Assassin’s Creed Origins and Assassin’s Creed Odyssey feature stunning open worlds based on Egyptian and Greek history, with a fanatical attention to detail – and now it’s possible to experience those worlds on console at 60fps, double the frame-rate of the initial releases. Harnessing the power of the new machines for smoother gameplay definitely sounds appealing, but with the massive scale and complexity of these titles, is a stable 60fps really achievable?
Going back to test these 2017/2018 releases, Origins and Odyssey still visually impress. Lighting is beautifully saturated, with strong volumetrics and great global illumination, while while cutscenes feature a solid depth of field that cascades into beautiful bokeh shapes, all aided by a stable temporal anti-aliasing (TAA) that gives the titles a clean, filmic quality. Even against contemporary open-world titles, there’s little to complain about – perhaps some spotty texture work in places, but that’s a minor blemish on an otherwise spotless work by the developers at Ubisoft.
The move from 30 to 60fps is the headline feature here, and it is delivered with surprising reliability. In most circumstances, Series S, X and PS5 all hug that 60fps line perfectly, without any dips or deviations. There are some exceptions though, and curiously most of them apply to all current-gen machines, from the powerful PS5 and Series X to the more constrained Series S.