Assassin's Creed: Valhalla
- Thread starter AzBat
- Start date
The art looks so cartoony. Seems fitting in my brain to just rename this to Vinland Saga: The Game.
btw the taglines on the trailer, so... this is assassin's creed or Viking's Creed?
could be originally planned as For Honor DLC but reworked as AC?
btw the taglines on the trailer, so... this is assassin's creed or Viking's Creed?
could be originally planned as For Honor DLC but reworked as AC?
It’s the perfect anti-cover - who would suspect the barbarian as being a master assassin?btw the taglines on the trailer, so... this is assassin's creed or Viking's Creed?
Silent_Buddha
Legend
Not necessarily. Some companies do a 1.5 release. Witcher 1 and 2 had a rerelease with technical improvements to the engine and rendering. But existing customers got it for free. Same thing happened with one of the Call of Juarez games, IIRC, with an engine update from Dx9 to Dx10.
Prior to console first development for PC developers (like CDPR), cross gen. was generally in terms of updating or redoing the game engine to accommodate a new level of DX combined with updated and improved assets. You can still see this with some indie developers.
With PC developers moving to console we move to the following situation...
Bioshock series, Metro series, and others have had rereleases with updated engines and graphics. On consoles players had to buy the game again. On PC, existing owners sometimes get them for free (Bioshock series) and sometimes have to pay for it (Metro series).
Regards,
SB
Tkumpathenurpahl
Veteran
Subdue and conquer England... So the player's a villain?
In the next Assassin's Creed game, will the player control an English, land owning aristocrat who assassinates Irish peasants by forcing them to grow potatoes in spite of the blight?
For those wondering, yes, that is the reason for the Irish potato famine: English aristocrats refusing the Irish the right to grow food that could actually grow.
This reminds me of the time Graham Linehan was talking about games on Charlie Brooker's Gameswipe.
The last AC game I played properly was Black Flag, so I don't know if the storytelling has dramatically improved since then, but if it hasn't, this story is going to be quite ham fisted. The trailer suggests it will be, by portraying the king (of whichever kingdom) as some sort of deceitful villainous type, when he's describing the people invading his country, as it intercuts with snippets of them raiding and burning down a settlement.
Invading, raiding, and destroying the homes of peasants isn't heroic. I appreciate the quandary of "how do you play as a Viking, and be the hero to an audience with 21st century sensibilities?" I appreciate less their conclusion of "invade England and make 1 or more of its kings shallow villains with twirly moustaches."
Wouldn't it be more appropriate to play as, say, a Pict? Someone who's a good foot smaller than the invading giants? The Vikings make more sense as the equivalent of the Templars, given the Templars' desire to control and subdue (and conquer.) The Picts then make more sense as Assassins, because a much smaller person is going to have to lurk in and strike from the shadows.
I dunno, it strikes me that there was a Ubisoft focus group somewhere that asked "what's popular?" got the answer "Vikings!" and set to work slapping beards and fur on all of Odyssey's character models. And rather than get creative and consider the story and gameplay ramifications thereof, they decided that in a Viking themed game, of course you're going to play as a Viking! How do you do that? Cheap acts of villainy from a baddie who's just a one dimensional gameplay mechanic propellent.
I was trying to imagine that bear sized wrestler jump from hut to hut without being noticed.
Yeah it would be awesome if it's a real rpg with proper branching story (like growlansher). Be a villain, be a good guy. Or heck, even better if it allow you to do "humane war" and the NPCs will comments on that (like GATE anime).
Yeah I have my concerns about that too. They actually where brutal invaders that as the saying goes (and the trailer itself alluded to) "rape, pillage and murder". Not too sure how well I'll get on with not only playing one of them, but playing one of them portrayed as the heroes subduing the "evil foreign nation".
Then again I had similar concerns over AC3's initial reveals but it turned out to be far more balanced than the initial trailers suggested.
AC games have hardly ever been historically accurate!
I think you're expecting way too much. The XSX GPU is only 2-3x more powerful than the XBX GPU (ignoring memory bandwidth where it's much less). Since both are already running at 4K and the XBX will be running 30fps, you've just used up most of your spare power but doubling framerate to 60fps. "Full blown raytracing" is likely to pull that back to well under double XBX performance so I don't see much room for anything else on top if you're running at 60fps too.
In general people probably need to temper their expectations for next gen graphics. We're already way past the point of diminishing returns and a massive chunk of the generational power increase will be sucked up by going from a baseline resolution of 1080p to 4K (ignoring the mid-gen refreshes).
That's not to say the graphics won't be obviously better. But a PS3->PS4 level increase seems highly unlikely. Other aspects should hopefully improve to a greater degree though thanks to the massive CPU and storage jumps.
