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Design :: Day 007

Shaken, not stirred

One of the more interesting technical challenges I had encountered in a former project was on Assassin’s Creed Odyssey: Legacy of the First Blade.

The game is a DLC (Downloadable Content), which means it’s an additional content for an existing game that is already released.

Fellow developers who have worked on DLCs might have experienced similar challenges in terms of limitations on what they can do. For instance, in this project, I couldn’t change the game world (adjust the terrain, add a new building) as doing so will mess up the game and potentially cause issues for the player. To give an extreme example, imagine if the original game doesn’t have a mountain beside a village but because of some gameplay sequence that you might want to have, you remodel the village and remove half of it to be taken over by the mountain. That can potentially mess up the data. To the player, that will also break immersion.

Coupled that with a game that has approximately 85h of content just for the main and side quests, tacking on a few more hours of similar-ish quests can make it feel repetitive. We can’t simply stir the same pot of plots and gameplay segments and hope that we arrive at something new and different.

Sometimes you have to shake it up a bit.

The Persian Puppetry quest is one example where the team and I had fun exploring ways to do this. A few things that were done in this quest that the team and I felt could help shake it up (that may or may not be visible in the video below):

  • Adding a ship and blowing it up in a cinematic to introduce the villain
  • Using a lot of letters and ambient dialogue (more so than what we did in the main game) on quieter segments to help fill in on less important exposition
  • Spies that follow the player as they go about their investigation. They also give funny replies if you confront them
  • Giving the player the choice of engaging the bounty hunters in the second segment through dialogue options. This changes Neema (the ally) and the bounty hunters’ AI behaviors to suit the situation
  • Leveraging on the mercenary system as a foundation for mini-bosses to give them some unique behaviors but still cheap enough to make
  • Ending the quest with a naval segment which culminates in a swordfight at sea with a mini-boss and his minions.

These are by no means groundbreaking or unique solutions. I am sure many others have made similar solutions when faced with these challenges. To me, they are a good reminder, at least for myself, that given the same Lego blocks and even with added limitations, a bit of elbow grease and creativity can go a long way in shaking it up to come up with imaginative solutions.

Addendum

Yes, I made a James Bond reference for Day 007.