Assassin's Creed Odyssey recently introduced a Story Creator mode, allowing players to build their own custom missions. Ubisoft has noticed a glut of missions intended to easily boost XP, and has announced changes to the mode to prevent farming. The studio said in an update that it is doing this to maintain the integrity of the creative mode, as well as to keep the XP farming missions from crowding out other community stories that are using the mode as intended.
"Story Creator Mode was designed to be a tool for players to let their creativity and imagination run free as they build their very own Stories to share with others, using a modified version of the tools our own designers used to develop the quests in the game," the update states. "These exploits risk jeopardizing the overall quality, integrity, and purpose of Story Creator Mode and results in less visibility for the creative, interesting and frankly fantastic community stories that have been published."
The post details several steps it will be implementing going forward to reduce the instances of these XP farming quests. Those include filtering XP farming quests from its automatic recommendation system, hiding any stories that are reported for exploits, sanctioning those who misuse the tool, and updating the terms of use to reflect these changes. It also says it will be implementing "further solutions" in the future with other title updates.
While some of these changes do clearly connect with improving visibility for non-farming quests, banning the quests altogether isn't necessarily needed for that goal. It's worth noting that Assassin's Creed Odyssey's steep experience ramp was one common point of criticism among reviews, including in our own. The in-game shop also offers a permanent XP boost item as a real-money purchase.
"When looking at Odyssey in the bigger picture, it can often feel like too much game for its own good," Alessandro Fillari wrote. "There are numerous moments where the loop of exploring, completing missions, and traveling can slow the pace significantly. This is exacerbated by the expansive map, which can sometimes feel excessively big and a chore to travel through. ... Several times throughout my journey, progression was somewhat exhausting, which made some of the more impactful and exciting moments in the story feel like a drag."
For more content authored by Ubisoft itself, the final installment in the Fate of Atlantis episodic DLC trilogy is coming on July 16. That is the last piece of planned DLC that we know of for the game, which released in 2018.