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Assassins Creed Valhalla is a boring mess
- Thread starter Gonzito
- Start date
One net positive is that Valhalla absolutely has the best ending out of the three RPGs. Arguably the biggest "WTF" ending since AC2.
I certainly don't think they shake things up. 😅
Because it keeps the IP relevant while the next gen only game is cooking. Sorta like how we got the AC movie/Ezio collection in 2016 while Origins was cooking. It's been three years since the last mainline release and AC fans are starving.
Haven't played any AC games since they automated the parkour. I do understand that for a series as long-running as this one, major changes are necessary from time to time to keep audience interest (unless you're making FIFA or NBA I guess). And many long-running series' have changed significantly over time - Zelda, Mario, Final Fantasy etc.
But mechanically, the core idea of AC was an open-world Prince of Persia. Movement was a huge part of the gameplay. Now it feels like a generic RPG in terms of gameplay.
But mechanically, the core idea of AC was an open-world Prince of Persia. Movement was a huge part of the gameplay. Now it feels like a generic RPG in terms of gameplay.
I remember completing ACV, but I couldn't tell you much else about it, there were few high's or low's to it just mid for 100hrs. It didn't help that it had one of the dullest characters in the dullest environment in the franchise as a playground.
While you're very much right, I also think no one at Ubisoft remembers what a "Prince of Persia" is.
*Shrug* Well I'm enjoying it.
I have a bit over 40 hours in it right now. I'm not playing it as much as would because it drives the fan on my laptop pretty hard (I started the game on Stadia, and moved over to PC when that shut down), but whenever I do jump in for a session I'm usually there for longer than I'd planned for. The game is great at constantly giving you little things to do without that much friction, so you never really hit a roadblock. There is always a treasure to find, or a 5-minute side story to do, if you don't feel like grappling with the main quest.
Also the world is just really nice to look at at trek around in. Ubisoft somehow managed to make the South-East of England look interesting - which is an achievement!
Can't really say the animation and clipping shortcomings bothered me. It's a massive open-world game, that stuff is just par for the course and it works as well as it needs to.
I only got into AC games with Odyssey, so maybe it's because I don't have any history with the franchise, and no built-up expectations?
I have a bit over 40 hours in it right now. I'm not playing it as much as would because it drives the fan on my laptop pretty hard (I started the game on Stadia, and moved over to PC when that shut down), but whenever I do jump in for a session I'm usually there for longer than I'd planned for. The game is great at constantly giving you little things to do without that much friction, so you never really hit a roadblock. There is always a treasure to find, or a 5-minute side story to do, if you don't feel like grappling with the main quest.
Also the world is just really nice to look at at trek around in. Ubisoft somehow managed to make the South-East of England look interesting - which is an achievement!
Can't really say the animation and clipping shortcomings bothered me. It's a massive open-world game, that stuff is just par for the course and it works as well as it needs to.
I only got into AC games with Odyssey, so maybe it's because I don't have any history with the franchise, and no built-up expectations?
I should give it another go. Mostly I remember not liking the 'grunt/exertion' sound that Miss Viking Assassin made. A very shallow reason to not play anything but I guess I was just trying to climb everything, it being named an AC game and her verbal exultations put me clean off. Also didn't overly like the combat, I never really liked Odyssey' either now I come to think of it. I did like Origins, but I'm not smart enough to puzzle that out. And I think I tried to stealth a 'Viking Raid' which is not what they want I don't think, ah just maybe wasn't in the right frame of mind for it.
This is the slowest navigation in any AC game and I really need a list of the apparent cavalcade of games that play like this if this is the metric for generic. Especially RPGs.
I only say this because almost literally every other game I play where I can't go over an obstacle that theoretically should be climbable i'm reminded of how AC still has my fav navigation in any open world game. The closest is Zelda and that has really simple animations by comparison. Followed by Ghost of Tsushima, which is very floaty because the climbing is an iteration of Infamous. If anything I genuinely do wish wish more games played like AC. I got so blueballed by Horizon FW's marketing that admitted that the first game had trash overly automated climbing and that the second would be way better. And yet FW still feels so very limiting and also inconsistent when it comes to what's flagged as climbable.
