Assassin's Creed Valhalla Ultimately Disappointed Me

[Music] i spent most of 2020 being hyped for assassin's creed valhalla i made 101 things you need to know i replayed most of the series leading up to launch i interviewed key developers on the project it's no secret i was really really excited to play this game and like anyone playing the new game from one of their favorite series i've been in a perpetual honeymoon phase for most of the last three months with a game this long packed with this much content meant to be played over an extended period of time it never made sense to come to a definitive conclusion until i'd played mostly everything over 150 hours assassin's creed valhalla ultimately disappointed me this video is brought to you by nordvpn who's running a special offer just for my viewers guys i know a lot of you are like me we spend hours per day watching game reviews hanging in discord and lurking around streams but unlike me you're probably doing it unprotected the reality is one your isp sees every single website you 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valhalla i sincerely hope there's something here that ubisoft can use to improve the series moving forward if you know me and you know my channel you know i'm generally an optimist i want to give the benefit of the doubt wherever possible i want to cast aside biases and give things a fair shake and honest chance that's where i was leading up to valhalla after unity and syndicate ubisoft ripped out the guts of this franchise and crafted a new vision with origins now that we've gotten three new assassin's creed games it's never been more clear what ubisoft is doing with their cash cow franchise for most of the last three months i held on to the idea that valhalla is the best new open world ac game it's the perfect mix between origins and odyssey leaving behind parts i didn't like and propping up those that i did it brings back classic elements from the older games and it's more grounded in the setting than odyssey is those were things i told myself based more on expectations rather than realities now that i'm completely out of my honeymoon phase valhalla exists in this vast murky area between origins and odyssey certainly closer to odyssey depending on how i think about it it might actually be on the other side of odyssey it's definitely not my favorite new ac game that award goes to origins which guys if you've forgotten you need to go back and play origins i think it's absolutely brilliant but i'll stop there that's a discussion for another time before we go further let's be clear this is not me making the case for why valhalla is awful and why you should hate it i think valhalla is a solid video game and outside of some pretty bad microtransactions i'm glad people are enjoying it from a macro level i think it's fun to boot up valhalla and go on a raid it's fun to jump into one of its story arcs and experience the narrative self-contained within that area it's fun to get on your horse or hop in the longship and just soak in this environment i mean it really is a breathtaking video game one thing we can't dispute is how massively successful this game is valhalla was the number five best-selling video game of 2020 that tells us one it's a really appealing type of game that people generally want to play and two ubisoft has no reason to shift gears in the future and we shouldn't expect them to and i can't help but add that the failure of cyberpunk probably contributed as well i'm of the mind that if something is generally successful there's probably something to it being popular doesn't make something good but it does mean it has value for people that's worth recognizing even if this game is not my cup of tea about a year ago i made a video talking about why i miss the old assassin's creed i started this series with the original game in 2007 and like many people i loved the ezio games i even loved assassin's creed 3 but after unity i put the series down i played origins a little bit and i beat odyssey when it came out but my interest just wasn't nearly as strong i spent about a month researching all of the plots of every game for that video replaying the first four games really just soaking in this franchise to figure out what made the older games tick and at the end i reasoned that it was the doomsday plot and the franchise's focus as a sci-fi experience with strong connections between the animus and the modern day stories it's also how they just made me feel like an assassin the reason i'm telling you all of this is you need to know that i am a purist i just am i'll give the benefit of the doubt i'll hold out for hope all day long but ultimately i will prefer the older experience unless the new ones do something to surpass it i don't need the new games to feel just like the old games i'm not stuck in the past and i'm not blinded by nostalgia what i do need is for these games to present something anything worthwhile that doesn't feel like a watered-down version of another game that i've played a hundred times before i built a lot of expectations around valhalla and i shared a lot of those with you guys here on the channel it was supposed to get the series back on track it was supposed to feel more like origins than odyssey it brought back the hidden blade wearing a hood one-hit assassinations social stealth a settlement system emphasis on the assassins and on and on how could it not be something for me it's true these things do exist in valhalla but i can't say that they're actually present or impactful enough to make a difference valhalla tries to say that it visits old ideas but to me it just doesn't it threatens to make an impact to deliver on that old school feeling it dresses itself up literally by giving you a hidden blade and a hood early on and showing you how to assassinate it takes you on a leap of faith tutorial mission with a real assassin but if the game stopped you right then and there and said this is the most assassinate