Baffling In All The Wrong Ways | Assassin's Creed Valhalla - Luke Stephens

assassin's creed valhalla is probably one of the weirdest and most bizarre games that i've ever played in many ways it's really good with a beautiful open world map that's expansive and offers so much content that it would make a persona game blush but even with that having been said it is so long and so drawn out that it meanders in focus tone intention and delivery constantly now after evaluating all of this as you can probably see by the length of this video i've come to the conclusion that valhalla is one of the most disappointing games that i've ever personally experienced and this project really is a true testament to that reality you see typically in the gaming industry we can expect each subsequent iteration of a franchise's main release to improve on its predecessors achievements or lack thereof like with the witcher games or the elder scrolls games or the last of us part two you see it's funny because it's controversial however in the particular case of assassin's creed valhalla we're left with a game that takes many more steps backwards than it does forwards it's a phenomenon that is so totally baffling that in my humble opinion it has no directly comparable familiar at least for a game like dragon age 2 a title that failed in almost every way shape and form to live up to the originals ideals and qualitative standards there are excuses that can be made such as the incredibly rushed development cycle the insanity-inducing crunch and the inflexibility of the publisher's executives all of which i will say is outlined spectacularly well in jason schreier's book blood sweat and pixels yeah it turns out when he's not tweeting really depressing stuff about our industry he actually writes a pretty interesting book but as far as i can tell with valhalla there is no good reason or excuse as to why it's in the condition it is except perhaps the pandemic that affected the entire planet towards the end of this game's development cycle something that we'll touch on a little bit more later and yes if you hear a bell chiming or purring it's my cat hermione do you want to say hello she's going to chill with us while we record the critique today you want to say hi say hi listen to those purse she's a cutie yeah there you go okay lay down cuddle down okay let's do this like i said we'll discuss exactly why the game is likely the way that it is at the very end of this video when we evaluate everything on the whole but first we must explain what exactly is wrong with valhalla after all one must evaluate a sickness by way of its symptoms before one can be confident in their diagnosis and the prescription to cure that ill and that is the chief end of this critique to evaluate what exactly is wrong with valhalla why it happened and what if anything could be done to remedy it spoiler alert it's probably already too far gone but first allow me to break down my thoughts quickly and succinctly as to whether or not this game is worth your time because i would guess that a fair number of you haven't actually played the game and are just curious what the hell happened now let me say i really didn't enjoy valhalla when i first played it and i stand behind most of my initial criticisms all of which we'll discuss in the coming sections that will have their own timestamps in the description box below such as the world design gameplay dynamics combat changes skill tree design etc now after putting in well over 100 hours i can say that i understand the appeal of the viking hack and slash rpg that they were going for here but it's still very bloated unfocused and at times bafflingly lacking in thought and polish but by far the most widely complained about aspect of valhalla is its length this game could have been half the runtime and it would have felt significantly better and yes i'm going to prove this to you by the end of the video using gameplay examples comparisons to previous games and also a live study that we did on stream over on the twitch channel where we played valhalla and then odyssey and then origins compare the sidequest length and how the quests were designed everything together pulled out the excel spreadsheet and had a great time with it so make sure to watch to the end to see the results of that little study we did because it's pretty crazy to put it simply think of valhalla as the quintessential example of a junk food game there's a lot of it it's not that good and it seems to have been created with the sole intention of getting you hooked on its simplistic and yet oddly addictive offerings it has no real substance it seems unburdened with the duty to deliver a quality experience throughout and often it leaves you feeling rather empty and wanting wondering what could have been if you had made other decisions with your life don't expect any moments that cause serious reflection any truly memorable story beats that will stick with you for months or even years a la naughty dog this game really is about living in a lighthearted viking fantasy and in that pursuit it succeeds mostly at least there are still plethora issues with the world design repetition and even something as foundational as the setting in england itself furthermore i was hoping for some complex ideas to be explored for example from the moment i heard that the next assassin's creed game was set in a viking england i really wanted to see a ghost of tsushima style reversal of roles since you're dealing with vikings flip it on its side and force them to deal with their problems not in a bombastic violent way but in a stealthy assassin way it would have been a really interesting dynamic shift where these rough and tumble vikings have to go against everything they've been trained to do it would have been fascinating and really interesting and i know it would be because they did this in ghost of tsushima where a man was raised in the way of the samurai and then is forced to go with the ways to bastardize it of the ninja go stealthily instead of bombastically and it caused moments of serious reflection questioning whether or not this was right or even noble and honorable and it caused a crisis of self in many ways that would have been cool to see with valhalla but we never get it there's some dialogue at the beginning of the game that mentions the possibility of valhalla going in this direction when you first meet bassem but it's never mentioned again seriously it's like they just forgot what they were doing or that that was one of their goals they just never touch on it again but the point is it's really disappointing to see them miss the mark so severely on something that could have integrated the viking and assassin themes together so well it's just a bummer but we never see it and speaking of missed opportunities and things that should have been easy to do well but they somehow screwed up in origins and odyssey ubisoft spent years creating systems for sailing naval combat and even faction-based wars like we saw in odyssey something that could have been perfect for warring viking tribes going head to head for territory in england but none of it is here systems they already had and that would have fit perfectly in the setting that they chose are either so severely cut down and simplified that they bear no resemblance to the original counterpart that we're discussing in origins and odyssey or they are completely missing furthermore even smaller items that have a huge impact on the quality of life of a game like this such as the dynamic cinematic camera placement in quests is largely gone i would say that roughly 90 percent of the dialogue interactions you have in the world of assassin's creed valhalla don't have scripted camera movements or even dynamic ones and again this is something we saw in odyssey we've seen it in the witcher 3 from 2015 and even fallout 4 from 2015 and i know it makes us all realize we're really old but those games are six years old as of the time of this recording six years old that's an entire console generation they had it figured out back in 2015 odyssey had it figured out in 2018 and valhalla just there's nothing they don't even have a modicum of what they had in the last game it is a huge step backwards for seemingly no reason at all it's seriously bizarre to see it so much worse here than it was just in the last release that they put out i have a few theories as to why it's like this and why this might have happened but again we'll get to that later it's just time and time again valhalla has the chance to do something unique and instead of bettering the system from the last game they don't even have it they just dump it and then pretend as though the absence of that feature is a feature in and of itself but all of that said i think right now the game is probably worth the current sales price something around 20 to 40 dollars sounds fair and the caveat to that is that you need to know what you're getting yourself into the amount of content the quantity of content that you have here is insane and ridiculous there's well over 100 hours worth of stuff to do in assassin's creed valhalla but you need to understand that the overwhelming majority of players get burnt out within the first 25 or so hours so if you're willing to spend 20 40 bucks to have a viking fantasy for around 25 hours valhalla could be perfect for you just don't expect to get the hundred hour epic that ubisoft was pitching because it's a hundred hours it's pretty far from epic but now we're gonna get into the spoilery section of the video where we're just gonna talk openly about the entire thing beginning to end all of the side content the main story the isu storyline everything so if you have any intention of playing valhalla or you care about those storylines and want to experience them for yourself hold off pause the video it'll be here when you get back it will also be on all of your favorite podcast hosting sites such as apple podcast soundcloud for download if you would like to take it on the go that way or spotify you can listen to these on the go just hop on spotify look up my name luke stevens and you'll see all of the critiques i've ever done listed there so you can listen to them on the go if you like and also there's no ads if you do that so that might be better if you care about that sort of thing but first real quick i want to say a special thank you to all of these patrons that make these videos possible i don't think people realize that to get these videos out at the pace that i put these out about one a month of videos of this length i have to work with an editor that costs hundreds of dollars for every single video that we put out not to mention the time that i put into recording all of this footage writing the scripts recording it doing my portion of the editing it's a lot of work and it can be pretty expensive and it would not be justifiable at all without people like all of these fine boys and girls over on the patreon so if you want to contribute to this it's only a buck and it actually helps get these videos out at a quicker pace and it helps support me my first child is on the way here by the time you're seeing this probably in a week or two might have already come that is kind of crazy to think about but you know we'll cross that bridge when we come to it end of august early september is when he's due to come so yeah so if you want to support the channel support what we do here these meaningful intense discussions and critiques of video games you want to see these videos more frequently and you want to see them before everybody else head over to patreon only a dollar to get access to it means the world and yeah that's the end of my my pleading special shout out to inrg for his overwhelmingly generous contributions he's been a patron for a long time and has always been at the higher tiers just making all of this work so thank you einar you're awesome i told you i'd give you a shout out here you are thank you really and the last thing to do before we get into all of this is i wanted to just share with you a little side project i've been working on of course i'm over on twitch we live stream all of this footage when we're playing these games and working on the critiques i dealt with a couple dmca bull crap things and claims it was a nightmare beside the point the point is i worked with a few musicians to actually create background music for these youtube videos the background music you've been hearing in this video up to now and for those live streams i own it free and clear and i created that music specifically for the purpose of background within youtube and twitch gameplay it's actually fairly complicated to get it just right but we've actually nailed it down and i was sitting on all of these tracks just hoarding them until one day i realized you know what i should share these it doesn't matter if i have them or i'm the only one using them i should share these so i created rhapsody stream rap city stream is a free to use royalty free dmca free music platform we have two different albums out right now six hours worth of music it's completely free to use you can stream it right off apple music or spotify even title or you can download the tracks to using your youtube videos through the soundcloud link on the website we even have a portal on the website rhapsodystream.com where you can request tracks to be made if you're looking for some sort of background music specifically for a given video or maybe a theme song for your youtube channel or twitch stream you just put in the request and me and my musicians will actually create the song for you for free rhapsodystream.com it's my own thing so i guess i'm the sponsor but whatever enjoy it let's get into the video here we go [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] now the first thing i feel i should address is probably the thing that's going to be painted on the screen for the rest of this video most clearly and that is that i primarily played with male ivor you do have the choice between male or female and you could swap back and forth if you like i actually started with female ivor and switched after about five or so hours just to try out the male voice actor but i really honestly never went back nothing against her personally but the female voice actors performance was just too brooding in my opinion and it was a bit too gravelly i think she was trying to put forward a rough and tumble viking but instead it just often sounded like a chain smoking gas station attendant you coward you let an innocent die in your place mail ivor was a lot more varied from scene to scene and i found him much more representative of what i thought ivor was or should be like i know i'm not just saying this to be sexist or something i thought cassandra was miles better than alexios in assassin's creed odyssey i'm just not personally impressed with female ivor and i even have a statue of her on the bow of a boat so like yeah there's only so many conversations where i can listen to somebody go oh like it just it hurts my own throat hearing it so at the very least male ivor he was kind of soft-spoken and it was very grounded but confident it just worked you know it just worked anyway we're moving on i just wanted to say there's a reason for that i did try both i just liked one more than the other personal choice i admit moving on now probably the most important element of a video game is the gameplay loop yes there are narrative titles there are walking simulators but at their core they still have a gameplay loop and if we're talking about a game the gameplay is important valhalla's gameplay loop is very familiar to what we've seen in the last couple of assassin's creed titles you explore you find a quest or some sort of event to engage with you gain xp to level up after completing that quest and then you repeat along with that xp you're also collecting different items those items could also be rewards paired with experience points and different weapon sets and armor sets and crafting materials and in-game currency all could be paired with experience points as you level up and complete these quests to help you gain footing within the world it's something we see in pretty much every single open world rpg game especially one that really focuses on exploration above and beyond anything else so it's nothing new and there's nothing inherently wrong with it now in the last game assassin's creed odyssey leveling up gave you certain skills and abilities but most of the player's power level came from their gear and i really liked this it actually encouraged exploration and crafting itself within that game fed into this as well with different enchantments and things that you could do to the weapons to improve them and this is actually why i think breath of the wild's weapon durability system isn't actually that bad people bashed on it found it inconvenient and that was kind of the point when your weapons broke down it forced you to go out into the world explore and find new ones to replace the broken ones with it's a very simple concept but it's one that worked fantastically well to encourage that exploration loop in breath of the wild in odyssey you were encouraged to explore the world and find new weapons to replace the old ones not because the old ones broke but because if you wanted to explore new areas you were going to encounter more difficult opponents and more difficult enemies and bosses and quests so the only way you could keep up with them is if you leveled up your gear by finding new gear and the only way you found new gear was by exploring make sense it also worked out really well because if you for instance mained a large axe and found a really high level sword you would be encouraged to try that new weapon because it was so much better than the current main weapon that you're using so even though normally you wouldn't have gone out and tried and experimented in terms of gameplay and different combat abilities now because the gear is encouraging you to try that in order to go to higher level areas you're trying something you wouldn't have tried otherwise in the same way that breath of the wild if you had just maimed the master sword now because the weapons and their durability causes you to try new things you're experimenting with all of the different elements and systems that the designers have created yeah all of this is just gone in valhalla it's just gone they swapped this gear-based leveling system for this travesty of a skill tree there's still gear and runes and some armor and weapon sets are certainly better than others and have effects such as poisoning or fire or certain durability against different types of opponents but it's just nowhere near what it was in odyssey it's significantly walked back and it works in my opinion much worse again this was completely solved in odyssey this wasn't an issue they just had to bring new weapons to the table in valhalla and spend their time focusing on enhancing other systems such as the open world exploration free running that was walked back from origins moving into odyssey they didn't need to do this but instead they completely destroyed the gear leveling system that they had in odyssey and replaced it with this skill tree what's wrong with this skill tree i'm glad you asked let's discuss they had skill trees in odyssey and origins however nothing similar to this skill trees usually have a few basic branches at the core that you start out with and as you specialize you go down a branch all the way to the top where that is your specialization that's what you're focused on and choosing to do so will afford you different abilities that you wouldn't have if you went down a different branch in valhalla it's much more of a skill bush than it is a skill tree for one there's no real option to go down one specific branch and specialize in something very specific there's three basic color coded sections of the skill tree each having their own general theme whether it's just rough and tumble combat more stealth or more ranged but for the most part especially by the time you're in the end game at level 300 plus you are going to have applied skill points to the entire skill bush because there's not enough points to attribute to just one section you're going to run out of space pretty quickly so you have to go over to the next segment and then the next segment and pretty soon you just have a full skill bush instead of any sort of specialization and when this is the case in these types of rpgs where there's no actual specialization in a skill tree or in this case a skill bush what's the point of having it if you are just going to give us all the same abilities over time why not just make it so you level up and you gain this new ability you level up you gain this new ability why are you making pretend as though we actually have some sort of agency in what we're doing because we don't and i think it's pretty clear it's just that ubisoft wants to give players the feeling as though they are playing a open world rpg when in reality they're not they're playing an open-world action-adventure game there's no real role-playing at least in terms of the combat and gameplay systems because everybody's going to land in the same place as everybody else the only real dynamic gameplay element that you're going to get from player to player is for one what broad build they choose to go with with regards to their armor and weapon sets so are they going to be a poison build are they going to focus on fire building are they going to focus on playing like a tank are they going to be arranged type of character and then beyond that choosing which abilities to equip that specialize each of those that's very thin when it comes to action rpg and it's incredibly thin when it comes to open world adventure rpg it's very basic now back to the skill bush really there are so many things that rpgs have been doing so well for decades at this point i really don't know why ubisoft felt as though they needed to try and reinvent the wheel when it came to this stuff but they did you see they focused on the wrong things this skill tree bush is awful initially it seemed intriguing there were tons of branches and it really does seem as though every single selection offers some root to a new skill or ability that you'll be able to use but like i said the problem one that you'll notice pretty quickly upon opening the map is that the highest level area recommends a power level of 340. when you start the game you're just barely hitting level 30. and this seems insane because it is now for one i think that this is sort of a controversial take i actually made a dedicated video to this because i i find it so gross and uh transparent at this point i really think ubisoft was trying to push players into using the xp boost they tried to make the levels much less impactful so it takes very little xp to level up each individual time because they know you're going to need to level up roughly 170 some odd times in order to get to the point where you're at the appropriate level for the final in game area that's a lot of level ups compared to like the 30 or 40 levels most rpgs give you and they chose to do that so that it feels much more daunting and so that you are encouraged to get the xp boost which will make this process a lot faster like i said i actually did a dedicated video where i broke down how this xp boost works and whether or not it actually has a serious impact on the game i found that it does and it actually leads to the game feeling significantly different so i'll have the video linked in the description box below for you to watch after this but the main takeaway after testing the xp boost myself is that this game is incredibly bloated and ubisoft knows it's bloated and they encourage you to fix that problem with something you can pay for of course they also have a currency boost that increases the amount of coin you'll make for each mission and task and that will increase by the