Immortals Fenyx Rising Was Inspired By An Assassin’s Creed Odyssey Bug

Any game that goes into development has more than a few bugs or glitches to fix. It’s just part of the process when developing. However, some glitches and bugs are actually so unique that they further inspire development studios for other projects. Whether it’s adding a new feature into the game or even inspiring the developers to further expand on the bug with a completely different video game. With that said, that’s exactly what happened for Ubisoft when they crafted up Immortals Fenyx Rising. 

If you’re not familiar with the title then you might recall the original name given for the game, Gods & Monsters. Ubisoft has several IPs in the works and for one team of developers, they have been embarking on a journey within Greek mythology. It first started off with Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, the latest installment to the franchise although Assassin’s Creed Valhalla will soon take that title when it hits the marketplace in November of this year. Still, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey was a massive video game and it took quite a large team to make it out into the market. 

Set in ancient Greece, players mainly dabbled with the historical figures more so than Greek mythology, although there were plenty of areas within the game to offer some content regarding the mythical creatures or locations. However, Immortals Fenyx Rising’s game director, Scott Phillips, was work on the game when a glitch occurred when the protagonist boarded their ship. On the ship the entire crew only had one eye making them cyclops. 

“While we were developing Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, I think the first, time for me, that I had a hint of what Immortals Fenyx Rising could become, was actually a bug. As the player, you were on your ship and your ship crew was normally humans, but in this case, all the humans got turned into cyclopses, so you had a ship full of cyclopses. And it sort of, for me, kicked off this feeling of, ‘Hey, that’s pretty cool. We have this whole depth of knowledge that we built about Ancient Greek history, but we also have this little bit of mythology. Maybe we could go a lot deeper into this mythology.’ So, after Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, we got the opportunity to develop a much deeper game going into Ancient Greek mythology, and that’s where Immortals Fenyx Rising comes from.”

While the studio went on to fix this bug, the glitch stood out for Scott Phillips as he made note in an interview with Gamerant. According to Scott, the team had all this knowledge of Greek mythology from working on Assassin’s Creed Odyssey that they thought making another game right after that dived further into the unique mythology would be entertaining for the studio along with players. That’s where Immortals Fenyx Rising was born, a game where a single human is granted powers of the gods and must rid the land of all sorts of nefarious foes. Currently, players can expect Immortals Fenyx Rising on December 3, 2020, for the PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S.

Source: Gamerant