thing you will do in the entire game i would have had a hard time believing it but it's true because for the next 50 hours it vaguely resembles assassin's creed it settles into what it really is an open world viking game here's where you might be thinking this guy doesn't like change assassin's creed is a different kind of game now and you just can't accept that things change series evolve franchises develop they reinvent themselves when they need to i'm fully aware of what ubisoft has done here but this is not that situation not to me valhalla was sold on the idea of bringing old concepts back so much of the press was buzzing about how the hidden blade is returning and one hit assassinations are back content creators like myself were praising yubi for going back to what worked before but the harsh reality is that if you play through all of valhalla few if any of the classic mechanics feel like they belong there they feel tacked on added as an afterthought and included to justify the title of the game they're like window dressing they're awkwardly jammed in and painted over social stealth for me is the biggest offender of all in the largest cities of england you'll find groups of monks to blend with this is most useful to help you pass through guarded entrances to cities that's the only time that it really makes a difference outside of this single example social stealth is irrelevant cities are loosely guarded there are a few patrols walking around and fewer people existing in these cities you can move around with ease there's no danger no reason to be worried at all so unless you want to walk slowly around with monks in a one-to-one scale city it's just faster to run around you can also skip the monks entirely by climbing a wall not 10 meters away from guarded entrances this was just so disappointing to me after ubisoft showed off these mechanics during their deep dive gameplay before launch these mini blending activities like i think it's making bread i'm not even sure what they are other things like this they looked cool initially but i can't think of a single instance where i used one in 150 hours of playtime these things they don't matter if you're not actively using them and they're not useful when you do to know why social stealth is so disappointing you have to understand how fundamental it used to be in the original assassin's creed social stealth was not an option it was the only option you couldn't sprint past guards in a white hood without expecting to be detected you had crowds of people moving about cities which made these areas feel believable you had these ladies transporting pots on their heads if you bumped into them they'd knock over and crash all over the ground you had beggars pestering you every now and then asking for coin it's small details like this that made these places feel breathing and alive but more than anything crowds they felt like tools to be used like fluid chaotic chess pieces moving around the environment you could turn a corner to break line of sight and quickly identify a group if you needed to blend there's something delightfully simple and incredibly compelling about crowd blending to this day it remains a completely unique concept in video games that only ubisoft used like this and they're just not using it anymore i don't think it's completely fair to say this mechanic is bad because it's not how it used to be that's reverting back to i don't like change territory but there's more to it isn't there change for the sake of change it never works but if you evolve in meaningful ways it can make all the difference in the world i can't sit here and say that assassin's creed has done that and valhalla social stealth exists to give you options to play stealthily if you want it's pretty common in open world rpg style games to give you a set of believable play styles and then let you choose how you want to play it's not an inherently bad idea in fact i think it's generally great and often empowering as a player it lends to a greater sense of agency that more linear games can't achieve however including options while intentionally steering the player towards a single playstyle is not empowering and that at the end of the day is what valhalla does it desperately wants me to play as a viking and it tries its hardest to get me to do that it does this by offering few meaningful social stealth opportunities it does this by filling the world with empty cities and omitting crowd blending altogether it does this by offering up the clunkiest parkour in the series it does this by creating an entire mechanic around loudly blowing your horn and raiding enemy camps via longships yes valhalla is a viking game i mean if you look at the box art and think otherwise that's on you but it spends a lot of time masquerading as a game that offers stealth and assassinate gameplay if you want it when even if you do want that it's neither present enough nor satisfying enough to exist you get stealth skills you get to toggle one hit assassinations if you want to you get to crouch down and you get to pull on your hood these are all elements that used to come by default and they now act as unlocked skills or features that are new the kicker is that if you want to reap the rewards of england and gather supplies to bolster your settlement to essentially progress through the game you have to initiate a viking raid there's no option to fully complete these areas without blowing your horn so if you want to be an assassin here's what you have to do awkwardly steer your ship to the side of a river before you're seen have your crew yell at you for crashing into the shoreline hop out of your longship crouch down sneak up and then hope that you can assassinate everyone in the camp before the spotty ai gets you detected and then you can blow your horn to get help to gather those supplies and progress don't get me wrong the options are there but they are so clunky and unfun that i can't imagine people enjoying them the way