My ultimate perspective of the game:
And I'll admit, my perspective of it is difficult to disentangle from the academic intrigue, because the game, even more than most AC titles, has a very... conflicted notion of the past. It's one of those where I never quite got an excited rush from the gameplay itself, but it mechanically engaged where it seemed fine to just keep doing the next thing, while I did analysis in the background
And I'll admit, my perspective of it is difficult to disentangle from the academic intrigue, because the game, even more than most AC titles, has a very... conflicted notion of the past. It's one of those where I never quite got an excited rush from the gameplay itself, but it mechanically engaged where it seemed fine to just keep doing the next thing, while I did analysis in the background
I liked it, we have few games with historical settings and I thought Valhalla was really good. The combat was a big improvement on AC Odyssey, a also great game. Matter of fact there isn't one mainline AC game that I didn't really really like and Origins is one of the best in the series.
At worst it's a decent game.
At worst it's a decent game.
IT HURTS.
I'm hoping the Sands of Time remake is good. Don't expect to see it for the next three years though.
How slow or fast it looks is irrelevant to the point I'm making. I remember playing AC 2 and feeling clumsy as heck with the parkour system. But once I mastered it, I actually felt like an assassin in Italy, and my brain was engaged as I moved through the city. The city felt like a gigantic movement puzzle I was constantly solving. This feeling seems utterly lost in the newer games. The removal of mechanical complexity with the increased focus on large open areas means that parkour is no longer a gameplay element. And that's a shame. It's weird comparing AC to Zelda or Horizon cause those were never parkour games. They weren't conceptualized as a spiritual successor to Prince of Persia, a 2D and later 3D platforming game. The current games feel generic to me in their removal of engaging parkour mechanics. AC Valhalla is a lot more like the Witcher than it is like AC2 or Unity.
If you like the current direction of AC games, well, I'm happy for you. It just isn't for me.
You are describing what happens when you have to actively fight against obtuse controls and bugged navigation. It wasn't a movement puzzle there were clearly laid out paths and the navigation when it worked as intended was smooth and easy. Ezio missing a jump and dying was the vast majority of the time, not the fault of the player. It literally used to be one of the biggest complaints about the series. "Wow when this works it's fantastic but when it doesn't do what I want it to it sucks."
It's akin to saying that entering windows in AC Unity was an engaging challenge that was lost when AC Syndicate rightfully created a contextual button press for that action that works 100% of the time.
It's objectively not. Because a five foot will kill you in the witcher and you have to walk around the hill instead of climbing it. The whole point of AC is that parkour is NOT meant to be a challenge. It's supposed to feel natural. Like you're effortlessly traversing in the same way the character would instead of constantly being challenged like you would be in PoP or Mirror's Edge. Navigation isn't a puzzle, it's a tool that gives you an edge.
A tool that isn't fighting against you because the tech behind it, not YOU as the player, made a mistake. AC players who figured out all the nooks and crannies of the Altair and Ezio games figured out how to AVOID the navigation bugs. Meanwhile every AC Unity video is the result of like, tons and tons of takes because that game is simply not finished and misreads the player's intention more often than any other game in the series.
Horizon straight up has multiple parkour set pieces, and BOTW embraced player freedom and part of that is the universal climbing system that AC currently has, only one with a stamina bar. Even with stamina in mind though it creates a layer of interaction with the player that you just don't see very often in games. It becomes second nature enough that most players don't even realize how smooth the navigation is until they play a game that's far more limiting.
"Gotta go talk to this npc, oh damn he's up there. Light work no reaction."
Boom easy nav. If I could literally just climb the walls of the hideout in FFXVI to talk to npcs or climb in SFVI they'd be better games. 😩
I don't consider me not being able to do that a flaw in those games because you know, they're not intended to provide that experience. BUT, regarding open world games it's weird how this is still so novel.
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I fundamentally disagree that navigation in AC is meant to be automatic and require zero player engagement. Again, if that is your conception of AC, you must be having a great time, good for you.You are describing what happens when you have to actively fight against obtuse controls and bugged navigation. It wasn't a movement puzzle there were clearly laid out paths and the navigation when it worked as intended was smooth and easy. Ezio missing a jump and dying was the vast majority of the time, not the fault of the player. It literally used to be one of the biggest complaints about the series. "Wow when this works it's fantastic but when it doesn't do what I want it to it sucks."
