Ubisoft foresaw the grindy fate of Assassin's Creed Valhalla back in the Odyssey days, wanting a literal "odyssey" but not "a world that was just fatiguing to travel through"

Assassin's Creed Odyssey is, as its name would suggest, a pretty big game. Vast swathes of Ancient Greece are yours to explore, and while its world director Ben Hall wanted to make the game feel big, he didn't want it to be a chore like some open-world games can be.

"We wanted to create an odyssey for the player," Hall tells Edge magazine. "But one of my tasks was to make sure we didn't create a world that was just fatiguing to travel through."

Hall cut his teeth on Burnout Revenge, an adrenaline-fuelled, twitch-fast arcade racer – about as far from trekking through the long grass in your sandals as you can get. It's fine to have a big world when you can speed across it in a few minutes, but that's not the case with Odyssey.

"When we first started looking at ancient Greece for Odyssey, we knew we weren't going to be able to build all of it," Hall explains. "For example, Athens becomes a big anchor point. That's going to be our biggest city. Then we start with sketches. We start with whiteboards, we start in Photoshop, then draw lines between things in terms of the locations that pop out as being places that we want to use."

Athens is placed right in the middle of Odyssey's huge map – in the region called Attika. To the east lie a smattering of islands, and to the west are the main landmasses you can explore. Putting Athens right in the middle means you can venture out from it and already be relatively near to your destination. You get to travel, but it's not too much of a chore. If it were up in one corner, journeys would be a lot longer and could get frustrating.

Unfortunately, the next game in the series, Valhalla, is known for being too big. Large, open-world games filled with checklist activities have become synonymous with Ubisoft, so the company toned things down for 2023's Assassin's Creed Mirage.

If you're a fan of the genre, you should check out our ranking of the best open-world games you can sink dozens of hours into.