More importantly Egypt also gives Bayek a brilliant new playground in which to hunt his targets and unravel his conspiracies. As good as Bayek is, it's a shame she's not the lead.) I played most of the game on a PS4 Pro and it was fine - heading back to a standard PS4, it seemed a little more framey at times. (His wife Aya is even better, incidentally, a full-blown secret agent with mysterious alliances. He is driven by death, but he cannot entirely set aside his love of life. It's grim stuff, but with Bayek as the lead, the game is able to walk a neat line between bloodletting and something a bit more, you know, cheerful.
Early on in proceedings, Bayek's set on the path to vengeance when events in his home town leave him tracking down and killing a group of masked cultists who have dispersed across the land. Bayek's a fiercely capable Medjay - a proud pharaonic militia, I gather, which means Bayek operates a bit like a sheriff and a bit like a general problem solver for the community. It gives the game a charming new lead in the form of Bayek, for starters. You get moderns, in other words, and we already know intimately how moderns feel about life.Įgypt does an awful lot for Origins. Oh yes, and in the streets you get people worn down and sometimes driven towards darkness by the sheer weight of political, economic, and cultural uncertainty. You get the violence and confusion as a declining empire finds itself squeezed between powerful international players (you also get some rather timely stuff on the way a nation in decline will debase itself in bitterness and xenophobia) and you get tart sibling rivalry for the big chair, a brother and sister fighting it out in private and in public.
Opting for the reign of Ptolemy XIII means Ubisoft gets to have it both ways, in other words: you get the sheer scale of Egypt, but you also get the melancholy of its specific greatness receding into folk memory. Sometimes Bayek will be the one to de-limb them. The huge statues of pharaohs that we see in museums these days, often missing an arm or a leg, are often already missing an arm and a leg here too. The Pyramids? They're already unfathomably old, limestone facades pockmarked and crumbling away in the corners, good for parkour but also a bit tatty and knackered.
This, then, is Egypt as it was a mere 50 years before the birth of Christ.
Hieroglyphs are an easy shorthand for antiquity when dropped into the 21st century the interesting thing here is that they're a shorthand for antiquity to Bayek, too - he has to work a bit to remember how to read them. There's a moment early on in Origins where Bayek, the new hero, comes across some hieroglyphs. Perhaps this explains why the developers have been so canny with the dates as they take the series back into the ancient world.
0 kommentar(er)