It's akin to saying that entering windows in AC Unity was an engaging challenge that was lost when AC Syndicate rightfully created a contextual button press for that action that works 100% of the time.
It's objectively not. Because a five foot will kill you in the witcher and you have to walk around the hill instead of climbing it. The whole point of AC is that parkour is NOT meant to be a challenge. It's supposed to feel natural. Like you're effortlessly traversing in the same way the character would instead of constantly being challenged like you would be in PoP or Mirror's Edge. Navigation isn't a puzzle, it's a tool that gives you an edge.
A tool that isn't fighting against you because the tech behind it, not YOU as the player, made a mistake.
Horizon straight up has multiple parkour set pieces, and BOTW embraced player freedom and part of that is the universal climbing system that AC currently has, only one with a stamina bar. Even with stamina in mind though it creates a layer of interaction with the player that you just don't see very often in games. It becomes second nature enough that most players don't even realize how smooth the navigation is until they play a game that's far more limiting.
"Gotta go talk to this npc, oh damn he's up there. Light work no reaction."
Boom easy nav. If I could literally just climb the walls of the hideout in FFXVI to talk to npcs or climb in SFVI they'd be better games. 😩
But as a person who enjoyed engaging with movement systems all the way from AC 2 to AC Unity, I'm deeply disappointed by the direction the series has taken. What felt clunky and a chore to you felt compelling and thrilling to me. It isn't simply a matter of things being buggy (which they can be) but entire mechanics were removed over the years. This thread points out some of that-
Reddit - Dive into anything
www.reddit.com
I think of movement in the old AC games like combat in a game like Sifu. If you don't enjoy it, of course you'll bounce off the game. But its richness and complexity allows you such granular control over your movement, mastering it brings immense joy and immersion.
Bloated but still a great game. Played the shit out of it and the expansions. Can't wait for the next huge open world AC.
I love the AC RPG games to death but Valhalla was boring as hell. The issue I have with it is that the side quest were replaced by mysteries that last for like 5 minutes and are done. They can be funny but no where near as compelling as actually side quest in Odyssey
Of course, I am part of the problem though. I think it is the most boring of the RPG trilogy and yet I have 260 hours in it and the platinum. What can I say? I love AC.
Of course, I am part of the problem though. I think it is the most boring of the RPG trilogy and yet I have 260 hours in it and the platinum. What can I say? I love AC.
I fundamentally disagree that navigation in AC is meant to be automatic and require zero player engagement. Again, if that is your conception of AC, you must be having a great time, good for you.
But as a person who enjoyed engaging with movement systems all the way from AC 2 to AC Unity, I'm deeply disappointed by the direction the series has taken. What felt clunky and a chore to you felt compelling and thrilling to me. It isn't simply a matter of things being buggy (which they can be) but entire mechanics were removed over the years. This thread points out some of that-
Reddit - Dive into anything
I think of movement in the old AC games like combat in a game like Sifu. If you don't enjoy it, of course you'll bounce off the game. But its richness and complexity allows you such granular control over your movement, mastering it brings immense joy and immersion.
Just wanna say I whole wholeheartedly agree with your opinions. There isn't anything like the classic AC games anymore and the new ones look more and more like generic action games.
I mean, I fully believe that removing parkour and assassination from Valhalla and make it an actual action game would have made it significantly better.
The lack of any meaningful parkour or exploration together with the simple fighting, just made it feel soulless and lackluster.
You do know a new one is out very soon that looks like classic Assassin's Creed, yeah?
Again, the player literally fighting the controls was never what the devs intended. Nor does the game genuinely ever challenge the player when it comes to navigation, which is how we arrived at a situation where it took a decade for players to figure out "Wait, AC1 has a hidden and extremely contextual vault mechanic?" Which is a neat idea to master once you figure out the small list of triggers to make it work consistently but clearly a tech holdover that never got fleshed out before getting outright removed when they made AC2.
