I mean it doesn't help that parry is two buttons, puts you in animation lock so if it turns into a red attack midway (dagger mercs do this a LOT) you're taking the hit. Also you have to aim towards the attack, which isn't always the best in a battle with lots of enemies. Compare that to dodge which is basically free iframes, just hit square button, and if you get slowed time whack 'em if not back off then whack 'em.
Now that I'm Level 17 I should probably look into actually using engravings too. I keep getting more in my collection and then just not doing anything with 'em because I was leveling and replacing gear too fast.
well, got Sigurd back, the death convo between Eivor and Fulke was something else. Sigurd is...uh, well, seems like nobody should listen to him, even if he's right about having isu blood
wondering what Basim's whole deal here is, and why he's so set on guiding Sigurd down this path, feels out of step with the assassins and more in line with what the templars want? in general I'm waiting for the story to really get into what it's doing with the king stuff, because a lot of the alliances are predicated on who has the right to rule, and Eivor in general is a lot more friendly to bad nobles than I uh...fully understand, given that a lot of them show back up in the lead up to the siege at the end of the Sussex arc, and I'm fairly certain the game wants me to be like, "hey, it's your friends, the cool kings! they're back!" and I'm like, "fucking...I thought I was done with these assholes." well, the non-vikings were assholes I don't want to talk to, most of the vikings that turned back up I was happy to see. anyways, the Sigurd arc it's setting up is almost certainly, Eivor struggling to deal with Sigurd kind of losing his mind, while she's dealing with both her fears at the seer saying she'll betray him, and probably a few people going, "well, you see, he really is extremely special so get over it," which is...more interesting than a lot of the set up has been, and I'm interested to see how it plays out.
I did have a convo with Randvi wondering about if Sigurd knows we've been having an affair, and Sigurd is definitely not extremely trusting of Randvi at the moment, which might be a breaking point for Eivor, the way I've been playing her, if Sigurd treats Randvi like dogshit...well, keeps treating Randvi like dogshit, anyways
Kind of a bummer that you can’t use normal swords in this. Especially since they were used quite a lot by real Vikings and even had their own general style of sword.
Vikings didn't really use swords, according to wiki: "Swords were very costly to make, and a sign of high status. They were rarely used and some swords found in graves were probably not sturdy enough for battle or raiding, and instead were likely decorative items."
Finished this last night, I think I'd put it at the top of the last three games just for some of the mechanical changes and less reliance on needing the boat for everything. I think it's also the most frustrating in that more than any other entry it feels like there's a really good game in there, but it's lost due to a lack of focus. There are too many area storylines to really get a well-developed story out of any of them, and the few good mysteries don't have enough context or impact to make the effort worthwhile. There's also some wild swings in tone would which be okay if they landed, but the attempts at humor were too wacky and the maudlin stuff didn't work because it's basically just Eivor seeing something and going "wow that's sad."
Still, that said, I liked it a fair bit. Eivor is pretty cool, the new equipment system is so much better, and the landscape and world map felt a little better realized than Odyssey (a lot of islands felt too cramped).
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DemonStaceyTTODewback's DaughterIn love with the TaySwayRegistered Userregular
I mean it doesn't help that parry is two buttons, puts you in animation lock so if it turns into a red attack midway (dagger mercs do this a LOT) you're taking the hit. Also you have to aim towards the attack, which isn't always the best in a battle with lots of enemies. Compare that to dodge which is basically free iframes, just hit square button, and if you get slowed time whack 'em if not back off then whack 'em.
Now that I'm Level 17 I should probably look into actually using engravings too. I keep getting more in my collection and then just not doing anything with 'em because I was leveling and replacing gear too fast.
I also didn't use engravings until very late.
I just boosted my Crit Chance while Full Health engraving to +10%, by finding Ostrakas. Then I paid money to increase it to 18% at Hephaestus. It goes up to 20% but that costs 200k drachmae. Slap that on legs and head, crit chance on other stuff, and some of the level 50 abilities, and you can eventually hit 100% crit chance with full health. I'm at 71% crit while healthy currently.
Kind of a bummer that you can’t use normal swords in this. Especially since they were used quite a lot by real Vikings and even had their own general style of sword.
Vikings didn't really use swords, according to wiki: "Swords were very costly to make, and a sign of high status. They were rarely used and some swords found in graves were probably not sturdy enough for battle or raiding, and instead were likely decorative items."
