Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and the mystery of the Ancient Greek Cactus
(I started writing this for my Cohost page like 2 years ago. Still not sure why an article about fictional cacti took so long.)
So for a quick bit of background, I own Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and to date have put around 20 hours into the game, but of that 20 hours probably less than 10 minutes of it has been spent playing the actual campaign. Truth be told, I don’t think I ever even finished the tutorial mission where you fight through a portion of the Battle of Thermopylae. Instead, the majority of my time with the game has been spent in the Discovery Tour mode, just wandering around the Ancient Greek countryside taking in the scenery and diving into the various points of interest and educational tours. To be perfectly honest, I don’t really much care about the Assassin’s Creed storyline or Ubisoft’s style of open world adventure games, but the amount of work they put into creating a believable, historically accurate rendition of Greece during the time of the Peloponnesian War is genuinely impressive and makes for a genuinely enjoyable experience as a walking simulator. The different educational tours and landmarks also further prove how much thought and effort the developers put into making sure this fictionalized take on Ancient Greece was still true to life and as historically accurate as they could possibly manage within the limitations of a video game. With the amount of effort Ubisoft put into crafting their in-game version of Greece, it might then surprise some people that there is one seemingly glaring flaw with their take on the Greek scenery; all the cacti scattered across the map.
For anyone not aware, cacti are not native to Greece, or in fact anywhere across all of Eurasia. Other than a single species that can be found in Southern Africa (which bears no resemblance to the types of cactus seen in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey), cacti are entirely exclusive to the Americas. While it’s true that the game itself isn’t 100% historically accurate, making smaller mistakes or cutting corners in the name of gameplay, prominently featuring a family of plants all throughout the game world that don’t actually grow there is a pretty glaring miss given the general level of accuracy seen throughout the rest of the game. This apparent mistake is even more confusing once you consider that Ubisoft, the developers of the Assassin’s Creed franchise, are a European company. While obviously France is a fair distance away from Greece, one would think the developers would have at least some awareness of what plants grow on their own continent. It’s this strange inaccuracy that led me down a bit of a rabbit hole, just to try and find a possible explanation for why these cacti are present in this game.
The first, and probably biggest detail I discovered is that while cacti are not native to Greece, and would not have been present there during the time Assassin’s Creed Odyssey takes place, they have been introduced there in the modern era and are now fairly common as both a farmed plant and as an invasive species. With this in mind, the easiest explanation for the question at hand would simply be that Ubisoft didn’t have any botany experts on the development team while working on Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, and simply weren’t aware that the cacti that exist in Greece now would not have been present there 2000+ years ago. However, while logical, this is also a very boring answer and doesn’t make for a very interesting editorial. So with that in mind, I decided to dig a bit deeper for any more interesting potential explanations.
It was this deeper dive that eventually led me to discover the etymology of the word “cactus”. As it turns out, the modern cactus plant was actually named after the ancient Greek word “káktos”, which was originally used by the Greek naturalist Theophrastus to refer to a spiky plant which we no longer know the identity of. While it’s now commonly believed that the ancient Greek kaktos may have been a species of thistle related to artichokes, this connection did finally provide a potential explanation for why new-world cacti appear in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey.
While the simplest explanation is still that Ubisoft simply didn’t know the invasive cacti in Greece are not native plants, it’s also entirely possible that the developers were aware that these plants are not native, but chose to include them anyways to serve as a stand-in for the now forgotten kaktos that was known to the ancient Greeks. Given the level of detail seen everywhere else in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, I feel that this explanation is entirely possible. Either way, at least now I can still enjoy wandering around the game’s Discovery Tour mode without questioning this random inaccuracy.