Note, as the series evolved and started streamlining mechanics that only an extreme niche of hardcore superfans knew about in the first place the general reception was "Wow this feels a lot smoother than the other games." Not because navigation in the other games were more challenging, but because the main goal was making the system actually work as intended. It comes off as some major revisionist history regarding how players, especially the average player and not someone who reads the AC reddit, felt about the parkour. Like take for instance the niche obsession with wall ejects, and how, you are at most saving a single second of game time in a game that is not at all pressuring you to make the right call when it comes to "Should I wall eject here."
Which is how we arrived at the part where the only people who complain about navigation in the last three AC games, are the small but LOUD peeps who figured out years after release that there are hidden triggers for vaulting in AC1 and confuse that with intentional depth/challenge.
"Oh this trigger is kinda tricky to pull off and looks kinda glitchy. This is inherently newfound depth that makes the gameplay deeper."
Meanwhile using stuff like vaults literally slows you down in the chase situations made without it mind...such depth. 😩
I can't repeat it enough, the point of navigation in AC is that it's MEANT to be effortless to navigate. Not "This string of buildings is inherently a challenge." They even made set pieces where literally attempting to do any of the fancy tech AC redditors talk about would result in failure.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2DLT5TVUc4
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuYzAR18Ooc
"Damn these annoying ass controls and the tech behind the game are actively working against my best interests." was a flaw they've been working on for 16 years. And they've arrived at a sweet spot where they killed the "AC had bad controls" discourse. That took ten years. It took ten years for that discourse to genuinely die out. Around as much time as it took for Halo devs to eliminate the "Halo should never have sprint" discourse.
That would be a genuine insult to how much genuine intentional depth and player challenge exists in Sifu.
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Tell me you haven't read my post without telling you haven't read my post
It's half classic AC, and half modern AC game. But I can't say that they took best parts of each.
This is me
- absolutely gorgeous , possibly still the best looking ac game to date (especially interiors)
- charming protag
- actual Assassinations with multiple ways to get infiltrate
- coop which has never been repeated
- I enjoyed the revamped traversal system , although it still had some jank getting in / out of windows
- huge variety of weapons
- really interesting time jumps . Fighting nazis etc is cool
It's only major negatives (which modern AAA games still get away with), is some terrible visual bugs etc (I personally didn't see much of it playing on console ), plus they have away free dlc so for me it was good.
Also the stupid loot boxes, which thankfully they removed in a patch .
i got it because it was great launch game to get for the new consoles.
Played some. No idea until where. remember asking here where i was story wise etc. And someone said. At 10%.
And i played so many hours already. And it was like nah. As the story and main character werent great also. So i dropped it
Played some. No idea until where. remember asking here where i was story wise etc. And someone said. At 10%.
And i played so many hours already. And it was like nah. As the story and main character werent great also. So i dropped it
I did read it though. You said Valhalla is missing the Assassin's Creed DNA and lament the end of the old style and Mirage looks like it's made specifically for the old school fans?
I thought it would be the AssCreed game I finally finished. I swear I've either bought or played everyone since Brotherhood which was the last one I finished. There was a time I was so into the game and put in at least 40 hours but I just I don't know got tired. I have no doubt I'm near the end so one day same with Fenyx Rising.
The OP states that they can see the Valhalla DNA in mirage which is hindering their excitement. A mindset I personally find odd given that every game that's considered the best in the series is built off of what came before. Origins was the first time a major tech/structure overhaul went very smoothly.
I think we're talking past each other at this point. I did not talk in any of my posts about what other players might or might not enjoy. I was talking about what I enjoyed and was lost.
As for whether the traversal was MEANT to have complexity and require effort, AC literally originated from Prince of Persia (Link)-
I doubt when the creator thought of the player completing "amazing acrobatic feats" inspired by the best of PoP, he meant for the player to keep a button pressed and watch the character automatically traverse through an environment. The games that made AC a worldwide phenomenon were those that placed a significant emphasis on movement mechanics. I feel like I'm living in some alternate universe here.
Let's just agree to disagree. I have better stuff to do with my time.
I generally think settings AC have gone with are pretty boring. Greece England aren't interesting especially with how many different cultures, cities in history they've been. Second aspect I think is that AC goes with too much. It's three times as large as it needed to be. Game needed something more refined, and focused instead of going for scale. To me why relationships for example feel so half baked. Upgrading towns felt like a chore to do. Shame because I think the game looks great visually, and gameplay is fine. Didn't think the main story was as interesting could have been.