they exist in this game i mean you've gotta jump through 10 hoops do a hop skip and a somersault if you actually want to feel like an assassin but even when i do this i don't feel like an assassin free running is an area that ubisoft more or less completely ignored leading up to launch you literally could not find a shred of palpable information on parkour and we know now why with a more open world structure i was thinking oh it's fine we're not doing it as much so it doesn't matter this is an excuse that i carried into black flag when i replayed it last year but that game fills the void of parkour with sailing providing an alternative that feels authentic and satisfying for different reasons in other words it evolved in a meaningful way deeply rooted and connected to its setting valhalla does not offer interesting traversal as much as i wanted longships to do that they are glorified vehicles a means to an end now i will say that traveling is not boring in valhalla and that's mostly due to the incredible world design and technical art direction it's legitimately one of the most gorgeous video games out there and i do see value in being pretty to look at but after a couple dozen hours in valhalla i started fast traveling everywhere in one of the prettiest games i've ever played it became hard for me to hop on my horse and ride a couple of minutes without checking out mentally this made me realize that being pretty has its limits insomniac's spider-man games represent masterful open-world traversal web swinging is beautiful it's engaging it's intuitive you can master it within minutes and still have fun doing it hours later i don't know how assassin's creed can make traversal great again but i do know that it used to have that same spark that spider-man has when there were layers of vertical planes to travel across that hit the right mix of fun to navigate and realistic enough to not feel ridiculous when you could more or less travel from one end of a city to another without touching the ground at all when there were real obstacles in the way that forced you to make decisions this formula it's absurdly compelling to this day and it's one reason why so many ac fans go back and replay the older games once again we're talking about the bygone era of assassin's creed because origins reformulated parkour to fit the reimagined version of this franchise since that game it's been hold down a button move forward and you're climbing like there's no tomorrow even if i don't agree with the reasoning i do understand why ubisoft did this with an open world structure it's easier to be able to climb everything with the game set more than a thousand years ago there aren't enough buildings in most places to the point that it makes sense to focus on this as a core gameplay element but now that we've had three new era assassins creed games there's something missing here even if assassin's creed will never have engaging parkour again it must deliver interesting ways to navigate not because it's assassin's creed but because that's a fair expectation for this genre as it is now other open world games that don't have assassin's creed in the title they recognize that travel should be engaging mechanically and that it needs to exist for reasons beyond being a means to an end even if you take a closer look at parkour and valhalla i struggle to make up reasons why ubisoft would do this it feels worse to me than origins or odyssey and again for the life of me i can't dream up any explanation for why they did it this way from the most basic level avor feels sluggish it's like they took the speed slider on parkour and dialed it down to 75 percent of normal movement speed if you don't believe me boot up origins or odyssey and run around for a minute you'll see what i mean avor is slower in every phase of parkour normally changes like this come with a trade-off perhaps navigation is slower because it's more complex not in valhalla then there's no sense of momentum either if parkour is stringing together movements there's no connective thread linking one movement to another this is on full display during valhalla's tattoo parkour activities each time you reach an apex or a place where you have to jump off from avor grinds to an absolute halt my input does not matter that's a predetermined behavior this translates to every other part of parkour you can bump into things and jump off of heights that hurt avor to slow you down but outside of that every movement is equal to another and that's just strange to me the result is that parkour feels lacking in depth and the path i take does not matter i've seen lots of explanations for valhalla's parkour the most popular one is that there's a narrative reason for avor to be unskilled at running and climbing which boils down to the simple fact that we're a viking i mean duh avoir shouldn't be a skilled climber why would we be we're good at viking stuff like raiding flighting and drinking but not stealth and not climbing usually i am all for this kind of reasoning i like having explanations for why gameplay is the way that it is but i see no value in avor controlling like this i mean zero all i get is frustration not only because it's not how it used to be and that was clearly better but because it's not engaging for what it is now is valhalla's parkour more fun because it is slow does that add to a sense of realism or lend to a more grounded experience is there value in having a character that is supposed to be like an assassin but still needs to feel like a viking some of you might say yes but i say no not even close another fundamental change to the series didn't happen until odyssey and that's dialogue choosing what your character says in conversations initially i have to admit i wasn't too skeptical of this change seeing the direction the series was headed it it felt like a natural transition and it's one reason why many people enjoyed odyssey valhalla showed me that this decision comes with more sacrifices