Assassin's Creed's locations might always deliver on giving the player great big buildings to climb up and then leap off, but sometimes the developers need to add a bit of extra historical fiction into the fact.
Speaking to Edge (via GamesRadar), Assassin's Creed Odyssey's world director Ban Hall soon realised when making the game that Ancient Greece wasn't packed with tall buildings to scale. "A lot of the buildings and the points of interest we were building were much smaller," Hall said.
"And that's kind of where some of the ideation came from when it came to building some of the big statues that we put around Greece. They were always based on mythological or historical fact, always based on working with the research team, working with a historian. But what we did is we took a fantastical approach to the giant statue that then gave us something epic to climb. It gave the player a distraction. So you could be on your main quest, going across to a different town, but like: 'Oh, there's that - I'm going to go check that out'. Then you get that climbing, you get that verticality."
AC Odyssey's statues did allow for some of the game's most interesting climbs. Partly that's due to them letting you hang off a statue's private parts, but mostly that's because they were a break from the giant structures other games had us accustomed to. It just goes to show that even if Assassin's Creed isn't always the most historically accurate game, it can still make its world feel like it fits the fantastical assumption of a historical period you have in your head.