Oh man Valhalla.
so that thread a while back about games you couldn't talk about rationally? I thought I couldn't really think of examples. I forgot this game.
Every design decision in this game baffled me.
Toss the sidequests and random plot threads you discover by exploring, here have shitty 'world events' wherein you climb a building for a random NPC. Now the only major sidequests you get are from residents in your village, and by the end of the game I still couldn't tell most of them apart.
Why did they make so much of England feel so damn similar. Like I get it, Southeast England is limiting (so why do that) -- but they still made fair few pretty different maps, and then make sure to have like 10% of the game take place in them. Could they have cut back some of the fantasy stuff a bit and included Scotland and Ireland out of the box while shrinking the map?
Monastery raids are as far as I can tell the most reliable way to get certain loot and the raids are all identical.
Why does every story arc feel so damn similar. They didn't even try and dress things up outside of a couple of them. They feel mechanically and narratively rote by the third time you do the whole song and dance.
Fuck having a straightforward skill tree, now you have two of them, and the cool skills you only find randomly dotted around the world so good luck going for a build. I hope you like scraping samey environments and bandit camps/buildings/forts. Then the stat skill tree is an absolute mess, so you want to auto assign, but then you miss out of the handful of interesting skills which are deliberately placed in that skill tree as well.
Gearing holy shit. What are these numbers? What does anything mean? Why are there so few interesting pieces of loot for crazy builds?
Why does combat feel like playing underwater after how smooth Odyssey felt?
Why does climbing feel so slow and intertia-heavy after how smooth Odyssey felt? It felt like it lacked the complexity of the older games (both in mechanics and environment), but also didn't just say fuck it and make it fast and as seamless as Odyssey, sort of being the worst of both worlds.
Why do all the dialogue choices have such little impact now?
Where is the crazy emergent shit you'd get with Odyssey and its mercenaries? I feel like somehow the cult of cosmos was also handled slightly better mechanically. It wasn't great but you'd have mercs tied to different facets of the world, like the one in the colosseum in crete, or the 5 that would sail around in their pirate ships, stuff like that.
Why is the facial animation so ass? Yes there are some scenes where everything looks fine but they feel in the vast, vast, vast minority.
Odyssey didn't feel like a AC game, but it felt like a historical demigod power sandbox fantasy action RPG historical Witcher 3-like, and in that sense it was kinda successful. Valhalla was such a massive step back I have no idea what they were thinking. Hope Red really does more of the former and less of the latter, even if it dials back the superhuman stuff somewhat.
I liked the fantasy stuff, the batshit ending, the visual fidelity especially in the environments, the music is great, some of the areas and the vibes and art direction, and how you could do one hit assassinations out of the box, and honestly that's probably it. Also props to Ubi for supporting the game for so long. I didn't like it but can appreciate that lots of people did, and people who perhaps are less fortunate and can only afford a few games a year got something they could keep coming back to for a while.
Overall probably my least favorite Assassin's Creed. I'd sooner play some of the spinoffs like Chronicles than this. I can get what they were going for in terms of trying to correct some of Odyssey's weaknesses, but what they came up with just felt compromised in different ways, ill thought out, and sometimes just a straight up regression.
I am so much more excited for whatever Panache Digital makes next than the next AssCreed though, that's for sure. Hope it's Amsterdam 1666 but honestly down for whatever weird shit after Ancestors.
so that thread a while back about games you couldn't talk about rationally? I thought I couldn't really think of examples. I forgot this game.
Every design decision in this game baffled me.
Toss the sidequests and random plot threads you discover by exploring, here have shitty 'world events' wherein you climb a building for a random NPC. Now the only major sidequests you get are from residents in your village, and by the end of the game I still couldn't tell most of them apart.
Why did they make so much of England feel so damn similar. Like I get it, Southeast England is limiting (so why do that) -- but they still made fair few pretty different maps, and then make sure to have like 10% of the game take place in them. Could they have cut back some of the fantasy stuff a bit and included Scotland and Ireland out of the box while shrinking the map?
Monastery raids are as far as I can tell the most reliable way to get certain loot and the raids are all identical.