that i'm willing to take to the point that while this is wildly unrealistic i sincerely hope this series ditches dialogue options entirely in the future that probably sounds pretty radical considering so many other games are doing this in this day and age but hear me out valhalla is a massive game it's the biggest of the series in terms of how long it takes to do everything there's so many conversations to be had so many people you'll speak to once for two minutes and then never again the vast majority of open world games with dialogue like this use an automated solution some kind of proprietary tech that animates faces at scale automatically instead of on a case-by-case manual basis with the sheer size and magnitude of a game like valhalla ubisoft chose this path too but unlike other games in this genre the overall end product here just doesn't work it's strange because there are moments where i'll look at valhalla and think man that face looks incredible and then two seconds later i'll think yikes whatever upgrade the engine got from origins to odyssey produces great visuals for screenshots and minor characters actually look awesome in motion too but what happened between odyssey and valhalla sincerely i went back to odyssey and i was stunned to find those conversations with characters you only talk to once they often look better than valhallas and what do we mean by look better there's something off with the animation here it often fails to convey human emotion to the point where i don't connect with the character that's talking this is not just random npcs you talk to it even affects avore there are exceptions the major arcs and valhalla each have a scripted cutscene where the actors faces are fully motion captured these for me fully deliver on the narrative weight that they're carrying they're genuinely impressive and they make cecily stenspill and magnus bruins performances truly shine special shout out to fulkay still one of the most interesting characters in this game she looks fantastic she's completely unique and most of her scenes feel hand-touched but this represents a fraction of a fraction of the total experience 99 of the time i'm seeing an automated cutscene that doesn't accurately convey human emotion again this applies to avor when i try to dig down to the core of why this stuff bothers me i always come back to cohesion it's not necessarily that valhalla needed to be 100 motion captured or that animations just should have been better it's that there's a general lack of consistency in what i'm seeing it's odd to see incredible animation in one moment and mediocre the next i'm just not someone that requires all my video games to look like the last of us or red dead but i'm also someone that recognizes games can do something like sucker punch did with ghost of sushima these are not the best faces but they are consistent they have a certain rhythm that as the player i settled into and recognized subconsciously as yeah this is a human talking there are no dialogue options for jin sakai but sucker punch chose the best solution for their project and it worked so what's the solution here how do you deliver endless hours of multiple dialogue paths convincingly i think you have to evaluate the scope of this project before even starting it and pick the right solution with a four year dev cycle i think we all accepted that valhalla would not be some generational defining experience but it could have scaled back its scope it could have become a 60 hour game instead of 120 hour game it could have simplified its presentation looked something closer to ghost of sushima which works for most people or it could have done what ubisoft already did with origins scale back by 20 give us a singular protagonist fully voiced and scripted with hand-touched animations and no dialogue options i'll actually go one step further and say choosing dialog options doesn't make me connect further with a character in fact it might do the opposite more often than not because it's more difficult to pull off this is coming from a mass effect fan there has to be some sort of balance struck between dialogue animation choice and presentation if only one part of that formula doesn't work out the whole thing crumbles i found myself wishing that avor was a singular character with scripted scenes when i was stuck in my honeymoon phase i was pretty defensive of valhalla in a lot of ways but none of them more than the narrative this was ubisoft's viking epic darby and the narrative team took inspiration from icelandic poems and sagas this sounded awesome to me so i approached with an open mind but after a couple dozen hours i had thoughts you never really want while playing a video game where is this game even going and then after another dozen hours i would think when is this game going to end i hit that point multiple times from a conceptual standpoint i really do like that ubisoft tried something different each region of valhalla is treated as a self-contained arc each starts with a clear purpose seek peace and seek an alliance each area tells a unique story with varying paths and not super predictable endings albeit the structures of these become a little repetitive the result is a mixture of stories plots that don't always flow from one arc to another but altogether represent the narrative as a whole to me this idea sounds good on paper i do think darby and the crew succeed in their goal of making a game that mirrors a saga but i think it introduces some real pacing issues born from expectations we just naturally bring to the table as gamers valhalla's nearly two dozen arcs are represented via the alliance table in ravensthorpe some arcs end up being more important than others but what's not explained not until you realize it is that you have to complete every single one of these on the map have to it's not an option and there are points where you have to finish all of the arcs on the table in order to unlock the next set this introduces a