same amount as the xp boost of 50 though in my opinion the currency boost is far less impactful than the xp boost the xp boost is the one that really grinds my gears now to quickly recap what i went through in that video with all of that research i really don't know how to clearly and concisely explain this other than just bringing up a huge excel spreadsheet and showing you a bunch of charts and things that i plotted but that doesn't make for a good youtube video so allow me to explain it this way when you have the skill boost turned on in the span of about an hour you will find yourself outpacing the missions that you're engaging with by a noticeable margin i decided to turn on this xp boost for approximately 10 hours of gameplay time just to see how out of whack my save would get with the quest i was being tasked with and after this 10 hour section of gameplay i was regularly 30 to 50 levels above the recommended level for the main story quests i was on and of course this made every combat encounter a joke furthermore this pushed me into increasing the difficulty level to the highest possible where i played for the rest of the game and i did this because it was the only way i could feel any sort of challenge and all of this built itself into a cycle where there was no way to recover really if you had realized after playing 10 to 20 hours of the game with the xp boost on because you just thought that you should you've heard the game is really long so you flipped it on there really isn't a way to undo this damage and rebalance the game you're just screwed and the only way to fix it is to restart you see regardless of how high level your power level is you still need to complete all of the territories on the map and if you're higher leveled then they'll just be ridiculously easy and unfortunately there's no cap on how difficult you can make the game to maintain this engagement and unfortunately until very recently there was a cap on how difficult you could make the game to maintain any sort of engagement in the last few weeks ubisoft has actually added in hard level scaling so if you are out leveled for a certain area you can enable this and it will pull everybody's level right up to you so that in theory the game doesn't break like this but to me it just seems like slapping a band-aid on something that needs to be amputated like they caused this issue with the xp boost that they sold to you for real-world money and then they're gonna fix it by just undoing the xp boost effectively by pulling up enemies to your level so like what what was the point for real it's like they sold you something that made you incredibly sick and now they're selling you the cure to it and then pretending as though they did something great like no you misunderstand you you did this this was your fault i mean i'm still glad that the level scaling is there especially for players going through the game now but honestly it's kind of too little too late many player had their experience ruined because of this xp boost breaking everything and because of the fact that the game's difficulty is so low even on the hardest difficulties that nothing can fix this if you happen to be efficient with your xp farming and application of skill points now of course i could continue ranting and raving on this point but the message is simple the xp boost is stupid it's clear that this was put in because the game was so big they assumed that people would buy it and use it and of course they were right but it was done in such a careless way that it actually ruins the game itself and short of restarting or loading a save file 10 to 20 hours before there's been no real remedy for this until the last few weeks when they added this level scaling which is more of a band-aid than a fix now of course i'm sure that the argument that many people in the comments will be throwing at me is that the whole point of an xp boost is to help players get through sections faster likely by making them easier so it very well could be that ubisoft doesn't view this as an issue but as a feature and that really worries me because if ubisoft is looking at this as a net positive we're probably going to see this in the next game too and because ubisoft has a habit of going bigger and badder with every single monetization scheme in every release it likely will break the game even further and ubisoft will shove it down our throats even harder and my refutation to this would be to say that xp boosts in the past with origins and odyssey were designed to effectively bypass the side content if you were playing odyssey just straight no boosts or anything you needed to complete much or even all of the side content in a given area in order to level up to the point where you could take on the next main story quest line xp boosts were balanced just such that you could bypass all or most of that side content and just blast through the main story just clearing through valhalla doesn't have side quests like at all we're going to talk about that a lot here in just a few minutes and so the xp boost has nothing to balance itself against it's just a boost that out levels you to itself so the whole thing breaks down now the other and arguably even more baffling thing to consider has to do with how you assign these skill points you see by the end of the game you can expect to have divvied out roughly 350 of these damn things usually you get two for every single time you level up and you can find some in the world for completing basic tasks or rock stacking and things like that now the overwhelming majority of these points will go into slots that have very minor effects it could be something as simple as increasing your light attack by 1.2 or increasing poison damage by 0.75 or increasing fire tolerance by 1.3 but just those descriptions are part of the issue nobody knows what the hell any of this means i would assume that these are hit points and it's fair to assume that if your damage is being increased by a certain number that isn't a percentage that's the damage number it's being increased by but default assassin's creed valhalla features damage numbers when you're making attacks and initially these are usually in single digits based on the weapon that you're using however by the end of the game you can expect to be dealing out triple digit damage numbers with every single hit that you land and so while i think it's incredibly clunky and unclear to communicate damage numbers and increases in this way i think there is an argument to be had as to whether or not this is valid i personally would prefer a percentage increase because that's easier to understand at least for me or perhaps to contextualize again at least in my mind if i see that selecting one skill tree option will increase my damage by five percent i feel as though i have a better idea as to what that practically means in terms of its impact on gameplay than if i'm told it will increase my attacks by 1.2 whatever that unit is or perhaps this actually is a percentage increase it'll increase it by 1.2 percent and not 1.2 damage points but this isn't actually clearly communicated to the player and it's possible that by the time you're watching this they've patched it and it has a percentage sign next to it or they have some clear communication but i went back through all of my footage to look for any sort of clear explanation as to how this works and there's nothing given if you have an opinion on this i would love to hear it on the comment section maybe i am just being pedantic and pointing out stupid little nitpicky things but the whole point of a skill tree is that you should be making intelligent choices informed and attempting to try and reach the end destination of the type of character and build that you want if you don't understand what the description and what the individual skills do other than broad ideas that it will increase your light attack or fire resistance or something by some metric it's very hard to actually do that because you don't know what you're doing but one thing i don't think is debatable is that having 350 skill points over the course of a single game each of which has to be manually selected and applied leads to a lack of appreciation on the part of the player with regards to these skill points most of us will have tuned out this selection process by the time we're done with the game and i'm just being honest what's initially a very intentional process of selecting and applying different skills and points on this skill tree for the points you've worked so hard to earn is by the end of the game just a chore and it really seems as though ubisoft wants this to happen they want players to stop selecting the skills and to stop treating the game like an rpg the very thing that they seemed obsessed with transitioning this franchise into how can i prove this point well because ubisoft put a freaking auto assign option in the center of the skill tree slash bush and your cursor defaults to this spot when you tab over to it they want you to let the game automatically select and apply your skill point for you and this is probably because they realized during focus testing that players started to view leveling up as a chore they would have to sift through all the branches and check what armor they were wearing so that they could apply it to the right subset of the branch of the bush and then they would try to make an informed decision as to which selection was the smartest for their build at that given moment now when you level up once every hour or two such as in many other rpgs maxing out at level 50 for instance by the end of the game each of these selections can be made carefully and players are often excited to be given the opportunity but when you have 350 of these small decisions to make instead of just the 50 we just mentioned it's easy to start dreading them especially when they have such a small effect as 1.2 increase to damage whatever the hell that means every single time you have to apply one of these 350 skill points they pull you out of the gameplay because if you don't assign them immediately there will be a small number counter on the screen taunting you and i would argue shaming you into assigning these so that it goes away so you stop whatever you're doing and in this case most xp points are assigned after the completion of a quest or the discovery of some item of worth so you pull up the menu tab over to the skill tree sift through the dozens upon dozens of immediate options you have and make the choice for the two skill points that you will have earned close the menu and continue playing for the next 20 or 30 minutes until you unlock the next batch of skill points and i guarantee you that this auto selection button in the skill tree was not always here i have no way of verifying this of course but having an auto assign button to select skills and attributes in an rpg is absurd on its face it is literally like having an rpg where a robot or in this case the developers and the systems they're in automatically decide what role you're playing instead of letting you choose all it means is that most players who will understandably i think begin using the auto assign feature because assigning skill points as a chore will end up with an ivor that plays in the exact same way as everybody else's because everybody is using the exact same auto sign feature to generically select the next reasonable option based on what build you happen to be apparently going in the direction of and this brings up this same topic that we've discussed many times before in these critiques and that we will continue to discuss throughout this video ubisoft doesn't know when to cut features they assume that anything and everything that could be added to the game will be a net benefit more content is always better right but in their quest to make things more convenient and streamlined they ended up making one of the core features of an rpg the genre of game they're trying to make the skill tree a chore that players don't want to engage with to the point that the developers gave up and let the game make the choice for the player it really is a shocking and yet totally unsurprising gameplay design choice and one that i totally and utterly detest i really don't know how anybody could possibly think this was a good idea now in that same vein let's back off the gas a little bit and talk about the game and its development and the tech contained they're in stop bashing the skill trees for just a second and uh talk about some positives technically the game is really impressive and in some respects i find it downright amazing for one the game loads really quickly it is actually quite impressive how quickly it can load especially on next-gen consoles such as the ps5 xbox series x and s and the pc if you're booting off of an nvme ssd or something like that i've tested all of them and they work fantastically well the game is graphically really impressive it runs at a smooth 60 on all of these next-gen consoles if you select that option and of course it runs even better on pc and i know this won't apply to everybody but the cloud save feature that they've nailed in valhalla was a lifesaver for me and i i cannot praise it enough it works so well you see i have the studio down here in what is the basement of the house because it's nice and cool with all the lights and everything it gets really hot down here if you can't tell like i usually start kind of sweating by the end of videos this is a big one we've already been recording for like two hours so here we go anyway the studio is down here i do have consoles and i do play games down here and i record footage and this is where i store it on the big work station but sometimes i want to be up on the couch in the living room or in the bedroom playing a game or something and it's really difficult especially with a big game to finish it if i need to find some way of transferring saves and carrying progress across especially a game as big as valhalla but far and away the most impressive thing that i found in valhalla was that i could save my game here on my pc after playing it on stream over on twitch or something i could shut all the computers down everything and i could go upstairs into the living room boot up the series x a different platform load the game up and pick up right where i left off because the cloud saves were working through the ubisoft connect system that's behind the scenes and everything like that i don't completely understand how it works all i know is that i could swap between my pc my series x my series s or ps5 and the saves would always be up to date right where i left off quickly i never had to do any sort of you know press option download latest save from the cloud it just worked and it was awesome i hope to see this in more ubisoft and honestly every publisher's games moving forward because it's phenomenal so props now let's touch on a couple of the bugs and some of the issues i ran into over the course of my time with the game now at launch on series consoles uh specifically xbox series x screen tearing was horrendous i really don't know why this was such a major issue you usually don't see screen tearing that much on console ports of games but it was bad i'm honestly not sure if i still have footage of this but i'll try to put it up here if i do it was just it was rough another one that i really don't know how it happens was there is a glitch for weeks possibly even months where every time you loaded into the game ivor loaded in very very drunk as though you had just completed one of the drinking mini games in the world i i don't know how that happens but it was funny just a weird bug one of the weirders i've come across in any game recently so that was kind of fun not serious at all but just weird sticking in the same vein is like not that serious of a glitch doesn't break the game or anything but it's just noticeable and makes you scratch your head and pulls you out of your immersion for a second there were a handful of occasions when i played through the game that i still remember to this day so they stood out at least somewhat where multiple characters would refer to ivor by the wrong gender and with the wrong pronouns for an entire conversation and i think this is because of course you can hot swap the gender of your character whenever you want you can play as female ivor and then pause swap to male iv and continue along the quest and it doesn't it's not supposed to break a sweat at any point so there seems to be some sort of issue with some characters and quests in the world where it can't select this properly and it can't detect what gender you are playing as at that moment so it just defaults to one and then you end up with characters referring to you with the wrong pronouns and again not a big deal but it does make you go what like this one right here i'm playing as male ivor running up to the castle and then the kids say this are you spying on me scarpa she's on to us but then we have glitches that are a little more noticeable and are harder to move on and forgive um because they actually have a major impact on either gameplay or the story your immersion in it or all of that together for instance upon killing the sikhs all of the other guards surrounding him died and disappeared instantly i really don't know what happened here but the boss fight went from really challenging to all of a sudden non-existent just because something happened i really don't know what happened here they just all despawned so this affected the gameplay in this case it made it easier for me but it's hard to feel accomplished in some sort of gameplay pursuit when you unintentionally cheated the game basically so this was just weird there was also another major glitch in the final boss fight like of the game with baseem i just randomly went flying off of the stage while doing a finisher i really don't know what happened here but it pissed me off i was like i was doing pretty well and then i'm doing my finisher and it just launches me off i i don't know what happened here but this is something i ran into a lot especially towards the end of the game there were weird glitches like this animation issues texture pop in characters referring to you incorrectly all of these things happen towards the end of the game so it seems as though the quality assurance team focused a lot on the early stages of the game which is very common because that's when most people are going to be paying the most attention to it but really like the last 10 hours or so of the game there are glitches and bugs everywhere even now going on months and months and months after the game's launch it's it's still a major issue i don't know if they'll ever patch all these out but probably the most hilarious was this next one i was in the final boss fight in asgard against fenrir when i was hit with all sorts of hitbox issues sound bugs and these really weird animations which are kind of hard to take seriously and i died in my first attempt at this so i reloaded went through this whole thing again the whole cut scene and everything and it still happened so it wasn't like just a one-off issue with the animation glitching out this happened even after reloading and this is a real bummer because it took what could have been one of the coolest parts of the game and it just made it feel as though it was one of the most rushed and that the developers really didn't care because there were hitbox issues that made the boss fight feel unfair there was this weird animation intro sound glitches so like the tornado sound just cuts out randomly and then even after i finally defeated the boss instead of going back laying down and collapsing as you would expect the wolf to do he glitched out and stood up and went to a default standing animation for the wolf armature that they have for these models where it's just standing and breathing when you engage with the next cut scene just after this he actually snaps back down laying down so like again this whole boss fight this whole ending section in asgard was just a nightmare of glitches and bugs for me i don't know what happened or why it happened to me if this happened to you let me know in the comment section maybe this is really common i'm not sure but it pulled me right out of the immersion i was in but to be fair i really think all of this probably comes down to a bit of a wash i think the game is really impressive in many technical ways and there are glitches and bugs especially if you're looking for them and towards the end of the game there's a lot of stuff that rears its ugly head but all told the game is pretty impressive on a technical level and come on i mean 100 hour open world exploration adventure game you're gonna run into bugs it's it's just gonna happen so i'm willing to forgive a good amount of these to this day if i'm playing the witcher 3 i still run into bugs and glitches so i'm much more forgiving with these than many other people i don't consider this to be a particularly buggy game just the last 10 hours or so but with that said let's move on to quests because this is an important element of the game's design and one that i think is pretty hard to justify now within the quest there's some slight variation in general they're going to follow the same tropes and archetypes as every other open world rpg that you've ever played in terms of rough structure of the quests you will have fetch quests like collecting a flower in a tree for a young boy in love which we'll discuss in just a second you might have confrontation quests such as requiring the player to find and engage in combat with some other party or group sometimes you're even given the option of engaging with the party initially accused and the quest giving party which is kind of fun flips it on its head and then there's also challenge type quests where you are asked to engage with some sort of activity that will engage some skill or ability that you have or at least the player character has this could be something as simple as shooting targets with your bow and arrow all the way to playing a mini game like orlog or the drinking games or even the sort of rap battle mini game that they have all of which are pretty robust i will say orlog is pretty fun it's no gwent but it's robust enough that i believe it's like a viking game and i enjoy it a fair amount the drinking game it's fine i don't find it particularly fun i don't seek it out to be honest the rap battles they're quirky and fun but they drop off in quality pretty quickly especially again in later areas of the game where the lines that are winning are far less obvious and it's not that it's difficult to even pause the screen to break out like syllable counts and things some of them match exactly it's just word choice differences they arbitrarily think one is better than the other so that's the winner things like that and of course rock stacking which is fantastic and i love immensely i actually went and spent like 20 minutes on stream when we were doing the gameplay test for side content which we'll get to in just a second stacking rocks trying to get it to work i enjoyed it thoroughly i really like rock stacking in this game i know it's stupid i know it's probably the dumbest mini game that they have here but i really like it so now as with any game where they're trying to prompt you to play a role you are engaging with one of two options main content and side content the main story quests in valhalla are actually fairly robust there's a lot of them they last a long time there's a lot of characters you'll meet some of the main cast is fairly forgettable and even unlikable in many cases i didn't find myself rooting for somebody such as sigurd for instance which i think is one of the main points of the story you really have to like sigurd in order for the whole story of forgiveness and conflict and betrayal to work really well you have to be rooting for ivor and sigurd to work together i just didn't find him to be likable to