1927

If you don’t do that, the Zealots will actively hunt you like the dirty Norse dog you are. Otherwise, they just run around on their paths and will fight you if you engage them or agro them. At least, that’s my experience as I remember it.

1928

To be honest I regret burning that paper. I’m not sure what it does but Zealots didn’t even attack me when they saw me. Sometimes when they saw me fighting someone else they joined, but it’s a far cry from Origins and Odyssey shenanigans with the bounty hunters.

1929

My god, I just randomly walked into one of the settlement’s shops, found there was another potion I could unquestionably quaff, and found myself in … a roguelike. I actually put the controller down and just kind of stared at the screen for a few seconds. I didn’t know how to take this, but I can tell you that one thing I never wanted out of Assassin’s Creed, it’s a roguelike battle crawl to see how far you can get before you’re eventually overwhelmed. Good grief, I know these games have been highly criticized for being overstuffed, but this takes the cake. As my grandfather would say, this game is ten pounds of shit in a five pound bag. I think I’m just going to pretend I never found this little corner of the game and go on with my life.

1930

There’s plenty of optional stuff to ignore! I also completely skipped this after an hour or two of messing with it, as I had no real desire to play infinite filler. For people that really really love the game and want a 500 hour experience, I guess it’s there for them.

1931

This is one of the last additions to the game. And, honestly, I think it’s the best part of ACV, I enjoyed it the most.

I don’t like a lot about Valhalla, but these post-release additions were quite cool… Sometimes. River raids (it’s not what you do with the monasteries, those are raids on separate maps) are a big exception, but mastery challenges and tombs and this roguelike - The Forgotten Saga - are very cool. They, however, do feel very isolated from the rest of the game. They mostly award you new equipment and XP and gods know there was enough of that in the base game. I haven’t played Discovery Tour yet but it seems to be very good too.

Wish that energy went into populating the world with proper side stories, but instead we’ve got these activities that are supposed to be their own reward, like curses and endless puzzles with shooting a lock through a window.

1932

A lot of Ubi games get like that over time IMO. They add new stuff per season or whatever, and if you come in later once all that stuff is in, it’s a bit much.

Having played them more or less as they turned up I would say thumbs up for river raids and the roguelike thing, plus some new tombs, thumbs down for mastery challenges. But none of them were present in my main playthough.

1933

I’d love an AC game where you have a nice meaty main quest with only a sprinkling of side quests, all of it totaling no more than 25 - 30 hours of gameplay. No stupid collectibles or other activities.

Or, I don’t know, keep that stuff in but keep the game at AC II length. Ubi needs to stop trying to go big every time. Even when I love one of their games, I end up burning out at some point (or getting so intimidated, I don’t get far, as with the RPG AC games).

1934

AC Valhalla is quite long, true. To me it looked that they took criticism about having too many side activities and shoved them into the main story.

Both Unity and Syndicate have an average length of under 20 hours, and those games are the most over-filled with side activities that don’t do much for you, so this might be what you want. Even Origins is under 30 hours, but it can get frustrating cause it’s paced so that at some critical points in the story you have to go do side content.

1935

Yeah, I guess this is where I’m at. I was taken by surprise, I had no idea this sub-game was even in there - or at least, that it’s part of the base game and not the several DLCs that I haven’t even thought about purchasing (yet). I guess it’s kind of amusing that my encountering this roguelike whatever thing didn’t initially delight me, but rather kind of dismayed me. ‘Oh my god, there’s a whole other thing I have to do?’ and my instinct was just to nope right out. Maybe I’ll change my mind down the road.

1936

I like how that Fenyx game actually made an entirely different perspective mode (a sort of Diablo-like) at the end.

It’s clear Ubisoft is (or was) a well oiled machine that could crank out content and they had enough staff to make that content. It does feel a lot like that as the games age they allow their staff more and more leeway to just make whatever thing strikes their fancy - since they’re already on payroll and need to keep them working, and at the end of the game’s lifespan DLC sales go down anyway.

1937

Ha ha, ok wow, I did not see that coming.

1938

Finished up Valhalla over the weekend, and as with just about all of the games I say that with some degree of relief. Even though I have enjoyed them all, they’ve definitely turned into a kind of endurance test. I feel like the character from The Crucible, as they continue to pile content on me, I just smile and say ‘yes, more!’ Though I did tap out on some of it, I didn’t really dig into the roguelike content I mentioned earlier, or those challenges, whatever they were.