Yeah but Beowulf uses a sword and the game owes as much to him as it does to actual history
I'm not sure the gear system is that much of an improvement, and it's mostly because the way you upgrade your gear means you're much more likely to just, find one set and stick with it forever, because the investment involved in boosting gear isn't extremely bad, but it does take investment. If I want to try out flails now I have to boost this flail up from scratch that I found in a starting zone and hope for the best, and I have to level it up via the blacksmith and I have to level it up via resources that I burn through fairly quickly. In effect, the loot still has levels, and it's more of a pain to level them up to your current level than it was in Odyssey, for example. I think it's good that there's not a bunch of trash gear to sift through, but I mean, I still have a bunch of trash to sift through and I think I might be spending more time in menus this time.
Gear sets compound this problem because there's not really any reason to not use a full set, it's just flat out worse to not use a full set, with no real exceptions. Which is fine! But it means when I find like, a boot from one set, I just go, "huh!" and forget about it, because it's just...a boot I found in a box in some random fort. Occasionally you get a new weapon from a quest, and those are a little more fun, but again, it's much easier to settle in with one type of weapon than it is to figure something else out.
I don't think they should go back to the gear system from Odyssey entirely, but they've taken out levels for the character, and I think they should just...remove power levels from the gear entirely. Keep the perks, and keep the upgrading quality to unlock more rune slots, I think, and cut out the bit where you have to fill a bar for minor stat boosts. The act of collecting leather and metal to slightly increase the power of a sword isn't interesting enough at any stage to fully justify the time you spend doing it. Rune slots give you choices, and collecting rarer materials to upgrade the quality of your gear can be a fun challenge, and upgrading the quality to give you more choices for runes and making your gear look fancier is much better overall. And those materials eventually show up in shops, or at least the lower level versions do, in manageable numbers, which makes catching up less of a hassle.
I think the sill tree unlearned a lesson World of Warcraft learned a decade ago, also, in that most of these choices aren't compelling, because I don't really care about a +3 bonus to stealth, especially because it doesn't really tell you what that means? I've filled out all of the special perks, and now I'm just scrolling across filling in circles I don't really care about.
(I'm gonna stop this post here before I fill it with all the nitpicks I have about the systems in this game that I don't necessarily notice while I'm playing)
I've read that in Odyssey there's a feature where the last piece of a legendary armor set you find will cause all the other pieces to scale to your current level. Is this true?
I prefer to do a 3/2 or 2/2/1 split to get two tier 1 set bonuses than whatever full set bonus there is for most things. We also get enough of the ingots to make smithing everything plausible, but the iron costs are prohibitive. I never have enough iron and I loot everything.
I'm not sure the gear system is that much of an improvement, and it's mostly because the way you upgrade your gear means you're much more likely to just, find one set and stick with it forever, because the investment involved in boosting gear isn't extremely bad, but it does take investment. If I want to try out flails now I have to boost this flail up from scratch that I found in a starting zone and hope for the best, and I have to level it up via the blacksmith and I have to level it up via resources that I burn through fairly quickly. In effect, the loot still has levels, and it's more of a pain to level them up to your current level than it was in Odyssey, for example. I think it's good that there's not a bunch of trash gear to sift through, but I mean, I still have a bunch of trash to sift through and I think I might be spending more time in menus this time.
Gear sets compound this problem because there's not really any reason to not use a full set, it's just flat out worse to not use a full set, with no real exceptions. Which is fine! But it means when I find like, a boot from one set, I just go, "huh!" and forget about it, because it's just...a boot I found in a box in some random fort. Occasionally you get a new weapon from a quest, and those are a little more fun, but again, it's much easier to settle in with one type of weapon than it is to figure something else out.
I don't think they should go back to the gear system from Odyssey entirely, but they've taken out levels for the character, and I think they should just...remove power levels from the gear entirely. Keep the perks, and keep the upgrading quality to unlock more rune slots, I think, and cut out the bit where you have to fill a bar for minor stat boosts. The act of collecting leather and metal to slightly increase the power of a sword isn't interesting enough at any stage to fully justify the time you spend doing it. Rune slots give you choices, and collecting rarer materials to upgrade the quality of your gear can be a fun challenge, and upgrading the quality to give you more choices for runes and making your gear look fancier is much better overall. And those materials eventually show up in shops, or at least the lower level versions do, in manageable numbers, which makes catching up less of a hassle.
I think the sill tree unlearned a lesson World of Warcraft learned a decade ago, also, in that most of these choices aren't compelling, because I don't really care about a +3 bonus to stealth, especially because it doesn't really tell you what that means? I've filled out all of the special perks, and now I'm just scrolling across filling in circles I don't really care about.