be perfectly honest i i just didn't i know this is completely subjective and personal to me but i found them to be kind of whiny to be spoiled and titled an arrogant prick i i think i could defend if you've played the the story of valhalla he's just a brat but broadly the game works pretty well the characters bounce off of each other fairly well the writing the conversations all work very well there's not a ton of consequence that you'll see but most of that has to be with how they structured all of this which we'll discuss a little bit later when we talk about the overarching structure of the serialized episodic format that they have here but all told it's pretty good there's also some really memorable quests ones that i look back on fondly such as the halloween quest line about two-thirds of the way through the game let me just say drunk ivor is best eyebore i have to piss a great blackness chases stars across the sky in great worlds of color and light woosh now i did run into a glitch where the mask that you put on at one point in this storyline it stayed on like permanently so you'll see a lot of cut scenes where i just i have this mask on that's what happened it's not actually supposed to be there in most of these situations so just letting you know and you know what come to think of it this section on the whole is pretty glitchy across the board even though it's one of my favorite sections especially visually thematically and in terms of the ambience that they have here it's it's pretty pretty glitchy here i went straight out of the door and was immediately told that this character tev dear was dead and that i was being accused of murdering him but the problem is that i didn't know he was dead in fact i didn't really realize what was going on until i watched back the footage i just recorded it's clear from the dialogue and how this scene is shot that they assume you knew he was dead before you walk out the door it's just really weird and awkward makes me wonder if like some sort of small cutscene didn't play properly for me or glitched out and just didn't play at all that showed me but i really don't know it just was very confusing the quest gutted lamb with modrin was probably the most unique in the game for me though it involved a good amount of unique stuff unique set pieces that for the most part as far as i could tell weren't used anywhere else in the game which was refreshing because they recycle a lot in this game and this is really rare for valhalla almost everything you do is copied from somewhere else so the fact that this quest stands out as unique is remarkable there's also another glitch here where after the boss fight tev deer is released but is still locked in the walking animation from the last time you saw him which was when he was super drunk so after a very serious conversation he walks out just plastered which i actually found kind of funny but again it just reaffirms the idea that later in the game the quality drops significantly they just weren't able to assure the quality of all of these late game quest lines so bugs show up out of nowhere all over the place at the end of the game that you don't see early on this is just another example of that i'll also say ubisoft still hasn't figured out how to make a crowd that reflects the emotion of the scene accurately in this very last speech the alderman is emotional and he is impassioned and means every word he's saying but the audience is jeering in the same way that they would for a dog fight like it came off as incredibly inappropriate and out of place and what should have been a very solemn occasion ended up looking much more like a rave i i don't know i get it it's really hard to do crowds in a video game unless every single individual crowd member is animated specifically and individually group animations are tough i get it i understand it but come on but even in spite of all of these glitches and bugs this quest line still stood out to me as one of the most memorable and notable ones that's because of the writing that's because of the setting that's because of the environment that they are presenting you with it's actually a really cool little story that you take place on i won't spoil it in case you uh are almost there or want to play the game and just blast it past the the spoiler uh warning but it's really good i actually thoroughly enjoy it so props but what about the side content well it's it's a long story you see there aren't side quests in valhalla they're just not here at all now i've received conflicting information as to why this was done some developers have tweeted out and actually said that this was mostly done because they wanted to pair the side content into the main story so it all worked together and that every side quest you did would have an impact and would tie into the main story much better but to me that just seems like an explanation of saying that the side content was added to the main quest to pad it out into 100 hour experience because you need to do all of the main content by definition to finish the game so if you take side content out and then put it into the main content you've just turned it into main content and it's not side content anymore i'm surprised i need to explain this because that's literally what side content means what it seems like they did is they struck all of the side content which was long structured quests as we saw in odyssey and swapped it out with what they call world events and these show up as just small little dots that are colored differently based on what they're for on the map they could be blue for little world events that could have little stories or little quest lines attached to them it could be gold implying that there is actual loot here that is valuable could be white implying a location in general it's just a little notification saying that you should pay attention to this area there's something here for you and some of these are actually very memorable and funny and unique and stand out as kind of awesome for example there was this quest that we came across in the end area the 340 leveled area at the very end of assassin's creed valhalla we actually came across this on stream and uh i'll just let this play that's amazing they've been baptizing people and they're drowning don't you get tired of all that yelling welcome that's huge praise god who has brought you here to join us my ship is not steered by your guard cease your blasphemy you have been summoned by god to be baptized submit or pay the price and how do you plan to make me faith is our weapon and the only one we need your threats aren't worth the breath of my arse we'll see about that faith cleanse this pagan scum oh it's a crazy nunn wow people will worship anyone these days faith faith you monster how could you she was so sweet luke why are you killing a nun [Laughter] that's amazing now i have to find someone else to tell me what to do okay so that was pretty funny there's also this memorable one in winchester where you climb on top of a steeple and you see a little kid there he explains to you that he wants to retrieve a flower that's stuck on top of a tree to prove his love to his little girlfriend and actually if you look around right next to him up here is a small note where you can read all of the poems that he's written to his little girlfriend my favorite line was quote and your hair is like my favorite goat's beard and it was made all the better by the classic question i love you do you love me please respond yes or no i love it dearly it's adorable you agree to help the little kid after you retrieve the flower you can go and actually find the response note from the little girl that he had a crush on she also had some great lines in her writings such as quote i have been struck by the horse and cart of love might i die if you do not look at me and of course she answered yes at the bottom of her note adorable there's also some really adorable dialogue after this he proposes to her claiming that they're betrothed now and afterwards the kids around him have some funny ideas of what constitutes marriage i'll just play the clip and now we are betrothed it takes more than that that's holding hands and grunting and then sometimes praying oh god oh god the point is there's some gems here and if all of the side content and mini quests and everything that you do other than the main story were of this quality and memorability we wouldn't have much of an issue here but unfortunately that just isn't the case now the biggest question i think is why would they do this why on earth would you get rid of side quests in an rpg like there are some things that you just don't need to iterate upon like we figured it out we're good for instance the pen or the stylus i guess you should call it in its generalized form some things have just been iterated upon and in essence affected like this shape for writing is just about perfect you can try to change it change it to an s shape or a cube or a sphere but this just works well with the human hand you don't need to reiterate it you don't need to reinvent the wheel it's okay this is good just like add some polish change around the logo shine it up a little bit change the grip or the ink that you use iterate on those things but the broad structure keep the same in the case of valhalla they took the pen that is side quests in rpgs and turned it into like a vitamin bottle and then were confused when people were like can i have a pen and they hand you this and you're like i can't write with this what is like i wanted side quests what is this i'm like well it's it's side content that's not what i asked for oh what i know i know that analogy got lost in the weeds and the multivitamins hopefully you get the point they didn't need to do all of this they they just didn't need to now there's a few reasons they might have done this for one i think smaller bite-sized tasks and encounters are certainly easier to develop like this one where you're challenged to out baseball a bunch of kids and their totally not weird friend who is of course voice acted by some baseball player i don't watch baseball and i'm not gonna pretend i knew who this guy was but his performance is so bad and his voice is so stiff i just knew it had to be a non-actor so i actually googled it and i found this out anyway this quest if you can call it that is something you could write record and place almost anywhere on the map like anywhere there's nothing specific enough to tie this encounter to this particular part of the map and this is true of almost all of these little encounters and remember this it's very important as to why i think all of this happened it's also the gameplay embodiment of adhd there's so little play time required here that you can expect to blast through four to five of these types of encounters every hour if you're focused on world exploration and bouncing between them one after the other now i wanted to compare this side content strategy to odyssey and origins so i conducted a simple experiment on stream where we played origins and odyssey to test the average length of side quests granted our sample sizes were quite small only roughly seven quests per game but hey i mean how many youtubers do you know who would go to this length to prove and analyze side content in a video game like come on give me some credit and i'll just let luke on twitch explain how all of this worked and what our findings were go for it lukeler so what i think we're going to do is we're going to be going through valhalla we're going to test like five ish we'll see how long it takes us for one but we'll test like five-ish um random in-world side events and then we will test odyssey same thing we'll try the same number of events and then we will try origins testing the same events and see um for one like we'll try rating them on a scale of complexity so if it's just like go to this location and deliver this item that's like super basic not very interesting it's just very bland so that's a very simplistic um side quest but if it's a little more elaborate and it's like hey you have to go talk to this person they're going to tell you this then you have to make a choice and then you know all of that that's interesting so that'll get a higher score and then the other thing we will grade it on is narrative impact um to see if it has like a story of its own basically um because i i just want to see if they've stuck to their guns because one of the things they said with origins is they made a concerted effort to make sure every story or every quest had a story and so we're gonna test it and see if that is true in origins odyssey and valhalla i've tested it before in origins and odyssey and um it is true they do really good work but as for valhalla i really don't know i really don't know if it'll hold up so we're gonna find out okay i'm pulling up my excel spreadsheet buckle up so the entire stream that this test came from and happened in is roughly five hours long so i'm not going to subject you to all of that instead i want to give you the highlights if you want to see the whole stream it should be saved as a vod over on the twitch channel which of course i have linked below now we started with assassin's creed valhalla testing length complexity and the narrative me and those in chat voted on how complex a quest was on a scale of 1 to 10 and on a scale of 1 to 10 with regards to its narrative and how complex that was and of course we timed it out to get an idea of what the exact length was on average for these side quests in the case of assassin's creed valhalla we tested seven different quests we rescued hundwald we helped a narcoleptic hunter that was stranded by a tree we hunted a legendary boar we helped wrangle a misbehaving trained bear and then we dealt with his owner who wasn't happy that we killed it accidentally we stacked a ton of rocks which was my personal favorite we chased down a lover's arrow and then we dealt with the killer nun that we discussed earlier now on screen you can see the length in minutes that each of these timed out to this is the most objective element of this experiment what's subjective is the complexity level and so the best i can do is try and explain how little thought and how uninteresting each of these individual quests are and again quests is a bit of an exaggeration in this case but we'll discuss that in a moment in the case of the first quest you're simply saving a guy that's being chased by other bad guys in the case of the guy that was passed out by the tree you come across a guy passed out by a tree and then you carry him to the place that's noted on a sheet of paper laying next to him because apparently this happens all the time with the legendary boar you simply kill a legendary boar and this is as complex as these types of small world events actually get they don't grow more complex beyond the simple description but this doesn't mean that they're necessarily bad like i said the case of the killer none faith is one that stands out to me and i'm gonna remember that for a long time but it doesn't change the fact that that experience that was memorable i'll grant you was only a minute and 55 seconds long from the moment i started engaging with those characters the point is when we took all of these site activities that we did on that stream and we averaged them out it comes out to an average of 3 minutes and 48 seconds and the only reason it's that high is because we had a 9 minute and 13 second detour trying to stack some rocks if you remove that rock stacking time which was inordinately long we have an average of 2 minutes and 54 seconds that's right we are under 3 minutes on average for the side content here we then swapped over to assassin's creed odyssey these side quests were significantly longer and in some cases were even multiple parts long so you helped one character do one thing and then after you helped them initially they would ask you to follow up with additional tasks or with something more complicated these quests included one where we helped a little girl get all of the materials she needed to make some ghoulery for her friends or when we were asked by two women to get the ingredients to form a love potion so that they could win the love of a wealthy aristocrat on the island probably the simplest quest was when we chased down a shipwreck off the coast of a small island all to get some treasure from it since we overheard a couple of guys discussing it and then we had a multi-part quest line where we helped some local pirates get a map for a shipwreck find the ship wreck get treasure out of it and then we had to confront the pirate when we were double-crossed and lastly we had a quest line where we had to sink a bunch of enemy ships in order to establish the dominance and independence of a local naval fleet now as you can see the amount of time needed to complete each of these was significantly longer than that of assassin's creed valhalla 15 minutes 12 minutes 11 minutes 7 minutes 11 minutes 14 minutes significantly longer all of these average out to around 12 minutes and 9 seconds for each of the quests but what i can say is that the complexity for each of these was significantly better than that of assassin's creed valhalla in the case of the questline where you're helping the little girl retrieve all the items she needs to make jewelry for her friends we can break this down and see that there are multiple gates multiple requests and multiple different gameplay systems that the player is being challenged with she needs items out of a cave and this requires you to go and deal with multiple enemies the other one she doesn't know exactly where you need to go so she gives you rough directions you have to look at your map and the local terrain and figure out where to go only to be greeted by a shark in the lagoon once you find it and then once you've collected all of these things together you bring them back to the little girl only to realize that her friends are actually made of clay and it all stems from a conversation she had with her late mother and father where they told her that she needed to make friends so that's what she did she made friends and then as if that wasn't enough the player is asked whether or not they're going to break the harsh news to this little girl and tell her that she needs to get off her ass and make some real friends if you tell her that these aren't her real friends and that these are just clay statues and that's not what her parents meant she's heartbroken and doesn't know what to do and although you were truthful with her she's devastated but if you lie to her and say that her friends are great and you're very happy to meet them she goes along her merry way but your player character is pissed off at themselves for lying to her already you can see the huge difference in the quality of the side content and the stories that drive them whereas last time we simply carried a man that had passed out by a tree to take him to a new spot here we have multiple levels of complexity or in the case of the quest where we're trying to get the ingredients for a love potion it's very similar to the last one you need to go and fetch certain items to craft this but it's all tied up in a couple of very interesting back stabs that happen you see fundamentally this is a disagreement between two women they both want to win the affection of this local aristocrat who's very wealthy and powerful and is looking for a bride one woman offers to help the others saying she knows how to create a love potion if only cassandra or alexios if you're playing as alexios goes and collects the items the other woman very grateful for the help encourages you and begs you to help her so you go collect the items much in the same way as the last quest that we discussed where there's multiple enemies guarding certain items that you'll need requires you to evaluate the terrain to figure out where you go etc once you've collected all of the items you bring them back to the women they create the potion and she gives it to the woman who's looking to win the affection the next evening on the night that the bride is to be selected you can go and see how everything went down and when you show up you realize that the woman who needed help so badly actually is bald the potion wasn't a love potion at all you see the woman who said she knew how to make a love potion lied she wanted to win the affection of the young aristocrat so she decided to sabotage the competition using your help furthermore she also backstabs you and refuses to pay you effectively saying that you were only to be paid once a love potion was created and no love potion was created so there's no need to pay you and this double crossing means that you have a personal interest in resolving this not just moving on and letting the two women deal with their spat themselves and so naturally i decided to freak out called her a witch it started this whole thing everybody killed everybody it was kind of an ordeal and again compare that to the occasion even the one i liked in valhalla where we come across a group of people being baptized in a river talk to them they're upset i won't convert until they have a giant nun come and attack me and i know it seems as though i might just be nitpicking or i might be cherry picking my examples in valhalla to prove my point and show that the quest lines and side content is remarkably simplistic but i challenge you if that's what you think to go and find a very complex world event that challenges this whole narrative the simple reality is that valhalla's side content is incredibly simplistic especially when you compare it to what they did just a few years before lastly we looked at assassin's creed origins one of my favorite games that ubisoft has ever made this game is also important to look out because it's the last game that was created by this very studio this exact team behind valhalla now assassin's creed origins was pitched largely as the first step in a huge transformation for assassin's creed at the time many people mocked it saying it was simply a witcher 3 clone and in many ways that was fair they definitely got most of their inspiration from that game and this isn't even controversial the director ashraf ismail did discuss it at the time and say they had learned a lot of lessons from that game the chief lesson that ash said they learned was that every single side quest needed to have a story tied to it stories are what make the worlds feel alive and so you need to make sure everything you do fundamentally has a story and they really do deliver in origins every single side quest or side activity you engage with has a story tied to it and here i could point at almost any example of a side quest in assassin's creed origins and it would prove the point so i'm just going to point to a couple that we played through on this stream in this first one you have to find a successful gladiatorial fighter he's effectively been locked up in a dentured servitude serving this game maker for years and years and finally decided to break free because he doesn't want to continue living a life of violence he wants to live on the coast a simple life get a wife have a family but you don't know this at first all you know is that this guy escaped seemingly attacked a bunch of people and is going awol and over the course of this quest you're going to be doing everything from using detective vision very similar to the witcher 3 to evaluate the crime scene figure out what exactly happened only to realize that the fighter is actually the innocent one and the game maker that hired you is the bad guy you eventually find the fighter after tracing him to a small fishing hamlet on the coast talk with him evaluate whether or not you believe him and his story and then when the game maker shows up to reclaim his prized fighter you have the choice of standing with him or going and standing with the fighter again it's a story that initially seems quite simple but takes on