Assassin's Creed Valhalla Fronts Ubisoft's Strongest Quarter In History

This worries me a bit. I enjoyed Vallhala as a game, but as an Assassins Creed entry, it was a very weak one. Sadly, it's success might simply tell Ubisoft this is the right direction for the Series, and we will just get another huge landscape to explore again next game, with minimal vertical exploration, zero rooftop running, and no parkour Dungeons/temples, the kinda stuff that made AC so great and unique to begin with.

Had no idea Assassin's Creed 3 sold that much..

@Tharsman Eewww, Valhalla is a flat landscape with no verticality like 3? Ew ew ew! I regret buying it now. I hated 3. I consider it a spinoff.

I think a lot of games companies are going to get the wrong messages from this year. Things like Animal Crossing and Valhalla did a lot wrong, but they sold amazing numbers, and the companies are going to try to replicate the success of their flawed games endlessly to recapture those sales, which were no doubt largely pandemic fueled.

But I kept hearing that Valhalla was such a good entry, better than Odyssey....it sounds to me like it's much worse.

@Trainer I dont personally have much issue with the grinding. It's always been a part of the game, in one way or another. Be it upgrading your weaponry, that might require upgrading your town first, or upgrading your ship, or what not. Its always been very hard in AC, starting with AC2, to just go out there and play through all the missions and ignore the progression.

It's gotten a lot harder since Unity, though. Replaying 4 now, and although most ship combat is heavily tied to your upgrades, hand to hand combat can mostly all be done even bare handed if you are VERY good at it.

I played Origin, Odyssey and Valhalla the same way I play every AC game (doing side content first) and never had to grind for any story content. I understand the desire to just do the story content, though.

Got to give this to older games: after you were done, if you wanted to re-experience the story, you could just select the memories in the dna sync menu and play through them, fully upgraded. Is there even a New Game+ in the last 3 games to make up for that? I have not gone back to check.

I also dont have much trouble with the microtransactions in the last 3 games. They are almost all cosmetic stuff that break immersion anyways.

Do feel its an insult that they provide the 2xp thing, but in all fairness, we can also just dumb down the difficulty instead.

Despite that, my personal grudge is that the game lost all vertical exploration. Climbing anything is as easy as pushing forward and waiting, most of the time. Some arbitrary keep walls are entirely unclimbable unless there is a huge hole to walk through... I miss having to figure out how to go around a tower to climb all the way to the top.

@Trainer AC is now an actual RPG, not an action adventure like in the past. In that context, grind encounters and materials for XP to level up or get one shot doesn't sound different from any other RPG. Or at least JRPG, ans WRPGs tend to be either on rails like Mass Effect, or level-scaling like Elder Scrolls.