couple issues depending on which arcs you play first and in what order you can run into periods of time where you're forced to play areas of the game that don't feel essential to the things that the game is nudging you to care about most this happened to me multiple times and any narrative momentum that the game tries to build with its central arcs really suffers for example you can spend three to four hours completing an arc involving your brother sigurd this seems to push the story forward in meaningful ways then you can turn around and have to spend depending on how you did things more than a dozen hours completing other arcs before you get to see the next part of sigurd's story this was so frustrating for me especially since there is always a cliffhanger it seems at the end of an important arc that doesn't get resolved till the beginning of the next related arc there's one specific situation with sigurd where he's in a real mood and he kind of skulks around your camp my sigurd i kid you not was doing that for like 20 hours of game time like four or five maybe six arcs of gameplay and then whenever i completed the required unrelated arcs suddenly i could sit down and have a chat with sigurd and there was no specific narrative reason for that those arcs were not required to sort of have a conversation with sigurd that's just not a natural situation that players should have to deal with it breaks any narrative weight that that thread might have had the solution in my eyes seems relatively easy it's to separate the arcs into essential and non-essential that way we as the player we know which ones advance the central plot then give us a direct path of essential arcs needed to complete the main story that way these narrative beats aren't disrupted by arcs that might not be bad in and of themselves but nonetheless feel like filler or feel out of place because of the structure in any case we have what we got it was difficult for me to get really truly invested in valhalla's narrative because of the way it was structured i do need to say that i really enjoyed the payoff from the last several hours in valhalla i made a whole video focusing just on the ending it took me on a wild ride that is deeply intertwined in the overarching plotline in a way that felt more satisfying than in origins or odyssey in my perfect world i just want to see more of that i want to see more animus anomalies more sci-fi elements ingrained in what's happening within the animus this game's ending does remind me of the older games and for a purist that's a step in the right direction [Music] back in the historical plot i wish this game did better with alliances it never felt like i was truly impacting the world by completing the arks i went to each region and i completed a quest that told me that i earned support but that support it's never tangible it's not reflected in raven's thorpe beyond placing a statue on a map you do see some characters from early arcs appear in later ones but the payoffs just don't come through for me before launch i saw so much potential in the fantasy of building an army through political intrigue through conquering regions and generating a real threat against the saxons something on the level of a grand strategy game but contextualized for an action rpg the best example i can think of is dragon age inquisition it does an excellent job with this kind of thing that fantasy is never truly realized in valhalla for me strangely enough it feels like odyssey does a better job of contextualizing a large-scale conflict i was expecting an evolved version of how that game represents the peloponnesian war instead the perceived impact of something as major as winning the support of halfton ragnarsson is limited to a cutscene at the end of the jurvik shire arc give me a representative with a building in my settlement let me talk with hafdan's advisors and negotiate on how many troops i'll need for the impending war against alfred the great show me some level of depth beyond what's right in front of me [Music] a lot of the negative reviews of valhalla claim that the game is bloated it's too long too big and doesn't justify its length the debate of can a game be too big was circulating and generally speaking this is an easy answer for me as long as a game continues to be entertaining for its entire length if the quality holds up if i'm having fun after dozens of hours then sure i'd love to keep playing a game but as we've seen it's hard to tell an endless story and do it well if you're going to have a plot it needs a resolution valhalla is a long game by most standards but its length feels more like a symptom of a larger issue feature creep there are so many parts of valhalla that felt fine on the surface but slowly unraveled as i played more like the term suggests feature creep is an invasive problem it seeps into every single corner of a game until at worst the entire thing becomes an unfocused wishy-washy mess that's a bit harsh to call valhalla a mess but i will tell you with zero doubt in my mind that valhalla has far too many things going on too many bells too many whistles too many systems on top of systems it tries to do so much that for me it ends up coming short in many ways this game does not give you options to organize your loot at all zero no sorting there's less loot in this game than before but for a game that still has looting and gear management there are fewer options than origins or odyssey here's how runes work you scroll through a very long list of every single rune you've ever looted which is not sorted in any logical way the statistical impact of your runes is not reflected outside of the stats screen so most people really don't notice the difference this one was strange to me because both origins and odyssey have very clear indicators on their gear pages while you can technically compare two pieces of equipment there's no red down arrow or green up arrow to show you at a glance this is better than that the skill