discovery tour ac odyssey

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Assassin's Creed Discovery Tour

The Discovery Tour series is made of dedicated games that let visitors freely roam Ancient Greece, Ancient Egypt and the Viking Age to learn more about their history and daily life. Students, teachers, non-gamers, and players can discover these eras at their own pace, or embark on guided tours and stories curated by historians and experts.

Discovery Tour Time Periods

Discover the life of Vikings and Anglo-Saxons in the 9th century! Purchase the Discovery Tour: Viking Age as a standalone product for yourself or your classroom on Xbox, Playstation, PC and Luna. The Discovery Tour is also available as a free game mode within Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.

Ancient Greece

Dive into the incredible richness of Classical Greece and meet Sokrates and other key historical figures of the time! Purchase Discovery Tour: Ancient Greece as a standalone product for yourself or your classroom on PC. Discovery Tour is also available as a game mode within Assassin’s Creed Odyssey on Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5 and PC.

Ancient Egypt

Discover the Great Pyramids and learn about Ptolemaic Egypt at the time of Cleopatra! Purchase Discovery Tour: Ancient Egypt as a standalone product for yourself or your classroom on PC. Discovery Tour is also available as a game mode within Assassin’s Creed Origins on Xbox One, Playstation, and PC.

Discovery Tour: Viking Age

News & noteworthy, deep dive into history, history through stories.

Immerse yourself in history through a memorable and engaging interactive experience. Curated by historians, professors, and experts, the Discovery Tour covers a wide variety of topics, ranging from art and architecture to philosophy, politics, and religion.

Used In Classrooms, Praised By Teachers

Winner of Best Learning Game and the G4C People's Choice Award at the 2019 Games for Change Awards, Discovery Tour has been used by teachers to bring their students closer to history. In addition to its guided tours, Discovery Tour's freely explorable re-creations of Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece and the Viking Age enable students to visualize the landscape, architecture, and cultures of the past like never before.

Personalize Your Experience

Travel through Ancient Greece, Ancient Egypt and the Viking Age as one of dozens of different avatars, unlocked as you progress in the Discovery Tour. These include a range of fictional characters as well as such legends as Cleopatra, Sokrates, Caesar, Pythagoras and King Aelfred.

Delve Into An Immense World

Explore massive, painstakingly detailed re-creations of ancient lands and eras. From the heights of the Parthenon to the depths of the Aegean Sea, from the Pyramids of Giza to the snowy lands of Norway, Discovery Tour's historians and designers have invested a great deal of time and energy into meticulously re-creating the famous landmarks, geographical features, and daily routines of the ancient world.

Curriculum Guide for Teachers and Students

We've partnered with McGill university, Technology Learning & Cognition Lab to create curriculum guides for Discovery Tour! Create your own lesson plan and discovery useful tips and tricks to make the most of Discovery Tour in an educational context.

Discovery Tour FAQ

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This article is a disambiguation page for Discovery Tour

The following is a list of links to pages that might share the same title. Please follow one of the disambiguation links below or search to find the page you were looking for if it is not listed. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.

Discovery Tour series keyart

The Discovery Tour is the overarching title for a series of educational modes for the Assassin's Creed games released between 2017–2020. First introduced as downloadable content for Assassin's Creed: Origins , its positive critical reception led to the program being expanded to include similar content for Assassin's Creed: Odyssey in 2018 and Assassin's Creed: Valhalla in 2020. Notable features include a variety of avatars related to the subjects discussed, as well as a lack of combat mechanics and damage.

It may refer to:

• Discovery Tour: Ancient Egypt
• Discovery Tour: Ancient Greece
• Discovery Tour: Viking Age
• Assassin's Creed

• The Inventory

Assassin's Creed Odyssey 's Discovery Tour Mode Lets You Ride Around On A Unicorn And Take Quizzes

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey finally gets its Discovery Mode Tour this month, offering a way to explore the game’s recreation of Ancient Greece peacefully while maybe just learning something. As with all things Odyssey , it is intimidatingly large.

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I’ve only taken the quickest of tours in Odyssey ’s new mode, just enough to see the game’s map freckled with nodes for some 30 tours and hundreds of educational points of interest. I’m not sure I’m even ready to plunge into this mode yet. I’ve still got piles of quests to clear in the main game, even after playing it for over 140 hours.

