Assassin's Creed Odyssey

• Skills are now mostly active, requiring you to spend a level of "adrenaline" to do them. A few are passive, others are still active but trade off requiring adrenaline for a long cooldown (like poisoned blades)

• Sync points increase your bird's perception levels.

• Don't waste your money on engraving most things.

• Spartan Kick is great for knocking enemies off rooftops for huge damage. The shield breaker one is very useful as well, since a huge number of enemies use shields.

• AFAIK the only way to heal during combat is by using the active healing ability.

• Crafting materials are used only for upgrading weapons/boat, no ammo pouches or whatever.

• A surprising number of things can catch fire.

• The "parry" actually has a really long window, it is more of a soft block that parries whatever hits you at that time, and knocks back everyone around you. Abuse it

• Ramming a broken down ship dead middle at speed will split the ship in two and give you way more resources than boarding, for some reason.

• It isn't necessary to upgrade things early on, since you'll be getting items that will be matched closely to your level. You might want to upgrade your bow if you are going for a Hunter build.

• In the end-game purples might be better than golds, since golds can have a set bonus whereas purples will give you an engravement slot there (so it has up to 4 slots).

• If you complete an armor set, it will be leveled up to your current level as you put the last piece on.

• You can reset your abilities whenever and as much as you like. The currency cost for a respec is dependent on your level, but it stays reasonable.

• You can occasionally find tombs that offer additional ability points. Usually you need to break some walls to get inside the actual tomb itself.

• You can craft arrows in combat, only certain actions (like rolling) block it for a second.

• You won't have enough skill points to unlock every skill in the game fully, so the game wants you to specialize -- that said, I feel there are great skills in each tree that benefit you no matter what you're trying to do. Second Wind in the warrior tree is a great heal to have in your pocket, as mentioned above. The Overpower shot in the top of the Hunter tree is an amazing ability that absolutely wrecks groups (and does single target damage on par with most of the melee overpowers). The "sight of athena" skill or whatever at the bottom of the assassin tree is your "press button to locate treasure in your vicinity" pulse and honestly should probably just be in the base game but whatever. And each tree has a passive "do XX% more assassin/warrior/hunter damage" skill that's honestly not a bad thing to have.

• The sidequests marked with a gold border around the diamond are individually-crafted, and offer insights into the characters/region you're exploring. They're not witcher-caliber, but they're pretty good, and are the sidequests you should focus on if you need extra xp or whatever. In contrast, the sidequests with a white border are generic radiant filler quests that might as well be procedurally generated, don't feel the need to do them unless you're desperate for the rewards.

• Wood will be a bottleneck for upgrading your ship, so make sure you dismantle any weapons you aren't using instead of selling them -- they tend to give you wood. Also make sure to loot war supplies before burning them, sometimes they have wood too. Check blacksmiths to see if they're selling wood as well. Sometimes they also sell ancient tablets, which are the other bottleneck (these will be found in ruins, so loot those as you find them).

• You cannot die from fall damage, ever, so feel free to just jump off a high cliff if it's the most direct route to where you're trying to go (just make sure you don't get bit by a wolf or something immediately after you land)

• The game will slowly introduce more key mechanics via the main story, so if you can control yourself at all, it's worth focusing on the main plot until it takes you to the island of Andros--I think that after this point, the game has nothing new to teach you and you can go hogwild with whatever you want to do but someone please correct me if there's more.

• There's a teleport assassination skill that can chain when you level it up. It is almost hilariously broken, mechanics wise, but the damage it does is still based on your stats so it isn't always a one shot.

• Don't take the armor sets off the Ubsioft Club page. They aren't skins, they are level 5 crap that you can't sell or dismantle as far as I know, so they will sit in your inventory forever. But there's a chest on your ship where you can store unwanted gear.