What's Going On With Assassin's Creed Valhalla - Luke Stephens

 I'm pretty sure I put this video off for so long just because I didn't want to get caught up in all the crap and drama that's going on

ubisoft has a lot of stuff going on at the moment and i'll break it down a bit, but this video is mostly about assassin's creed

Valhalla, which is what we're going to be debating most of the time, so be aware there's a major scandal going on at Ubisoft right now where they say they treat employees in a rather sexist way, like a lot of senior executives in trouble have been advised, some of them have even been fired and removed from the company for their behavior, that this is going on and it is shaking up a lot of things within Ubisoft, but probably the most relevant scandal related to this video in Assassin's Creed Valhalla is, that the game's creative director, Ashraf, emailed someone I spoke to in the past, someone who directed Assassin's Creed Black Flag and Origins, two of my favorite games in the franchise, became for a few weeks to a month and a half on leave while they did an internal i Basically, he resigned from his position as creative director ck

of the game and following this internal investigation, it has just been announced that Ubisoft has fired him and he is no longer with the company. What happened isn't just that he cheated on his wife with gamers and girls, uh, and it wasn't just that he lied about being married to get with these girls and have affairs, the drama and the Reason it's a problem and the reason he got fired was because he used his creative director position on all these Assassins Creed games to get together with these girls, he apparently shared confidential information about the development of the games and showed them preview footage of the game, which would be shown in later trailers

bed with girls allegedly and that led to him getting fired which is a lot more understandable than just getting fired because you were having an affair. Think about it if you're someone on the development team and happen to be giving away footage or gameplay information for whatever reason

 You're jeopardizing your entire career. You're jeopardizing your job. You'll probably get fired if this is found out to be happening, that's why

I am careful not to reveal anything about my sources when they come to me and tell me things about what is going on in the industry because it can ruin their lives as it seems that Ismael is having it ruined right now and yes full transparency if I was managing Ubisoft and I found that one of my creative directors was using his position to target girls who were fans of the franchise he was at the helm of. I would be upset and I

I would fire him. I would go ahead and find someone else. There are plenty of talented developers out there who do great work and would do anything to be creative

Director's chair I mean just think about it put another developer in the same position if todd howard came out he was showing girls early footage of elder scrolls six so he could get along with them and have affairs like yeah that would be nice of a big deal it would be slimy and just not ok while i think ash and his team have done a great job with assassin's creed games over the past few years and i think they have some of my favorite games in the entire franchise i i still understand the decision to let him move on and just cut the ties. I get it, I would probably do the exact same thing

decision ok with all that out of the way let's talk about the game itself because i think the game is what gets lost in a lot of these discussions. yeah a creative director does lousy things and a lot of the execs over at ubisoft are lousy people and they should be fired, they should be kicked out, that doesn't mean the game itself is going bad or that you shouldn't support all the artists that have been playing for years worked on this game just because of the actions of a few bad eggs that's one of the reasons i'm really against boycotts of any kind, especially in an industry like this

for years just because of the actions of some rotten eggs this is one of the reasons why i am really against boycotts of any kind, especially in an industry like this where there is a lot of work to be done and people are breaking into sweat and tears to boycott it because of the terrible acts of a person yes I think you make a point but you are also really kidding the people who worked on this project for three four five years who had nothing to do with it and if anything were victims of the person you are try to punish you punish the victim to draw attention to the person

At this point, but other than that, there were actually quite a few fun and interesting mini-sidequests that I stumbled upon just exploring this small portion of the map. It was really cool to see because most of the time these types of games were focused on quantity rather than quality

So it was pretty cool to see the attention to detail that went into a little side quest. For example, here you can actually get into a rap battle with other people in the world, it's kind of a weird viking toss but it was actually pretty cool or when you get into a drinking game where you try to beat your competitor to trump, it actually gets a bit tricky as a minigame. I'll be perfectly honest, you have to keep the pace right to make sure you're still drinking, and then as you get more and more intoxicated you start to falter, so you need to balance yourself as you drink and maintain that balance

It's actually quite difficult, but I think it's fun now. The one thing about these types of preview events is that it's always very difficult to get a feel for the tone of the game, because they show you something striking or indicate something in the hour or two of the intro, it's always difficult to figure out , What

