Old Spice Guy
The Man Your Man Could Smell Like
- Location
- Riding a horse, backwards
You can get a pet fox and wolf too.
This game rules.
This game rules.
Assassin's Creed
- Thread starter Faker
- Start date
- Megathread
Fool, the ability to cast 'Summon Wolf' is clearly superior!
Old Spice Guy
The Man Your Man Could Smell Like
- Location
- Riding a horse, backwards
Chairman Meows intelligence service will be with you for mandatory reeducation shortly.
E: The fox's name is Dandy. I love it.
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Thanatos757
Captain of the Four Knights
Whoever did the boss fights for this game should be fired. All of them have stupid inflated hp pools and frustrating movesets with way too many invincibility stages/moves. It's honestly ridiculous, I shouldn't be spending 20 mins on a boss fight because it spends 15 of that underground and can't be attacked.
VolantRedX
Official Conscience of Worm Fanfiction!
So I'm looking for a new massive game to get into in the coming weeks and I'm wondering which is better, Assassin's Creed Oddessy or ACV?
Well, while I'm feeling pretty good about Valhalla, it would probably be a better deal if you can grab the ultimate edition for Oddessy if it's on sale, cause it tends to drop down to $30 - $40 and has all the DLC.
Derek58
Rocket Punch is Best Punch
- Location
- Getter Valhalla
Skip the first DLC, Legacy of the First Blade. I found it thoroughly awful.
Fate of Atlantis, the second DLC, was quite good imo.
- Location
- Here
Just a bit of pedantic literature for anyone who wants to read it.
Collections: Assassin's Creed: Valhalla and the Unfortunate Implications
It sums up most of my issues with the narrative and world-building of the game. I never even considered the neo-Nazi canards as I was just irritated that Ubisoft whitewashed what a Norse invasion looks like, leaving out the slaving, murder, blood sacrifices, and expulsion of the natives that such invasions typically involve.
Collections: Assassin's Creed: Valhalla and the Unfortunate Implications
It sums up most of my issues with the narrative and world-building of the game. I never even considered the neo-Nazi canards as I was just irritated that Ubisoft whitewashed what a Norse invasion looks like, leaving out the slaving, murder, blood sacrifices, and expulsion of the natives that such invasions typically involve.
Old Spice Guy
The Man Your Man Could Smell Like
- Location
- Riding a horse, backwards
Whoever decided that you can't move the camera while cairn stacking deserves an axe to the crotch.
VolantRedX
Official Conscience of Worm Fanfiction!
I think the issue is that Ubisoft is a cowardly company that doesn't want to confront their players with anything requiring moral discussions or depth. ACV is just another in a long line of games from them where the players are allowed to basically play the wrong side of history thanks to insane amounts of twisting the narrative goes through in order to justify it all. They knew if they presented the invasion of England with any actual accuracy they'd likely alienate a lot of players, or at the very least write the story in such a way that the players are asked to look deeply at their own actions and the actions of those they're asked to side with. Doing so means confronting the player with hard moral questions and ideas. Something Ubisoft avoids like the plague.
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I think the issue is that Ubisoft is a cowardly company that doesn't want to confront their players with anything requiring moral discussions or depth. ACis just another in a long line of games from them where the players are allowed to basically play the wrong side of history thanks to insane amounts of twisting the narrative goes through in order to justify it all. They knew if they presented the invasion of England with any actual accuracy they'd likely alienate a lot of players, or at the very least write the story in such a way that the players are asked to look deeply at their own actions and the actions of those they're asked to side with. Doing so means confronting the player with hard moral questions and ideas. Something Ubisoft avoids like the plague.
I think this is giving them more credit in assuming they bothered to do the research on the Great heathen army and didn't just watch the show vikings and based the game entirely off that.
... you really believe that? Because from everything I have heard and know Ubisoft tends to be quite solid when it comes to their research for the AC games, going well beyond the surface level, even if they tend to value entertainment and game design over historical accuracy in their end product.
Derek58
Rocket Punch is Best Punch
- Location
- Getter Valhalla
I just did a cairn, and i can confirm that you can move the camera around the area you build a cairn with the right analog stick (on PS4).
XD, have we been playing the same Assassin's creed?
It's always been pop history at its very best.
- Location
- Melbourne, Australia
- Pronouns
- She/They
I've seen some very positive assessments of Origins and Odyssey, but my impression is that they're generally very thorough and good about the dressing/aesthetics of whatever historical period they're using (so things like architecture, environments, clothing, etc.), albeit with minor concessions to gameplay, while actual writing is just a pile of pop history tropes and/or whatever the fuck they feel like, which is reflected in the whole Vikings Good Saxons Bad framing of Valhalla, the characterisation of Caesar and Cleopatra in Origins, and, like, everything about Unity (Disclaimer: I don't have a lot of historical knowledge myself, this is mostly stuff that I've heard second-hand).
However, that Bret Devereaux post linked above suggests there are a number of anachronisms/errors to do with the dressing as well in Valhalla.
For whatever it's worth, the Narrative Director of Valhalla actually responded to the post on Twitter and argued against Devereaux's interpretation of the game's colonial politics. I've yet to play the game so I can't comment myself but it might be worth a read. I've included some of the key points below but I recommend reading the full thread since I've chopped it up a little due to SV's media limit. I think there might be some spoilers though.
