DLC #198 - Assassin's Creed Origins - The Curse of the Pharaohs

"Would you like to Boost your character to level 45 before you start this DLC?"

Erm - OK? I was already level 44 anyway, but if you insist. After all, there's a trophy contained within this content to reach level 55, so why not?

I would guess the benefit to this offering is to allow much lower levelled players to enjoy the DLC content without having to put the hours into levelling their character up to reach it. 

I personally wouldn't categorise The Curse of the Pharaohs as "must see" content to the point where you absolutely have to make it instantly accessible to all, but it is an improvement on The Hidden Ones, albeit just very slightly.

Desecrated tombs, Spirits rising from the dead and back and forth ventures into the Afterlife. This time, Bayek is called to the city of Thebes, overrun by evil spirits, angered by the theft of artefacts contained within their burial tombs. The city is being terrorised by Pharaohs of the past whose spirits have been resurrected via a curse in order to seek death upon those who have pillaged their tombs of it's riches.

Naturally, Bayek's role is to prevent the curse from spreading, and ultimately do what needs to be done to bring peace upon Egypt again. Also naturally, this will involve a lot of killing. It seems to be the common progression tree for Assassin's Creed story arcs.

Each of the Pharaohs you encounter terrorising Egypt are significant historical figures of the past, and each of them will need to be banished into the Afterlife in order to lift the curse for good. These new environments are welcome for you to explore in great depth, and each of them reflects on the Pharoah they're attached too. Both the Pharaohs and their relevant Afterlife are the best parts of this DLC package and these new parts of the map finally look like you're exploring completely new areas of the game, and don't feel like they've just been subject to bland copy and paste work, which was my biggest disappointment of The Hidden Ones DLC.

New enemy types await. Aside the Pharoah's themselves, new enemies include Cultists, Giant Scorpions and Mummies. The addition of Star Shards as a crafting material now also allow you to further upgrade your equipment to new strengths once enough of them have been collected and there are some shiny new Legendary weapons to get your hands on too.

It's a better package than The Hidden Ones, but it's still far from perfect, and the main faults I encountered with this content reared their head when I was pursing the trophies.

The package comes with 6 trophies in total. There is a secret trophy awarded upon completion of the Main Quest arc, which contains 5 quests. There's nothing really outside of the ordinary here and the primary focus of the story is stopping the curse sweeping across Thebes by taking down the identified Pharaohs whose spirits walk the land. Each of them put up a tough fight, but if you're well versed with the combat system, they shouldn't take too long to dispatch. Most of my deaths were my own fault, mainly attempting to over-extend attacks in order to finish fights quicker and leaving myself exposed to devastatingly powerful combos which will instantly kill you.

However, the pacing of the game is off here. This content was going absolutely fine. It was nicely paced, fights felt fair and there wasn't a feeling that I was ever behind the curve. Then suddenly, I hit a brick wall with the difficulty scaling. Enemies suddenly became overpowered very quickly as they scale faster than you in terms of levelling, making fights unnecessarily challenging. I understand that the intention in this is to make the player take a break from the main quests and invest some time into levelling Bayek further via side content, but I just felt aggreged about having to do that given how dull the side content in this game is. This is my biggest criticism of the package.

There's a lot of exploration and fetch-questing too. Probably a bit too much for my personal liking. You seem to be scouring a building for clues every other objective, and I think it slows the pace of the game down way too much in it's frequency.

The other trophies outside of this are at least fairly straight-forward. There is a Gold trophy awarded for completing the 5 Serqet locations, which you more than likely won't be able to do until you're close to level 55 anyway. The Scorpions present at these locations that you'll need to kill are all level 58, and will make light work of you anywhere south of level 55, but they're easy enough to take down once you're of a strong enough level.

The importance of levelling has been mentioned a handful of times already, and it's mainly down to one trophy;

Higher Power - Reach level 55 (The Curse of the Pharaohs)

First issue. For what reason do you need to raise the level cap a whole 10 levels from 45 to 55 when this clearly exceeds the amount of experience the main questline gives you? I'd only just reached level 51 once I'd beaten every story mission and had to turn to alternative solutions in order to earn the remaining amount of required experience to hit level 55. Why are you pushing me to complete loads of mundane side missions and locations. Again. 

Second issue. It just takes far too long to reach level 55. As stated, I was at the beginning of level 51 once I'd beaten the main questline, and from this point, you need to accumulate roughly 140k of experience points to reach level 55.

If you visit the Bureau of the Hidden Ones in Memphis in the main game, there is a vendor who sells Tablets of Knowledge. These objects cost 1,000 coins, and in return, will grant you 1,000 experience points. A great way to easily boost your level. Providing you have the money. Which I didn't really have. After selling all the surplus in my inventory, I barely had enough to purchase myself an entire level. What's my option from here?

Grinding out the remaining 100k experience points on side quests and conquering locations. It was the onion topping on the ice cream sundae. I have somehow found myself in a position where I've ended the Origins DLC experience in the exact same way I had ended the Platinum experience - With an element of post-game grinding necessary to achieve my end goal. I didn't like it then, and I don't like it now.

Granted, it wasn't anywhere near as laborious as the "Old Habits" trophy in the main game, but it just felt like an extension of the same activities and quests, and here I was repeating them all over again. This process took roughly an additional 5/6 hours to finally reach level 55. It made me wish I'd kept more items back in my inventory to take advantage of the Tablets of Knowledge.

The DLC doesn't change my overall opinion on Origins. The refresh is exactly what the series needed, and it's still exciting to see what this looks like moving forward, but the DLC is very average when you balance the pros and cons. This package is slightly better than The Hidden Ones, if only for the fact you actually see some different environments that don't look like direct extracts from the main game's map, but is soured by poor scaling and an unnecessary grind to the finish line.