So what worked well? As usual, the worldbuilding was pretty great. Everything looks nice and feels like an actual world, and not just a bundle of mission locations. The characters were very interesting and I was surprised to be a little saddened when some of them died. I enjoyed the random activities out in the world, they rarely felt like a chore - though I did get tired of chasing down tattoos and stacking rocks.

I like the way the game would notice your actions in small ways. At one point Eivor was talking to a character, and that character mentioned enemies would be gathering at a certain monastery. Eivor mentions that his group had already sacked that monastery, and the character goes something like, ‘oh nice, good job dude.’ I liked that it had that flexibility, even though it’s a minor thing, to at least recognize that things have happened.

One thing I didn’t like, and I’ll spoiler it because it’s plot related - the game’s plot really felt like it petered out at the end. There were a few things that happened and they all felt kind of anticlimactic. Eivor travels with his brother to Norway to find Valhalla, which we kind of do, but it’s an Isu trap or something so we bail out but then we have to fight Basim, and we trap him in the matrix and leave. Then Eivor’s brother steps down as jarl and Eivor becomes the new one. Then Layla finds where the matrix is, and jacks in but Basim escapes and now we’re Basim! But we just keep doing all the other stuff and Rebecca and other guy are all, well ok, guess you’re our buddy now. Then we fight to the last territory but it’s not even really an epic battle against Aelfred, he escapes and we just fight our way out of his men and we win! And then we find Aelfred hiding in a village, but he’s secretly the head of the evil Order! Except he hated the order and was working to bring them down, so he just kind of gives up. The end!

I don’t know what I was hoping for, but it was more than all that. It’s not bad exactly, I guess, but it didn’t grab me. Anyway I’m certainly glad I played it, it was overall quite enjoyable, but I’m not exactly sorry to be done with it either. I don’t really think I want to deal with the DLC at this point, though maybe I’ll change my mind.

Also, I found Valhalla to be buggier than the other games. I couldn’t finish one of the tombs of the fallen because one of those push thingies got stuck and I couldn’t move it at all. No forward progress. One time, I got off my house and found myself hurtled about 300 meters away. Couple of hard crashes. Kind of weird.

1939

Valhalla story emulates your bro getting excited about a brand new game and it turns out to be boring and repetitive.

I of course agree that the worldbuilding is the best part of this game. Pardon the comparison to Skyrim, but very few open world games have this quality of being great just as a place you can travel around. I know it’s repetitive and inaccurate but it’s still a great simulation of a place instead of the usual decoration around the plot.

Also the roguelike part is great. It only feels somewhat bad as (like masteries) it’s misplaced and forcefully shoved into a chill game so it feels like you’re suddenly told that actually you should put some effort into the game.

1940

I’m sure it’s very well done, I just could not get excited about that kind of content when I was in the middle of exploring and fleshing out the game world. It definitely felt jarring coming across it and having no idea it was there. Maybe I’ll change my mind and come back to it some day.

1941

While it is well done it is definitely not what you’d expect from a game like this, true. Asgard part may also be unexpected, but it has some relevance to worldbuilding as it demonstrates Norse beliefs in all their glory. Forgotten Saga is just about gameplay and environments that look like heavy metal album covers. I suspect the Dawn of Ragnarok expansion is like that too but I’m not buying it.

There are also 2 expansions but they’re more of the same. It might be a better approach compared to what they did in Odyssey where there were 3 endings to the main game and expansions added 3 more. Valhalla feels like there’s no end at all. I suppose the wedding is supposed to be it? Well I guess the Last Chapter is actually a nice bookend, but it feels like it comes out of nowhere and it’s also much better written than the rest of the game. I understand it also requires hunting down the whole order and I don’t think I recommend anyone doing that.

1942

At least the Wrath of the Druids and the Siege of Paris expansions offer some interesting loot, and a few nifty mechanics (though rat swarms can DIAF for sure). But both suffered from being relatively similar in every respect to the core game. The landscapes aren’t that different, and the situations you end up in are all of the same ilk. I did enjoy both though.

1943

Yeah, they’re, like, fine. But I don’t get the idea of adding more of the same to this enormous game. Origins expansions were similar, but at least the second one featured the Egyptian afterlife, and Odyssey did the same but more. In Valhalla the best gameplay came in free expansions and I feel like devs knew the base game wasn’t up to snuff in that regard compared to previous RPG installments.