Assassin's Creed Valhalla

[Big Gulp]

Was hoping for the best, but man, is this game not great.  It has way less personality than Odyssey did and is way less engaging than Origins.  Maybe I haven't given it enough time (2 hours so far), but initial impressions are pretty underwhelming.

[Trippy]

SkillUp did not enjoy it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HPNCA_XoBg

[Big Gulp]

SkillUp did not enjoy it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HPNCA_XoBg

Yeah, I'm just not seeing how the setting fits in that well.  I still try to play these games like sneaky silent killer dude, and this game is just all axes and decapitations.  There's not much of an assassin vibe.

Wish I had a PlayStation, because Ghost of Tsushima looks way more like an Assassin's Creed game than this does.

[Sky]

I've liked the direction they've been going in, though Odyssey did benefit from leveling enough to have both a sneaky and melee outfit preset. It's been almost necessary to have one or the other at different points of the game. Game really needs unlockable skill presets, similar to the outfit presets. The constant resource starvation, especially at the late game, has oddly made less gear available. I can't afford to upgrade my melee outfit, which is now level 54 (I'm level 69, and I was never able to upgrade my ranged outfit). So I'm stuck in my assassin outfit but it's much more difficult to be effective outside the stealth portions. I've been getting my ass handed to me in bigger fights because it leaves me 1 adrenaline attack on a long CD (not to mention the Isu locking you out of skills completely, so it's a pure melee/ranged game where you can't apply ANY assassin skills).

I won't be jumping into this one until some time next year. I'll definitely need a break from the formula for a while after binging both Origins and Odyssey this year. But I've heard similar complaints about both games, moving away from the core AC franchise style. I guess I'm just lucky to be in the demographic they're shooting for! I'll be surprised if I don't get a couple hundred hours out of this one.

But I do wish they'd address this weird schism in their skill tree trifurcation and resource starvation (as someone who refuses to buy my way out of that with real earth dollars).

[Riggswolfe]

I've put in a decent amount of time. So far my feeling is it's better than Origins gameplay-wise but a step down from Odyssey. I actually liked the loot system in Odyssey and I liked Odyssey's skills better. This game feels a lot more random in how skills work between finding active skills in books and the passives being hard to plan for since they put a fog of war on the skill map.

I'm also in the group of people that prefers the new direction the franchise is going. The old AC was getting extremely stale and it was hearing about AC that brought me back. I liked it enough to buy Origins which I never finished because it felt like a big step back after playing Odyssey first.

Things I like about Valhalla:

1) Raids. I mean...come on! That's fun!
2) The general setting. I like being in old England. It's a neat change.
3) The continued borderline open-world RPG stuff.
4) Assassinating seems easier in this game than it was in Odyssey for some reason.
5) I like how, just like in Odyssey, the whole Assassins vs Ancient Enemy people is sort of a background to the rest of the story. That stuff was just getting old.
6) The settlement stuff is fun. I hear it was in past AC games but I'd gotten bored and stopped playing them before they came out.

Things I don't like:

1) Mentioned above. How the skills work now isn't a good idea IMO.
2) I'm ready, past ready, for them to do away with the modern day stuff. Who cares anymore about that story?

[Tebonas]

So, this made me realize I should play Some Assassins Creed finally, having bought them all.

Any before Black Flag still worth going into today if you have no nostagia? I Heard 2 was one of the best, but I also heard bad things about the controls.

[Big Gulp]

So, this made me realize I should play Some Assassins Creed finally, having bought them all.

Any before Black Flag still worth going into today if you have no nostagia? I Heard 2 was one of the best, but I also heard bad things about the controls.

I think Odyssey was probably the pinnacle of the series.  I don't see any reason to play anything pre Black flag.

That said, I've put in more time and it has grown on me more that I'm now in England.  Personally I don't care for the raids and the big battles.  The big old group melees from the previous games were my least favorite parts, so the raids leave me cold.  I just really enjoy sneaking and being a sniping asshole.  It's how I play the Far Cry series also.  There's a good mix here, but you really can't ignore the top constellations of your skill tree that emphasize melee combat.

