The Steropes Bounty Contract appeared in my Assassin’s Creed Odyssey Quest Log. It was disappointingly short and easy! Let me tell you what was wrong and why!
The three main stories of Assassin’s Creed were decently long, detailed and well paced. The first DLC quest “The Lost Tales of Greece” was funny and entertaining, but with a rather bad and pointless reward at this point in my character’s progression. The Live Events have been a disaster of sorts with only Epic ships appearing since their official start in mid-October – the Mercenaries refuse to appear in Ancient Greece to this day. On top of that the newest mythical epic creature – Steropes the Cyclops, was kind of a let-down for me.
I was done with the quest on my first attempt after less than 10 minutes of time passing from reading the description, through traveling to the location, the fight itself to the examining of my new Legendary bow I got as a reward in the end.
Please note, this article contains some minor spoilers about various quests and storylines in the game. Nothing major, of course.Having to go through a series of quests in a long and interesting chain for the other mythical creatures from the base game, such as the Minotaur, the Sphinx and especially Medusa, I was hoping for a step up in both duration and most of all – challenge. Given the fact that this is a post-launch content, the developers had plenty of time to tweak the challenge based on players’ feedback and all sorts of internal metrics from more than a month since the game’s official launch.
To get to Medusa you had to go through mystical forest and witness the power of love between two women and about a million snakes. Oh, the snakes! Indiana Jones completely ruined this beautiful creature for me, heh.
For the Minotaur fight you had to go through several pre-quests, gather information and interact with several NPCs before you get to a labyrinth and only after passing through it without getting lost or falling to your death, you get to see the mighty Minotaur. The lore is also there to back up the reputation of this beast of a reckless killing machine.
The quest you don’t even need to pick up. It’s placed in your inventory, in the “Contracts” category as it’s a Bounty mission. All you have to do is travel to the location, which is in the existing world – on Andros island, on its eastern shores.
Steropes bears a unique title – The Storm Bringer. Well, I didn’t try him in Nightmare difficulty, but in all others he did not display any affiliation to lightnings. His slow movements and boring not-so-special attacks made the fight extra easy.
What’s worse – if you go with a Hunter Build, you can end the fight without a scratch, even if you are not a hard-core player. The arena is so large and open, that you can easily avoid pretty much all of his attacks with little to no effort on your part.
There are some tricks you can pull off on Steropes to speed up the fight, of course – like dodging some of his attacks in the appropriate moments to enter “slow-mo”, or interrupting his rush attack with your Overpower attack. This is rather useful and helpful in the higher difficulties, but not really required on Easy or Normal.
Steropes looks very cool and is impressive in size, that’s a given. The Arena, although too big and too open, looked very cool and detailed. The gameplay mechanics involved in the fight were what disappointed me the most. Steropes is a lot easier to beat compared to even the easiest Animals from the Daughters of Artemis storyline.
This is all I wanted to say for now about Steropes Bounty Contract mission. I was looking forward to this. Now all I can do is wait for the next one and hope that it presents a better challenge with a more meaningful story. Thanks for reading!