tree feels like a classic example of style over substance each little node offers a small statistical difference that you won't notice plus there's no way to highlight certain paths to i don't know synergize for a specific playstyle you're gonna hit max level no matter what if you keep playing this game so there's no real trade-off here there's no risk and no reward remember the bear raven wolf designations that each piece of equipment has at the very top of its card i've played 150 hours of this video game and i couldn't tell you if that matters at all and if it does i don't feel the impact of it truth be told it feels like a holdover element that they planned to have more of an impact in gameplay but decided at the 11th hour not to use it's in all of these ways and more that valhalla manages to feel half baked and bloated at the same time there are so many things going on and if you take a magnifying glass to any one thing it either feels unnecessary or unfinished yom's vikings are another example while you can create your own raiding ally the options are too limited the shared yams vikings who appear on your dock are other people's randomized warriors who feel just as generic you can recruit a limited roster of named allies you can take on your boat but you can't really talk to them and there's no impact on gameplay the river raids update tries to add depth here but it just doesn't i mean it adds ranks that have unclear impact and they sequestered all of that to a separate mode away from the main experience there are just too many design decisions here that leave me scratching my head wondering what were they thinking it's strange right because i was all aboard the make assassin's creed feel less like an rpg train i really desperately wanted it to go back to its action focused roots i'm talking less damage numbers and gear grinding less time spent in gear pages in inventory and what i think we got with valhalla is an action rpg that is missing some rudimentary pieces that it actually really needs even if i want to play valhalla like the rpg it is i find that experience difficult i still like the idea of valhalla not force-feeding me loot i'm not constantly barraged with another piece that sends me into the pause screen to equip the new thing that is slightly better that being said i think this was an overcorrection there's less loot but i don't really like any of it you know that feeling when you're just starting an rpg and you think i just got this low tier piece it's crap but that's okay because i know the good stuff is coming later i got that with valhalla but it never got better there's this weird disconnect with item perks where none of them feel good it's also hard to gauge the differences between weapons of the same type one danax is slightly faster than the other but i can't feel the difference reflected in gameplay and the fact that most loot comes from randomly placed boxes didn't work for me either i wanted those wealth chests to make me feel like i was uncovering something special each time but if the loot isn't great then that experience falls completely on its face another thing i really genuinely miss side quests i made a whole video about how valhalla's opportunity system is revolutionary for open world but after spending more time in the game i found myself missing traditional side quests perhaps it's the animation issues i touched on earlier but i can't say i connected with many of these three-minute sometimes a little bit longer sometimes shorter adventures they don't stick around long enough to make an impact and there's just so many of them i think it's more than fair to say that valhalla offers a great impressive variety of content lots of different things to do but i'm not sure that they have the lasting impact that i was looking for i also praise the fact that information isn't tracked anywhere long were the days where this game would be holding my hand and telling me exactly what to do in reality the novelty of this wore off i ended up googling basic things because critical information isn't tracked anywhere if there was a dialogue queue telling me where to go or a glowing object i needed to find it either wasn't clear enough or i just missed it i like having to figure things out instead of being whacked over the head with obvious instructions on how to do things but at the same time i don't remember giving up and using the internet for help as much as i have in valhalla like darby told me in our interview it doesn't make sense for avor to scribble down notes on every single task you come across but i found myself wishing that avor did the next feature that i initially praised was the approach to minor chests each area has a set of these but most of them are locked in houses these turn into many environmental puzzles asking you to find the weak spot and shoot it or get the right angle maybe locate a key to get inside i like the idea of asking the player to give a little more effort to get a reward instead of just walk up to the chest and open it but this routine gets old and became frustrating more than anything it's one of those repetitive actions that it's okay for the first few dozen times you do it but then it starts to artificially lengthen the experience plus you kind of have to loot every single chest you find if you don't want to grind for iron ingots in leather to upgrade your gear shortly after launch i made a video critiquing combat and i talked about how finishers disrupt any sort of rhythm or flow that you might get into plus they feel repetitive since you're seeing them so often over the 100 or so hours of time you're gonna play this game but i really need to get this off my chest too i don't like the adrenaline or the ability systems specifically within valhalla i don't think it makes sense to contextualize basic moves as super abilities in a grounded action rpg many of avore's abilities are semi-realistic some of them have more ridiculous animations but they're mostly