multiple levels of complexity and that quest timed out to just under 12 minutes long we can look at another questline this is one where you're effectively dealing with a serial killer and you have to use different investigative measures read documents talk with characters and of course engage in combat occasionally to solve the mystery of who's killing all of these people and what can be done about it and that quest line is just under 20 minutes long and we see this time and time again with origins this is the last game that this very team made and it's so much better in terms of side content than valhalla something happened which made them totally drop the ball i have our little spreadsheet we've we've been working on this whole time and uh valhalla the average side content that we tested today the average time for each individual one was three minutes 48 seconds so that's from the start of engaging with it you stumble on it in the world or in our case we were pursuing side content so from the start of the the content to the end three minutes 48 um oh sweet thanks for the uh the gifted akigoxo patty welcome to the sub club that's awesome hey oh patty um that's awesome thank you aki thank you um so three minutes 48 odyssey the average time for a side quest was 12 minutes 9 seconds so almost 10 minutes a full 10 minutes longer than valhalla and origins average quest length 13 minutes 5 seconds now granted these sample sizes aren't huge but uh that gets the point across you know so valhalla times in three minutes 48 that's including rock stacking which was like nine minutes if we take that out it's around two minutes 50 seconds so we'll say three minutes odyssey at 12 minutes origins at 13. and i think this is directly reflected in the field because in valhalla you're riding through you're exploring you stumble on something it takes you literally three minutes to deal with it and then you move on and so even if there is an interesting story that's at the core of that encounter or a unique character or even something cool in terms of gameplay that goes beyond just like a fetch quest or finding something or killing some group of people it's not gonna be memorable because the average time is only three minutes you know three minutes is not enough time to have anything last and be memorable whereas in odyssey if you have a 12-minute quest a 15-minute quest 10-minute quest that's enough time to have some impact and be memorable um failed hook sweet that's awesome um all of this kind of stacks up and then origins you see like it's much more varied so the quests are like 20 minutes long or they're like five minutes long so it's there's very little in between um but you can tell odyssey and origins way more effort went into the side content way more stories interesting characters events everything works very very well and then you get to valhalla and it's just scattered and it's bizarre and i'll talk about this at the end of the the full critique but i really think a lot of this had to do with probably um i would assume the pandemic and working remote i think they looked at it and they said you know what it'll be easiest for us to get these stories put together if designers can piecemeal them together and have these small bite-sized things and then we'll just slap them together towards the end of development and throw them and sprinkle them in the world we'll do that instead of like these carefully crafted side con or side quests because when we went through odyssey for instance tons of very specific things were said you're exploring the map and then you find a side quest you start talking to them and they say oh we need you to go help us uh deal with these bandits you ask where the bandits are and they say that the character says to you oh it's just past the shipwreck on the west side of the island um right on the shore so in order for them to do that and design that quest and place everything there and get the dialogue recorded they have to have the map pretty much done so that they can make that direction record it and it ties together in valhalla you have that sometimes usually what i noticed is in valhalla when they tell you to go somewhere and they have vague directions like that it's only in the quest description or in the like little uh to-do list that's in the hud it's not actually communicated by the character on screen and i think that was because they probably didn't have the map done when they were designing that and so they just were like oh we'll just put it on the screen so we'll say it's in north of lincolnshire and then it's to the west of the hill and we'll leave it there so i'm hoping most of these issues are a result of the pandemic because at the very least then they can be explained away and there's a reason for it if these changes and differences were actual design choices they made because they thought this was better the future of the franchise is in way more danger than at least i initially thought because i was again if if there's some reason that this is not present and that it's so different it's so much worse then okay as long as they go back to how they were doing it that'll be better but in this case like if they actually thought this was going to be an improvement and then they cut side content and do all that like we're in trouble we're in trouble because that's that's not good and i think that this little experiment we did today demonstrates pretty clearly the changes that they're making and that they made in valhalla were significant were huge downgrades and i'm hoping they go back to how they did it in odyssey because odyssey i think far and away i mean you guys saw as we went through it far and away odyssey seems to just have uh probably the best quest design out of all of them i think so that's the experiment that's where we're at so uh quick shout out to people in the chat if you're watching this in the critique shout out to maddie to patty oh that rhymes that's awesome aki goku white wolf k gourd um nobody is here bloody nine logan shrek of course uh anybody else needs that random gamer my wolf i said lightsage all of you guys guys are all awesome yes ross thank you for coming out again follow the twitch head over to the twitch if you're watching this in the critique and you haven't followed yet because you could be in a video like this or you could participate in these experiments as they happen live so yeah that's all i have so yeah we found that the games of the past that had actual side content that was meaningful and good and quality and had effort put into it actually averaged between 12 and 13 minutes oh hello it actually averaged between 12 and 13 minutes to complete the side quest from beginning to end valhalla on the other hand averaged roughly two minutes 50 seconds give or take a little more than three minutes if you count some of the uh random like the rock stacking that i did if you want to count that which took me like 10 minutes so this just reaffirms the idea that side content in valhalla was about making bite-sized small easy to consume little encounters and it wasn't about making meaningful lasting impactful stories and experiences for the player it just wasn't the intention or the priority now furthermore the obvious conclusion to reach at the end of this experiment is that these encounters aren't side quests they just aren't but that's part of the point these aren't side quests which means that there aren't any in this game they cut them and these small tic-tac-sized things were the replacement and as i mentioned earlier if you say that side quests were moved into the main story so they're still here i would say that's not how side quests work by definition they have to be on the side if they're in the middle they're not on the side so they aren't there now the only conclusion i can come to as to why they would have done this is that it had to do something with covid restrictions and working from home of course i have no direct evidence of this i didn't work on this game so i don't know what the inner workings over at ubisoft were when this game was being developed but i think i do have some circumstantial evidence that would suggest this was the case hear me out for one valhalla's last year of development was completed during pandemic restrictions across the globe this forced all of ubisoft's offices to go and work remote also it would have presented ubisoft with a very difficult challenge where they would have to cut the game's scope or significantly change the way that they built it and one thing that's clear is that ubisoft's scope for valhalla was far from constrained meaning that the other had to give secondly according to the official twitter account for assassin's creed valhalla went gold on october 16th or a few days before that they tweeted it out on october 16th just a little under a month from launch now this marks the point in the game's development where all of the content has been added into the game and the developers are focusing on polish and this means that presumably the game was receiving content additions and was having new quests and content added up until this point now according to interviews from the developers of assassin's creed origins the same team they started on the main story finished that and then went back through to fill in the gaps with the side content meaning that the side quests were likely the last thing done in valhalla likely during the last year or so of development and thirdly in my mind one of the easiest ways to generate a lot of content is to let individual quest designers work and build dozens and dozens of missions by themselves and then plop them into the world once they're all but finished this results in smaller scale encounters and quests that aren't tied to the locations wherein they're placed and lastly all of this together still allows ubisoft to release a game that's massive and features a ridiculous number of individual encounters in the middle of a global pandemic so i think that this is the most likely explanation as to what happened that caused ubisoft to cut side quests it wasn't in a word intentional it was an unfortunate side effect of the development cycle in extraordinary circumstances they didn't want to cut scope so they decided to let individual quest designers work on small bite-sized encounters that then they could plop in anywhere in the world free from any sort of inter-team work which they normally would be able to do in the office when they could just go across the development hall speak to the quest designers then speak to the level designers all work together now they're having to do it through zoom calls and discord messages and teams meetings way more difficult so they just develop small bite-sized things individually plop them in the world randomly make some polishing things and passes to make it look roughly in line with what you would expect for that area of the map but in general they all work together they blast through it in the last year during crunch time and during quarantine when they all have to work from home and call it good so while hopefully this wasn't an active choice on the part of the developers because they honestly thought this was the best option because clearly it's not the end result is that side content in valhalla is bite-sized and lacks depth it feels like a huge step back from origins and especially odyssey and that's a step back that we can quantify using the small study that we did live on stream where we found that the content in general was cut back to a fifth or less of what it was before really i can only hope that the next game doesn't follow the same design philosophy just because valhalla sold well really this is a concern of mine because valhalla sold freakishly well i think ubisoft stands a good chance of being like hey valhalla sold really well let's do everything the exact same way we did last time but with a new coat of paint for whatever setting they choose to go in i hope that's not the case because i think that this was a travesty and was really poorly done and the side content is ridiculously lazy and it's crappy like you can kind of forgive it knowing that people had to work remote and quarantine was going on and all of that but it doesn't change the fact that the side content sucks like it just doesn't change that fact really the last two games in assassin's creed were comprised of three basic parts they were comprised of the main story and the questline tied to that side content and the quests attached to that and world exploration such as in the case of valhalla pledging territories going out exploring finding equipment armor leveling up your gear all of that ubisoft effectively removed the middle of that so they just removed a third of what these games have been for the last two releases and replaced it with what they claimed was side content but are just small bite-sized world encounters that honestly should still be in the game but they should also still have side content uh akin to what odyssey put forward it it's just baffling and i really hope that they don't continue this trend moving forward now we've talked about the placement of side quests within the world and how they very very rarely feel specific to a set area so let's touch on world building and actual world design as i mentioned earlier the game is beautiful and the levels usually don't disappoint valhalla is really good at communicating a feeling by way of the world you're exploring and this is something that assassin's creed has really been quite good at going all the way back to what i think of as the first example would probably be assassin's creed unity they're able to communicate smell and temperature and the wind and everything just hits you all at once when you're really immersed in these worlds they do it really really well in essence the visuals match the feeling and the feeling matches the visuals and the sound design and when you're really immersed in these worlds there's very little like it and truly in the world of assassin's creed valhalla there are some amazing areas and some great attention to detail but it's not just in world design and level design this attention to detail is paid in other areas as well an example would be when they capitalize pronouns referring to the christian god when a christian specifically is speaking and this is actually accurate to the way that believers capitalize words in their sentences even to this day and this is something i wouldn't actually know if i hadn't been raised by and around people who took this sort of thing very very seriously in fact i actually remember a time when i was really little my parents had brought us my whole family to this like hardcore church this is a tidbit but i i know hear me out they brought us like this hardcore church where one time like little nine-year-old luke i had this little watch i remember timing it and the pastor started praying in this like really monotone voice for a solid 49 minutes and like i still remember to this day my timer counted it out 49 minutes i've just and we pray dear god for this and for the strength to continue on in our pursuits of your glory like that for 49 minutes it was intense church service was like four hours long kind of beside the point to my thing that's already beside the point i remember going to the sunday school for that church and they had us like writing out bible verses or something and i wrote down the bible verse and it was something like you know the lord said this he doth proclaim it and i didn't capitalize the h in he doth proclaim it he referring to god and i got like reamed and yelled at as this like little kid by this middle-aged man who had nothing better to do uh for not capitalizing the h because you're supposed to capitalize the pronoun referring to god because it's like a sign of respect or something i don't know i i just that still sticks with me today and it's something i even noticed in uh the case of assassin's creed valhalla where the when a christian a devout christian is speaking and he refers to god and says like he is watching over us they capitalize the h but when like ivor is referring to that god and says like i doubt he's doing that they don't capitalize the h it's a very small touch but it's amazing and now that i've mentioned it you won't be able to unsee it now in that same vein as early game variability in verticality and landmark design i've been very clear on this i don't like england as a setting for assassin's creed specifically england in this time period honestly it's just too flat and boring and this point in history doesn't offer any significant structure or verticality in your average village or town or city to make free running interesting at all which is why it's been pretty much entirely neutered in this game and speaking of free running i won't dwell on this too long because i think it's more of a side note to the other crap going on in valhalla the free running system in assassin's creed has steadily been getting worse and worse over time origins was probably the most interesting because they opened it up and you could climb absolutely anything any boulder rock wall you wanted to climb you could do it and that was interesting odyssey brought it back a little bit it got more generic and handholds just stopped looking very specific and intentionally placed but it was still there pretty robust and then valhalla just like totally gave up on the idea of interesting free running and parkour which was like the staple of assassin's creed it's honestly amazing how far these systems and uh this this whole idea of free running has fallen in assassin's creed over the last few years if you go back and you watch some of the clips of the free running and assassin's creed unity it is night and day different it's just really depressing to see how they haven't just treaded water with it they've actively pulled it back simplified it to the point where now it's not impressive at all it's just you run up a wall and then you climb it like there's nothing impressive about it at all there's no flare there's nothing unique i will also say in valhalla it's incredibly inconsistent ivor is able to make some massive leaps and be just fine but he's also completely incapable of entering small windows that any normal human being could step through it's very inconsistent now i really don't know why they have simplified the parkour system so much it makes me wonder if it's a technical issue like as they've gone bigger with the open world they can't afford to have as many animation sets like in memory at any given time so they have to remove animation sets simplifying the free running in order to open it up for more encounters or a more dynamic world i don't know if that's why maybe that's really the only thing i can think of otherwise they're just simplifying a system that was at one time really impressive and amazing in order to achieve something that i really don't know like there really is no reason to simplify the system as much as they have it's just gotten worse and worse over time they're removing sets animation sets they're removing abilities and i don't know why if you have a theory let me know now the few times you actually do get the chance to really stretch your free running muscles in valhalla is when you're exploring the world and you come across ancient roman ruins they are some of the only tall structures that you can actually climb and occasionally there are actual forts and things set up around these and in some very rare cases there are main story quest lines that you can engage with in these ruins that add verticality and at times even stealth which is something that is not a priority at all in this game but i'll be honest whenever i saw these ruins they bugged me more than they excited me and this is mostly because they are direct copies and pastes of the same assets from odyssey and origins seriously all of the roman ruins the trees the rocks and many of the rural buildings as well are just direct copies from those previous games now i get it this is due to the roman history in england this is actually explainable in the world it's not like they're just copy and pasting stuff that doesn't make sense at all and the ruins the basic wooden structures all of that can be hand waved away because like hey it's a wooden structure how many different ways is there to make it like it's okay if they're copied across origins odyssey valhalla but that doesn't change the fact that the game offers very little that's new in terms of systems and in terms of assets compared to the previous games and if anything they've been removing stuff actively the stuff they do have here is copy and pasted the stuff they don't have here they cut from previous games for some reason and everything that's new in valhalla is way worse than the thing they're replacing granted with regards to the copied assets i did play through all of origins all of the dlc i played through all of odyssey all of the dlc i played the crap out of those games so i'm able to spot this stuff and it stands out to me very clearly i admit and acknowledge that for somebody that either didn't play those games or didn't play the crap out of them like i did this might not stand out or be as noticeable but still i want to just let you know that i spotted all these copy things and it stood out to me and was frustrating i mean all told england just isn't that interesting of a place for a game that focuses a lot on verticality free running and exploration much of the countryside just looks like countryside it's beautiful countryside but there's only so much countryside that you can look at before it starts to just look like countryside it gets kind of bland it looks recycled it looks repeated because it is and to be true to the map to be true to england you have to have a very samey location that's just kind of the point and this isn't just me i've talked to several friends of mine who are brits even cami who i work with on press start again links below that's the side channel where i work with two very talented people we do gaming news videos all sorts of stuff so check that out make sure to subscribe over there but i talked to cami who lives in the uk and uh she she agreed she's like yeah no england in terms of a setting like there's just not a lot of variability there's just not much you know at least if you go to like venice or you go to italy there's a lot there to explore and that offers differences in terms of gameplay but in the uk it's just kind of like farmland you have some coast and then you might have some snowy regions and that's about it again granted not every game can be like horizon zero dawn and have the four different quadrants and all this different looking terrain like i get it not every game can be like that but if you're asking the player to spend 100 hours in your game world the least you can do is make it a little varied and a little interesting i didn't force them to choose england as a location to place this game they chose that and yes they opened it up to different areas such as you can go back to norway you can go and explore some dream realms such as asgard and gothenheim but still those all just feel kind of the same asgard yottenheim finland norway all of those places in valhalla are distinct areas and maps granted but they all feel and play the exact same as all of the other areas in valhalla specifically in england there aren't any unique things that they really throw at you other than in vinland when they take away everything from you and you have to play through that area with all of your items and abilities stripped from you it's an interesting gameplay alteration i grant you but it doesn't feel that notably different i mean really at its core it's a frustration that's born out of where i started in the assassin's creed franchise and that was with assassin's creed ii that was with the good old days where you were in a medieval city exploring climbing having a great time you know