I loaded up a save of my second playthrough of Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey for this experiment. I know I can just make a manual save of the “complete” one and mess everything up there, but I’m paranoid and I refuse. Mistakes were made in the past with other games, so I’m just being careful.

So, I crafted some arrows and started killing for a full day. I tried this in a big city first, but they kept spawning cause there were too many corners and buildings they just “appeared from”. I went smaller this time, to the Chora of Delphi. Oddly enough, the guards weren’t the most disruptive thing that happened.

Note: I paid off all my bounties in between takes. It was irritating trying to murder people with bounty hunters chasing me. The gall, I know. There were a few of them, about 1000 drachme worth.

I learned a few interesting things about AC Odyssey:

• If you kill people with a bow, you’re less likely to attract guards or trigger bounties. Perhaps the game sees the mechanic as hunting. Attacking with melee weapons will quickly draw attention.
• Guards need to sleep too. They are less likely to appear late afternoon and don’t even care if you’re killing NPCs at night.
• Bounty hunters are actually more persistent than guards. Better pay, perhaps? I got two pairs of guards reacting to the massacre while around 8-9 times I got the bounty trigger.
• Not even bounty hunters care about a murderer late at night.
• Bodies do eventually disappear even if you don’t leave the area, but it’s barely noticeable.
• Only a few NPCs will fight back.
• The developers have placed a few immortal NPCs in Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey to have the village at least a little populated in case of random events. Or a murder hobo player.
• NPCs have their patterns, no matter what.
• The NPC bard was singing the Tale of Leonidas. Just the one verse. Over. And over. And over. It was like a Daft Punk song (no hate on Daft Punk, though, I love their music).

In truth, what made me try this in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey was seeing one NPC, in particular, reacting to my actions in the game. There were two brothers at one point that I completed a quest for, and after it was done, I think one of them annoyed me so I just held my bow up in their face. I didn’t shoot, I just held it there for a few seconds, talking smack to an NPC. I like getting immersed in RPGs, alright? Apparently, that pissed him off for some reason and he attacked me. It took me by surprise a little because I didn’t expect that sort of AI from Assassin’s Creed. Good on Ubisoft for this one.