Assassin's Creed Valhalla: Post-Release Content Updates

Ubisoft+ subscription was again 1€ for a month and it was time for me to return to Assassin's Creed Valhalla, which had finally gotten the last of its story updates at the end of last year. And there sure was a whole lot of content added in the two years the game was actively supported post launch. In total, Valhalla got three paid expansions and about five free additions that could be considered as separate bigger features. I was finished with the full game at 270 hours played.

I had serious trouble figuring out in what order I should do things. I ended up on some manner of release order though hardly a strict one. For instance, River Raids were updated twice after an expansion came out and you can thus kind of end up visiting the expansion-related areas ahead of time in the mode. I could tell when there were features that would probably be properly introduced in the actual expansions. But it didn't truly matter.

Before I got to any of the added stuff though, I had to finish all the fishing quests I hadn't done. It turned out to be quite an undertaking, chasing fishing spots all over England and Norway to find specific sizes of different fish. That was a good opportunity to reattune with the game's controls and mechanics though. I tried every weapon Valhalla this time but in the end returned to dual daggers. Their special fast stabbing attacks return adrenaline so quickly that you can stunlock all enemies not immune to Kick of Tyr. That includes the majority of humanoid bosses.

River Raids

Next I did the River Raids which I had also already started previously. While raiding in the main game is a fun activity, in this mode it becomes tedious, even if you only play it a little to get just some of the available rewards. I feel every time a Ubisoft game wants you to do a repeated activity, it's always immediately boring on the first replay. Clearing a monastery for a unique skill or item is fun; doing the same thing repeatedly for generic resources is not.

Your jomsviking hirelings can also end up injured in a river raid and not be able to participate in the next raid or two. You can help a downed viking up before they're out but you need a ration for that. And the vikings go down so easily that you're soon enough out of rations anyway -- and raids even begin without rations. I don't know what Ubisoft Montreal was thinking making you babysit your crew like that. The natural conclusion is to leave the vikings in your boat and clear the outpost on your own before starting a raid so that you can open the supply chests.

A weekly Connect challenge was 50 window assassinations --
bit of a grind.

Grinding the mode enough allows you to upgrade your jomsviking hall to hire up to rank 5 vikings. The max rank ones are definitely more durable but hardly invincible yet either. There are places in the river maps where two enemy crossbowmen can easily take out your whole crew if you're not there to do something about it.

The jomsvikings are other players' customized lieutenants and can have quite fancy looking equipment, especially if the player had endgame/cash shop gear visuals to pick from. I'm not sure if lieutenant recustomization was a thing before or did I just miss it then, but at least now you can edit their appearance after creation. I liked that because I created mine when I still had only very basic stuff. I reckon people will rather recruit a viking in a flaming armor than a generic looking one. You're unlikely to get rich from other players hiring your lieutenant regardless though.

I feel AC Valhalla had more trouble with morality than other Assassin's Creed games. Raiding settlements didn't exactly make vikings the good guys of history. Maybe that's why Ubisoft decided to keep desynchronization when attacking civilians like in the games you play as an actual assassin. But it sure is ridiculous to have the game tell you that vikings didn't do that. I think Ubisoft would have been better off with just having your attacks not connect with neutral NPCs and not show such a stupid claim.

Mastery Challenges

After completing the River Raid quest chain, I started doing Mastery Challenges. There are quite a few of them now after all the updates. Doing them back to back can get exhausting -- especially if you try to get gold medal in each.

Each challenge location has a Bear, a Raven, and a Wolf challenge -- melee, stealth, and ranged respectively. You play with given active abilities and gear but your passive perk points do count as they are. Getting gold requires a perfect run most of the time. Based on your medal, you get tokens to buy stuff from the mode's related quest character.

I initially retried the challenges until I got gold but then realized (as they were getting tiresome) that I don't really need to do that since I didn't care about achievements on this non-Steam game and the related Ubi Connect challenges don't require 100% completion. In the end I had still gotten enough gold medals to buy the full armor set, which seemed like the main reward.

