Assassin's Creed: Valhalla

Great to hear, but the game is still underwhelming. Nothing about the gameplay is appealing, IMHO.

 

An opportunity to bring in RT or something really next gen wasted. Maybe just RT shadows or something. Something simple.

That being said, all of Ubisoft's titles would benefit from higher frame rate. They are beautiful titles, but the response is really slow.

 

Yeah but at 60fps And no loading, I’ll give it a go for sure! Those were always my biggest issues with the previous games.

 

Yeah, I wasn't a fan of the transition to full RPG. I can't insta-stab this guy because he's five levels higher?

Putting arbitrary barriers in the way of why I can't assassinate somebody in an Assassin's Creed game?

Ubisoft lost me this year. Watch Dogs Legion - you can be anybody; this granny, this kid, this dude, this chav? Actually, I like to invest in my character over the course of the game, so playing as an ephemeral character for 20 minutes appeals zero.

 

I doubt framerate will affect the laggy response in their games. Seems to be an animation thing.

 

It doesn't going by the PC versions. I'm not sure what it is. Their games have poor animation to begin with so it must be something else.

 

I thought it was deliberate. I really loved the handling of Arno in Unity, you could't spin on a dime but would weave effectively through those massive crowds. The only control issue I really hated in Assassin's Creed, which was still a thing in Odyssey, was the overly sticky climbing decontrols.

Have a hold button (press once to toggle hold/release or press-to-hold - user selectable) and if I'm not holding, don't have me stick to anything. How hard is this?

 

The last run in I had with AC was Origins and Origins was fairly good on console, or at least on XSX.
But it sounds like Odyssey is worth trying.
I'd be willing to try Valhalla after reading reviews to find any sort of gating system they might have in place.

 

I really the idea of Odyssey. The world environment is absolutely amazing but but it's just too fecking long and too big. And it's really easy to wander from here - where you are level appropriate to one-stab-kill an enemy - to over here, where the enemies are five level high and you basically can't damage them at all.

As quote one of my favour anime shows, Sword Art Online, (haters can just f*** off): "400 in seven seconds give or take. That about the total damage the seven of you can inflict on me. I'm level 78. I got 14,500 HP. My battle healing skill regenerates 600 points every 10 seconds. We could stand here all day and you wouldn't get anywhere." This is just not fun, doubly so in a single player game.

Why Ubisoft, WHY!?!

 

I never had an issue with Odessey's leveling. There was plenty to do in level appropriate areas. I'm an ex-wow player so that gated world progression felt like an old habit.

(although I think they adjust the 20's leveling by the time I bought it)

 

Odyssey’s size was its biggest problem.

Never thought I’d say it but... Turns out that there is such a thing as too big.

 

That so reminds me of exploits in text-based DikuMUD. This is long ago so the numbers may be off, but it's of the same sort. One server in particular had huge mobs called Trees that had hundreds of thousands of hitpoints. You weren't meant to be able to kill them. Your typical level 20 warrior weapon did maybe 60 points of damage per hit and you could maybe hit once every 2 seconds depending on the speed of your network connection and client. Meanwhile the trees hit for hundreds of damage. There used to be organized raid parties put together that would have 30-40 people in them with clerics all set to heal and warriors set to attack and rescue based on the lead tank's health. It would go on for hours until everyone finally would give up. Over the entire time the tree lost maybe 10% life total over the course of hours and hours. It would heal back nearly all of the damage it took every 10-15 minutes or so.

It wasn't until later when it became feasible, using a few exploits I discovered. The thief class had higher than usual backstab damage multiplier since their weapons were limited for lower damage and still had some strength based damage boosts as well. They also had the ability to flee before the mob could counter-attack if you could macro it yourself or had a nice client (TinyFugue). One day I found what I thought was a novelty item called the Cheese Grater or Cheese Slicer. turns out in the hands of my thief it was a god killer. It's damage was negative number, like negative thousand or something crazy like that as it was obviously not meant to be able to do any damage at all. As best as I can tell, the server code did some even number of calculations using multiplication for the thief class, maybe one for backstab bonus and one for strength bonus. Negative times Negative equals Positive. I was soloing trees with the BackStab/Flee strategy in minutes. Entire forest was decimated.

All the fun ended when an Admin or two logged on and was curious enough to see why there were 80+ users shouting "TIMBER!" every few minutes from the Forest area and why there were so many noobs leveling up from 1 to 20 in about 15 minutes. The admins forced my character to sacrifice the item, thus destroying it and all the fun.



Anyways, it seems beyond annoying to me that in an AC game that you're gated by levels. I guess they ran out of techniques to artificially gate your progress, like certain targets being only available after you learned how to triple jump or zipline, or pick locks, etc.

 

For the life of me, I can not understand the appeal of Ubisoft open world games. As you level up all the enemies around you level up as well so nothing actually changes. You're just fighting the exact same enemies over and over that are always the same power level compared to you.

 

yes but its a hard thing to balance, in my game I recently got rid of levels altogether for the enemies (they just get better items so are harder to fight) but its a PITA to get right

 

Does Valhalla follow the Origins/Odessey leveling model (I assume so, but don't know)?

 

It looks like it does, the system looks very similar but I’m sure they’ve made a few tweaks.

 

Too big and based on the places I visited, also lacking variety in biomes. Everything looks stunning but, and maybe I missed some different biomes because the map is so big, but everywhere kind of looks like everywhere else. I mean it's all distinct and there are some great geographical areas, mountain paths, deep valleys etc, but it mostly all looks the same.

They tweaked the levelling system in Odyssey over time. I played at launch and tried a second run earlier this year and got a bit further. If I recollect right, and this may be backwards, originally there was less rubber-banding on differences in level between you and the enemies, i.e. you levelled as played but most areas have enemies of a fixed range of levels. My most recent play I recall there was options for more aggressive rubber-banding and even options to allow you to out-level enemies in certain places.

I still love Unity, I like the challenge of needing to infiltrate somewhere, spotting all the envies and working around them (or killing them) to accomplish my mission. Here is the terrain. Good luck. I don't want an open world game, which invites exploration, then punishes you with high-level enemies because you explored. I'm an assassin, if I stealth assassinate somebody from cover, they should be dead, they shouldn't lose 10% of their HP which regenerates in seconds while I'm avoid their one-hit-kill attacks.

So I'll be giving Valhalla a miss. Fortunately I'm barely into Ghost of Tsushima which is basically a Sony first party old school Assassin's Creed game set in Japan.

 

Oh it’s an absolutely beautiful game (although I look forward to a next gen AC to fix all the little limitations it had) but yes, all way too big and samey. I think the Atlantis DLC provides some nice variety but I never bought that, as by then (and after getting the Platinum, which was LONG) I’d had enough.

 

The game looks much better with polish


Cool trailer



And some previews

 

It does look much better. If it's single player, I will buy. If it's MP, I won't. I am a bit averse to Ubisoft MP games at this point in time.

The skills upgrades still reminds me a lot of the Path of Exile upgrade system.

You can change you character sex on the fly during the game? Isn't that going to break the immersion?