Ubisoft introduced the Discovery Tour concept in 2017’s Assassin’s Creed Origins , opening that game’s ancient Egyptian map for educational exploration mixed with a dash of anachronism . The idea was to allow players to play virtual historian, exploring an ancient civilization without having to deal with the combat or quests of the standard game.

Everything is enhanced in Odyssey ’s take, as things tend to be for gaming sequels.

There are tours again, guided walks from node to node to learn about the Acropolis or Spartan politics or the Battle of Marathon. Origins had a disembodied narrator talk players through each tour. Odyssey uses historical and fictional figures who were featured in the main game to guide you. A tour might begin with Herodotos or Leonidas greeting you, offering you a chance to chat before you hear them explain each sight along the tour. The educational traipse ends with a low-stress quiz that doesn’t appear to be scored.

Players can also freely explore in this mode, activating the many markers on the map for quick image-and-text entries about various cultural and historical elements. It wouldn’t be a true Ubisoft game without a ton of things to clear on a map, right? Frankly, that’s just the kind of thing to hook me in, and I had a good time ignoring the tours so I could poke around and see what individuals nodes indicated about a building or gathering of people.

A small number of these markers reveal behind-the-scenes details about the making of the game, though none that I’ve found yet are all that extraordinary. One node explained the prevalence of music in ancient Greece and the game designers’ subsequent desire to compose a lot of music for the game.

Origins let players choose from a roster of main game characters, some of them initially locked off, to use while walking through the Discovery Tour mode. Odyssey does the same, but adds a selection of horses to ride. Explore enough and the game will unlock more exotic rides like a unicorn or a horse on fire. If that doesn’t make much sense, it didn’t in the main game either, but where better to learn than on the back of a Pegasus?

Odyssey ’s Discovery Tour will be added for free on Tuesday, September 10 and will also be sold as a standalone $20 experience on PC for those not interested in the other parts of the game.

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Learn about ancient Greece in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey’s Discovery Tour next week

Discovery Tour: Ancient Greece finally has a release date

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Assassin’s Creed Odyssey ’s educational mode, Discovery Tour, will launch Sept. 10, publisher Ubisoft announced Wednesday. That’s actually just before the “fall 2019” launch window that the company gave during E3 2019.

Discovery Tour will be released as a free update for Odyssey owners on all platforms: PlayStation 4, Windows PC, and Xbox One. Just like its Egypt-based predecessor, it will also be available as a stand-alone product on PC, Discovery Tour: Ancient Greece , for $19.99. That experience will be sold on Uplay, Ubisoft’s digital storefront. We’ve asked Ubisoft whether it will be available for purchase via Steam as well, like Discovery Tour by Assassin’s Creed: Ancient Egypt , or if it will be exclusive to Uplay; we’ll update this article with any information we receive.

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey ’s game world is a massive, intricately detailed version of ancient Greece, and the Discovery Tour mode will allow you to explore all of it — free from combat or any of the other constraints of the main game. For more on how Discovery Tour works, check out our impressions of the version for ancient Egypt in Assassin’s Creed Origins .

In Odyssey ’s Discovery Tour, you’ll be able to travel through ancient Greece’s 29 regions at your leisure, and go on guided tours featuring characters from the game’s story such as Aspasia, Barnabas, and Herodotos. The mode will offer tours at more than 300 in-game stations, covering five fields: philosophy, famous cities, daily life, war, and myths. And at the conclusion of every tour, you’ll get quizzes that Ubisoft described in a news release as “engaging, fun, and rewarding.”

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey was originally released Oct. 5, 2018. The game will be available as a Google Stadia launch title this November. You can check out 15 screenshots from Discovery Tour: Ancient Greece in the gallery.

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Assassin's creed odyssey – discovery tour: ancient greece, common sense media reviewers.

Education-focused historical tours without mature content.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this game.

