King Leonidas in Assassin's Creed: Odyssey.

How Ubisoft built player choice into Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey

The Assassins faction of Assassin’s Creed are all about freedom and free will. But the characters in Ubisoft’s long-running game series haven’t always offered players a raft of choices. But Ubisoft hopes it has accomplished something different with Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey.

The massive new game, set in ancient Greece, debuts on October 5 on the PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4. I played the first four hours or so of it — the first full chapter in a very long game — at a Ubisoft event last week in San Francisco. I got to make choices, such as playing as a male or female protagonist, Alexios or Kassandra. And in the gameplay, I could be cruel and ruthless. But if I went too far, someone would put a price on my head and mercenaries would chase me down.

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Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.