Agreed, but portraying invading barbarians as heroes over besieged local populations seems a little too far. I'm sure they're just overdramatising for the trailer and the story itself will contain far more subtlety
D
Deleted member 11852
Guest
The player wasn't particularly heroic in in Black Flag, Unity or Odyssey; in the latter you literally were a Misthios: a mercenary. Pirates, Assassin's and Mercenaries are not typically heroics archetypes so Valhalla isn't changing much in this regard. I doubt there will be much attacking peasants beyond a few intro missions, because that just isn't interesting.
edit: despite the fact I'm not a fan of AC's RPG-combat, if this is a launch game for PS5/XSX I will be very happy indeed. But unless these consoles are launching in November, I expect this game to follow a few weeks after launch unless somebody buys a few weeks off launch exclusivity.
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Tkumpathenurpahl
Veteran
Exactly. It's like Amazon's New World game. Every time I see a screenshot of it, I'm baffled as to how anyone greenlit the project.
Good point, a switch up like AC3 would be interesting.
Maybe the guy we see in the trailer is the main character's father, and you control the child that was born in the Viking settlement in England? That would make for a much more interesting narrative angle IMO. You wouldn't be controlling a raping, pillaging invader who had laid claim to land that isn't theirs, you'd be controlling a child who was born into that stolen land. The immorality isn't the child's, it's their father's, but the child would be burdened.
I doubt that's going to be the case though, given the conquer and subdue tagline. That strikes me more as the idiom of an invader. I could be wrong, it could be the mantra that Viking Dad, during his dying breaths or something, gives to his Vikenglish child.
Correct, but none of the ones I've played had me controlling a villain. Someone who's morally grey, sure, but an antihero is distinct from a villain. And I think "conquer and subdue" goes beyond the territory of antihero and into the territory of villain.
When it comes to storytelling, a lack of historical accuracy doesn't bother me, same with scientific accuracy. I care about themes and characters. So when the player's avatar is part of an invading force which is responsible for swathes of innocent deaths, and a gameplay mechanic is to conquer this foreign land, I get the feeling that a very fundamental theme is a rapacious one, and a very fundamental character is an unsympathetic one.
So that's what bothers me. I wouldn't, for example, mind them adding in unicorns. Unless those unicorns were unsympathetic...
Not particularly heroic, no. But not particularly villainous either.
AC1: I played as Altaïr, a native of the lands being invaded by the Knights Templar. The villains were the invaders.
AC2 + Brotherhood: I played as Ezio, a noble who falls foul of a cruel and murderous political class. The villains were the corrupt political class, especially the Borgia family.
AC Revelations: I can't remember anything about that game, other than the fact that I played it over the Christmas period to help me adjust to night shifts. The villain here is the state of intoxication I was in.
AC3: you begin as an invader, then there's a switch up, and you're a native who fights the invaders. The villains are the invaders.
AC Black Flag: you play as a pirate, but a pirate who mainly fights and steals from Spanish and British Imperial forces, both of which are invaders. The villains are the invaders.
AC Odyssey: I've barely played any of this entry, but given that the states of Greece were constantly at war with each other, it doesn't strike me as a villainous context in which to be a mercenary. The villains in this game are the poorly implemented RPG mechanics.
1, 2, Brotherhood, 3, and Black Flag are the ones I've played and completed (and actually remember haha.) In each of them, you play as a plucky underdog who takes the fight to the more powerful forces who are trying to... conquer and subdue.
Now that looks to be getting inverted. The trailer could be playing with us. I recall reading that one of the AC games (one of the ones I didn't play - perhaps Rogue) had you control a Templar. Maybe that's the case here. If so, all is forgiven and it would be quite interesting to play as a villain who has valid motivations.
But I fear that this inversion is more along the Weiss & Benioff or Rian Johnson lines of... *sigh* subversion of expectations. More along the lines of "I bet you weren't expecting the Assassins to start behaving like the Templars, right? Well now they do!!"
SoE Writer
"You're being chased down a dark alleyway. Ahead you see a pub, your only hope of shelter, your only chance to lose your pursuer, but there are half a dozen scoundrels stood in front of it."
We, the audience, in our heads
"Oooh, I wonder if he's going to fight the scoundrels? Or turn and face his pursuer? Maybe the scoundrels will be friendly and block the pursuer so that our fair hero can head inside and get pissed? I wonder, I wonder, I wonder. Maybe they'll surprise me!? Aww man, I hope they surprise me!"
SoE Writer
"And he woke up and it was aaaaaall a dream."
We, the audience, in our heads
"Well, that was certainly surprising I suppose."
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cheapchips
Veteran
Has that been confirmed? They were talking 4k30 at the May event.
cheapchips
Veteran
You'd think, but at the moment they're only saying "At least 4k 30fps" on XSX.
