Dodged that spear

Or bash it aside with your shield, if you are following protocol according to Homer.

When I heard the rumor the next Assasins Creed game would be set in Greece I worried. Then I saw the title was Odyssey. That's all I needed; for a major AAA game to be set in the Heroic Age, especially if they went all accurate about bronze age Aegean culture. A three-hundred person team with years to work can do some pretty serious research.

But, thankfully, the game turns out to be set during the Peloponnesian War. (More-or-less. The Assassins Creed series has very nice looking history, but the actual events get a bit bollixed.) In any case, this is high Classical Greece. Four hundred years after "Homer penned" The Odyssey and eight hundred years after the setting of my novel.

Although, from the looks of the previews I've seen, the lead dives on what looks suspiciously like a sunken Minoan palace, and meets what has to be the minotaur.

So maybe it isn't just my current focus that has been making me notice more and more of the Classical age (that is, Greece and Rome) getting talked about in various corners. Maybe there's a renewed interest in those corners. Not that the classical world ever went away, but we are today far from the mindset of Schliemann and his contemporaries, who lived and breathed Greek Myth and the Glories of Rome in a way that shaped their perception of the past and their overriding goals in learning more about it.



(The game is also a full RPG with a dialog wheel and "choices that matter" in the Mass Effect et al style. And nary an assassin in it, cueing various people to sneer that they'd never buy it while it pretended to be an Assassins Creed game, but then they only buy Assassins Creed games anyhow.)

(One of the complaints is you can chose which gender to play. Which the purists don't like because it sort of flies in the face of the "reliving the genetic memory of your ancestors" thing the games were originally built around. I'm unhappy because as egalitarian as I want my games, the experience for men and women is different, particular in earlier ages. Further, the game gives you choice of playing as an Athenian or a Spartan. Well. Spartan women were expected to be fit and know how to fight but the shit would really have to have hit the tower shield for one of them to be out on the front lines. Their sacred duty was, basically, to make more Spartans.)

(The Athenian woman, on the other hand -- were rarely let out of the house (well, there's a class distinction here, plus the rules were different for non locally-born but anyhow) For all that vaunted Athenian democracy it was one of the most repressive of the Greek City states (a low bar when it comes to Classical Greece -- the Laconians are very much the exception) when it came to women's rights. The evidence is unclear how widespread female literacy was in Athens, or how much exposure they got to the vaunted philosophical, artistic, and scientific glories of the golden age. The evidence is somewhat clearer that the nobel Athenian women were, however, bored out of their gourds.)

(Point being, it is not impossible for the player avatar to be out there adventuring. But every interaction should be colored differently depending on gender as well as background. What I am afraid is with all the RPG elements and millions of lines of recorded dialog and so forth there simply won't be resources spared to make the experience differ in any substantive way. And it should matter. Not because it is historical, but because it gives a richer experience.)

The reason I got into this particular series of games in the first place was to be able to walk the environments and interact with the people of historical times. I'm getting this game, if and when it comes down and price (and so does the computer that can run it). But more and more I have to recognize that this is less a walk through history and more a deeply flawed diorama; well-positioned, nice artifacts, but the plaques and posters explaining it are complete garbage.