sobaka770
Banned
100 hours. It took me a 100 hours to complete this game. I’ve done the main quests, all the Order members are dead, Asgard/Jotunheim visions are complete. I’ve done roughly 80% of all the mysteries and artifacts, found Thor’s hammer and Excalibur – pretty much completed most of the interesting content.
And boy I got things to say. The main one being: STOP IT Ubisoft! Seriously, just take a breather and think about what you’re doing! AC: Valhalla is a good game. No it’s a great game on paper – good mix of new AC with some old stuff returning like 1-hit assassinations, social stealth and, personal favourite, finding bits of a video about precursor race through puzzles straight out of AC2 (only puzzles are worse in this one). It has meaty if slightly janky combat which gels well together once you upgrade your character with a few skills, it has good main protagonist and a likeable supporting cast. The raid system is fun and assaulting castles while obviously scaled-down feels quite epic. It’s a much better package than Odyssey and Origins in core mechanics.
That being said, the game is ruined, totally and irrevocably by it’s sheer length. I don’t always agree with SkillUp but his review was right on point. I totally loved my first 30 hours with the game, I kind of liked it at hour 50 – but the last part was me just dashing through cutscenes and repetitive slog to get to the end. And to what end?
And boy I got things to say. The main one being: STOP IT Ubisoft! Seriously, just take a breather and think about what you’re doing! AC: Valhalla is a good game. No it’s a great game on paper – good mix of new AC with some old stuff returning like 1-hit assassinations, social stealth and, personal favourite, finding bits of a video about precursor race through puzzles straight out of AC2 (only puzzles are worse in this one). It has meaty if slightly janky combat which gels well together once you upgrade your character with a few skills, it has good main protagonist and a likeable supporting cast. The raid system is fun and assaulting castles while obviously scaled-down feels quite epic. It’s a much better package than Odyssey and Origins in core mechanics.
That being said, the game is ruined, totally and irrevocably by it’s sheer length. I don’t always agree with SkillUp but his review was right on point. I totally loved my first 30 hours with the game, I kind of liked it at hour 50 – but the last part was me just dashing through cutscenes and repetitive slog to get to the end. And to what end?
- The supporting characters and their arcs are underdeveloped. Because of the structure of the game you spend a few hours liberating a territory before moving on. There are a TON of territories (15-20?) That means you meet a cast of characters for a short arc and apart from very short cameos for some later on they are gone from the game. You don't see them for dozens of hours and their plotline never comes back. Remember how in ME2 you went on that suicide mission and you had a squad and they had a mission each and the game was 30 hours long and you felt the bond with all these guys? Well it doesn’t work when the game is 100 hours, you forget the sidequests you were doing in each region because they are all padding with similar missions. It's not great when during the final battle when I met them all my only reaction I had was: I don't remember half of these guys. And even if I remember a character the way they are written clearly shows how bad the structure of the overall narrative is. In the final region I learned Ubba died – I remember Ubba, he was in one of the earlier memorable regions, not the one where I had to break up a couple, but wait: he dies off-screen and an NPC is telling me that and we don’t really get to do anything? How about remove 10 of these useless NPCs, spend more time with 5 or 6 across all regions so that they grow with me?
- The story is disjointed overall, and characters don’t make sense. Ubisoft apparently had different teams work on different regions and it shows in the chapter-based story approach but it also screws up the overarching storyline as well. Sigurd is supposed to be important but you barely interact with him after the first couple of hours and his character is all over the place. The climax of the story is muddled as usually is the case in latest AC games where you get a modern -day story dump in penultimate chapter and a totally underwhelming but apparently plot-resolving assault on a village(?)… I didn't believe it at first but it's true: after all the castles I assaulted in the game the last big fight is in a village and the alliances we made result in all our friends coming not with huge armies but seemingly by themselves in a single viking ship.It feels like there was a clear budget issue with the game ending as it just ends on a whimper of a mission without any emotional resonance. After the village is burned and you bury the dead NPCs No 1, 5 and 9 you literally return to Ravensthorpe and report back to Randvi and the game says – hey congrats you liberated England.
- So many wasted opportunities. I get that Ubisoft is meandering with the whole Isu-present day lore and it’s getting always more complicated and doesn’t gel together but if you’re gonna put Excalibur and Thor’s garments and hammer in a game, have decency to at least have a quest for them? Am I asking too much but to provide some context to finding 12 treasures across the map or killing the three witches other than pure world exploration? If you are burnt out by end-game and don't visit the unremarkable cave in the last region you might even never find the damn sword. For all the stealing from Wither 3 – Ubisoft can’t seem to be capable of understanding that the greatest strength of that game was density and sheer world-building and cohesion. If there’s a chest with treasure in a game there was a good chance there would be a letter or an NPC having a brief line about it. Hunting for Witcher gear was not just finding it on a map, you had letters and rumours to guide you in the quest log. Sometimes it simply meant buying a map from the merchant, but it’s something!
- 30 hours condensed awesome >>>> 100 hours of slog. Enough of games wasting my time because people want to "get their money worth". It's a videogame - you get your money worth in entertainment not in hours. I will not play Valhalla again. I will come back for DLC, but this is a game which will never ever be re-played. Just like Odyssey before – 100 hours of padding and shit side-questing while waiting for story bits to drop with glacial pacing is abhorrent game design. And what purpose does it even serve? I’m not sure how much Ubi makes on mcirotransactions for AC but I doubt people would buy more cosmetics and resources just because they have to spend more time in the game. Nothing in the store can even help making the game shorter this time, I was way overleveled by mid-game with just minor side-questing. Ubisoft’s own Watch Dogs Legion and Fenix Rising may not be as huge as AC but their 20-30 hour story is much more memorable, digestible and doesn’t outstay its welcome by much. Having AC entries become a 100-hour slog with not enough gameplay to support such length is stupid. I’d much rather replay AC2 or ME2 or even Origins (even purchase remaster) than ever touch Odyssey or Valhalla in a few years. I won’t even recommend the last 2 because they are simply too long and there are better ways to spend a 100 hours gaming.
