(2020) Assassin's Creed Valhalla

Only performance problem I've had is the fullscreen vs. borderless thing. I'd much rather use borderless anyway, WD Legion annoyed me because it was the opposite and ran like shit unless it was fullscreen. Otherwise I am getting 60-100 fps with only a couple settings tweaked down from ultra, at 3440x1440. There's a few dips into the 50's according to the performance graph, but nothing Freesync can't hide. Only other weird thing is that it's using all 12 cores, but only at about 30-35% on any of them.

WD Legion would've crashed half a dozen times in the amount of time I've played so far, and this hasn't crashed at all yet. So that's another mark in favor of the AMD-optimized Anvil engine over whatever heap of shit they used for Watch Dogs.

12 hours in and I didn't encounter any performance issues (9900k and 2080) but sometimes the UI lags in world map and other menus. The game is gorgeous and combat gameplay feels better than Origins, similar to Odyssey, they simplified inventory / loot and I'm not sure how I feel about that, though it still offers a lot of variety combat wise. The story is okay-ish (muh honor) but as someone said it before, they really need to fuck off with the Animus bullshit, it's not that invasive in Valhalla but feels kind of disjointed and out of place.

Also, about the usual "I've stopped playing AC in 2008 / how assassiny is the game now" questions, to me it pretty much feels like a followup of Odyssey where you can ninja your way through almost everything but the game will impose you crowded battles at some point you can either get straight into melee, bow snipe at range or murder people from above but if you're into some Splinter Cell stuff well, your character is story-driven. The usual Assassin's Creed material is still there, but it's rather an open world adventure with quests than your typical kill missions.

TL;DR: If you liked Origins and especially Odyssey, you'll like Valhalla. If you played the old AC games, it's a different take, there's lot of stuff to do besides "murder X" and a lot of places to explore and things to collect. If you're playing on PC just get one month of Ubisoft+ sub, you can cancel your sub anytime so it's just $15 to try it. If you're playing on console, I'd invite you to read reviews because the game seems to run poorly on old-gen consoles.

Blitz said:

The Greece setting in Odyssey was absolutely amazing -- and Valhalla has been absolutely stunning so far. These are very satisfying games to play, and the average storylines & the "animus" tie-ins, don't detract from the games much.

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Yeah I loved Greece world and I'm fond of the raiding Viking stuff too. To be honest Origins world was good too but to me because I only like my egyptians in Stargate or Rome.

Whelp, few hours of play, performance not too bad on an old 970, I know mostly what settings to tone down for it after playing rdr2 td2 odyssey to get 60fps. Game is heavy gpu for sure, while it's only using half my cpu(i5-9600k) and memory(16gigs).

Ran into a bug today though involving the sliding selves, where I interact with it to move, but then it won't let me disengage with it lol, had to port or reload to get out of that.

Yes t's Odyssey reskinned for the most part, but I loved that game and vikings so double plus for me. I really like the new skills tree expanded to be like poe, feels like you can really customize the character to the 3 areas of combat. I don't mind the new loot system either, upgrading old items or getting new items to replace old items, it's about the same really, as long as they give me access to items to make builds earlier on, so I don't actually have to wait till like level 50-70 to make a decent poison or fire build because I need to use a certain high level item.

Vandyn said:

As someone who's never really played the AC games, what is a good starting point (in terms of quality). I'm guessing most are standalone stories?

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It really depends the first truly awesome upgrade in recent memory imho was Black Flag with the addition of the ship stuff. The most well rounded would be Origin/Odyssey but there is literally no reason not to jump in with the newest one. You could also just go with what historical period you like better than others.

Dom said:

AC3 was the one that introduced the ship combat.

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My bad.

yeah the ship combat in ac3 was like a mini-game in content. with black flag the jackdaw almost felt like a character in and of itself.

Dom said:

It's fine. it's not like it was a memorable or well designed system in the game. Black Flag turned it into something good and integrated it into the game world.

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No doubt, I remembered as soon as you mentioned it though. It was so forgettable in 3 but the proper way to mention it in Black Flag is how you just did. They made it memorable and fully integrated into the world.

Most AC prior to Black Flag were '"hey let's Splinter Cell this target, oh wait there's combat happening, just press Y to dodge til next year" formulaic, unless you were going for the perfect kill run, combat was a Simon game chore.

jooka said:

So it turns out it was my controller causing all the fuckery, I left it plugged in not thinking about it and voila works perfectly. Switch to bluetooth, everything goes to shit again, WTF

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I am so glad I read this earlier because I ended up having crazy issues and bluetooth was the culprit. Good looking out Jooka.

Did most of you just leave it on explorer or bump it to pathfinder?

after you get to england and, what i assume is find your settlement to start... my game just... stops doing anything. you go through a cutscene where you meet a stableman and a merchant and invite them to join your settlement, the cutscene ends and me, dag and sigurd are just standing there in a football huddle and all i can do is move the camera around and put my hood on and off. no one moves other than their generic idle animations. it's sort of infuriating.

i've reloaded the game like 3 times, started from a different save point... almost wondering if i should just restart my whole game... i'm not super far in and i didn't really explore norway... bleh

Going to play this tonight/tomorrow on the new XSX. Which gender has the better voice acting this time around?

Haven't tried the male voice but the female is pretty great