Again, I think you confuse the fact that they opt for a not really historically accurate, more pop history oriented portrayal due to gameplay and other reasons with a lack of research/knowledge. As the poster above me said, AC is often very good in researching and accurately portraying the graphical side of things etc. and you don't do stuff like what they did with for example Origins or Odyssey without doing a lot of research and everything I heard this those extent well beyond architecture.
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As someone who has studied several of the periods they depict in their games... no they really don't focus on the history of the period.
- Location
- The Hague
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Their various full time historical consultants have better credentials than you.
It's one thing to suggest that the developers make concessions with the history to best benefit the gameplay and the narrative, but I don't think it's really appropriate to suggest that they aren't extensively well researched because, like, they are. A number of the games have included reams of text files about places, people and events, all of which are generally accurate to what is understood by historians. It's true that the games deliberately diverge from history in a number of respects, but generally they tend to be rooted in extensive research. Odyssey might play fast and loose with the precise timeline of the Peloponnesian War, but its participants and many of its events are depicted with reasonable accuracy, accounting for the fact that it's a video game. Additionally, the depiction of the culture of the time is pretty authentic. Not perfect, but hardly the work of pure imagination.
Some games aren't as well rooted as others, with Rogue, Unity and especially Syndicate feeling unmoored from time and space, but I don't think it's fair to suggest that the games are poorly researched. When these games diverge for reality it rarely comes across as the team 'not knowing' something, and more because they're super huge flagship video games and development has a lot of different priorities and pressures to balance.
- Location
- Upon the back of the Great A'Tuin
I haven't finished the game, being at a similar place where the author of the article is, but my initial feeling is that they could have gotten around the issue of Norse slavery and even not killing the priests with Sigurd's affiliation with the Hidden Ones. Have Eivor start as a thrall that is rescued by his crew to give him/her some sympathy for others in that position then have Sigurd return with a new 'freedom is great, stay your blade from the blood of the innocent' philosophy that Eivor et. al. go along with because hey, he's the popular Jarl and he's come back with a ton of loot so what he says goes.
Regarding this, I find the issues raised upon its release only show how distastefully Ubisoft executives weigh in on restricting play style. For the times AC forced players to progress on rails, that was a limit imposed by mission parameters and console capabilities. But for what they did in 2018, it is out of touch, placing a broad community of hopeful fans of the main Odyssey title into some bizarre waters.
Going beyond the initial shock -- that Ubisoft would force story progression into hey look at the protag courageously field-goaling a hetero-normative with newborn family and everyone is smiling doe-eyed like some breakfast cereal commercial -- it still cannot readily be explained why any major game title is all too likely to make this misstep. And this brings into question other precluded choices made in Odyssey and surrounding works, to then question the historicity.
Of coursse, like stratigo, I am not versed in as many research topics as Ubisoft's staff. Nevertheless, we both might recognize that Ubi is attempting to bridge the Legacy DLC with the preceding Old World title: Origins. This screams of Spin-Off Cookbook relaxed attention to detail.
Yes I am sure Socrates went around his entire life talking like a fortune cookie. You see, cause he did that in dialectics.
They are poorly researched. They don't try to adhere to history. Whatever consultants they hire.... well collect a paycheck. Like usually happens. Historic consultants rarely have much a say of what they are consulting on. And you think the devs are reading every notation they make? They ain't.
There is like, trivial errors littered throughout the games. Like calling some saxon warriors yeomen, a term that postdates the normans as far as I could find. This isn't a liberty, it's just not important. And that's fine because it isn't a huge deal.
The games only ever really seem to care about famous architecture and threading every name that exists in the record into a narrative.
These games aren't an exploration of history. And they don't pretend to be. And that's fine. Except when they miss the mark so hard the themes get pretty yikes. I don't care that much about them being accurate, but I do care about how some of the inaccuracies are really uncomfortable. Both the ancient order plot and the whitewashed colonialism elicit mixed feelings from me.
- Location
- The Hague
- Pronouns
- He/Him
That is not really the case at all.
A lot of effort goes into this stuff. That's not really an arguably point, it's essentially fact. You can say that they're not perfectly historically accurate, which is true, or they make a number of concessions on historical accuracy because they're video games, which is true, but suggesting that no effort is made to think about history or that the people who consult on the game just half ass it is clearly just bullshit.
I frankly don't care about what you say you have studied or not because you seem incapable of understanding that the lack of realism is a design choice and not something stemming from a lack of research. Just because Ubisoft decided to for example give women a more equal portrayal than historically accurate doesn't mean that it was not aware of the real history, just that they valued other things more highly than being completely accurate.
Saying that the Ubisoft games are not historically accurate is valid, saying it that this is because of shitty research goes against pretty much anything we know about that process and the people involved and is hard to take serious in my eyes.
My issue with Ubisoft is more with regards to the general, not sure if whitewashing is the term to use so maybe downgrading/lessening, of the evil shit some of the cultures they portray got up to. I mean its a constant thing with the games going as far back as the first Assassin's Creed, but the really big ones were Sparta in Odyssey and the actions of the Scandinavians in Valhalla. Like I'm okay with them giving Sparta a navy to ensure there's a fun game mechanic, and I actually like that they've made it possible to play as a woman in the games finally, but them going 'hey look Sparta's this totally great city state that's just being mislead by this secret ancient order and hasn't committed some of the worst atrocities in the time frame' is a take that I'm going to side eye.
The concessions they make for gameplay reasons are fine. The glorification of militaristic cultures and the filing away of their historic abuses is not. This is bad history feeding into bad perceptions of ancient cultures.