Kids can learn about Ancient Greece while explorin

Narrated tours encourage an interest in historical

The historical personalities players meet and lear

Players simply move their character through the wo

Some of the ancient art shown includes male and fe

Parents need to know that Assassin's Creed Odyssey – Discovery Tour: Ancient Greece is a learning adventure for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Windows PCs. It provides players a stress-free way to explore and learn historical information about Ancient Greece, as presented in Assassin's Creed Odyssey. It's available…

Educational Value

Kids can learn about Ancient Greece while exploring a simulation of the Greek isles as they were more than two thousand years ago. Tour guides send players on discovery missions informed by actual scholars and historians where they can look at and learn about famous cities, architecture, art, artifacts, and events. Tours also discuss the people, religion, philosophies, and culture of the time, before finishing with a quick quiz to see how much the player learned. The experience is explicitly educational, presented in an interactive and entertaining way.

Positive Messages

Narrated tours encourage an interest in historical locations, politics, and culture, suggesting that we can learn more about who we are by studying our past.

Positive Role Models

The historical personalities players meet and learn about have a wide range of traits. Some philosophize about morality and politics while others come off as warmongers who have little respect for suffering citizens. The tour guides are supportive and encouraging of the player's learning.

Ease of Play

Players simply move their character through the world, occasionally tapping a button to reveal more information about a place or thing. There's no way to fail or die.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Some of the ancient art shown includes male and female genitalia.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Assassin's Creed Odyssey – Discovery Tour: Ancient Greece is a learning adventure for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Windows PCs. It provides players a stress-free way to explore and learn historical information about Ancient Greece, as presented in Assassin's Creed Odyssey . It's available both as a paid standalone experience for Windows PC users and as a free update to players who purchased the full game. This is a series of education-focused tours created with the help of historians and scholars that provides players with factual information about the sites, architecture, culture, and people of Ancient Greece, presented in an interactive and entertaining way that ought to encourage kids' interest in history. Each tour ends with a simple quiz to test what players have learned. Parents and teachers should be aware that the standalone version for PC does not permit access to any of the mature content -- which includes bloody violence, language, substance abuse, and sexuality -- found in the story mode of the full version of the game.

Where to Play

Videos and photos.

Community Reviews

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• Kids say (2)

Based on 3 parent reviews

Fun and engaging game gives kids a chance to learn about Ancient Greece

Hidden violence, what’s it about.

ASSASSIN'S CREED ODYSSEY – DISCOVERY TOUR: ANCIENT GREECE allows players to learn about Ancient Greece without worrying about getting into combat or triggering any of the story events or quests found in the full version of Assassin's Creed Odyssey . It combines the years of effort developer Ubisoft put into researching Ancient Greece to create an authentic simulation of both the time and place with the expertise of historians and scholars. The result is a series of educational tours that allows players to explore the world and learn about the architecture, philosophy, culture, and people for which Ancient Greece is famous. Players interact with tour guides as they ride horses through the countryside on their way to visiting hundreds of historical sites scattered around the Greek isles, from the Parthenon in Athens to the religious sanctuary of Delphi. At the end of each tour, players are quizzed to see whether they were paying attention. Small rewards -- such as new avatars and mounts -- can be earned along the way, with some available only if the player goes off the tour path to explore the world on their own. The Discovery Tour is available as a standalone experience on PC for $19.99, but can also be accessed for free through a downloadable update to the full version of the game.

Is It Any Good?

These adventure games have always been praised for their dedication to historical accuracy, but it hasn't been easy for parents or educators to overlook the franchise's mature content. Assassin's Creed Odyssey – Discovery Tour: Ancient Greece provides an education-focused way for kids to experience the game's immense and beautiful simulation of Ancient Greece without worrying about inappropriate material. Players simply choose the Discovery Tour mode option from the main menu (the only selection available if you're playing the standalone game) to begin a purely educational experience. The narrator and historical personalities -- including the Greek historian Herodotos and the Spartan king Leonidas -- guide players as they cross dozens of regions on horse and foot to learn more about Ancient Greek civilization. These characters are essentially lecturers, delivering lots of knowledge about how ancient cities and monuments were built, how Greek citizens went about their daily lives, the origins of world-shaping philosophies developed by renowned Greek thinkers, and why and how wars were waged. Players will even get some lessons in Ancient Greece's famous gods, fables, and mythological creatures.

