Yeah it’s kind of amazing how much of a step backwards Valhalla was.
…and yet I bet it will run worse than Odyssey on my PC when I get around to buying it eventually.
@Octavious230 , you said you installed Unity on the Xbox. That’s the last of the pre- RPG-lite ones, right?
Odyssey ran like poo for me until I realized that one setting was pretty much murdering the framerates. No I don’t value fluffy clouds that much UBI. Some charts had it having something like a 44% performance impact lol.
I may have to shelve Valhalla for now as the eye candy in all the other games is so much better. I’m shallow sue me. ;)
A bunch of fields in England and dumpy monasteries aren’t much to look at it compared to sparkling Aegean isles and Greek megalopolises.
-Tom
I believe Syndicate was the last one, but close enough. I’m going to get around to playing that one too eventually. Between this and my Yakuza backlog I should be set for the next 4-5 years.
I think part of the perception there is based on the fact that we’ve seen medieval England a lot in other games and movies. Ancient Egypt and Greece aren’t as common as entertainment settings. That combined with the generally sunnier climes makes them more appealing, at least for me.
Heh, I know what you mean. I’ve got enough games that the question is whether the hardware to play them on will hold out.
I got Syndicate for free on the Uplay, and I liked Odyssey so much I went back to play it (part of me really wanted to see Karl Marx fight some goofy cultists) but all it did was remind me how much of a quantum leap Odyssey actually is.
The climbing and parkour stuff was so awkward and clunky, everything kinda felt thrown together without much attention to detail. There was no witty dialogue or characters to speak of.
It just reaffirmed to me that I was right to skip that noise up until Odyssey.
I disagree about Valhalla’s looks. I think it looks fabulous. The lighting and weather effects are great, the water is good, the buildings and incidental stuff are great. It’s just that it is, as noted, familiar, too familiar for many, and we sort of are jaded with medieval stuff. It is nowhere near as spectacular a visual experience as Odyssey, but it is far from being ugly or technically deficient. And there are truly sublime moments running through England.
Ah, got it.
You kids these days…don’t make me turn this car around.
I love the look and atmosphere, but found the combat tedious, which killed the game for me.
Maybe I fell into some kind of suboptimal style of shitty combat technique.
Yeah, I was kind of shocked by the comparatively low framerates (~75fps) I was getting on what is now an “older” game on my new rig.
Syndicate was great, big thumbs up from me.
One thing that’s bugging me about Odyssey (and maybe they introduced this with this game or Origins, though I don’t recall it in that game): you’ll have a battle where you have to kill a special target, like Hyrkanos the Mercenary or the Athenian Leader of Megara early on, and you die the first time you try it. Then, when you reload the last auto save, instead of facing all the opponents again, you’re facing maybe one plus the target, making it absurdly easy.
I’m playing on normal if it makes a difference.
Also, this game seems to have a lot of timed side quests which I don’t remember from Origins. Like one where a woman asks you to sink a fleet of ships for her because she oversold her abilities to get a gig. I didn’t realize it was timed and when I went to look for it in the menus it was gone.
That’s a generated quest.
Take me on your odyssey to fetch 10 wolf pelts.
Really? It had a cutscene and spoken dialogue and everything. And in that case I don’t remember her asking me to take her along on my ship.
That might be the exception to the rule. There are a ton of generated quests with timers. There are very few normal quests with them.
Thanks for the link. The quest I’m talking about was given by a lone woman camping on the beach right under the fortress you’re supposed to take out early on near Megara (one with a cave-to-well secret entrance).
Other observations for anyone to comment on if they like (I’ll actually search this thread for these too):
Another weird thing that happened one time is that my equipped breastplate became unequipped or disappeared (it may have done that-- it’s not like I keep close track of these things what with the flood of loot you’re getting all the time).
Finally, there’s a quest called “Besieging Bandits” that has you taking out bandit camps, but it doesn’t seem like any old bandit camp will do. I’ve apparently done 5 out of 10 of them, but taken out a couple more and the number doesn’t change.
EDIT: Apparently the camp has to be a special, named one.
Yeah, those are procedurally generated (?) quests. They’re not main or side quests, anyway. They’re the kind I never take, but every now and then I’ll ‘finish’ a quest, and a check mark shows up on the screen to receive a reward. If you look at the quest in the log, it says something along the lines of ‘while living her day to day life, Kassandra somehow completed a task for someone.’ I think those show up as hourglass-looking icons? I don’t know - I never take them (just accidentally complete them and get the reward - they’re always close by).
Yeah, doing the generated stuff will wear you down.
I actually really enjoy the sidequests in this one. It’s not really the gameplay either - sometimes it’s still just clearing out a fort - it’s the voice acting and the fact that I’m still dealing with characters.
As far as I can tell there’s a choice/outcome system as well where you’re making moral decisions too. I’m not sure if they actually have an impact, or if they’re false choices, but I really enjoy seeing it all unfold.