Gear has definitely been deemphasized.  I'm still using an upgraded version of my starting axe and the bow I had from the beginning.   There's not need to chase the upgrade dragon like in the previous games.

[Hawkbit]

Any before Black Flag still worth going into today if you have no nostagia? I Heard 2 was one of the best, but I also heard bad things about the controls.

Personal opinion here; everything from AC1 through AC 3 Liberation are a bit dated in mechanics. I would pass on these but catch up on story synopsis if you want. AC4, Rogue, Unity and Syndicate are also dated mechanically. They would be "fine" to play I suppose.

I would personally jump straight to AC Origins and AC Odyssey. Both games are wildly huge in size and the combat is much better than previous games, at the expense of less emphasized stealth from previous iterations. You could spend 200 hours in these two games without question.

I'm going to start Valhalla today at some point. Somehow the stars aligned with my wife traveling to see family and work had a 2 week COVID shutdown at a different jobsite, so work told me to rest a few days.

[Sky]

Also, just to reiterate for Tebonas: play Origins before Odyssey. I really enjoyed Origins a lot but Odyssey sets the bar. Also, imo Kassandra should be canon.

[Tebonas]

Ok, got it. Black Flag until I get tired of the Ship Combat and Sea Shanties. Then Origins and Odyssey. Then off to buy Valhalla.

Thank you all. I reckon you saved me about 150 to 200 hours gaming time! 

[Khaldun]

I do still kind of like Brotherhood, but basically yeah to all that.

[Tale]

On an expensive late night whim, I bought Valhalla on PS4. All I can say so far is that I liked the start. The interface feels like a cross between Horizon Zero Dawn and Assassin's Creed.

Last one I bought was Origins and I couldn't get into it because it was nakedly the exact same engine as Ghost Recon Wildlands, which I played the hell out of. I wanted a sniper rifle and all I had was a stick.

[Sky]

the exact same engine as Ghost Recon Wildlands

I've had my eye on that game for a while, but wasn't sure I wanted to pay much and it would definitely have to be on the PC...and I could feel it melting my old 970/i5 2500k...

[Tale]

the exact same engine as Ghost Recon Wildlands

I've had my eye on that game for a while, but wasn't sure I wanted to pay much and it would definitely have to be on the PC...and I could feel it melting my old 970/i5 2500k...

Wildlands is fucking great. Steam tells me I've played 308 hours. The story contains right-wing garbage and your boss commits ridiculous war crimes, but the game world and gameplay are magnificent once you figure out what you're doing, and forgive the AI teammates' pathing. You wouldn't find me near a gun in real life, but I can tell you all my favourites in Wildlands and what configurations I use.

I've basically done everything in it. I tried the follow-up Breakpoint, but it's a disappointing departure from what was good about Wildlands. So Assassin's Creed Valhalla it is.

[Riggswolfe]

Also, just to reiterate for Tebonas: play Origins before Odyssey. I really enjoyed Origins a lot but Odyssey sets the bar. Also, imo Kassandra should be canon.

I can't emphasize enough how important this is. I played Odyssey first and couldn't finish Origins because it felt bland after Odyssey, particularly in the combat and gear departments.

Also, yes, Kassandra absolutely should be canon and in many ways she is. The novelization, for example, has her as the canon character.

[Hawkbit]

I just made it to England, so I can't speak to the main game. The intro is a very small step backwards from Odyssey in many ways. It's not bad, just there's a lot of polish that didn't happen for some reason. Maybe COVID, maybe studio turmoil, maybe trying to build for twice the platforms. Who knows.

• The camera is fucky. I often lose sight of enemies at the start because the camera moves and gets hung up on environment.
• Boss fights start with the boss rushing the character as the cutscene ends. This feels cheap and because I'm playing on Hard it means the first fight is usually a loss so I can learn what to do as the scene ends.
• Many weird bugs - of note, the fight with Kjvote he bugged out and decided to attack someone above the ring, which caused multiple non-targetable enemies to fight me until finally the boss turned into a floating sphere in the center of the ring. ?? So weird.
• Fonts are really hard to read in almost every way they're presented. Edges are blurry and often are on backgrounds that are distracting.
• The environment is huge but doesn't really have anything in it except for the dots on the map. Even on "explorer" settings it still just pushes you to POI.