that's where i started so to me assassin's creed is innately tied to civilization to cities to exploring the verticality and climbing them that's what assassin's creed has always felt like at its heart for me so as we've gone through origins odyssey and now valhalla we're at a point where assassin's creed is trying to put just as much weight into gameplay in the forest and in the woods and in nature as it is to the city and in the case of valhalla there's almost no gameplay that takes place in hubs of civilization almost all of it is in small villages or in the wilderness so i i just think it's a distinction between approaches to this franchise i'm losing this battle obviously because they keep going more and more rural it's more and more focused on the wild on nature i don't have anything against nature it's just assassin's creed i've always enjoyed exploring cities and now that's an afterthought by a huge margin again i didn't force them to pick england they chose to place this game in england and as a result of that choice i'm just saying england is kind of boring it's samey it's very flat and there aren't any huge cities or places to explore of note in this time period at least in origins we had alexandria that we could explore that was really interesting and of course all of the great big pyramids odyssey had all sorts of small city states that you could explore all over the place with lots of verticality on the map itself valhalla just has none of that now while we're talking about the open world we should touch on exploration itself because that's kind of the point of an open world especially in assassin's creed they want you to explore and find stuff they put all of these little dots all over the map to try and encourage you to bounce around to every single dot grab the stuff that they had and that in turn encourages you to explore the map so it kills two birds with one stone the problem is that the dots at their heart are just checklists they're checklists without a clear description of what is there until you do it it's just a collectathon of little dots and that's all it feels like they're not dynamic they're not interesting and at their core the rewards aren't satisfying either yes as you go and look at all these dots you'll find new abilities armor weapons crafting materials for your camp to build new huts to upgrade it or lore items but you get so much of this from the main story that it's just not motivating granted i didn't feel the need to really 100 all of the armor types and checklists but that's just because i found a set that i liked pretty early on and i just upgraded it perpetually after that i can accept that i may be in the minority here but i just didn't find the rewards for these dots to be meaningful enough to care so if the side content isn't that engaging what else is keeping you playing what's moving you to the point where you're going to keep exploring keep going through the motions engaging with the main quest well this is where we start talking about pace about length and overall design of the narrative hello hermine she's like shut up i'm trying to sleep as we've said repeatedly the game is ridiculously long but that's not necessarily a bad thing there's a lot of content here as there is in a game like red dead redemption 2 or the witcher 3 or persona 5 there's a lot here the problem at its heart is pacing and variability of content we've touched on the variability of content the fact that what is here is repetitive and just not that interesting at its core so it doesn't feel like it's worth pursuing or engaging with but within the world itself when we talk about pacing there's a few more pieces to the puzzle that we have to consider and one of the chief ones among them when we discuss exploring a game world is how you traverse it and what that actually looks like on a more minute level you see in valhalla you're going to explore in one of three ways you're either going to run around on foot or you're going to use your mount or you're going to fast travel between points that you've already discovered and actually have an issue with two of those i think running around on foot is usually the best way to explore a game's world it's slow enough that you get to take in all of the sights and the scenery look around and notice everything that the designers have placed there for you but getting something that's more sped up such as vehicles or in this case mounts such as horses to work well is actually quite difficult because you have to set the speed for those correctly so that the player doesn't end up just blasting past everything that's meaningful that would make exploring the world worth it and this is why i think that horses and mounts in valhalla are too fast hear me out the mounts in valhalla move so quickly through the terrain and also the field of view is so narrow that the player isn't going to be able to visually pick up on much of anything that's going on beside them everything that they're staring at is directly in front of them which is likely as they ride towards their next quest marker if they broadened the field of view out so you could see more which would in turn make it feel as though you were moving slower because you have a wider range of context or if they were to slow down the mounts just a little bit so that they're more realistic and how fast they can run over certain terrain a lot red dead redemption too i think it would actually do the world a great service because it would slow the player down force them to take in the sights and the scenery look in the distance at points of interest and try to engage with the world that way instead what it is right now you hop on your mount and you just sprint to the next spot you hop off you keep going through the quest you go through the motions you never actually stop to smell the roses one of the best things is when a world is so proud of its open world that it forces you to enjoy it that's one thing i love about red dead redemption 2 and about ghost of tsushima where they actually say yeah this is our world enjoy it you can ride through a meadow and not have to have 15 things pop up and different crafting materials pop up for you to grab like you can ride through a meadow and be fine enjoy it you know that that level of confidence in your world design is so refreshing it's why ghost of tsushima feels so good it's why i read the redemption 2's world feels so real and why valhalla's world feels so video gamey in the same van i think fast travel is far far too easy to use this is a personal preference i know some people will disagree with me on this especially because i'm discussing this in the context of a game that's too long and is incredibly bloated i'm saying that yeah fast travel's too easy to use and you shouldn't use it which in turn would pat out game time i hear you that being said when we discuss open world exploration fast travel is effectively just throwing your hands up and giving up on forcing the player to engage with it you see i think in-game justified fast travel such as what we have in red dead redemption 2 or horizon zero dawn where there's an actual cost to fast traveling i think that can work a lot better because in effect i think it's actually like a mini gameplay element where you're deciding whether or not you want to spend money or crafting materials to fast travel to get from one location to the other or if you want to just suck it up hop on your mountain ride to the location yourself do it yourself i really think if valhalla either made it so you have to pay a significant amount of money to fast travel or if they went and removed fast travel between points of interest it would force the quest designers to one create quests that were far more interesting two it would encourage the player to actually take in the sights and scenery as they ride between locations and three it would fundamentally change the way that the worlds were designed because the understanding would be that the player was going to spend a lot more time in it when you have the constant reminder in the back of your head as you design an open world that the player is probably just going to fast travel between these big lengths you're not going to spend as much time really focusing on all of the byways and roads between locations because you don't have to you don't have to so why would you but when you make fast travel either inconvenient in game enough by way of making it expensive or that you have to travel to a train station and hop on the train and it takes you there if you do that it's going to force the player to one become acclimated and familiarized with the world and two the level designers are going to catch up because they're gonna have to but again this is just something that's personal preference for me i know some people hate the idea of removing fast travel from open world games i stand by it i think it's more of a hindrance than a help but i'll leave it there now going back to long-term goals and the idea of what keeps you going as you go through the game of course the main story is going to do most of the heavy lifting you're trying to reach some sort of conclusion to the story and that encourages you to keep playing that's obvious that's the chief one that we can point to but usually you want some gameplay element to encourage you to keep playing as well some games don't really do this they purely rely on the story which is ballsy because you need to have a really good story to do it in the case of valhalla the story isn't actually that emotionally engrossing so i don't think it's going to drive a lot of people all the way to the finish line so they need to rely on more gameplay elements to do it they have some systems such as of course the gear system where you're trying to level up your gear and get looking the the raddest that you can that clearly are an attempt at this they have other things such as the legendary animals there's nine of them and you can hunt them throughout the world of valhalla and uh the reward isn't awesome you get like a small item and you can mount their head to the long house at your camp for your clan it's kind of fun but it's something that also not many people are going to be that familiar with because the only way you can engage with this is if you actually finish crafting the hunting hut in your clan village and then also if you talk to them engage with the quests and then complete them something that after all of my surveys that i've done i'm actually surprised very few people have actually done when playing valhalla most of them just ignore that and just blast through the main story which is funny because that's probably like the closest thing you could point to to side content that valhalla has it has like hunting down members of the order which is sort of a broad side quest i suppose you could say and then these hunting quests which is like a broad description or fishing which is a broad element that you can engage with but on the whole it's just asking you to engage in a very simple activity that you're probably engaging with anyways and even that is something that most players are ignoring because they find it monotonous and boring the other piece for long-term goals is of course upgrading your village itself your camp i suppose is what it starts as you can upgrade all of these houses these structures they give you access to new activities and things that you can do it requires crafting materials you get as you raid the world but it's really not that interesting on the whole the extent of the transformation to your camp is that there's a new building in place of where a tent used to be it's not actually that awesome when you think about it in fact the only thing of note that's going to affect game play for an extended period of time are the missions that you'll unlock as you upgrade these buildings such as gaining access to fishing challenges or hunting challenges once you unlock those respective huts going all the way back to assassin's creed unity at least when you were working in the restaurant you could upgrade different elements of it there was a clear visual change and improvement not just to that specific item you upgraded but as the entire structure and building business improved you saw more customers coming in you saw yourself making more money from that which actually had a real impact on gameplay because coin was important all of that had an effect and it was worth it because it was like your baby whereas the camp in valhalla i found to just be kind of bland and wasn't a place i particularly enjoyed spending time in so we've established that there's not much that's going to keep the player going to the very end other than perhaps just a desire to be done with it and actually see the end credits or an invested interest in the story itself whether that's the isu storyline or just the main story of ivor sigurd and the clan what makes all this even worse is that the game's pacing in the early games specifically once we reach roughly 20 hours or so in start to take a nose dive and uh a lot of that has to do with throwing way too much at the player too early and failing to develop many of these concepts in those opening stages so that by the time you reach hour 20 or so you feel burned out you don't need to do anything else nothing's been really developed or grown on they threw everything at you too quickly and you're just left bored i think part of this is that they throw so much at you in the first 20 hours that a lot of players will find it overwhelming and because it's not developed clearly before they tack on the next gameplay element you just never really learn to use it or what the point is because often there isn't a point i think the idea was that they would have so much content that you could effectively take your pick as to what you wanted to do and only bothered to engage with the systems that were your favorite but if that was the case it just ended up leading to a very disjointed experience you see systems like fishing hunting rapping drinking the in-world game orlog all of these are here but failed to feel truly fleshed out and fully integrated into the main story and the mission design i hate to bring it up again but probably because side quests were cut and now the only engagement with these systems you can get is usually with small world events that last on average three minutes as we established earlier or main story missions and most of those main story missions don't touch these systems like at all fishing is probably the worst defender i can't actually think of a single time in the main story where you actually use it granted it could be there and i just forgot i mean the game is 100 hours long and it's possible that after the tutorial section which is technically a part of the main story i think they do touch on it and i just forgot i really don't know but that i would say is even proof right there it's not used enough to the point where i can't even remember if it was used at least in red dead redemption 2 they integrated all of these systems that they had into the main story and then also side things that you would do as well like when they used their fishing system in the quest where you teach the kid in this case a young jack marston to fish and it begs the question if a game designer puts a feature in the game is it in the player's best interest to engage with it even if the system isn't the most engaging or at the very least initially is it sort of an acquired taste type of thing and i think there isn't a definite answer to this i think it's different on a case-by-case basis of course however in general i think if a team of designers include a feature after years and years of iteration and refinement it was likely included for a reason hopefully a good one the problem is that ubisoft has built a reputation for themselves where they include so much bloat that players tune out some parts of it and deeply engage with others it could very well be that the designers of valhalla never really intended for players to engage with the hunting systems the order the raids the base building main story and fishing all at the same time maybe you're supposed to just pick what stands out but if this is the case i can't help but feel as though there's a more efficient way of introducing these systems to the player because so much is thrown at you in the first three to five hours alone that i think many players will just forget how much is there speaking for myself i completely forgot that fishing was a thing from like hour five to fifty forgot being a fairly exaggerated term in effect i had no reason to fish because quests and the designers themselves never asked me to use it or never used this system at all in any unique or fun way i mean of course not every game can be the legend of zelda breath of the wild not every game can masterfully interweave a few robust systems with each other creating a gameplay tapestry that would make hideo kojima blush admittedly i'm the one that forgot about fishing and didn't use it however the story never really prompted me to use this system it never encouraged me to use it by way of the side content it just forgot about it so i did too really the fishing mechanic and some of the other systems here just feel like quick gimmicks that were likely prototypes by one or two of the developers on the team and it was just tacked on because some of the lead gameplay designers thought that it was fun and didn't have that much of an impact on the rest of the game after all so more features are better right but again this is why i think fishing is a prime example of this problem just because you can add a feature or gimmick doesn't mean that you should for instance in jason schreyer's book that we mentioned earlier blood sweat and pixels he outlines the development process for uncharted 4 and describes how many conversations went that he had with developers one of the conversations that he mentions was with a set designer that worked on uncharted 4 specifically they described a system that they had built where nate and elena would be able to ballroom dance with each other in the living room of their home it was supposed to be a cute bonding moment and the player would rhythmically press x or square or triangle or circle in time with the rhythm and it seemed like a fun idea after all it could build the relationship between the two characters while also allowing for greater player engagement what could possibly be wrong with this but the lead designers at naughty dog understood just because you have a feature that's working doesn't mean that it should be included there's more to it the developer explained that it felt markedly out of place sure it was engaging but it didn't do anything to further the experience they were trying to craft it felt much more like a random dance sequence in final fantasy 7 than it did a valid gameplay addition to the next flagship narrative title so even though they had this feature up and running and i'm sure they spent weeks or even months working on it they decided to cut it from the game entirely because it quote just didn't feel right and this is the point it really seems to me that ubisoft struggles with cutting the bloat and providing a lean experience the stories are always fantastically long the pace is usually tortoise-like and there are so many ways to engage with the gameplay loop that it often doesn't even feel like a loop instead resembling a knot of hair pulled from a shower drain now some players of valhalla will love this i'm sure they love having everything at their disposal all of these systems even if they're not used a lot elsewhere however it turns a lot of people off say what you will about it but when players are overwhelmed they tend to shut down it's the same reason why so many people are so intimidated by large mmorpgs or a lot of jrpg titles now granted assassin's creed at this point is known for its vast amount of content and systems however it's my opinion that valhalla takes it just a little too far and the result is that we have an experience that is extremely overwhelming for the player and it takes 30 to 40 hours to fully grasp and become comfortable with everything that they throw at you sure when you write out all of the systems and mechanics it doesn't seem too daunting but when engaging with just a few is usually enough to hold a player over for 10 to 15 hours having a laundry list of features becomes much less appealing and i really think this is why i had such a roller coaster experience with the game there were some parts of the game i really enjoyed and engaged with and found interesting and unique than other parts of the game i just was totally uninterested in and then the developers themselves seem to have just forgotten about them and gave up on trying to get me sold on them so i just gave up on them as well and then like 15 hours later they'd remember that they had this system that they needed you to engage with so they'd ask you to engage with it again and there's just too much they didn't implement it well and really it just reaffirms the idea that because of working from home and because of lack of communication within the team itself we ended up with a lot of systems underdeveloped and poorly communicated to the player now the last thing i want to address in this section before we get into combat and all of that is uh romancing i couldn't find a good place elsewhere in the outline and script to put it so i'm just throwing it here i don't know where else to put it there is romancing in valhalla can uh chase down for instance sigurd's girl and get with her it's here but it's never really satisfying there's never really pay off you know um there are some interesting moments such as with this french chick in essex they're all just very bland and kind of lame but i had to mention it it's here there are romancings you can go with but it it's just always a little underwhelming okay let's talk about combat the first thing we should discuss is probably the one that was most hotly contested and debated and that is stealth and the idea of being an assassin in an assassin's creed game let me put it this way valhalla does have stealth systems you can play in a stealthy way in some situations but stealth is only as good as the quest that you're engaging with using that system and in the case of valhalla the levels the world and the quests are just not designed for stealth like hardly at all for instance there's this one where you need to assassinate this guy in this public square it's pretty straightforward classic assassin's creed quest makes sense there's a couple ways you can get to him basically you can either stealth up right behind him or you can climb on the pillars and the ropes above him so you get close to him and you assassinate him the thing is the second you do so you'll engage everybody in melee combat everybody and their mother is going to come running at you and you can either fight it out or you can escape again pretty much just by running away very seldom are there locations for you to hide within the level or the specific area itself usually you're expected to just sprint in one direction until the guards stop chasing you and then you return back to finish the quest that's pretty much how 90 of these levels are designed it's very clear that the developers primarily wanted you to initially engage with these assassination missions using stealth get to a vantage point where you could assassinate them do so and then fight it out with hand-to-hand combat and melee fight your way out of it which begs the question why you even bothered with stealth in the first place if you're going to end up killing everybody in the town square you might as well just go for that instead of spending 10 minutes trying to sneak up to it initially it just doesn't make sense and this is the thing ever since assassin's creed developed a fairly robust melee combat system i would say the first really robust one was with origins