Assassin's Creed Odyssey

• 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.

• 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.

• Sidequests can also pop up as extensions of main story missions or greater sidequests. If the current focus is on a particular city or island, keep an eye on the map for new ones popping up. They can feed back into primary quests!

• 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).

• If you absolutely cannot stand dealing with limited oxygen underwater, make a beeline to the small island between Chios and Samos on the east side of the map. There's a weapon there that'll solve your problem.

• A surprising number of things can catch fire. You are one of those things. The easiest way to put yourself out is to hold the dodge button while moving to roll or jump into water if there's any around, even ankle deep will do it.

• 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

• You can craft arrows in combat, only certain actions (like rolling) block it for a second. You can also turn on auto-crafting for basic arrows, which is highly recommended.

• The game's combat is by default quite HP spongy, and in particular it's very difficult to play as a "pure" assassin build early on. If you prefer a quick and lethal style of play which lends itself well to stealthy kills (as you might expect from a game with Assassin in the title), there's an unlockable engraving which limits your health to 25% but boosts your damage by 100%. It completely changes how the game is played and so is worth being aware of.

• 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)

• Early on, the only way to heal is through the active ability in the Warrior tree. Once you progress the story far enough you unlock the passive bonus of healing an amount of health for each point of adrenaline you spend.

• 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.

• The rank 3 shield breaker skill description is deceptive if not entirely wrong. You don't get a big AoE burst like it implies, it instead replaces the lateral shield smack of the previous two ranks with a massive forward blast, sending the target barreling away from you (they can hit other enemies for some extra damage too). YMMV whether or not this is useful or annoying.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Sync points increase your bird's perception levels, which makes it easier to spot enemies and goodies when scanning. It's a very gradual benefit that adds up over time. Around the point you unlock the first harass skill you should be able to feel it kicking in, though it never gets quite as powerful as you hope it would.

• Don't waste your money on engraving things early on, when you'll be replacing equipment regularly and whatever engravings you have access to will be low rank. Around mid-game once you're sitting on a pile of resources and gold, it's incredibly cheap to slap engravings on everything.

• You can check the engravings list to see where they come from. Most generic engravings are locked behind specific challenges (kill X enemies with Y weapon type, for example); the list is the only place to actually see your challenge progress outside of them popping up in the upper right of the screen.

• 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.

• Once the loot curve slows down you can generally get away with paying to upgrade your gear every five levels or so. Keep in mind higher tier gear costs more to upgrade.

• 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).

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

• Early on, dismantling all gear is a good idea to get a nice big stockpile of materials. Once you're swimming in purples, you'll start feeling the pinch on money and should switch over to selling most of your junk gear.

• There's a chest on your ship where you can store unwanted gear. Perfect for those Club Ubisoft items you can't otherwise get rid of.

• If you complete an armor set, it will be leveled up to your current level when you collect the final piece. They won't auto-level if any pieces are in ship storage when you complete the set.

• 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.

• 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).

• There's a final tier of upgrades for your ship that cost an obscene amount of money and materials and are, best I can tell, completely unnecessary.

• Recruiting someone adds them to your lieutenant pool, which can be used to buff your ship's fight-stats. You should only grab people you notice to have cool, high-level traits. Or ignore it, naval combat isn't super hard.

• Once you reach level 50, a new array of passive bonuses unlocks in the skill menu. Most of them should be familiar to you at that point, but there are a handful of unique ones like bonuses to parrying and dodging.

• Once you max out the left pips of the basic engravings, the only way to upgrade them further is by paying Hephaistos, found in Myson Cave in Mallis, a bunch of money per rank.