Assassin’s Creed Odyssey has a huge grinding and microtransaction problem

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, more so than even Assassin’s Creed Origins, is a game ruled by your character’s level. You can successfully fight enemies one, and maybe even two, levels above you if you’re particularly skilled or sneaky, but you’re usually better off sticking to areas that are designed for your particular level. Trying to fight someone someone three or more levels above you is a death wish.

This means that the game does a pretty good job of controlling where you can go and when you can go there, which makes parts of the open-world game feel a bit less free than I would like. But the real issue takes place later in the game, where grinding becomes all but necessary for most players.

“Early in the game, grinding by racking up small quests, only occurs in patches, with the central story offering almost enough XP to keep up with leveling demands,” our review stated. “But it certainly becomes more common later in the game, in which the final act is stretched over a vast hinterland of leveling.”

We’re not the only ones who were upset about the pacing or use of this level-gating.

“If your character goes from level six to seven, all of the animals and most of the nearby enemies will also jump from six to seven. This eliminates that moment where you instantly feel more capable and competent for a while after leveling up,” Gamesbeat stated. “I was making good progress with my character up until level 15. At that point, I had a story mission that required me to take on a level 17 assassin. That was so challenging that I decided to get to 17 myself first ... But it took me six hours to go from 15 to 17.”

The late game includes a brick wall that you can have to scale by leveling your character to a certain point.

The XP rewards of the game’s side-missions also seem to scale with you — which gives you quite a bit of freedom when it comes to where to go in order to grind for XP — but you’re still going to spend a significant amount of time grinding for XP unless you play like a completionist from the beginning.

This isn’t that big of a deal, in the larger scheme of things. Odyssey is fun to play, making grinds not much of a grind. The problem is introduced when you realize that Ubisoft is also selling you the ability to level up faster through the in-game store.

While the game doesn’t do much to surface the real-money economy to you through the game itself, the in-game store has a few items that will help you with that pesky grinding problem. A problem, by the way, you can’t avoid if you want to finish the game.

Luckily, you can buy an item that increases the XP you gain from playing by 50 percent.

The permanent XP boost, which gives you 50 percent more XP for everything you do and works on all your saved games, is available for 1,000 Helix Credits. So how much do Helix Credits cost? We’re glad you asked.

The most affordable option to get the XP boost is to spend $9.99 on Helix Credits, but members of the Ubi Club can also use the virtual coins they earn by playing the game to buy two-hour XP boosts that give you 25 percent more XP while they’re active. Each boost costs 10 coins, and you’ll earn a decent amount of coins just for playing through the campaign. You may already have a nice collection of coins if you own a few other Ubisoft games, in fact.

But those boosts are limited in both time and amount, while the for-pay boosts are forever, and give you much more XP. You just have to pay for them.

None of this is new; the Helix Credit system and for-pay XP boosts existed in Origins, but that game didn’t enforce its leveling requirements nearly as heavily at the end of the story. It’s almost inevitable that you’ll find yourself grinding to some extent while playing Odyssey.

This could be poor balancing or it could be a matter of Ubisoft pushing players toward paying to solve a problem the publisher created with the slow and controlled leveling system, but either way it’s a bad deal for players. It’s also possible that the XP system will be patched in some way after release, and we’re hoping for that outcome: This is a system that could use a bit of tweaking.