The game will actually be as it is based on this preview, which is why it is a preview and not an early copy, for example there is this one side quest

that you can come across as you explore the world in the area that we have been given access to and basically it's a guy who is fishing with his son and you start talking to him and he explains that he's frustrated that he couldn't die a hero's death he won't be able to go to valhalla he's basically stuck here but his only wish is for his son to see him effectively die like a warrior like a hero because it's an assassin's Creed game is

Offer to fight him and help him fulfill this dream he accepts you and you start a mini boss fight in the middle of this small pond which is actually a

Pretty cool set piece and there are some weird lines thrown as the battle progresses, but it's still fun, now I know it probably wasn't intended

to be, but I actually found this to be kind of a fun side quest, maybe it should be funny that this guy is so weirdly suicidal

the blue and is okay with this stranger killing him in front of his son, maybe it's just a cultural difference, maybe it's because I wasn't immersed enough in the world, but either way it came across kind of weird, but sometimes there are these boss fights with these demonic looking crow women who start fighting you as they cast spells and jump 30 feet in the air tearing you out of any type of immersion you might have had to walk in the world to grasp or think about it It's more historical but nonetheless it's an interesting boss fight and it's fun but it's quite dark it's quite grim and then you switch to the Fishmonger boss fight where it's basically just screaming please kills me it's a bit jarring now if i had any concerns whatsoever with assassin's creed valhalla it probably would and that's that i always have a really grounded assassin's creed game i always wanted i've said this for years after doing reviews for countless assassins creed games i want one that's really grounded and my favorite games in the franchise are the ones that are really Trying to be realistic within the time period in which they are played, or at least somewhat realistic for you to immerse yourself in. In Assassin's Creed Unity, for example, there is nothing in it except the kind of sci-fi elements with Abstergo

and the first race which for the most part really pulls you out is all pretty grounded and they fairly hold the historic record

In fact, moving further and further away from the clearly recorded historical records of Ubisoft and their scribes, one of the things that worried me when I first heard was that Assassin's Creed would go back to ancient Egypt and then ancient Greece said this

starting to openly feel like they have a lot more leeway, they can do whatever they want because they're no longer constrained by that very strict timeline of how things had to happen when you go back and play Assassin's Creed 3 set within there's a lot of stuff happening during the revolutionary war where they had to fit the story of assassin's creed into the historical narrative and i personally really like that, but when you go all the way back to ancient greece and it's just open and wide enough so everyone can throw whatever they want into the story, it gives the writers a lot more freedom but it also removes a lot of that punch of historically based timelines, but I understand this is purely subjective and just because I like things more historically grounded doesn't mean you have to like it that way, but I'd still be interested to hear what you think of more grounded storylines in Assassin's Creed v compare to that hold ey do now i dont know i want to hear let me know in the comments or

starting to openly feel like they have a lot more leeway, they can do whatever they want because they're no longer constrained by that very strict timeline of how things had to happen when you go back and play Assassin's Creed 3 set within there's a lot of stuff happening during the revolutionary war where they had to fit the story of assassin's creed into the historical narrative and i personally really like that, but when you go all the way back to ancient greece and it's just open and wide enough so everyone can throw whatever they want into the story, it gives the writers a lot more freedom but it also removes a lot of that punch of historically based timelines, but I understand this is purely subjective and just because I like things more historically grounded doesn't mean you have to like it that way, but I'd still be interested to hear what you think of more grounded storylines in Assassin's Creed v compare to that hold ey do now i dont know i want to hear let me know in the comments or

Consoles or launch it on our PC that we get a coherent and coherent style and feel of the game, because after four hours I'm really not sure what this game is trying to be, there are many moments where it is feels like the witcher 3 but with a slightly lighter color palette some better animations

pessimistic I'm just trying to be honest and direct, after spending four hours on a demo you effectively have a lot of time to figure out what you're picky about, what you're throwing away, what you're going to criticize because at the end of the day is exactly what you are there for

Most of it will come into play during the main quests and this demo wasn't geared towards that main quest, we had to take part in two or three main quest missions but there wasn't much to tell, in other words you could really tell, that they chose these missions for us to play through because they basically didn't tell us anything about the main story, and finally I feel like I should bring this up to a lot of people on Discord and Twitter