Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is, at points, far too large for what it wants to do. I think the story it tells is compelling - excellent, even, at least when it is allowed to take centre stage. But the in-between bits can be dull and draining. If a plot point is especially tense, right, but I have to gallop across acres - nay, hectares - of flat green meadows to earn the next one, I’m going to inadvertently end up on auto-pilot before going, “Oh yeah, that happened - remember that?” It’s sort of like driving on a motorway: you’re not going to crash (hopefully), but you’re probably not paying much attention to any of the probably lovely landscapes lining either side of the road. Admittedly, roaming around on top of a great big Dark Souls wolf is a bit more craic than zooming about in a Nissan Micra, but still, “Look at the wolf!” can only subsist off the rule of cool for so long.
The issue is that the absolute best bits of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla are the ones you might miss if you’re just hurtling headlong through the main story. I’m talking about the weird, dark, folky side stories, the magic mushrooms, Axehead, the drengr longing for a death worthy of Valhalla’s mead halls atop the basalt columns of the Giant’s Causeway. That last part is from Valhalla’s Wrath of the Druids DLC, which I reviewed a couple of months back. As an Irish person, I can confidently say the expansion is fantastic - it’s like the best parts of Valhalla, minus the bloat.
That’s an important point, because my first thought after rolling credits on Wrath of the Druids was, “Wow, the future of Assassin’s Creed is bright!” I meant it in the philosophical sense, but the recent reveal of Assassin’s Creed Infinity is a different kind of bright - it’s Lamborghini yellow, Manhattan neon, music festival glitter on day one before it becomes encrusted with vodka and orange juice and dirt from when you fall after drinking too much of said vodka and orange juice.
Admittedly, we know very little about Assassin’s Creed Infinity, so due diligence demands I be a little bit nicer to it. It’s based on a live-service model and is apparently years away from launch. The only two games compared to it in the report that originally broke the news are Fortnite and GTA 5, which, aside from being massively popular online, third-person games designed to assimilate as gross an amount of wealth as possible, are mostly incomparable to one another. Our own Stacey Henley reckons an Assassin’s Creed game convinced it’s capable of grappling with Rockstar is fooling itself, and I’m inclined to agree. I do, however, think a live-service Assassin’s Creed title has a lot of potential, provided it leans into what makes the series special as opposed to just looking at other popular games and seeing $$$.
The reason I mentioned Wrath of the Druids earlier is because the weird rhetoric in Ubisoft’s blog post is at least partially applicable to it. According to the post, Infinity is a game that aims to tell stories across various eras and locations. It’s worth thinking of it as a kind of hub, it seems - given Assassin’s Creed’s basis around the Animus, this makes perfect sense, too. Maybe the Animus is being reappropriated as a sort of omni-directional, time-irrelevant portal to 16th Century Brazil, and 14th Century Turkey, and 12th Century Japan, and 1st Century Italy. I mean, everyone’s mind originally leapt through hoops of fire to arrive at “it’s multiplayer!” as soon as the news was announced, which is understandable. It’s also not necessarily true, though - just because something adopts a live-service model doesn’t make it an MMO by default. Genshin Impact is mostly single-player, and exclusively single-player if you want it to be. That doesn’t make it any less gacha, or any less servicey and battle pass-y.
The more I think about it, the more I reckon Infinity is just a universe due to be packed full of smaller game worlds. I would like for it to have multiplayer functionality - AC multiplayer has always been great - but I’m not sure that’s even going to be the case. Assassin’s Creed, especially with recent entries, has cultivated a sort of hybrid experience based on its origins and more conventional RPG systems. I joked in my Valhalla review about how it’s starting to feel like a mix of Assassin’s Creed’s origins and Assassin’s Creed Origins - with that identity successfully carved out, opting to implement an ever-growing live-service backbone where each new game is a femur or humerus or ribcage or collarbone is actually a bit ingenious. In an age where games use uncompressed sound files to intentionally increase file sizes and, as a result, take up more space on your hard drive, live-service models provide a means of acquiring high player retention rates without damaging traditional development pipelines. It’s a platform that can be consistently managed by one team while others work on all of the story material - the new locations, characters, and whatever other features the team fancies.
Don’t get me wrong, I was a great big sceptic when I read this week’s report, too. “Oh no!” I shouted (in my head, I didn’t really care enough to open my mouth and make noises to form words). “Microtransactions! Paid expansions! The only Assassin’s Creed game that will ever be made again!” In the cases of one and two, Assassin’s Creed has had those for ages. For the third one, well, it sounds like it’s just a hub for Assassin’s Creed games - probably a free-to-play or cheap base game, innit, and you just pay for all the bits in different countries with new characters.
I just think we should probably hold our horses for a bit, yeah? Calm down. Take a breather. Boot up your favourite Assassin’s Creed game - mine’s Valhalla now. Yeah, good, isn’t it? Right, all of that is probably staying, it’s just being slightly repackaged for what sounds like an ambitious, risky new shape. Who cares, really? Assassin’s Creed Infinity is miles out. If Valhalla is anything to go by - and given how well it sold, it is absolutely something to go by - then Infinity is probably going to be fine. Good, even. Maybe great. We won’t know for several years, so maybe it’s best to just chill out a bit.