There’s a lot I like about Immortals Fenyx Rising. I’ve played around 20 hours of it now and I’ve done all four of the major quest lines to restore the essence of Aphrodite, Athena, Ares, and Hephaistos. I’ve also done enough side quests, Myth Challenges, and vaults (Immortals take on Breath of the Wild’s shrines) to upgrade my health, stamina, weapons, and abilities significantly. I love the art style and humor in Immortals and I’m motivated to explore and solve every puzzle I encounter in the pursuit of power and fun cosmetics. While I’m enjoying my time with it, the one thing that really sours the experience is the way that markers work on the map. Immortals tries to ape Breath of the Wild’s organic discovery system but neglects to account for the overwhelming volume of collectibles and challenges spread across the map. The result is an infuriating map marker mechanic that I don’t want to engage with at all.
Immortals’ map marker system tries to blend two different types of open-world games together, that while similar, reveal themselves to be completely incompatible. Immortals uses a discoverable map that starts out obscured but is slowly revealed by entering new regions and ascending a lookout point. The first time we ever really saw this type of map used was in the original Assassin’s Creed. In all of the AC games, you can’t see what’s on the map until you climb a particularly tall building or tower and survey the area. These are called viewpoints in the Assassin’s Creed game. Once a viewpoint has been conquered, all of the various collectibles, challenges, and quest markers will appear on the map.
The next iteration of this type of discoverable map came from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. In BotW, these viewpoints are called Sheikah Towers and must be located and climbed in a similar way. The big difference in BotW is that once the area has been scanned and the map of the area is visible, points of interest are not automatically filled in. Instead, you have to actually look around from this vantage point and identify and tag the shrines you can see. Nearby shrines are highly visible from Shiekah Towers and identifying them yourself adds a lot of immersion to the experiences. You’re not just climbing the tower to press a button that fills in the map, you’re actually using the vantage point to look out and see what there is to see.
Immortals borrows a lot from Breath of the Wild, including BotW’s map mechanics. By climbing a statue of a god, you can activate a vantage point and remove all of the clouds from the map so you can see the different biomes and geographical landmarks. Like BotW, the map does not automatically fill in with points of interest; you have to manually tag them by looking around in first-person. Unlike BotW, however, there is a metric butt-ton of sidequests, challenges, and collectibles to tag. This is a problem.
First of all, most of the POIs are so small you’d never be able to see them from a distance. There’s no way you can see a single ambrosia, for example, which is a collectible used to upgrade your health, but you can nevertheless tag it by moving your camera around until a white target reticle shrinks into place when you point exactly at where that object is.
This isn’t too difficult with a mouse and keyboard because you can move the camera quickly and be very precise, but with a controller, this process becomes an absolute nightmare. Moving the camera millimeters back and forth to perfectly target an object you can’t even see is incredibly frustrating. Repeating this process dozens of times to tag every single point of interest in the region is maddening.
What’s more, you don’t even need line of sight on these POIs to tag them. You can’t tag something that’s on the other side of a mountain, but if there’s something obstructing your view like a group of trees or a temple you can still tag things on the other side of it.
Assassin’s Creed games have collectible-driven exploration while Breath of the Wild has experience-driven exploration. It’s a bit of an oversimplification, but it’s useful for illustrating Immortals broader missteps. Immortals uses a BotW map system in an Assassin’s Creed world. It walks a strange middle road between the two that leads to oddly frustrating mechanics.
Of course, you can totally ignore the tags and just wander around the map as you please. You will definitely encounter quite a few challenges this way, and while you might miss some of the more hidden and out-of-the-way collectibles, this is probably how I would recommend playing the game to non-completionists. Ignoring the map markers makes the world a lot more fun to explore and makes it feel a lot more like Breath of the Wild too. If you are going to try to tag every POI on the map though, for the love of God, use a mouse.