however some people would say that syndicate for instance had a really solid melee system but i would say the first really robust melee combat system was with origins and ever since that day they have relied on it for pretty much every quest that they design it's the ultimate fallback if you have a quest where there's some sort of stealth option to get to a set location stealthily if there's ever an issue you can just fall back onto melee guards discover you just fall back on the melee you don't need to reload you don't need to try again in a more stealthy way or try a different route that's just not a thing just fall back on melee there's probably three or four quests over the course of assassin's creed valhalla where you will need to reset and they say specifically you have to do this stealthily but later in every single one of those quests is a melee fight which again just kind of defeats the purpose of stealthing your way through any section to begin with i mean on the whole i really don't know what else to say about stealth it's here sort of it's just not a priority for ubisoft anymore with these games they've put so much effort and time into crafting uh systems for gear for armor for weaponry for for enchantments for those weapons for runes for everything related to combat on a hand-to-hand level that there's very little time left over on the back end to think about stealth and how you're going to make that meaningful or important so it's here it's not a priority if you're looking for that in this game you're not going to find it i don't know what i mean i can keep complaining about it but this has been the case since origins and i think it's going to keep being the case moving forward so anything i would say here i've said before a thousand times in the critiques of those games so i just i won't bother now as for the melee combat the weapons do feel significantly heavier which is what you would expect in a viking game and it's something that was promised to us by the developers leading up to the game's launch that they wanted to make sure the combat reflected the feelings of being an actual viking but that's a double-edged sword or perhaps i should say hammer because every single weapon that you'll use pretty much feels like a variant of a hammer in some cases they even share the same exact animations between weapons at least the animations are so close i can't tell the difference between them axes maces swords hammers all of it feels the same in ivor's hands it's a big heavy metal thing that he's gonna hit people with it's yet another thing that feels like a major step back from odyssey when they had all these different variations of weapons that felt markedly different there are a fair number of weapons to be used in valhalla of course the biggest one that just recently came to the game in a post-launch patch was single-handed swords something that they didn't have before but now they do have it it feels fine the point is though everything feels very heavy and punchy in odyssey in origins many weapons felt light felt airy felt as though they had some impact but not much and it was about landing a volume of hits as opposed to just a single one in valhalla though everything is so punchy for the sake of making it feel as though a viking is using it that all of the weapons start to kind of blend together i understand why they did it i just don't like it weapon loadouts that stood out to me would be like dual hammers they're fun two-handed axes are heavy enough to be fun as well the shields i'll be honest never really felt viable or necessary dodging and movement is quick enough that you don't really need to play very defensively here and i don't think the developers are expecting players to play in any sort of defensive way either there's also a lot of weapon effects and runes that are an interesting attempt at introducing item complexity which is good to see as well however i found myself finding the weapons that i like to use and i used them for 10 hours at a time 20 hours at a time which is of course a lot i really wish there would have been a reason for me to experiment with different weapon types to swap out the weapon i was using for a different weapon that had a different status effect or something of that nature but there never was any reason to do it because going back to the leveling system nothing encourages you to swap out this gear i don't want to repeat myself too much but again odyssey had this fixed they had it figured out weapon variability different status effects and things that you could do paired with abilities to the runes or engravings on the weapons themselves all of that was just solved they had it figured out and then they tried to reinvent the wheel with valhalla and it's just not as good in my opinion maybe i'm just an odyssey fanboy maybe i just liked that system way more and so this one feels clunky and just bad but that's how it feels to me but all this leads us to the issue of difficulty and balance we've talked a little bit about how different areas are balanced poorly compared to others but i don't think i made it expressly clear how easy the game is even when you're not using xp boosts now until very very recently almost for a whole year that the game was out there was no level scaling it was if you were over leveled for an area they were just going to be extremely easy that's all it was going to be there was no solution for players like me when we played the game at launch and in the months following now there's a solution with the hard level scaling but even that i would argue hasn't really fixed the problem because the game itself is just it's too easy i went through the whole game on very hard because it was the only thing that kept the game engaging in combat they throw so many enemies at you that they want to make sure you feel as though you're just a viking blasting through hordes of enemies crushing skulls and living that viking fantasy the result is to balance it they decreased the health bars of those enemies even when you're directly comparable in level such that it only takes a few hits with a decent weapon to either knock them down and move on to the next one or to rip their head from their body it was actually quite frustrating i ended up changing out armor sets and weapons to try and make the game more difficult for myself because it was the only way that i could feel any sort of challenge while playing to keep it interesting for the hundred hours i had to keep going the only exception to this rule of the game being too easy i would say is the instant assassination toggle thankfully there is a toggle in the menu which i did turn on this was more just for sake of my own immersion i find it really stupid that you could dive on somebody from 30 feet up shove a blade into their cranium and it wouldn't kill them which is what it is by default by default if you are under leveled beneath somebody you can't necessarily one shot assassinate them which just hurts my brain so i turned on instant assassinations other than that everything else i had was to try and boost the difficulty and even on stream like last week i went and we played through this section of the game where i was under leveled by 40 levels we loaded up a save where i was level 300 and we went to an area that was level 340. i was playing on the hardest difficulty and even then fighting this weird nun lady was remarkably easy and listen it's not that i'm like so good at the game it's just so easy like i'm not very good at video games that should tell you how stupid this is now balancing video games is incredibly difficult i'm not going to pretend as though i could just explain how they could fix this and change it all i know is that odyssey and origins found a way to introduce actual challenge when you were playing through them for the tens upon tens of hours you were playing those games valhalla never figured it out and i'm not exactly sure why but no matter what i did or what i do now the game still feels too easy even when i'm in an area that is 40 levels higher than me and because of this all of the boosts and the different things that the game throws at you to help make combat easier such as the feasts which give all sorts of damage boosts to make combat easier problem is when combat's already stupid easy there's no reason to engage with those feasts so there are two systems fighting each other making you not want to use one because the other one is broken it also made it so certain abilities that you can use and trigger using your adrenaline in combat such as adding poison or fire effects to your weapons are also incredibly overpowered because they stack and then add a persistent damage on to the enemy that it's applied to it's just tough because if you want to engage with all of the abilities and systems that you've spent all this time building your character around you're gonna find combat remarkably easy too light-hearted and very very quick i mean like i said look at this thing we found on stream with this nun we are in the hardest area on the map we are 40 levels beneath her we're playing on the highest difficulty and still kick her ass in the span of roughly 60 seconds it's just lame now speaking of abilities these are very varied and the different methods of discovery shake it up enough that i actually started getting excited when i would unlock a new one most of these you find while exploring the world and it's actually a really good way in the early game to encourage players to keep looking in these little crevices and everywhere that you see one of those little dots beckoning you to find what treasures they may hold one minor frustration i had with these was that some of the really useful abilities are actually locked behind conversations with hatham at the assassin's hut in your clan's village you basically go to him and then you have to turn in medallions earned by killing members of the order of the ancients it's not really a big deal but i'm sure that many people will have overlooked this and never unlocked these abilities before quitting the game like 25-30 hours in again it's just not very clearly communicated there might be one conversation six hours into the game where hatham says yeah come to me and give me your medallions from killing members of the order of the ancients and i will reward you with abilities like great dude but the game is 100 hours long in 30 hours i probably will have forgotten that conversation keeping it at 100. again we can say that it's the player's responsibility to remember what the game communicates to them at any given point and to use all of the systems but i actually put more of the responsibility on the developer it's their job i think to get the player to the point where they're conditioned to use all of these systems to actively engage with them and know how to use them it's one of the more difficult parts of game development to take a player and show them how to defeat this thing you created you're not just trying to create something to screw over the player you're training the player to defeat it you create a robust combat system train the player how to use it to its utmost potential and exploit all of the enemies using it that's your job if there's a system and you only communicate it once early in the game and it's never brought up again i i think it's your fault it wouldn't take much only like a dynamic conversation maybe rodri looks at you and says hey you have a lot of medallions you should go speak to hatham something like that that's been in video games forever and i didn't have that happen once granted it might be in the game somewhere but because the game is kind of buggy at times it's possible that it just never triggered for me so maybe this is just something i'm complaining about and it's already been solved i don't know but that's me complaining about it so moving on now if you look at these abilities in game play it's obvious that they're not grounded in the world at all you're performing crazy jumps you're applying poison effects to your weapons that deal crazy amounts of damage very very quickly you're doing leaps and jumps and slams and all sorts of things that a human couldn't do you compare it to the combat in syndicate or unity and there is a big difference and this has been the trend in assassin's creed for years at this point but it really seems that ubisoft doesn't take it seriously either since in cut scenes the characters don't seem to be capable of doing these moves either for the most part these cutscenes are grounded and are realistic the gameplay is loose and doesn't care or hold itself to that standard at all now again very personal opinion very subjective i personally just i don't like this stuff i don't like the crazy supernatural moves i don't think you need them i think it's too video gamey and i i just personally don't like it but i know that a lot of people do like it so it's okay to like it i just personally don't but there's a lot of inconsistency here because these supernatural abilities don't just take place in dream realms like asgard or in combat when maybe you can just forgive it for sake of gameplay it happens in the main stories as well we'll talk more about that in just a second but first the cooldown for these abilities another thing i just don't like in gameplay i just really don't like cooldowns it feels too much like an arcade game or an mmo you use an ability and then you have to wait some arbitrary amount of time before you can use it again perhaps sped up by dealing damage or something but for the most part it's just a countdown until the game decides you can use this ability again i get why it's there you need it so you can't spam one ability 50 000 times but still i just don't like it a witcher 3 like system like toxicity could work great here because it achieves the same thing but it's grounded in the world effectively there's a set amount of time that abilities need before they can be used again but you can use other skills like fast metabolism to speed up toxicity reduction or something like white honey which comes with the side effect of removing potion effects while zeroing out toxicity allowing you to take more potions immediately in the case of valhalla perhaps you craft certain potions or something that you can buy in the world and this allows you to instantly heal up your abilities so you can use them more frequently or the countdown stops just some sort of shifted system so that it's not just a transparent countdown to when you can use it again okay let's talk about the supernatural stuff with regards to the story the combat and everything else these supernatural elements are not consistent at all sometimes they make the point that supernatural happenings are just drug or hallucinogen-induced illusions but other times ubisoft seems to suggest that witches and magical characters are actually magical let me explain you see there are actual curses out in the world of assassin's creed valhalla i can explain away the advanced combat abilities poison and fire effects on weapons and all the other unrealistic and fantasy elements involved with gameplay it's a stretch but i can do it however having actual cursed sights in the world that often come with negative status effects that are only remedied once the player destroys a cursed symbol it's just too much for me after all everyone has different tolerances for this type of thing for example in fallout there are some people that are just driven absolutely crazy by the fact that there are bottle caps locked in safes that have been locked since before the bombs fell this would be well before bottle caps were used as a currency so honestly it just doesn't make any sense at all that people would have locked them inside safes alongside with their actual money and valuables most players don't care or more likely don't even think about something like this it all just depends on how seriously you take the world that your video game is placed within i honestly don't think that i'm that extreme i'm somewhere in the middle i get the most out of games when i'm able to take them seriously and especially as far as role-playing games are concerned the world has to make sense within the rules it's set for itself one of my major frustrations with valhalla is that it's inconsistent it wants to be a fantasy game while still pretending as though it's historical and in a setting like ancient egypt with origins you can have some more leeway with these types of things it's further from the present day which allows the writers to fill in more gaps but valhalla isn't actually that distant sure a thousand years is a long time but we have kept very accurate logs and records from this times and so much of this world is based on what would make a fun fantasy exploration game and not what would make a grounded world and it's in that conflict rooted in the very conceptualization of this game's story and world that causes all of this to feel so bizarre the game just doesn't know what it wants to be pure and simple which is why you can have elements that are very grounded and realistic and then other elements and times where the game just gives up and fully embraces the supernatural stuff and there are so many examples i could point to to prove this point it's frankly overwhelming you play 20 minutes of assassin's creed valhalla and you'll see what i mean whether i look at the seer from the funeral pyre in snottinghamshire or you look at all of the stuff that ivor and bassem do towards the end of the story that's just not how nature works it's just clear the game doesn't know what it wants to be granted assassin's creed has always had supernatural elements with the isu and the first civilization and all of that i understand that but that's more like sci-fi futuristic but technically like super ancient stuff that's all at play underneath the world itself we're talking about being grounded within gameplay swapping back and forth trying to make up its mind as to whether or not it wants to feel like a grounded rpg in a historical england in which vikings are exploring and taking land or if it wants to be a fantasy rpg seems pretty clear they're leaning towards fantasy more than grounded in a historical setting and the last thing about combat that we need to really point out is that sieges and raids which was one of the major gameplay elements that they really hyped up in the lead-up to assassin's creed valhalla it just it blows all of these raids consist usually of setting some basic house models or hut models on fire using torches killing a bunch of enemies and then opening a few doors to get to some chests to get some loot and then a pop-up says you've completed the raid and that's it it's very very samey they're all copy and pasted there's nothing new or unique and really i'm not even sure if you can fail a raid to be completely honest you would think a raid like there's a lot of resistance there's also a lot of enemies that come up and uh of course fight you while you're raiding their village and uh you would expect like maybe they could push you back or you could fail a raid if you didn't do something properly but they're so easy that it's mindless they're not exciting it's just one more thing to check off the list of the open world and uh they they just suck i don't know what else to say it they suck sieges also could have been really cool and this is something i was excited for especially coming off of the big uh sort of faction battles we had in assassin's creed odyssey where you had two different factions the spartans and the athenians that were constantly fighting and based on your choices you could have two different generals fighting then you could come in and decide which way the battle would go it was really drawn out really interesting and it could have been so cool to see a system like that present here in valhalla but it's just not it's just not again they did all the work for that in odyssey they just needed to copy and paste that and bring it here and it would have been great they couldn't even copy and paste that literally like this is again i need to calm down so much of the game is copy and pasted and then the cool parts that would have fit really well were ignored and forgotten and left behind and it just doesn't make sense it just doesn't make sense i need to actually calm down i actually got worked up okay let's move on let's discuss the narrative i've thought a lot about how i could discuss this chunk of the game to be honest i could cover the whole thing from start to finish going through every single side quest all the characters one by one everything doing so though thanks to valhalla's remarkable size would probably take well over 10 hours and i'm not joking that's an actual estimation based on the previous videos i've done for like the last of us part 2 and cyberpunk 2077 both videos that are over five hours long so my conclusion was that i wasn't gonna put you through that we could touch on most of the key important elements um and and i think get across everything we need to but more than anything i just didn't want to have anybody's death from old age on my conscience so we're gonna hit the key points if you're looking for a story synopsis uh and you want that video we can do that i still have all the footage just let me know in the comments or look at one of the other story synopsis that i'm sure is on youtube somewhere but we're going to hit the highlights this video is long enough not its core the story of assassin's creed valhalla is a serial these are collections of small stories tacked together that have their own individual story arcs but that tell a larger story over the course of the total run time think of something like the office every single episode has its own small story contained within that's worth watching and engaging with by itself but each episode there might be a small movement in the over arching arc see what i did there of the story so over the course of an episode characters move very little in where they're going on the whole but over the course of a season there's a huge shift and a lot can happen with the characters their motivations and their relationships between them valhalla works the same way the difference is instead of episodes we have territories and each of these you pledge to as you go through the main story back at your base camp every single one of these territories have their own characters that are relegated specifically to that territory some characters can move between territories and will follow you as you go through the main story for half of the story or for the whole story in the case of somebody like sigurd it really just depends the point is each territory has its own story contained individually separate from all of the other territories meaning that they never really tie together that well other than the overarching story of ivor his family his clan and everything else that's going on with the isu storyline as well and this is actually pretty brilliant on the part of the designers even though it doesn't work very well because a character such as the elder man in glochester or for instance tev dier who is a character we discussed earlier these characters play out the story unique to that area in the form of the halloween harvest festival but after you leave there those characters are gone they're relegated to that territory you made choices in that territory that impacted their lives so maybe you make a choice one of them dies one of them lives or this person dies this person lives this person comes with you to your village this person stays behind all of this you can make individual choices there but that territory doesn't affect this territory so each episode is like its own microcosm of rpg decisions so it can make you feel as though you have a real impact on the world when in reality you're just messing little stuff around in this little petri dish and then you move over to this petri dish do stuff over there and they're all