I'm not entirely sure but I think the mode's name implies that you're supposed to be past maximum character level with points in the three mastery passives. I had that originally but some update expanded the passive tree and I no longer had things maxed out when I returned to the game. I think that may have made some of the challenges slightly more difficult.

While doing the masteries (and looking up for some help on Youtube), I learned that the mythical Excalibur and Mjölnir are in AC Valhalla. I had done the prior work required to be able to collect them but the game gives you no quest for either and so I had missed them.

Wrath of the Druids

The first big expansion is mostly more of the same stuff from the main game -- just in Ireland. Druids were not as prominent in the story as I had expected based on the title. The expansion's writing struggled quite a bit too. It also brought back the limited-space currency chest feature that's been missing in these post-Syndicate games.

Eivor's connection to the island is yet another cousin of hers. I knew instantly things weren't going to go well for the dude because he gave off such Dragon Age's Alistair or Guardians of the Galaxy's Star-Lord vibes. That kind of character always seem to end up dead in AC Valhalla.

The stone stacking puzzle from the main game appear in this expansion as well but I think they were far easier. I remember seeing numerous frustrated comments about the original ones and I too had trouble with a few of those.

The Siege of Paris

In the second expansion, Eivor travels to Francia: yet more familiar vikings there (for Eivor) but also a possible future Frank invasion to England. Eivor wants Charles III the Fat to promise no attacks will be coming. The expansion's narrative seemed oddly convoluted, as if the writers had had hard time tangling everything in historical events.

Assassinations were more involved than usual, requiring proper investigation. Exploring locations beforehand can spoil the fun of discovery in that though.

I think the expansion's rats were a failed puzzle feature. I would guess the developers had been inspired by the Plague Tale games but the implementation of the critters in this game was just annoying.

Also, I did do the GPU replacement on my desktop PC I mentioned thinking about in my Far Cry 6 post. With the newer card, AC Valhalla ran at 60 fps on 1080p with high settings. However, in this and the following expansion I noticed that my PC fairly often had trouble streaming assets when traveling the world, resulting in Eivor's mount slowing down or the game straight-up pausing to load. This whole 150GB monster of a game should really be installed on an SSD (like about all new titles these days). Lowering world detail and clutter settings down to medium however helped with the loading problem considerably.

A Fated Encounter

AC Valhalla's crossover story has actual crossover unlike the one in AC Odyssey. On Isle of Skye, Eivor meets Kassandra who's after Isu artifacts. For once it wasn't Eivor but me who was meeting a familiar face. And for the first time in this game I cared about an NPC.

Kassandra's become quite recluse of a person over the 1300 (?) years she has already lived by the time Eivor meets her. It is understandable for her to keep low profile but I feel she could have been less coy with Eivor who has already encountered all kinds of weird stuff. I liked the detail of how Kassandra is all glowy when you use Eivor's Odin sight.

Isle of Skye is a hefty free update and I quite liked it. You get few easter egg gear pieces too like the Spear of Leonidas. I got excited when I saw the name in the loot feed because I thought I would be getting the amazing looks of how the broken spearhead was at the end of Odyssey. But it turned out to be more like the modest looks of the whole spear in the prologue when in the hands of Leonidas -- and to be a non-canon thing anyway.

It's funny how in Odyssey I originally never considered the fact that Leyla has the actual spearhead in modern time. Why Kassandra abandoned it? What happened to its powers? I blame the length of the game having caused me to forget about the spear. But had I been wondering, the crossover story in Odyssey would have answered that mystery. Also a pro tip: Don't be hasty with progressing in the main quest of the crossover story in Odyssey until you've fully explored the island. Clearing outposts without any of Kassandra's powers is a pain. (You do still have all powers outside the island so that the rest of the game doesn't actually become unplayable afterwards.)

Tombs of the Fallen

Another free content update (or two) were Tombs of the Fallen which add puzzle locations all over England. They're not as fun as the dungeons (which also had combat occasionally) in the early titles of the series but were reasonably enjoyable still. They don't overstay their welcome even if the last one is pretty long.

