Firstly, I just wanted to say that if you liked Origins, more power to you. This is just my experience with the game.

For some context, I'm a fan of AC. I've played almost every mainline game (and liked actually all of them) but never got around to playing Origins. Steam sale, bought it, played it for about 22 hours now and I've just gotten more and more irritated the further I've gone.

And the NUMBER 1 culprit of my frustration (among many) is level-gating. I've never felt so restricted playing an AC game. Like the story (which I actually think is really good) starts to pick up and then is halted immediately because I now have to go grind out power levels. This really kills the pacing for me. Every new area you go to is a slog because anytime you reach a new area, you're at least 2-3 power levels below recommended which equates to you not being able to assasinate captains/brutes or wtv they're called. So it's either you stab them for a big chunk of their health and go into a 3 minute long fight or you stab them, hide and stealth stab them again and again until they eventually die. Neither of those options were any fun to me whatsoever.

AC Odyssey is probably my favorite, the world is beautiful and feels alive no matter where you go, the fact that you can find enemy ships Fighting against each other, animals fighting against each other makes the game feel even more alive, I know the game gets a lot of hate for not having a lot of stealth but I disagree, I play the game mostly stealth successfully, I'm at level 35 and can one hit most of the mercenaries that are my level on hard difficulty using stealth, and I don't have to use multiple builds either. It's such an amazing game that doesn't get boring to me.

Originally posted by Angry Gandalf:

Firstly, I just wanted to say that if you liked Origins, more power to you. This is just my experience with the game.

For some context, I'm a fan of AC. I've played almost every mainline game (and liked actually all of them) but never got around to playing Origins. Steam sale, bought it, played it for about 22 hours now and I've just gotten more and more irritated the further I've gone.

And the NUMBER 1 culprit of my frustration (among many) is level-gating. I've never felt so restricted playing an AC game. Like the story (which I actually think is really good) starts to pick up and then is halted immediately because I now have to go grind out power levels. This really kills the pacing for me. Every new area you go to is a slog because anytime you reach a new area, you're at least 2-3 power levels below recommended which equates to you not being able to assasinate captains/brutes or wtv they're called. So it's either you stab them for a big chunk of their health and go into a 3 minute long fight or you stab them, hide and stealth stab them again and again until they eventually die. Neither of those options were any fun to me whatsoever.

AC Odyssey is probably my favorite, the world is beautiful and feels alive no matter where you go, the fact that you can find enemy ships Fighting against each other, animals fighting against each other makes the game feel even more alive, I know the game gets a lot of hate for not having a lot of stealth but I disagree, I play the game mostly stealth successfully, I'm at level 35 and can one hit most of the mercenaries that are my level on hard difficulty using stealth, and I don't have to use multiple builds either. It's such an amazing game that doesn't get boring to me.

It's actually funny because the problem you described was much bigger for me in Odyssey.
I too do not like level gating in those kind of games. But I found that in Origins there are a lot of sidequests that somehow relate to the actual story (or your next bigger target).
So in the end I thought it wasn't that big of a deal. Besides, it just made me enjoy the other aspects of the game more.

Odyssey however had a much bigger level-gating problem. So much that it kind of started to annoy me.
I think there is a quest that tells you your mother is in danger and you have to find her (so, a quite urgent matter), but the follow-up quest was like 8 levels above?
That was crazy. And you had to deviate a lot from the actual story to get up in levels, since these level gaps were a bit bigger.
Still had really good times in Odyssey, too.