separate it's not one giant petri dish where every choice everything you do infects the other regions and going back to the previous discussion as to why they cut side content i think this probably has to do with the development cycle it seems as though it's a lot easier to develop small territorial stories that are contained individually that you can have different teams working on in each section of the map that broadly follows an overarching story as opposed to having a storyline that's tied all together and works like a giant spider web stretching across the whole of england now i'd be okay if the decisions and branching options were actually really awesome this would be a cool way to do it have the stories relegated to each territory but still feel as though you had a real impact on the world but like i said it doesn't leave this area so it's hard to get immersed and to really get to know characters when you only see them talk to them and hang out with them for an hour or two while you work through a pledged territory and furthermore the characters that do reach across multiple territories like rotary or evar have so little screen time in each of those territories that they never really stand out as true friends of ivor even though they're supposed to be that evar ivar however you want to pronounce it i heard characters pronounce it both ways over the course of the story i'm not sure which i like more ivar evar i don't know ivar we'll go with eyebar evar i don't know he's probably the closest when he was revealed to be the king killer i didn't actually feel that surprised or frustrated when i realized that i probably had to kill him because he was just kind of annoying and he did a lot of things that were irresponsible and downright crazy so to be offered the chance to kill him and rid myself of him for the rest of the story i actually found this to be a relief and furthermore for a lot of these main story questlines there's not actually that much thought put into them here's some examples of some really poorly thought out moments in quests or quests themselves the quest sunken hope shows two kids who are abandoned you find out that their father is in fact dead at the bottom of this water-filled tower so you send them away to travel to their aunt's house and yes that's the entire sidequest world event thing there's very very little to do here you basically show up see two kids they say their dad's gone down you find him drowned at the bottom of it so you send them off and uh they go to their aunt's house but the point is there's no option to escort them there's no option to help them back to the house of their aunt like this is a deadly world where you get jumped by wolves every 30 seconds and you just sent two children off to go who knows how far without helping them like i i wanted to walk the kids back to their aunts house i figured oh cool that's where i'll get a reward for helping them nope ivor says go to your aunt's house they leave and then that's it very poorly thought through or poorly executed one of the two or perhaps both or for example when you're heading into the ancient structure at the very end of the game right before the final boss fight with sigurd you find an icy outcrop and you hop out of the ship and sigurd says to all of his men to stay in the boat in the freezing cold in the middle of a blizzard and tells them to wait yes this feels familiar we will press on the rest of you wait here now i thought this was weird when i was playing through the first time because i was like hey man it seems really cold why not let them like set up a camp or something light a fire go somewhere where there's trees or cover something but instead he tells them to wait and this has made all the worse when i realized that sigurd knows where he's going and really honestly believes he's about to go to valhalla forever he doesn't plan on coming back to the ship and this is just like totally ignored and i know what you're thinking maybe it's not actually that cold and these men aren't actually going to die sitting in this ship waiting for your return but they repeatedly say on the way to this location and once they're out of the boat that it's so cold they're worried they're going to die before they reach their destination it's so cold they could drop dead within minutes of leaving the boat so what do you think is gonna happen to all of these men that you're asking to just sit in the boat for potentially days or weeks while you chill in valhalla like what this actually tainted my opinion of cigarette like severely even though i don't think he was supposed to he's supposed to be like a man that cares about his clan that cares about doing what's right and is very noble and worthy of respect even though he straight up knew he was going to a place where he was never going to come back that everybody in that ship would be left for dead and would die if they followed his commands all it would take would be a line where a cigarette says okay go back leave find somewhere warm and take care of yourselves don't come back for us that's all it would take but no he's like stay here and freeze to death basically it's kind of messed up but at the same time while there's these quests that are really poorly thought through there are other quests that are fantastically well thought through and are actually kind of sweet such as bearston's story where he wants to kidnap his own wife so that she can escape and get a new life all so that he can then marry his one true love like his teenage crush and you help him facilitate all of this it's awesome i love the quest line i thought it was really sweet and to this day it still stands out as one of my favorite questlines in any assassin's creed game it's really pleasant and uh really sweet i just found it kind of cute and very memorable but the point is it's very very inconsistent so some quests are very clearly thought out and have strong reasoning to them and others are just like bafflingly awful and change how you look at characters you're supposed to love and look up to let's touch on what all this was building up towards all of this this hundred hour experience of choices and making different decisions in all of these territories what does it come back to how long ago do your choices have an impact on the main story well it turns out pretty far back you see at the very end of the game story you are judged on all of the major decisions that you've made over the course of the campaign and to be honest this surprisingly feels quite fair some rpgs often feel fairly arbitrary as to which decisions have a significant impact and which don't cyberpunk 2077 is probably the best example where only a few statements in a junkyard can make or break the ending you get if you want to hear all about it i'll leave a link to the critique in the description where i actually on stream went back and found every single hidden decision that led to the hidden secret ending and uh it's pretty underwhelming but i'll save that for that video links now based on your decisions over the course of the campaign sigurd will choose to either remain with you and your people in england or he's going to stay behind in norway and find some sort of new life there this is based on five main choices over the course of the game there could be others but everything i've read and all of the research i've done shows that it's these five choices and whether or not he comes with you depends on if you've done three of them if you've done two he'll come with you back to england if you've done three he's staying behind and he's not going with you the first is whether or not you stole strybjorn's cargo at the very beginning of the game when you leave norway for england this is a decision that feels like it's going to have a real impact when you make it and sure enough it does basically if you do this at the very end of the game after defeating basseem after dealing with all the fake valhalla stuff he sits down and he tells you how bad of a person you were for betraying uh your family like that which is just i felt like a kid that had messed up and i was being lectured to it felt really bad the next one is whether or not you start a relationship with ranvi while she's still with sigurd which honestly is fair like i started a relationship with her while she was still technically with sigurd felt bad about it not bad enough to stop so you know what that one's fair the next is whether or not you punched bassem when you guys got in an altercation whether or not you denied dag his axe and entry into valhalla in turn and whether or not you contradicted sigurd towards the end of the game and his decisions with the settlement and the inhabitants because there was a little spat that you walk in on the last one feels less fair because he's acting like a crazy person leading up to it so i think to defer to his judgment as a real test of your loyalty i stood up to him because he was acting like i said like a crazy person but all of the others feel fair the baseem implication for fighting and punching him i guess you could say is the judgment of your temperament and whether or not you can keep a level head but all told the decisions that impact the ending feel fair to be honest i mean all told the ending impact on the rest of the game the end game when you are playing after the story ends it really doesn't matter whether or not sigurd is there it's not going to have any major implications for you but it does have a story implication which is the point as for the rest of the story there's of course a lot of elements with the isu storyline layla being mirrored with desmond all over the place there's some interesting parallels that they draw between the dream realms and the in-game realm in england basically implying that baseem is in effect loki or a loki-like character and ivor is an odin-like character which is why when you go to asgard those presentations are drawn in that way and there's even similar things that they do such as having the characters and voice actors that played all the isu characters going back in the franchise for a decade playing the characters of the gods in that asgardian flashback flash forward flash sideways thing that you experience in the dream realm there's a lot going on there and it's something that's so complicated i'm not sure if i fully understand it and i don't think many other people do in fact i actually did a survey asking my audience which is fairly into assassin's creed i mean you're here watching this video and the overwhelming majority of people can't explain assassin's creed's uh main storyline with regards to the issue the first civilization all of that it's just not really priority for people maybe it's poorly communicated maybe there's 15 other different things going on to explain it but to me the point is this is complicated probably doesn't matter that much because not many people seem to care so i'm not going to spend an hour going through all of that in this video if you want to break down if you want me to go through it and analyze it in detail i'd be happy to again i have the footage i have the research done i just don't think it's that important for this critique breaking down what the game does well and doesn't do well what i will say is that the modern day storyline with layla and uh all of the implications for the story on the broader spectrum with baseem being brought to the future effectively and having these loki parallels all over the place loki of course being the one that ushers in ragnarok it begs the question whether or not baseem is going to usher in the next era of assassin's creed wherein the world changes significantly because ragnarok is rushed or ushered in so i think it's interesting i think they did the uh the tie up to the layla trilogy really well i'm actually pleasantly surprised with how they did it but we'll have to see i really don't know what this means for the franchise moving forward i don't know what this means for assassin's creed infinity and how they're going to tie all of this in with that but what i do know is that they made some big moves with the modern day storyline here that surely is going to have some sort of major impact at the end of the day to where all of this ends up so i think assassin's creed is about to change i just don't know how and finally we've reached the conclusion let's try to tie all this up with a bow all told i think assassin's creed valhalla was an interesting idea they wanted to put assassin's creed in a setting that really doesn't seem like it would be that friendly to it they did the best with what they had and we got a game that stays true to the idea of living a viking fantasy but fails in almost every sub category that you could look at and judge the game against i think the combat is a notable step down from odyssey i think the gearing and leveling systems are all major steps backward there's tons of features that were developed in odyssey that are just completely absent in valhalla for seemingly no reason in fact i think in many cases they would have made the game significantly better such as the warring faction system that they had in odyssey that's just completely absent here that would have been so cool different tribes of vikings fighting against each other to take territory would have fit so well with what they were trying to do here and it's just not present at all there's just so many things that are inexplicable and don't make sense to me and i've spent a lot of time trying to figure out why they would make all these changes why they would cut certain things why they would pursue these different things i can't make sense of it and the only explanation i can come up with is that there was some sort of coveted impact that there was some sort of change in how they designed and made this game compared with how they normally would make a game like this uh as a result of the pandemic and working from home and doing all of that but that excuse only goes up until january of 2020 march of 2020 depending on where the offices were and when they went into lockdown and i can't imagine that all of these things could be blamed on that because that's only what like six months seven months like seven to eight months of development time realistically before they went gold that they were working from home and i can't imagine that the whole of the main story the side quests the weird shift in the leveling system i can't imagine all of that was done in the last seven months of development maybe who knows but i highly doubt it so the only conclusion i can come to is that they were trying to change a lot and shake it up and it just didn't work at all the other implication and the other piece to this puzzle is of course the the scandals that have been going on at ubisoft ashraf ismail who is the lead director on valhalla he was the lead gameplay director on origins and black flag he was caught up in a scandal where effectively it looks as though allegedly he was using his role as director of all of these assassins creed games to talk up fans of the franchise female fr uh fans female fans and was leveraging his position within ubisoft and within the franchise of assassin's creed to effectively cheat on his wife he lied multiple times that he was married and and all sorts of things like that and he uh was caught up in this scandal went on a leave of absence i don't know if he's still at the company i don't know if he's still working on assassin's creed i i really don't know last i heard he went on a leave of absence and um at the very least even if he is still at the company still working on assassin's creed i doubt he is going to be public facing ever again but that scandal could have thrown a wrench in all of this and changed the direction multiple times so you know the last minute refinements and cutting of features and things couldn't and didn't happen the way it normally would have with a game like this so that could have had a huge impact on this and that would make sense to me there's of course also been a lot of turmoil within ubisoft allegations of abuse and improper management and things like that and so that possibly could have led to issues but everyone i've spoken to who works at ubisoft um a lot of employees even some high up people i know for a fact do watch my videos and critiques so hi if you're one of them um i honestly do appreciate you being here and and watching and absorbing i mean if you've made it this far in the video jesus like you're taking uh you know critiques and criticism seriously so props to you truly but everyone i've spoken to who works at ubisoft says that the process was pretty smooth like all things considered the studios are working well together and other than you know the stuff we've heard about ubisoft singapore everything else and all of the other studios are working pretty well and aren't running into a lot of issues so i really don't know what went like what happened and why it happened i have some ideas and there's some disjointed stuff but more than anything i think the simplest explanation is probably just that this was an experiment that failed they were trying to do something different with a lot of different systems and it just didn't work my fear though is that ubisoft is going to look at valhalla and say well yeah like we aren't that happy with some of the review scores but it sold really well and the players speak you know the customer is always right and if the customer is really happy with valhalla we're just going to do everything the same next time around and with the next assassin's creed game we're going to have no side quests you know what cut it screw it we're going to cut main quests too let's just cut it all like who knows like that very well could happen and i hope that doesn't happen because in my opinion there are so many pieces of the puzzle in valhalla that just don't fit together at all and need significant reworking my fear is that that is going to be drowned out by the commercial success of the game and the fact that it sold quite well so we'll just have to wait and see i'm excited to see how the dlc affects all of this of course we did have the first major dlc expansion come out there's more coming down the pike and if you would like me to do a critique of all of the dlc like i did with odyssey and origins let me know in the comment section i actually would honestly like to know if you'd be interested in hearing all of that i'd be happy to do it i haven't touched the dlc yet so some of the complaints and critiques and criticisms i made here i sure have been partially addressed there but all told i'm excited to see where the franchise goes but i'm also concerned that they aren't going to learn the lessons that should have been learned here because there are a fair number of them to be honest as for the elephant in the room assassin's creed infinity this was a story that broke that i kind of need to address here um effectively we just know that they're working on some large live service version of assassin's creed it's very very early in development we're talking like 2023 to 24 more likely 2024 to 25 is when we would ever see any possible uh version of it all we really know about it is that it's a live service living breathing version of assassin's creed and honestly at the outset that doesn't sound like an inherently bad thing think of one animus with one character like effectively what we had with the layla trilogy with origins odyssey and valhalla where you have one character that can go to these different realms together off of one animus or in one platform and there could be co-op there could be all sorts of things that i think could be interesting it could work pretty well the danger is that it's going to be a huge shift away from the you know single player linear narrative or rather rpg narrative experience so we'll have to see how all of this works and how it shifts and what it looks like um but i don't i don't see the point in getting heated or dramatic about it right now because we don't know anything about it like whatever i would be frustrated with and yelling about would be a straw man because it doesn't even exist yet i'd be inventing something to be upset about and then being upset about it for sake of clicks and views and that's not why you guys watch me i know for a fact many of you have told me like you're the only one that keeps a level head anymore like yeah i try very hard i i don't want to lean into all of that when we find details out and when we know what it's actually going to look like i'll talk about it i'll break it down i'll say if i think this is good or bad as right now we just don't know anything so there's not much to say really to wrap up valhalla and everything i i was hoping this would be a really cool experience a really cool assassin's creed in a viking setting what could go wrong turns out pretty much everything i haven't played a game where almost every system had a huge issue in a very long time even something like cyberpunk there were many elements and systems there that were really good you know side quests they're all phenomenally well written structured gameplay stupid like it just boggles my mind and i can't really explain it you know normally there's a reason a rhyme or reason to it but here it just doesn't make sense they just made choices that were bizarre the game sold well and now they're probably going to lean into it and make the same mistakes next time will i be playing valhalla more not unless you really want me to that's why i asked if you could share your opinion as to whether or not you want to see a critique on the dlc something like this for the dlc because i think right now based on how i feel about valhalla and the insane amount of time i've had to spend with it for the sake of this video i'm i'm done i'm i'm kind of sick of it and i want to move on but that will be up to you guys to decide so if you want to subject me to more of it i'm more than happy to i mean all of this is only because of you guys you know it's only because of you guys so if you want me to play valhalla okay i guess i'll play some more valhalla i'll play the dlc so let me know in the comment section below make sure to follow my twitch right now head over there usually after i post a new video we are live um to kind of respond and hang out so head over to my twitch linked below the lucha you can hang out with us we work on these videos live as i've said many times in this video you've seen the footage from those live streams so head over there follow us and become a you know part of that community it's a great community and i'd love to have you i really would we're growing quick so if there's ever a time to get into it it would be right now because we are growing very quickly and i don't want to leave you behind you know i would love for you to be there at the beginning when i can actually still get to know you so head over there and uh follow right now and of course again rhapsody stream that's a thing i did so if you are thinking of working on your own youtube videos your own live streams and you don't want to deal with dmca crap let me deal with that for you rhapsody stream.com rhapsodystream.com like easy free you can request your own tracks it's a home run rhapsody stream.com gotta say it three times right but that's that's all from me i i am very tired i actually have to frantically eat and then we're going live on twitch here in 22 minutes so i'm gonna try to get ready for that give my voice a break this has taken about five and a half hours to record a lot goes into these videos people don't even realize i actually don't know how long this video will be when uh we get it out but from hermione and i i don't know if you can see her that's her collar that little pink yeah you can barely see it that right there that's hermione from both of us thank you for watching i love you all more than you possibly know and i'll see you in the next video hugs and kisses bye-bye we did it hermione

