Socrates, a philosopher of such influence that the history of the field is literally divided into the pre- and post-Socratics, is a character in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. It looks like he will challenge (read: annoy) you in his customary style, dismantling your beliefs and your values merely by asking forensic questions.
And, for the first time in Assassin’s Creed, you’ll have choices in how your character responds. At Ubisoft’s E3 demo, the publisher took the opportunity to demonstrate these choices via a dialogue with Socrates. Perhaps a playthrough of Odyssey will help me sympathise a little more with the Athenian authorities who executed him for asking too many questions.
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Given that Socrates was executed in 399BC, his presence in the game confirms that Assassin’s Creed Odyssey is set during the Peloponnesian War, which puts it hundreds of years before Assassin’s Creed Origins and thus the foundation of the assassin’s order. We’ve seen that our character will have a skill tree called ‘assassination’, but other than that it’s really not clear that there’s any interaction with the rest of the overarching narrative of the series at all.
But, whatever. Socrates is cool, philosophy is cool, and I’m personally far more interested in this game than I was when our best theory was that it continued after Origins and into Roman-occupied Greece. Plenty was still going on then, butthisis when the really exciting stuff happened.
Skip to 5:56 in the E3 presentation below to see the conversation with Plato’s teacher.