Game Like
By Max
A single-player, story-focused game like Assassin’s Creed Odyssey can be a refuge for gamers who don’t want to play theoretically infinite battle royales, MMOs, or team-based shooters. If you invest enough time in Ancient Greece, you can complete every quest, get every reward, and explore every location. While that concept is comforting, it doesn’t place Odyssey in a completely different space from service-driven titles; regardless of the game, keeping players immersed and excited is important to sustaining interest. Developing a post-launch strategy tailored to the needs of a massive open-world RPG, Ubisoft has spent the months since Odyssey’s release rolling out an impressive array of improvements and new content to continually surprise players – and along the way, the process turned a good game into a great one.
Developing and releasing Odyssey required hundreds of people spread across multiple studios. The game is staggeringly large, so even though you can technically see everything it offers, completionists can easily spend 200 hours exploring the far corners of the map. So even though Odyssey isn’t a multiplayer live-service game, its audience behaves similarly, coming back regularly to continue making progress.
We knew we had a different type of game, and that people could stay with it and engage with it, so we did approach it a little bit like a multiplayer game in that sense,” says creative director Jonathan Dumont. “Every time you return to Odyssey, we wanted there to be changes, new things. We needed a super-strong live structure to support that.”
Ubisoft transitioned to a different development model to execute its post-launch roadmap. That meant one group focused on creating the Lost Tales of Greece quests, one on quality-of-life changes, and one on the episodic DLC arcs (which are the only paid aspects of the post-release content). Not only did these teams produce plenty of compelling content to expand Odyssey, but they did so at a consistent pace, ensuring fans’ attention wouldn’t drift for long.
The content roadmap Ubisoft released prior to Odyssey’s launch
Sticking to a regular update schedule seems like common sense; it’s the goal for just about every team making a live game. Pulling it off is difficult (just look at what happened to Anthem), but the Odyssey team had the agility to make it happen – and some other Ubisoft success stories to learn from. “One of the things we took from the other Ubisoft games that are doing very well – For Honor, Rainbow Six, The Division – is a predictable cadence,” says post-launch associate producer Andrée-Anne Boisvert. “At first, every three weeks we were pushing out new title updates with new features, quality-of-life [improvements], bug fixes. Instead of waiting to have a big offering and push it out, that was something relatively new for us.”
The contents of the updates come from a mix of deliberate planning and community feedback. In September, prior to Odyssey’s launch, Ubisoft released a roadmap that gave timeframes for what would launch and when. But some of the most substantial changes happened outside of those announced milestones, like New Game Plus, an increased level cap, and cosmetic gear customization. Many of those additions were already on the team’s radar, but input from players also made a big difference. “Between each of the features, sometimes community suggestions would come in, like the auto-crafting of the arrows, that was not on the roadmap,” Boisvert says. “But because the community felt strongly, we would add them earlier than some other features. So the important thing is having an idea of what you want, but then being flexible.”
By Max
A single-player, story-focused game like Assassin’s Creed Odyssey can be a refuge for gamers who don’t want to play theoretically infinite battle royales, MMOs, or team-based shooters. If you invest enough time in Ancient Greece, you can complete every quest, get every reward, and explore every location. While that concept is comforting, it doesn’t place Odyssey in a completely different space from service-driven titles; regardless of the game, keeping players immersed and excited is important to sustaining interest. Developing a post-launch strategy tailored to the needs of a massive open-world RPG, Ubisoft has spent the months since Odyssey’s release rolling out an impressive array of improvements and new content to continually surprise players – and along the way, the process turned a good game into a great one.
Developing and releasing Odyssey required hundreds of people spread across multiple studios. The game is staggeringly large, so even though you can technically see everything it offers, completionists can easily spend 200 hours exploring the far corners of the map. So even though Odyssey isn’t a multiplayer live-service game, its audience behaves similarly, coming back regularly to continue making progress.
We knew we had a different type of game, and that people could stay with it and engage with it, so we did approach it a little bit like a multiplayer game in that sense,” says creative director Jonathan Dumont. “Every time you return to Odyssey, we wanted there to be changes, new things. We needed a super-strong live structure to support that.”
Ubisoft transitioned to a different development model to execute its post-launch roadmap. That meant one group focused on creating the Lost Tales of Greece quests, one on quality-of-life changes, and one on the episodic DLC arcs (which are the only paid aspects of the post-release content). Not only did these teams produce plenty of compelling content to expand Odyssey, but they did so at a consistent pace, ensuring fans’ attention wouldn’t drift for long.
The content roadmap Ubisoft released prior to Odyssey’s launch
Sticking to a regular update schedule seems like common sense; it’s the goal for just about every team making a live game. Pulling it off is difficult (just look at what happened to Anthem), but the Odyssey team had the agility to make it happen – and some other Ubisoft success stories to learn from. “One of the things we took from the other Ubisoft games that are doing very well – For Honor, Rainbow Six, The Division – is a predictable cadence,” says post-launch associate producer Andrée-Anne Boisvert. “At first, every three weeks we were pushing out new title updates with new features, quality-of-life [improvements], bug fixes. Instead of waiting to have a big offering and push it out, that was something relatively new for us.”
The contents of the updates come from a mix of deliberate planning and community feedback. In September, prior to Odyssey’s launch, Ubisoft released a roadmap that gave timeframes for what would launch and when. But some of the most substantial changes happened outside of those announced milestones, like New Game Plus, an increased level cap, and cosmetic gear customization. Many of those additions were already on the team’s radar, but input from players also made a big difference. “Between each of the features, sometimes community suggestions would come in, like the auto-crafting of the arrows, that was not on the roadmap,” Boisvert says. “But because the community felt strongly, we would add them earlier than some other features. So the important thing is having an idea of what you want, but then being flexible.”
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