believable and i thought that was a good thing but this system works better in a game like odyssey that is self-aware of how magical and ridiculous its abilities really are in valhalla i feel like i'm building up a resource meter to pull off basic moves i'm talking about throwing a harpoon to hook an enemy lighting my sword on fire charging my weapon for a powerful attack this is stuff that similar games of the same genre require just a specific button input combo to pull off now i realize this is probably a very specific nitpick and i'll admit a big part of this comes from how things used to work before the reboot and honestly in origins too moves like this are just things you can do they're tools you have a massive collection of options to do very specific things that are useful in a variety of situations these provided a lot of utility and gameplay i just feel a disconnect in valhalla with these abilities and this adrenaline system it just doesn't work for me we have to talk about the settlement ravenstorp was one of those big features coming to valhalla you be compared it to skyhold and dragon age inquisition or the normandy and mass effect the idea of a home base that feels alive and reactive where all the fruits of my labor would be reflected where a village would sort of build around me over the course of many hours it sounded dynamic and deeply connected to what avor was doing in england it sounded like an evolution of the incredibly underrated homestead system from assassin's creed iii in reality i can't say that ravenstorm meets any of those expectations the npcs they just stand around in one place at all hours of the day they have nothing to say they have a small handful of unique quests and the buildings exist as a means to an end i like the idea of expanding the settlement by constructing buildings it's true that you collect resources via raids but these never break the surface in terms of depth raven's thorpe is not a place i can call home i can't feel like i can just hang out in it jorvik or any of the other major cities in valhalla they all feel more lively to me the settlement is a gallery of menus that i can walk to and from when i need something kind of like a modern day monterregioni it's a place i must return to so i can do what's required not a place that taps into my intrinsic motivation it's true that i do things here after each arc that i return here but man i just sprint back and forth and i get these done as quickly as possible it was such a bummer for me to realize that the settlement didn't stick the landing it was so disappointing considering what the series has already done in terms of a home base and there it is a long long laundry list of things that i liked at first until i just didn't i started to feel a general sense of weariness about midway through valhalla almost like an exhaustion i think that feeling can be attributed to feature creep genuinely it can feel exhausting to play a game with ideas that cause more friction than they need to be or that feel repetitive the thing is most of the time when i feel that way it's because i'm playing too much of a game i know i play games for a living but i usually can't play more than like four to six hours of a single game in a single day my brain turns to mush and i just need a break i didn't grind valhalla 24 7 from launch to completion i didn't force myself to play this game more than i wanted to it took me a full month to complete the story and then i did everything else except for jotunheim and asgard over the following two months i completed those arcs but i just didn't do everything in them so that means i felt exhausted i felt weary even though i was really taking my time to soak in and get a sense of the experience and that's how i know that what's here just missed the mark for me now i can't make a huge video like this and ignore ubisoft's approach to microtransactions guys it's not good it's actually as bad as it's ever been if we're all being honest here in origins ub implemented an mtx model that wasn't great they expanded it further in odyssey adding various ways to collect currency to earn these items instead of paying for them and really baking it into the end game live service experience in valhalla though they purposefully withheld boosters out of the launch period of the game to avoid negative press from people like me and then they slipped it in they shadow patch it into the game say what you will about boosters and the ethics behind that personally i don't think you need them in valhalla but sneaking them in like that it's extremely dishonest in a world where information spreads like wildfire this was so obviously the wrong move it's like ripping a loud fart in a silent crowded room and not owning up to it it stinks and it sucks and then there's the opal grind i'm not particularly familiar with odyssey's post-launch free content but i do know that by now there were plenty of ways to extend that experience in fun and engaging ways by this point i know valhalla launched during a global event that only comes around once every few hundred years but ubisoft quebec just approached the post launch better more transparency better communication and if we're being honest better content the yule season has just been disappointing in valhalla and because the content is free it doesn't mean it's immune to criticism especially considering ub makes these games with microtransactions in mind they release post-launch content trailers before the game even comes out ubisoft set our expectations for this content with origins and odyssey people didn't just wake up one day and realize they wanted an endless experience from assassin's creed and so the best way forward is to be honest ubisoft's best quality in my eyes is their ability to take criticism on the chin like this entire video for example i mean i am just ripping on this game but i doubt that i'm gonna get blacklisted because i'm being honest after i beat valhalla's story like a lot