At the end of each tour, players are given a little quiz to test what they've learned. The questions aren't designed to be overly challenging, but instead simply provide additional incentive for kids to pay attention during the tour. If they get a question wrong, the tour guide will kindly correct them and provide the right information. There's no way to fail or lose. Assassin's Creed Odyssey – Discovery Tour: Ancient Greece is a great way to glean educational benefits from the years of work Ubisoft put into creating a realistic simulation of the Ancient Greek world without worrying about running into the game's more mature content, making it a great pick for parents and teachers who want to encourage kids' interest in history.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about learning with technology . What did you learn about Ancient Greece while playing Assassin's Creed Odyssey – Discovery Tour: Ancient Greece? Have you played any other games that you felt helped you learn something practical about our world?

Why is it important that we study our species' past? What can we learn about ourselves from people who came before?

Game Details

• Platforms : PlayStation 4 , Windows , Xbox One
• Subjects : Language & Reading : reading, reading comprehension, storytelling, Social Studies : cultural understanding, events, exploration, geography, government, historical figures, history, timelines, Arts : music, painting, sculpture
• Skills : Thinking & Reasoning : applying information, Self-Direction : academic development
• Pricing structure : Paid (Free if accessed as downloadable content with a copy of the full game.)
• Available online? : Available online
• Publisher : UbiSoft
• Release date : September 10, 2019
• Genre : Educational
• Topics : History , Horses and Farm Animals
• ESRB rating : NR for No Descriptions
• Last updated : September 10, 2019

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Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey’s educational Discovery Tour mode is here at last, and better than before

“My name is Herodotus, and I am a traveler from Halikarnassos.”

That’s underselling it a bit , I think. More than mere traveler, Herodotus is generally considered the first historian in the modern sense. And here he is standing on a remote beach, ready to regale me on the battles of Pylos and Sphakteria, key conflicts in the 30-year Peloponnesian War.

It’s an experience only Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey ’s Discovery Tour can offer modern-day fans of history, and yet more proof how special this spin-off series can be—and how much more potential there is to explore.

All Greek to me

Discovery Tour debuted in early 2018 with Assassin’s Creed: Origins . After years of cramming historical tidbits into Assassin’s Creed submenus, Ubisoft (or at least someone at Ubisoft) apparently thought “Wait, this could be a whole experience in itself.” So they took their meticulously crafted facsimile of Ptolemaic Egypt, stripped out the enemies and other video game elements, and then filled it back up with history.

I loved it. As I wrote at the time :

“ Assassin’s Creed: Origins was built by hundreds of people, spanning multiple continents. It took four years. The virtual world all those artists and programmers and sound designers and animators and so on created is inconceivably complicated, the type of world you only get with an enormous budget from a game expected to sell blockbuster numbers. No education-first game could accomplish what Origins accomplishes. Nobody could afford it, not even in the heyday of edutainment. Piggybacking education on the back of a massive project like Origins though? This exhaustive recreation of Ptolemaic Egypt is going to exist regardless. That’s the genius of Discovery Tour. It’s one of the most ambitious educational games I’ve ever played, certainly the most expensive and polished, and it’s an afterthought.”

Then Ubisoft released Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey , somehow an even larger and more detailed recreation of Ancient Greece than Origins ’s Egypt. I hoped another Discovery Tour would follow and now, nearly a year later, it’s finally arrived.

And it arrives with significant upgrades over the original—presumably the type that happen when someone goes “See, it sold well!” At least, I hope that’s the case.

Anyway, Odyssey ’s Discovery Tour brings back voice actors from Odyssey proper to act as pseudo-tour guides. I say “pseudo” because they don’t actually walk in front of you and gesture to points of interest. Nothing so complex or dynamic. They do introduce each tour though, with Herodotus generally the purveyor of myths and legendary battles, Pericles your guide to Greece’s great cities, and so forth.

Once you’ve finished your self-guided tour, they then show back up to quiz you on what you learned. These are simple, three-question affairs and there’s no penalty for failure. The contrary, actually. Choosing a wrong answer prompts your guide to explain the concept in question, i.e. “No, Icarus was well-known for flying too close to the sun, not for slaying the Minotaur.” It’s sometimes  more interesting to fail.

Having the quizzes come from established Assassin’s Creed characters also prevents it from feeling too dry, and I’d love to see this concept expanded on in the next Discovery Tour—whenever that might be. Let the characters drive the storytelling. Stop handing off the tours to a professorial voice over and instead let Herodotus wax on about the Peloponnesian War in character, maybe even add his own thoughts to the mix. Sure, you want it to be educational, but that doesn’t mean it can’t have a little more spark.

