Video Game of the Day is a daily show available on Amazon Alexa devices and here on this website. Each day, we briefly discuss the history of a single game, randomly chosen. If you would like to listen on your daily flash briefing, you can enable Video Game of the Day here: https://amzn.to/2CNx2NJ.
Hello and welcome! My name is Katosepe and I’ll be your host for today’s Video Game of the Day!
If you didn’t hear the news yesterday, Video Game of the Day is heading to Twitch on Monday, 4 PM Pacific time. I will be at twitch.tv/katosepe so go give me a follow so you are notified when we’re going live. There’s a lot I want to do with Twitch, including streaming some of the games we talk about on the show but for right now, I’m going to be streaming once a week and it was tough to pick a game to play. With Valhalla coming out soon, though, and with how behind I am in Assassin’s Creed, I thought it would be a good time to play today’s game for the first time. Today’s game is Assassin’s Creed: Origins, developed by Ubisoft Montreal and released on PC, Playstation 4, and Xbox One in 2017.
Assassin’s Creed: Origins may have just been the latest in a long line of Assassin’s Creed games but it marked a turning point for the franchise which had been starting to dwindle in popularity. Many of the staples of the series were switched up and the game was given an extra layer of RPG thrown into the mix. Players play as a Medjay named Bayek as well as his wife Aya as they fight to protect the people of the Ptolemaic Kingdom, an area within Egypt, around 50 BC. It is a time of war and strife as Cleopatra seeks to take over the lands from her brother Ptolemy XIII while Julius Caesar to the north threatens invasion. Secret forces are also at play which lead Bayek and Aya to become the first in the Assassin line.
Assassin’s Creed: Origins has many gameplay changes from the previous entries, with the biggest being the addition of RPG elements. Throughout the game, the player gains skill points which they can use to level up various abilities in one of three skill trees. The game also features crafting where the player can hunt to build upgrades to their equipment, similar to Red Dead Redemption or Horizon: Zero Dawn. Combat has also been overhauled as they changed from using an animation focused system like that in Batman: Arkham Asylum to a more hitbox-based system requiring greater player input than before.
Assassin’s Creed: Origins was generally well received by critics with many calling this a resurgence for the franchise. The gameplay changes were appreciated by many who felt the series was becoming stale. The setting was also very well received. While Assassin’s Creed is known for its painstaking efforts to depict locations accurately to the time period, Origins was a step above, in many ways, with several Egyptologists praising the accuracy of the game’s world. A special Discovery Mode was added which lets players travel across the Kingdom without combat or missions, providing information about the various landmarks around the world. As a soft reboot of sorts, Assassin’s Creed: Origins was successful and the series has regained much of the attention it had lost over the last decade.
Thank you so much for listening and if you want to see some of the game for yourself, come find me on Twitch at twitch.tv/katosepe Monday at 4 PM Pacific. I’ll be going in completely blind other than the research I’ve done for this episode so we can discover ancient Egypt together! It’ll be a good time. Either way though, don’t forget to check back here tomorrow for another Video Game of the Day!
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