(I'm gonna stop this post here before I fill it with all the nitpicks I have about the systems in this game that I don't necessarily notice while I'm playing)
They should have just combined the stat boosts as part of the quality upgrades at the blacksmith. There's no reason to have both and quality progression is already gated behind ingot availability based on difficulty of the regions.
And for me, the skill tree is annoying because they hide it from you. You have no way of prioritizing how you progress because you have no way to know what to build towards. Which would be OK if all skills were of equal utility, but they are most definitely not.
Just remember that half the people you meet are below average intelligence.
I'm not sure the gear system is that much of an improvement, and it's mostly because the way you upgrade your gear means you're much more likely to just, find one set and stick with it forever, because the investment involved in boosting gear isn't extremely bad, but it does take investment. If I want to try out flails now I have to boost this flail up from scratch that I found in a starting zone and hope for the best, and I have to level it up via the blacksmith and I have to level it up via resources that I burn through fairly quickly. In effect, the loot still has levels, and it's more of a pain to level them up to your current level than it was in Odyssey, for example. I think it's good that there's not a bunch of trash gear to sift through, but I mean, I still have a bunch of trash to sift through and I think I might be spending more time in menus this time.
Gear sets compound this problem because there's not really any reason to not use a full set, it's just flat out worse to not use a full set, with no real exceptions. Which is fine! But it means when I find like, a boot from one set, I just go, "huh!" and forget about it, because it's just...a boot I found in a box in some random fort. Occasionally you get a new weapon from a quest, and those are a little more fun, but again, it's much easier to settle in with one type of weapon than it is to figure something else out.
I don't think they should go back to the gear system from Odyssey entirely, but they've taken out levels for the character, and I think they should just...remove power levels from the gear entirely. Keep the perks, and keep the upgrading quality to unlock more rune slots, I think, and cut out the bit where you have to fill a bar for minor stat boosts. The act of collecting leather and metal to slightly increase the power of a sword isn't interesting enough at any stage to fully justify the time you spend doing it. Rune slots give you choices, and collecting rarer materials to upgrade the quality of your gear can be a fun challenge, and upgrading the quality to give you more choices for runes and making your gear look fancier is much better overall. And those materials eventually show up in shops, or at least the lower level versions do, in manageable numbers, which makes catching up less of a hassle.
I think the sill tree unlearned a lesson World of Warcraft learned a decade ago, also, in that most of these choices aren't compelling, because I don't really care about a +3 bonus to stealth, especially because it doesn't really tell you what that means? I've filled out all of the special perks, and now I'm just scrolling across filling in circles I don't really care about.
(I'm gonna stop this post here before I fill it with all the nitpicks I have about the systems in this game that I don't necessarily notice while I'm playing)
I 100% agree with all of this. It's nice to not have to dismantle/sell a bunch of random weapons that aren't special, but I basically haven't changed my setup since the start of the game because everything takes so much resources to upgrade.
And I straight-up don't understand why they got rid of the Origins/Odyssey skill tree for something so much worse. In addition to the stat increases being boring as hell, you have to trial-and-error your way through the paths to find the abilities you actually want. Or do what I did and google an image of the full skill tree so I could figure out where the assassination abilities I wanted were.
I've read that in Odyssey there's a feature where the last piece of a legendary armor set you find will cause all the other pieces to scale to your current level. Is this true?
yeah, it's extremely satisfying, especially since those pieces are generally locked behind quest chains or like, assassinating templars
only thing in valhalla that's close is (general spoilers)
finding abandoned hidden one bureaus and finding a gear set, feels like actively hunting something down
Fuck yes! Patch tomorrow with different visual modes and fixes to screen tearing, fingers crossed it actually fixes it. Normally I don’t really care about technical stuff but the screen tearing was literally giving me a headache and I couldn’t play, so I’ve spent the week playing other games while thinking about Valhalla
God fuck you Ivarr. Dumb bastard. Hope you like Hel. "Hand me my axe" Get the fuck outta here, you too Odin you bastard quit acting like this shit's groovy.
We don't even need the Order doing stuff in this region. We're perfectly capable of doing shitty things to each other all on our own.
One thing that’s bugged me about the last 3 games is they look great but all 3 have weird pixelation on the clouds. It can look really rough when under certain lights
well, that was fucked, I just wanted to have a fun time with my friend, not murder a girl's mom in front of her and then light her dad on fire in a wicker man
Oh hell yeah, this PC patch really smoothed out a lot of the performance issues I was having previously, with the game getting almost unplayable in crowded areas.
