worth the effort.
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Marshall Honorof is a senior editor for Tom's Guide, overseeing the site's coverage of gaming hardware and software. He comes from a science writing background, having studied paleomammalogy, biological anthropology, and the history of science and technology. After hours, you can find him practicing taekwondo or doing deep dives on classic sci-fi.