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👀 can we get that rant about how Valhalla is 💩?

Oh boy, where do I even start? So, for one, Ubisoft moved the launch date of Valhalla up to align with the release of next-gen consoles (Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5) near the start of November 2022, and likely to have more time to sell copies before competition from games with December releases, like Cyberpunk 2077. But what we got was an unfinished mess of a game (and I’m sure a month wouldn’t have made much of a difference, but we’ll never know now). This isn’t an issue particularly with Valhalla as it is with the entire gaming industry at the moment, though.

The capitalistic drive to charge ridiculous amounts of money (most base games start at $70 USD now) for an unfinished product is sickening. Why can we not just take the time to release a game that will be playable at launch anymore? Do I expect all games to be perfect at launch? No. From the Assassin’s Creed series, neither Odyssey nor Origins were perfect, but they were a whole hell of a lot better than what we got with Valhalla. Even Shadow of War and Red Dead Redemption 2 had their flaws at launch, but at least I could still play the games. Also, the price for DLCs? Insane. The Dawn of Ragnarök DLC is running for $40 USD, that’s almost the price of a new game?

I got my disc (call me an old-timer, but I like to still have physical copies of things) popped it in my Xbox, and waited for over 5 hours for it to install and download the needed content. And that’s where things went wrong. The cutscenes looked awful. The dialogue didn’t match up to lip movements. NPCs would glitch out. Has this been improved? Yes. But it took over three months for the game to even look halfway decent, and by that time, I’d already done half of the ridiculously long main storyline (for the love of God, I never want to play a game that takes close to 100 hours just to complete a main storyline).

The opening sequence for Valhalla is ridiculously long, so long I thought we wouldn’t see a title card at that point, but you know what sucks even more? Having to replay that portion of the game 4 times because the save function was not working properly. I had to start over 4 times. Easily 20 hours of playthrough. Then, once someone on Reddit who was having the same issue as I was suggested to make sure the game was saved both to the cloud and my storage, I was able to progress. But not for long.

The number of times Valhalla crashed back to the Home Screen is ridiculous, so I would lose progress every time that happened, but not as bad as starting back from the beginning. So many of the main quests were bugged. The start scene wouldn’t trigger. I couldn’t interact with an NPC to progress. Once or twice I even desynchronized during a cut scene. So, what does that mean when the quests bug? You either restart the game/console or have to wait for a patch. One of the quests with Aelfred took several restarts for it finally work (and the loading times in Valhalla are so bad).

But if I thought the main quests were bad, the side quests, oh wait world events, were even worse. Some of them I was not able to complete until 6 months after launch, and each patch and update was just me waiting and waiting. Just ask @mrsragnarlodbrok about the damn pig of prophecy. Oh, let’s not forget the fast travel bug. For almost a month, I could not fast travel anywhere, could not call my longship, and while the England map may not have been as large as Odyssey, it’s fucking inconvenient, especially when your character runs faster than the horse half the time.

Also, I love still falling below the map in 2022 or the random times Eivor was yeeted into the air with no way to get back until the game decides to desynchronize me. Like very cool. And as I mentioned, every addition of free content just makes the game’s performance worse. Two of the mastery challenges are still bugged for me. It took this long for the River Raids to finally cooperate. It’s going on two years post-launch, and things are still...not good.

There is still a lot wrong with Valhalla, I hear it from friends who play, from subreddits, and there’s still a lot of room for improvements. But I guess we’ll have to wait for that since the focus is on another DLC for now. Valhalla isn’t perfect yet, and who knows, it may take another two years for it to run as smoothly as Odyssey and Origins, but I’m just ready for NG+. Maybe I wouldn’t be as bitter if I had NG+ because I could replay the story after the patches and enjoy it over just getting frustrated when the missions didn’t advance or when it crashed and lost my progress. But alas, we do not have NG+, and at this rate, I don’t expect it any time soon, and I do not have the time or energy to put that many hours into a new game from scratch when most of the time was just spent grinding (but that’s for a reason right? To sell microtransactions? Pay to win though, lol).

So, here’s my suggestion to Ubisoft. Stop focusing on releasing repetitive free events and focus on fixing the damn game that’s part of your flagship franchise, and I don't know, maybe drop NG+ soon so the game can be played and enjoyed the way the developers and writers wanted it to be? Instead, we were sold a ridiculously expensive half-finished product that still isn't up to par with its predecessors over a year later.