It's playable, but with more jank than I expect from an AAA studio.

[DevilsAdvocate25]

So, this made me realize I should play Some Assassins Creed finally, having bought them all.

Any before Black Flag still worth going into today if you have no nostagia? I Heard 2 was one of the best, but I also heard bad things about the controls.

I had a ton of hours in AC3. It was fun running around in the American Revolution and jumping tree to tree. It also introduced the ship mechanics used in Black Flag.

The only game I have actually finished is Unity. The French Revolution setting was awesome and climbing on the buildings was fun. To get the "authentic" feel for it, I set the in game language to French and the subtitles to English. It made a big difference for immersion.

I'm going to have to consider getting Odyssey and Valhalla now after the glowing reviews in this thread.

[Tale]

I've just left Norway for England and I am having a good time in Assassin's Creed: Valhalla.

The fights to defeat the Norway miniboss and then capture his fortress felt epic and my heart was pumping. I don't have a lot of time to play, but what time I can put into it, I do. It's got Skyrim-like depth, too. There are lots of places to go in Norway and things to do that are not part of the quests.

[Khaldun]

This to me is the thing that lots of supposedly open-world games just do not get right that Skyrim did super-well, at least for my tastes. Most of them don't have stuff that's just there and interesting--places you can go do shit in if you feel like it that aren't part of some collectibles thing. They have really repetitive clusters of spawn points for random map encounters. Almost every place that's visually interesting and distinctive is going to be for a quest and sometimes if you go there before the right stage in the quest it just sits there inert, with no interactivity. There's nothing weird or unexpected except maybe for a quest or two here and there. AC mostly has fallen into that pattern--I think Black Flag is the one before Odyssey and Origins that felt the closest to verging on openness.

[Sky]

With the size of the map, I'm ok with that. I can wander and explore, ignoring icons if I want to (and I often do). But when I want to clean out the last couple Tartarus rifts before finishing the last quest for Hades, I don't want to spend days wandering around looking for the ones I missed. I find it a nice mix. Sometimes I feel like fully scouting a POI with Ikaros, sometimes I just want to stumble on the bad guys slowly. Since I'm approaching 210 hours in Odyssey with 1-1/3 DLC content (First Blade entirely + Chapter 3 of Fate of Atlantis) left to explore...I don't need more time spent wandering around unless I choose to :)

Then again, I finished the main quest to Skyrim and left that jank behind long ago. Series hasn't clicked with me since Daggerfall 

[Tale]

[Khaldun]

This is ok. I like it well enough. It's not quite grabbing me the way Odyssey did. I don't like the camera/interface change when I'm raiding/storming castles; I want to be really in my character at all times.

[Hawkbit]

Same here. I'll finish it, but I'm not hurrying myself along.

I really dislike the side quests - the funny tone of them doesn't quite fit the theme. There's too damn many of them. I also intensely dislike the way cutscenes often end with an enemy charging the player. On hard, some hits are one-shots so it makes for an instant reload. When I start playing again I'm going to drop it down to normal difficulty. The whole game feels like a series of mini-games. I know most of the series is actually that - but this one feels a bit on the nose about it. The skill tree is also ASS.

However, I do appreciate the story so far. The Order/Zealot tree is good, just like Odyssey. And who doesn't like being a dang viking?

[Khaldun]

I appreciate the way that Origins, Odyssey and Valhalla are trying to fix common mispronounciations of Egyptian, Greek and Norse words, it's a subtle but cool thing. Bill and Ted were closer than they knew with "So-Crates".

[Riggswolfe]

So, I've "discovered" easy mode in this game. After it happened I looked it up and it's already known. It's not a cheat, it's just something in the game that seems quite unbalanced.