Why does every story arc feel so damn similar. They didn't even try and dress things up outside of a couple of them. They feel mechanically and narratively rote by the third time you do the whole song and dance.
Fuck having a straightforward skill tree, now you have two of them, and the cool skills you only find randomly dotted around the world so good luck going for a build. I hope you like scraping samey environments and bandit camps/buildings/forts. Then the stat skill tree is an absolute mess, so you want to auto assign, but then you miss out of the handful of interesting skills which are deliberately placed in that skill tree as well.
Gearing holy shit. What are these numbers? What does anything mean? Why are there so few interesting pieces of loot for crazy builds?
Why does combat feel like playing underwater after how smooth Odyssey felt?
Why does climbing feel so slow and intertia-heavy after how smooth Odyssey felt? It felt like it lacked the complexity of the older games (both in mechanics and environment), but also didn't just say fuck it and make it fast and as seamless as Odyssey, sort of being the worst of both worlds.
Why do all the dialogue choices have such little impact now?
Where is the crazy emergent shit you'd get with Odyssey and its mercenaries? I feel like somehow the cult of cosmos was also handled slightly better mechanically. It wasn't great but you'd have mercs tied to different facets of the world, like the one in the colosseum in crete, or the 5 that would sail around in their pirate ships, stuff like that.
Why is the facial animation so ass? Yes there are some scenes where everything looks fine but they feel in the vast, vast, vast minority.
Odyssey didn't feel like a AC game, but it felt like a historical demigod power sandbox fantasy action RPG historical Witcher 3-like, and in that sense it was kinda successful. Valhalla was such a massive step back I have no idea what they were thinking. Hope Red really does more of the former and less of the latter, even if it dials back the superhuman stuff somewhat.
I liked the fantasy stuff, the batshit ending, the visual fidelity especially in the environments, the music is great, some of the areas and the vibes and art direction, and how you could do one hit assassinations out of the box, and honestly that's probably it. Also props to Ubi for supporting the game for so long. I didn't like it but can appreciate that lots of people did, and people who perhaps are less fortunate and can only afford a few games a year got something they could keep coming back to for a while.
Overall probably my least favorite Assassin's Creed. I'd sooner play some of the spinoffs like Chronicles than this. I can get what they were going for in terms of trying to correct some of Odyssey's weaknesses, but what they came up with just felt compromised in different ways, ill thought out, and sometimes just a straight up regression.
I am so much more excited for whatever Panache Digital makes next than the next AssCreed though, that's for sure. Hope it's Amsterdam 1666 but honestly down for whatever weird shit after Ancestors.
Me too. I love it, and am playing through it again to get the alternate ending, such as it is. Movment and combat are beautifully flowing, when using all the tools avalible to you. Visually it has some rough edges, but it can also look absoluley stunning. The length and size of the world were a positive for me, but I wasn't really playing anything else, so it didn't get in the way. The soundtrack (or, soundtracks) are probably some of the best (if not the best) in gaming history, with some amazing artists, in their very specialized fields adding to it. Very much looking forward to Mirage, even though it's a more compact title, and the next BIG release.
I'm fully aware that AC was derived from prince of Persia. That's common knowledge. Now, when they started to deviate from PoP and embraced the idea of a new IP the idea of curated levels fell by the wayside in exchange for an open world. Jade Raymond literally said when AC1 was first presented that player freedom was the goal, which was the exact opposite of PoP where every level had curated challenges with specific solutions. Thus, it would've been a bad idea, if the game was constantly challenging the player. You're a master assassin, 3D navigation is not a challenge, it's second nature. Parkour is light work for the average player and any semblance of depth is the result of intrinsic motivation that most of the time doesn't provide major benefits. A good comparison would be the way the world of Mirror's Edge Catalyst is designed. And how it gets really repetitive to tackle the exact same navigation challenges over and over again when you're in between missions.
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There was a big drop in quality from Odyssey to Valhalla, I think. Valhalla wasn't bad, but I didn't care about the story or the characters or the setting that much, and at some point I was just hoping the game would end already.
Odyssey should be the foundation for the next one, because it's the best Assassin's Creed since Brotherhood.
Odyssey should be the foundation for the next one, because it's the best Assassin's Creed since Brotherhood.