Gun to my head I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between quality and performance visuals, so performance seems like the way to go since it’s so much smoother
yeah I went to quality mode and it was chuggin' so I switched to performance mode
I've had some texture pop in on the PS5, which is a bummer
Honestly assassins creed games and Ubisoft stuff in general have never really been the best optimised. So all the people doomsaying about how “is this all the next gen consoles can do” seem to have forgotten that last gen we had Unity and Red dead redemption 2 on the same consoles
It takes time to take advantage of the higher ceiling in better ways, and a fair amount of artistry too
It’s still a bummer that it doesn’t represent a giant leap, but it’s pretty telling that within a week they released an update that markedly improved Xbox series x performance.
I love how with the stun attack with the heavy hammer it ends with eivor just sort of haphazardly tossing the weapon at the enemy, it’s a real “fuck you” feeling that works so well
I love that the stun finishers use the enemies weapons, it’s very Viking to basically take the enemies own weapon and go “this is how it’s done son”
My favorite stun kill is the one on the... uh, the guys with two axes who attack really fast. You use both of their own axes to lift them up by the ribcage, headbutt them and push them back, then huck the axes at them
That or the banneret, where you grab his huge greatsword and beat his helmet in with it
Also it took me forever to see this but if you keep the left hand unequipped then you can still parry with the hidden blade and if you hold the button down for that hand you'll do a special hidden blade stab that does solid damage and will knock them down for a second
mosssnackYeah right, man, Bishop should go!Good idea!Registered Userregular
I always chuckle when eivor takes two hammers and claps a dudes noggin with em.
I’m at power lvl 110 or so, dual wielding 2h axes and it feels like I’m at the point where I am unstoppable in fights. The slow down on dodge is super helpful as well, maybe even a bit overpowered. It has trivialized the zealot fights so far. I think I might try pushing the combat difficulty to the highest one and see how that works out.
If enemies feel too spongy, I’ll probably just try a different weapon set and put the difficulty back on hard.
My favorite stun kill is the one on the... uh, the guys with two axes who attack really fast. You use both of their own axes to lift them up by the ribcage, headbutt them and push them back, then huck the axes at them
That or the banneret, where you grab his huge greatsword and beat his helmet in with it
I think mine is the standard bearer where you knock them down and plant their standard in their body.
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I also didn't use engravings until very late.
wondering what Basim's whole deal here is, and why he's so set on guiding Sigurd down this path, feels out of step with the assassins and more in line with what the templars want? in general I'm waiting for the story to really get into what it's doing with the king stuff, because a lot of the alliances are predicated on who has the right to rule, and Eivor in general is a lot more friendly to bad nobles than I uh...fully understand, given that a lot of them show back up in the lead up to the siege at the end of the Sussex arc, and I'm fairly certain the game wants me to be like, "hey, it's your friends, the cool kings! they're back!" and I'm like, "fucking...I thought I was done with these assholes." well, the non-vikings were assholes I don't want to talk to, most of the vikings that turned back up I was happy to see. anyways, the Sigurd arc it's setting up is almost certainly, Eivor struggling to deal with Sigurd kind of losing his mind, while she's dealing with both her fears at the seer saying she'll betray him, and probably a few people going, "well, you see, he really is extremely special so get over it," which is...more interesting than a lot of the set up has been, and I'm interested to see how it plays out.
I did have a convo with Randvi wondering about if Sigurd knows we've been having an affair, and Sigurd is definitely not extremely trusting of Randvi at the moment, which might be a breaking point for Eivor, the way I've been playing her, if Sigurd treats Randvi like dogshit...well, keeps treating Randvi like dogshit, anyways
Vikings didn't really use swords, according to wiki: "Swords were very costly to make, and a sign of high status. They were rarely used and some swords found in graves were probably not sturdy enough for battle or raiding, and instead were likely decorative items."
Still, that said, I liked it a fair bit. Eivor is pretty cool, the new equipment system is so much better, and the landscape and world map felt a little better realized than Odyssey (a lot of islands felt too cramped).
Is there a 30FPS option to avoid this?
Or is it 60FPS only?
I just boosted my Crit Chance while Full Health engraving to +10%, by finding Ostrakas. Then I paid money to increase it to 18% at Hephaestus. It goes up to 20% but that costs 200k drachmae. Slap that on legs and head, crit chance on other stuff, and some of the level 50 abilities, and you can eventually hit 100% crit chance with full health. I'm at 71% crit while healthy currently.
Yeah but Beowulf uses a sword and the game owes as much to him as it does to actual history
Speaking of which, how's the arm-ripping-off mechanic?