Tours are only the start of Discovery Tour this time though. The second improvement? Tiered points of interest.

The most involved, the aforementioned tours, function much the same as last time. Each revolves around a theme, say Winemaking. A golden line leads you from station to station, focusing on a nearby object or location and offering fully-voiced background information. Here, a tub for mashing grapes. There, an amphora. The narrations seem a bit more detailed than the ones in Origins , but the concept is similar.

When the narration’s finished, provided you want to learn more, you can call up additional non-voiced info at the press of a button—maybe an explanation of Greek army composition or the backstory for a Spartan general named in the voice over. And that info is accompanied by a reference image as well, like a shot of the modern-day Parthenon ruins, a relevant marble bust, or ancient coinage.

Origins was somewhat limited though in that everything had to fit one of the 75 themed tours. Odyssey  scales back the number of tours to 30, but compensates by adding hundreds of “Discovery Points.” As you wander the world you’ll spot purple beacons which, when activated, essentially act as standalone tour markers—or like historical plaques in the real-world. There’s no voice over, but some of the most interesting information in Odyssey is hidden in these one-off points, details on Minos’s “Kretan Holes,” Greek siege instruments, the Acropolis’s olive tree, and so forth.

And maybe a quarter of the Discovery Points are outlined in blue, which indicates they’re not about history but rather the creation of Odyssey itself. These are fascinating, especially in the context of Odyssey ’s magical-realist tone. [Minor Odyssey spoilers] For instance, I didn’t realize Medusa was housed on Lesbos because in real life there’s a massive petrified forest—and thus a tie-in to Medusa’s famed stone gaze.

Then below Tours and Discovery Points there’s a third layer of information, the “Historic Locations” that were already included in Odyssey proper. These, denoted on the map with an eye and triggered when you get close, offer one-paragraph blurbs about notable landmarks like the Thasos Theater and King Minos’s palace.

Taken together, there’s a much greater density of information in Odyssey ’s Discovery Tour. A few of the smaller islands are notably barren, but around the major population centers it feels like you could wander in any direction and learn something. The compulsion to simply hop from tour to tour is less strong this time than it was in  Origins .

And there are other miscellaneous upgrades as well. It’s worth noting for instance that the photographs of real-world artifacts are not censored in Odyssey as they were in  Origins . I haven’t been able to tell whether the in-game statues have been clothed or covered up, but at least part of the experience has escaped the clumsy retouching that was (rightly) derided with the original Discovery Tour. If you want to see pottery inscribed with clumsy Greek genitalia, you can.

There’s also a neat, completely superfluous feature that allows your player-character to take the place of the generic townspeople as they go about their daily lives. If you see a white circle on the ground, you can nudge your avatar into it and they’ll start in on a relevant task—mashing grapes, harvesting wheat, admiring fish, cheering, and so on. It’s a fun feature for Photo Mode, where you can make Pythagoras (or the other 40-odd characters you can inhabit) undertake all sorts of tasks he’d no doubt find unseemly.

But it’s also neat to see some of the strings behind-the-scenes of this vast and complicated world Ubisoft’s built. If you’ve ever wondered how these worlds feel so lively, here’s one small piece of it.

Bottom line

I suspect you know whether Discovery Tour is something you’re interested in or not. Do you want to learn about Ancient Greece in a moderately interactive fashion? Good news, this is practically your only option.

If you don’t, that’s fine too. It’s free to all  Odyssey owners (or $20 standalone) but there’s no mandate you experience the game this way. I’m nonetheless grateful to everyone who keeps buying Assassin’s Creed  because it’s undoubtedly funding what’s quickly become one of my favorite parts of the series. As a kid I would’ve killed for the opportunity to learn about Greece in this fashion, to place Marathon and Thermopylae in the context of the surrounding landscape, to visit a scale model of the Acropolis in its full glory instead of relying on grainy black-and-white sketches in textbooks, to delve into Crete’s ruins.

Odyssey ’s Discovery Tour upgrades make the experience richer and more engaging than it was in Origins , and I can only hope that trend continues.