Microsoft held its first reveal of footage from Xbox Series X games this morning and the crowning jewel was supposed to be a look at Assassin's Creed Valhalla. After Ubisoft revealed the game last week with a teaser that pointed to Microsoft's conference, the hype started to skyrocket about our potential first look into the next-generation of gaming. Why did it then land like a led balloon?
This piece isn't meant to insult the talented developers at Ubisoft or even the Assassin's Creed series in general. I'm not a particularly big fan of the games anymore, but the series has always been really great about getting historical details accurate. It creates massive worlds that fans love to get lost in and constantly tries to mix things up with new settings. The real problem here is that any gameplay we did see amounted to less than 10 seconds of runtime.
Ubisoft stated we'd be seeing the first look at how Valhalla plays, but we basically were given a bunch of in-game cinematics and a small snippet of actual gameplay. The trailer is mainly people standing around, looking grim and serious with generic music playing in the background. It does nothing to sell anyone on what Valhalla is about, how it will be different from past installments, or what it even looks like on Series X. This could have been the base Xbox One version and nobody would have known.
It also ended the Inside Xbox stream on a low note. The stream was pretty underwhelming anyway (despite a lot of the games looking interesting), but Valhalla just farted out a trailer and peaced out. No explanation of its editions or visual upgrades or...anything! We basically know exactly the same amount of information that we did last week.
Now, Ubisoft doesn't need to reveal everything at once. The marketing team for Valhalla is clearly going for a slow drip of information that should build into a massive explosion of sales for day one. The fact is, the company promised that something would be shown and it now feels like that was a lie.
Far be it from me to claim that Ubisoft actually deceived us, but I really just have no idea what Valhalla actually is. It's an Assassin's Creed game, I suppose, though maybe not. An actual trailer could have cleared that up, but I guess we'll just be left waiting for a proper reveal.