[Khaldun]

Lunden is sort of where I lost some affection for the game. I mean, I get it, it's post-Roman Britain, there are violent Norsemen all over the place, etc., but it was kind of hilarious just to walk up to the Arrow and shoot him in the face and then have the reeve say "good job man". I mean, my Eivor is murdering the fuck out of half of the British Isles with impunity. I'm also to the point where if the plot says, "we have to do a bunch of shit to get ready to attack this impregnable castle", I am like, nah, just let me go and give me about a day and I'll murder every motherfucker in that castle except the ones behind the door you won't let me open.

Was also a little annoyed that Eivor is forced to regard Sigurd as crazy considering that she's routinely being pulled into the spirit realm to have discussions with Odin, finding troll magic all over England, etc. Like, come on, your bro could be a descendant of the gods, why not. Also annoying that you find these little notes everywhere, some of which are major clues about things that are going on, but your Eivor never mentions them or "knows" what she's read.

I do like the character arcs, and the gameplay is decent enough if familiar. But basically this is filler until I can play 2077.

[Tale]

Spent half a minute wondering who "she" is, then realised it's Eivor. Seamless gender implementation in this game (I started off playing a female Eivor, but he's been male ever since).

[Khaldun]

Ugh, I am really kind of tired of not being able to intervene in obvious fucking narrative beats, especially if my character is otherwise played as savvy and hard to manipulate. Like, let me at least voice some skepticism about whose dagger that is in the cave and let me at least possibly put two and two together. There have to be multiple ways to get me up on the mountain storming that castle.

[Khaldun]

Also, yeah, as per an early comment, the camera can occasionally be really damn annoying, because it'll pull you behind a bush unpredictably just as you're sighting an arrow.

Can't stand the Predator bow interface for multi-sniping. AI definitely doesn't know where to look if you're way up high and headshotting people--it's another kind of easy mode (also enemy NPCs generally won't climb really high buildings like cathedrals).

Agree on the jarring tonal shifts--the wackiness of a lot of the world event quests is jarring.

[Riggswolfe]

Ugh, I am really kind of tired of not being able to intervene in obvious fucking narrative beats, especially if my character is otherwise played as savvy and hard to manipulate. Like, let me at least voice some skepticism about whose dagger that is in the cave and let me at least possibly put two and two together. There have to be multiple ways to get me up on the mountain storming that castle.

If this is the situation I think it is, it's the first time I sent someone to Helheim. "Give me my axe." "Nope, you're off to Hell asshole."

I've also lied about it to every NPC who has asked since it happened. "No, I totally sent him to Valhalla."

I keep waiting for repercussions but so far nothing.

[Khaldun]

It's the situation you're thinking about. Not only did I see it coming as the player, I feel as if the character sort of saw it coming. So I really hate that the character is forced to do something hugely consequential despite that--especially since the same character has a showdown with a sibling at an earlier point over keeping to an oath. If the character is gonna nearly break with a sibling over an oath, is that character going to go along for the ride in a situation that's plainly manipulated by someone your character has come to distrust (for good reason)?

[Riggswolfe]

It's the situation you're thinking about. Not only did I see it coming as the player, I feel as if the character sort of saw it coming. So I really hate that the character is forced to do something hugely consequential despite that--especially since the same character has a showdown with a sibling at an earlier point over keeping to an oath. If the character is gonna nearly break with a sibling over an oath, is that character going to go along for the ride in a situation that's plainly manipulated by someone your character has come to distrust (for good reason)?

The way I view it, you're genre and trope savvy. Eivor isn't. I never saw anything that hinted Eivor had any idea at all that it wasn't what it seemed on the surface. Like you I had my suspicions but it just didn't bother me that Eivor apparently did not. I interpreted Eivor as feeling extremely angry and betrayed in the fight. Eivor is going to walk away until he confesses what he did at which point the fight is on. This is why I sent that SOB to Helheim. So far the only non-order person I've done that to except for

[Khaldun]

 I wanted the option to take him on his very own adventure earlier in the game and accidentally push him off the boat with an accidental axe in his skull.

[Riggswolfe]

I wanted the option to take him on his very own adventure earlier in the game and accidentally push him off the boat with an accidental axe in his skull.

[Khaldun]

I anxiously went around to everybody in the village the next day