He's done game of the year lists for Giant Bomb before
Gear sets compound this problem because there's not really any reason to not use a full set, it's just flat out worse to not use a full set, with no real exceptions. Which is fine! But it means when I find like, a boot from one set, I just go, "huh!" and forget about it, because it's just...a boot I found in a box in some random fort. Occasionally you get a new weapon from a quest, and those are a little more fun, but again, it's much easier to settle in with one type of weapon than it is to figure something else out.
I don't think they should go back to the gear system from Odyssey entirely, but they've taken out levels for the character, and I think they should just...remove power levels from the gear entirely. Keep the perks, and keep the upgrading quality to unlock more rune slots, I think, and cut out the bit where you have to fill a bar for minor stat boosts. The act of collecting leather and metal to slightly increase the power of a sword isn't interesting enough at any stage to fully justify the time you spend doing it. Rune slots give you choices, and collecting rarer materials to upgrade the quality of your gear can be a fun challenge, and upgrading the quality to give you more choices for runes and making your gear look fancier is much better overall. And those materials eventually show up in shops, or at least the lower level versions do, in manageable numbers, which makes catching up less of a hassle.
I think the sill tree unlearned a lesson World of Warcraft learned a decade ago, also, in that most of these choices aren't compelling, because I don't really care about a +3 bonus to stealth, especially because it doesn't really tell you what that means? I've filled out all of the special perks, and now I'm just scrolling across filling in circles I don't really care about.
(I'm gonna stop this post here before I fill it with all the nitpicks I have about the systems in this game that I don't necessarily notice while I'm playing)
They should have just combined the stat boosts as part of the quality upgrades at the blacksmith. There's no reason to have both and quality progression is already gated behind ingot availability based on difficulty of the regions.
And for me, the skill tree is annoying because they hide it from you. You have no way of prioritizing how you progress because you have no way to know what to build towards. Which would be OK if all skills were of equal utility, but they are most definitely not.
I 100% agree with all of this. It's nice to not have to dismantle/sell a bunch of random weapons that aren't special, but I basically haven't changed my setup since the start of the game because everything takes so much resources to upgrade.
And I straight-up don't understand why they got rid of the Origins/Odyssey skill tree for something so much worse. In addition to the stat increases being boring as hell, you have to trial-and-error your way through the paths to find the abilities you actually want. Or do what I did and google an image of the full skill tree so I could figure out where the assassination abilities I wanted were.
yeah, it's extremely satisfying, especially since those pieces are generally locked behind quest chains or like, assassinating templars
only thing in valhalla that's close is (general spoilers)
Steam ID - VeldrinD | SS Post | Wishlist
We don't even need the Order doing stuff in this region. We're perfectly capable of doing shitty things to each other all on our own.
Dang what a bummer of a chapter.
So I changed my exploration settings to see every event and treasure and now I'm going to finish every single one while he stands there on the dock.
Now it actually runs great and looks gorgeous.
Steam ID - VeldrinD | SS Post | Wishlist
Eivor you are the greatest assassin ever
I've had some texture pop in on the PS5, which is a bummer
Health issues, adrenaline shortage, not currently tripping balls, there's a shroom for that.
~ Buckaroo Banzai
Honestly assassins creed games and Ubisoft stuff in general have never really been the best optimised. So all the people doomsaying about how “is this all the next gen consoles can do” seem to have forgotten that last gen we had Unity and Red dead redemption 2 on the same consoles
It takes time to take advantage of the higher ceiling in better ways, and a fair amount of artistry too
It’s still a bummer that it doesn’t represent a giant leap, but it’s pretty telling that within a week they released an update that markedly improved Xbox series x performance.
Most of them have singing, but there aren't that many. More do start showing up as you continue through the game but it's still pretty limited.
Smoke and moonlight look amazing tho
Also do you get adrenaline power attacks like odyssey eventually? Or is it basically the stun animations and the quick finisher moves?
You unlock the adrenaline attacks by finding books of knowledge in the world that grant specific abilities
I love that the stun finishers use the enemies weapons, it’s very Viking to basically take the enemies own weapon and go “this is how it’s done son”
That or the banneret, where you grab his huge greatsword and beat his helmet in with it
I’m at power lvl 110 or so, dual wielding 2h axes and it feels like I’m at the point where I am unstoppable in fights. The slow down on dodge is super helpful as well, maybe even a bit overpowered. It has trivialized the zealot fights so far. I think I might try pushing the combat difficulty to the highest one and see how that works out.
If enemies feel too spongy, I’ll probably just try a different weapon set and put the difficulty back on hard.
bnet: moss*1454
I think mine is the standard bearer where you knock them down and plant their standard in their body.