of you i dove into the subreddit and other areas where people were discussing the game's ending and the fact that there's a cliffhanger people talk a lot about how the story is not fully resolved but what they don't talk about is how ubisoft has now made it acceptable to sell story content which is required to get a full understanding of what's happening in their game's plots we don't know really what's going on by the end of valhalla there are so many open-ended questions even if the game delivers some awesome revelations in the final hours that made an old-school fan like me really happy i have to pay more money to see everything through that sucks plain and simple and then there's the expensive paid content in a single player game there's the fact that as of this video there are just as many paid armor sets as there are normal armor sets that you earn the fact that these are often better statistically than most armor sets there's really no excuse here i'm frustrated that yubi's leadership continues to guide us down this path i used to think because these games were a single player it didn't matter that these items affected gameplay that they gave someone an advantage that bought them over someone who didn't well i was wrong it does especially if you feel like i do about gear and think that most of these paid items offer more interesting gameplay that what comes straight out of the box after taking a brief break from ubisoft games in general and returning this past year i can't help but feel that these practices are just straight up scummy people attribute that to companies like ea like activision you know microtransactions loot boxes what's happening right here it's just as bad and if you're dunking on those companies for making those decisions you should be doing the same to ubisoft i keep asking myself was i dumb for expecting assassin's creed valhalla to blow me away maybe it's entirely possible that i was really naive and that i should have seen the trajectory of these games and adjusted my expectations accordingly but like you guys i'm not a robot hype is a reality i give myself a pass because i'm a purist and what was being said from reveal to release genuinely appealed to me valhalla has the hidden blade valhalla is a return to form valhalla has a chance to be satisfying for old school fans valhalla was not satisfying for me in fact i find myself wondering if valhalla's murky existence its lack of identity puts it below odyssey hear me out that game knows what it is way more than valhalla does this is not something i could have imagined myself considering and yet here we are what now if i'm truly the optimist i say i am surely i can think up a way for ubisoft to right this ship to turn things around hopefully without creating unrealistic unreasonable expectations again assassin's creed needs a clearer more consistent vision beyond open world game in historical setting if it's going to resurrect old ideas they have to be front and center not hidden or optional if it's going to be a broad video game features need to go beyond the surface and they need to be consistent with the genre if it's going to be massive it needs to have some sort of focus still honestly after valhalla i'd rather ubisoft keep pushing forward and progressing rather than regressing i don't think this series can deliver a classic experience within the current open world formula what it can do however is rip this page from the book and refocus there's no reason for ubisoft to change i get that but we have had three entries that are more or less very similar these franchises do tend to change once every three to four games if they manage to last as long as assassin's creed has not to be overly dramatic but that's my hope right now that's my lifeline i'll be crossing my fingers that the next assassin's creed shifts into another era and whenever the next game is announced i'll be looking with a very very skeptical and critical eye because as much as i'm gonna want to like the game as much as i'm going to be an optimist it's gonna be hard man this video feels like it was a year in the making i just want to thank you guys so much for watching and if you enjoyed this video please let me know by clicking the like button and subscribing to the channel and hitting that bell so you don't miss my next video and even going a step further and sharing it with your friends somebody that you might want to see if they agree on this opinion or maybe you know that they don't and you want to see what they think about another perspective you can also follow me on social media on twitter i'm at jv on yt and instagram i'm at jv.yt follow me on those for updates on all my content if you want to chat more about games like valhalla or other upcoming games join our community discord server over at discord.gg jv on yt links for everything are in the description below big thanks to my youtube members my ultra fans dave grass cullen bill and cam super fans kamal tipsy sergey tarlkay ryan tia robbie and william fans john matthew spyro jvo level 42 joe and bloodsky and my supporters nos sung adam mr hollow quickness ferkin john jay sam and abishek for supporting the channel if you want to support me further click the join button below this video in exchange for your support you'll unlock custom badges emotes and monthly play sessions with me and the community check the link in the description for more information thank you guys so much again for watching and i'll talk to you next time you

Channel: jayvee

Views: 756,535

Keywords: JV2017, JV2017gameplay, jayvee, ac valhalla, assassins creed valhalla, ac valhalla jayvee, ac valhalla review, ac valhalla ultimately disappointed me, assassins creed valhalla ultimately disappointed me, ac valhalla review 2021, ac valhalla in 2021, ac valhalla dlc, ac valhalla update, assassins creed jayvee, assassins creed valhalla jayvee

Id: SKSEX4vZIck

Length: 55min 39sec (3339 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 05 2021