Immortals Fenyx Rising won't let you immediately rush the final boss

Ubisoft's Greek mythology romp Immortals Fenyx Rising is being launched into a pretty long shadow and no, it isn't Zeus's. Between the climbing and gliding and puzzles and oh so many other things, it has a more than passing resemblance to Breath Of The Wild. One thing it won't share, though, is your ability to say peanuts to the grand quest and immediately go knock on the final boss's door. Ubisoft say that they really want you to see the game's story. Typhon will wait.

Ubisoft's new Q&A on Fenyx covers expected territory: changes to the game since its initial delay, aerial combat, and the characteristics of each of the main regions. What jumped out at me though, was the specific shout that you can't just run off to fight final boss Typhon immediately. It's as if someone at Ubisoft looked up at the generously overlapped Venn Diagram of Immortals Fenyx Rising and Breath Of The Wild, spotted this bit, and thought "we'd better mention that."

"We wanted to sort of build up to where you get to Typhon, where you climb Zeus’ mountain in order to then fight Typhon, and have a real payoff there," says game director Scott Phillips "We felt that if you could just go there, it changed the way you imagine the game, and it changed the way we were able to build the narrative, and build a progressive story that had a true payoff in that later part of the game that was meaningful."

It wasn't always that way, though. "There was definitely a period of time in the game when we did allow you to go immediately to fight Typhon, and what we found was that it worked, but it didn't allow us to tell the story that we wanted to tell with this game," Phillips says.

Passing over the entire game right after its tutorial sure may lead to some amusing clips from clever players, but I'd say asking you to properly play through the story is an alright choice. I'm sure Ubisoft don't want you to miss out on all those bants between narrators Zeus and Prometheus either.

In her Immortals Fenyx Rising preview, Alice Bee concludes that yes indeed, it seems like "AC Odyssey shagged Zelda and Ubi got custody of the baby". That said, I do appreciate that Ubisoft took a look at BOTW and put some thought into which bits to borrow and which to ditch.

It's not for nothing that I've got and eye on the ways in which Fenyx will play like a BOTW. I quite liked the latest Zelda romp, as did other folks I gather, and I'm quite hungry for some riffs on it to arrive on PC. Heck, Genshin Impact soared into sudden popularity last month thanks at least in part to its BOTW stylings. I'll be eager to see if Fenyx can do the same.

If you're feeling the same, you'll be able to snag it when it launches on December 3rd.