Assassin’s Creed Odyssey will bring the series to ancient Greece. From everything shown off in the game so far, its world looks to be lush and full of life. At the center of that world is the city of Athens. For Ubisoft Quebec, the game’s developer, Athens was one of the most important and difficult settings to recreate.
Part of that was defying against preconceived notions most people have about the ancient civilization. “Greece isn’t the white and cold it’s often depicted as,” Ben Hall, Odyssey World Director Ben Hall told IGN. “…it’s very colorful and vibrant and we wanted to make sure we reflected that in the world as you traveled around.” The world of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey looks to be brighter than any other game in the series, and that immediately makes it stand out. For the team at Ubisoft Quebec, part of the difficulty of making their own version of Athens simply had to do with how old the city truly is. “We had to try to understand which parts of it were contemporary to our time period, because… it’s been built on by so many different civilizations over the years that it’s important for us to figure out which layer of this was the correct layer for us.”
Here’s a look at Assassin’s Creed Odyssey‘s Athens trailer.

To help with this extensive research, the team brought on historian Stéphanie-Anne Ruatta to assist in creating the game. She n...