Valhalla and other such games are too big too ever deserve being called not good. Even if the story actively works to make the game worse than it would be without a story, even with a broken progression system - it’s still a huge beautiful world with a level of detail you’d expect from an immersive sim game.
I think Odyssey is one of the best open-world action games ever made but Valhalla’s combat is still better, even if it’s less varied and diverse. Valhalla was a disappointment cause doing Odyssey in a more boring setting would still result in a great game. If anything, it shows that devs do listen to players and react, even if they react in horrible ways. In fact it feels like evil genie reacting to requests. Too many random boring quests? Fine, no side quests at all for you. A lot of people complained they can’t one-shot enemies because of the character progression system? Fine, character progression system is full of meaningless numbers now. Too much loot and you need to keep up on a treadmill of equipment switching? As you wish, now you don’t have to switch equipment at all cause it’s all the same basically.
So, as @TheWombat says. And Christianity is indeed portrayed in a very weird way. I get that they were going for a unique perspective of a decidedly white guy for whom Christianity is weird but it’s a miss, cause every Christian believer in the game is evil and the game (almost) ignores the fact that most of those Vikings will become Christians (to some extent) in just a few years after this game. Monastery sacking is bonkers because of that and it feels like I’m observing mental gymnastic justifying some more recent atrocities. Eivor is a good Viking who just wants to trade and make “alliances” but alas the construction materials industry is monopolized by Christian monks who keep all the good stuff in their crypts, so Eivor’s hand is forced. But as he’s a good Viking he doesn’t kill any civilians in those monasteries.
The first time the warning came up for me that the mission would fail if I killed any more civilians, I think I almost died from laughing. Are you kidding me Valhalla? I’m a Viking raiding a monastery! So fricking dumb!
So it’s funny, all these complaints about the game have me actually wanting to play it.
I played the first hour of it and liked what I saw but put it aside as I started Origins, Odyssey and III this year and wanted to at least finish one of them before committing to another (not to mention I never did finish Syndicate, though I played quite a bit of it; waiting for that 60 FPS patch I know (hope) is coming).
At the end of the day, these games are so big, and my knowledge of historical events kind of hazy, that I don’t always know when the developers are being accurate or not, and frankly, it’s a video game so I don’t care. Once you throw in reliving memories via DNA using a machine, you’re in the land of make believe anyway.
But great post on your thoughts on the game, nonetheless.
This was so much of my complaint with Odyssey as well. You keep fighting in these big battles in the Peloponnesian War, but no one has any point of view of the war itself. It’s just abstract machinations that mean nothing.
I played Valhalla in November and feel quite similarly to how @TheWombat and @alekseivolchok describe their experiences.
The combat and world-level system felt better than the horribly off-putting one in Odyssey. Because I installed from disc, I had a 55GB download that queued and updated sometime while I played through the beginning of the game. And I was liking how I felt very capable as a warrior, taking down foes in a few swings. So I wondered what was the default setting for combat? I had the strangest mix of easy and immersive available across the sliders, I’m guessing the huge replacement patch. I brought both ends a bit closer to details of the normal and hard broad settings, to enable something more like the design vision, but I couldn’t go with them fully, not after having a thoroughly enjoyable experience to that point. It seems like an accident that the game started so in-line with what I wanted from it.
I loved not chasing armor or weapons. Skills were enough customization for me.
Each shire strikes me as a side story from Odyssey, with a downside that the story happens all in one go. I remain enamored with Socrates from Odyssey, so Valhalla suffers from me comparing with the best of the past. But the little “mystery” stories on the map markers have no weight to them.
I skipped every mode where you don’t play as Eivor, and I never found the guy to talk to do river raids after the tutorial one. I don’t feel like I missed anything…?
The most surprisingly well-done part was the Isu story layer. Maybe I just don’t remember anything from the earlier games I played, but I finally felt it was more than mystery forever unresolved. I got a sense of why it matters, relevant differences about the Isu, and why the Animus is a thing. At the moment the whole conceit doesn’t feel like an intrusive mess.
Heh, well, the game clearly got its hooks into me, enough so I’ve done a bit of thinking about it. Oddly enough–or maybe, not so oddly–it’s flawed works that engage me the most sometimes.
Did you also skip building the witch’s hut and dreams? That might be the most interesting part of the game.
I loved Odyssey but I can see why people wouldn’t like it, especially if they want a focused linear experience (but then I 'm not sure why would you play a game like that). The only thing that Valhalla does better for people who didn’t like Odyssey’s intrusive open world was making loot not matter, and maybe also rebalanced the game so that specialization doesn’t matter. Almost everything else is a step back.
Welp. Gotta eat my crow. So this 1.6.2 update had TWO additional free quests. I played the one with the Roshon character from the upcoming Mirage installment, but there is another new “Eivor’s story epilogue” mission - Last Goodbyes - that was buried in the quest menu. This one actually does wrap things up for Eivor.
Pretty terrible ending anyway. No gameplay. You literally just touch some glowing orbs and watch a cinematic of Eivor saying goodbye to someone in a handful of locations. Eivor decides to leave Ravensthorpe and go into the West like a Tolkien elf for reasons.