Channel: Luke Stephens

Views: 902,908

Keywords: luke stephens

Id: qIT8HqJC6F8

Length: 180min 0sec (10800 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 21 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Bergerboy14]

Long Man is only bad when it suits the agenda 🤷‍♂️

[u/[deleted]]

People complaining about video length act as if someone is forcing them to watch the whole thing in one go.

[u/One_Testicle_Man]

I watched a bit over the first hour, its horrible The guy is rambling, little coherency, bringing up the exact same things multiple times. Just because its long it doesnt mean its good

[u/Childish_Cambino2187]

Am I the only person who doesn’t like this guy. From the videos I’ve seen, he seems to be a Joseph Anderson lite.

[u/Reaps51]

It's particularly bizarre to still see people bitching about the length of Mauler's videos when even many of Mauler's original critics are now cranking out their own long long mans.

Joseph Anderson's last two videos are a four hour video on the Witcher, and a five hour video on W2. Only one of Hbomberguy's last five videos run under an hour long - but you'd have to go back four years to find another video of his that goes over an hour (the Sherlock one)

[u/MrFahrenheit2k]

Assassin's Creed Valhalla takes 130-160 hours to beat, so this 3 hour review is nearly not as long as the game itself. Checkmate, toxic brood!

[u/Brehmstorm]

Most complaints I see like that are on Twitter, though. Never jn the actual video's comment section.

[u/Claudioub16]

Don't worry, I will do it