Dawn of Ragnarök

The final expansion gets Eivor once again to dream of Havi (Odin) -- essentially picturing more final moments of the Isu dressed as Norse mythology. This time I changed Eivor's gender to male which was a good decision. Havi is clearly a different character. Not having female Eivor voice him made things feel less like a weird re-enactment it had been earlier in the main game for me when doing the other dreams.

Dawn of Ragnarök takes place in Svartalfheim which is inhabited by dwarves (and not black elves which I would think svartalf to be based on the word alone). Havi is trying to save his son Baldr who's been captured by the fire giants of Muspelheim.

The expansion is one of the better ones Ubisoft has ever done even though I dislike the three regions, three stories thing they repeated once more -- how about just one big continuous one for a change? I reckon that such modular approach makes content production more efficient: divided regions for different teams to work on concurrently. I did enjoy the expansion's location and the new special powers though. Being able to fly was particularly cool even if it's a bit limited and janky: essentially the same as controlling the bird your character has in these newer AC games.

Havi is hard to like as a protagonist: so utterly arrogant and overconfident. Maybe his great deeds in the past molded him into such a person but the way he constantly exaggerates his greatness makes one ponder if his stories are even half true. It's not hard to guess how things will go; you know his quest is doomed to fail. At least Loki is not involved in this one to make things annoying.

The Forgotten Saga

The Forgotten Saga was a free update but it's pretty much a continuation to the last expansion: another Havi dream. The god chases after Baldr to Helheim to bring him back from the dead. Instead Havi ends up stuck in a looping limbo, which fits perfectly the roguelike-inspired premise of the mode. I liked the perceived finality of the thing.

It's a shame big studios so rarely dapple with roguelike elements. I would particularly like to see procedural map generation in a first or third person game with AAA quality assets. The Forgotten Saga doesn't do that either: randomness is found in gear and abilities -- and even those are rather easily cleared from chance. The mode is fun though -- another great addition. It's unfortunate it's not deeper of an action roguelike.

The Forgotten Saga is easy too -- and I don't think the general difficulty setting affects it. On my first run I got to the second boss, on my second to the final, whom I then beat on my third run. But did still do a few more runs because the mode was simply great fun.

The Last Chapter

The final story update in December was fairly small: just Eivor saying goodbyes and then leaving to North America where her body will be discovered in the current day. The update also bridges AC Valhalla to the next game, Assassin's Creed Mirage, which should be coming out this year, developed by Ubisoft Bordeaux. Mirage's protagonist will be Basim who was in this game as well. I'm a bit conflicted about that because I consider him to be a bad guy, being reborn Loki and all that. I really didn't like how AC Valhalla ended with him surviving.

There was another tie-in update for AC Valhalla earlier too in which Basim's mentor Roshan meets Eivor briefly in England. Roshan is voiced by Shohreh Aghdashloo whom I previously knew basically just as a voice. (She was one of the Quarian admirals in Mass Effect 2 and 3.) But after her role as Avasarala in The Expanse show I now picture her appearance too when I hear her voice. That is unfortunate because I prefer not knowing how voice actors look so that I see only their character, particularly when then actor has such a recognizable voice.

Mirage will be sort of a return to the series' roots in gameplay and setting, taking place in Baghdad and also featuring Alamut the original real life assassin fortress. I think the latter is a pretty cool inclusion. AC Mirage is supposed to be smaller than the late AC games too, which is surprising because you'd think longer games fit the Ubisoft+ subscription service better. Longer games keep people paying for the service.

Mirage is not the only AC game in development however: there are a few actually. I'm mostly interested -- even excited a bit -- about the one that is going by Codename Red. It will be set in Japan and is helmed by Ubisoft Quebec which is my favorite Ubisoft studio thanks to the immensely enjoyable combat in AC Odyssey and Immortals Fenyx Rising.

Edited 2023-03-24: Changed secluded to recluse