As was the case with Origins and Odyssey before it, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla has finally received its highly anticipated Discovery Tour expansion, allowing players to eschew their drengr battleaxes for digital spades and sieves as they sift through Scandinavian history. Aptly named Discovery Tour: Viking Age, Ubisoft’s odyssey (eh?) into the origins (eh? eh?) of Norse history and mythology seeks to innovatively iterate on the formula while retaining its core aim of incentivising fulfilling interactive learning.

“I'm very fortunate it has been successful so far,” Discovery Tour world design director Maxime Durand tells me. “The idea was brought up at the end of 2014 when we were done with Assassin's Creed Unity. Both Jean Guesdon [creative director for AC Black Flag and AC Origins] and myself had this dream of creating a new tool, a way to reuse the game environments that could be used in classrooms or museums. We both had the idea and were building the project until a few months later we were made aware of the situation and united our efforts. In between that time, what we did is really try to understand how it could be beneficial - what were the best ways to make this inclusive for students and teachers?

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“That's really how we set [out] to create the first Discovery Tour, Ancient Egypt, with tours that were in conflict-free environments in an age-accessible game. The idea was we were following tours that would lead to a better understanding of history from a narrative perspective, but it would also explain where the information came from.”

According to Durand, updates to various systems between Origins and Odyssey enabled the Discovery Tour team to significantly improve the latter. By the time Viking Age entered development, the studio’s proprietary tech had once again been propelled leaps (of faith) and bounds, allowing the team to experiment with narrative and cinematic tools to make the whole experience feel more “human and comfortable.”

Perhaps the most prominent change to Discovery Tour: Viking Age, however, is its transformation from a typical “tour” into a full-fledged quest-based narrative. In Durand’s eyes, this is significantly more engaging for both students and regular Assassin’s Creed players alike.

“The idea is that it becomes accessible,” he explains. “It becomes inclusive, people can use it, teachers feel comfortable no matter the age of the learners or the situation in their classroom. That's really what I'm looking for. We've been lucky enough to have many partnerships with museums in the past Discovery Tours and we're renewing that to a whole new level with Discovery Tour: Viking Age. I just hope people can enjoy playing it and learn from it.”

Obviously with academic ambitions of this scale, Durand and his team needed to consult with experts on relevant subjects in order to ensure all of the material contained in the latest Discovery Tour was authentic and accurate. One of these people was Ryan Lavelle, a Professor of Early Medieval History at the University of Winchester who had previously met the devs during their “Magical Mystery Tour” around Scandinavia and Britain.

Lavelle conducted his PhD research on the royal estates of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex. Despite maintaining an interest in a variety of different historical periods ever since his undergraduate studies, he developed a particular affinity for the Middle Ages in England after being inspired by one of his tutors, going so far as to listen to audio cassettes of Old English poetry during summer vacation. Throughout the rest of his degree, master’s, and eventual PhD, Lavelle came to realise that he was seeing places and landscapes he already knew - in his words, “somehow this world which was at once familiar and yet unfamiliar was linked to places I had been to.”

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Speaking of places that are at once familiar and yet unfamiliar, Lavelle first met the Discovery Tour team at Stonehenge, introducing them to his corner of King Alfred’s kingdom of Wessex. At this point, Lavelle had only heard of the Assassin’s Creed series in passing, although he knew it was big. After having been told to “watch this space” in relation to previous Discovery Tours, he “nearly bit Ubisoft’s hand off for the opportunity to get involved.” Eventually, he and a select few other historians were invited to consult on Viking Age, with Lavelle in particular helping out with the Winchester questline.

It’s worth noting how attractive initiatives like the Discovery Tour can be to academics, primarily because of its inherent ability to track with people who might not otherwise engage with its subject matter. To Lavelle, the idea of properly portraying the landscape of the early Middle Ages - of thinking about how the people from that period might act and feel in specific historical places - was especially of interest.

“Though 100 percent accuracy is impossible when not all the evidence from the period exists, the Discovery Tour provides a great representation of life and sensibilities in the ninth century,” Lavelle tells me. “AC Valhalla, likewise - it gives us a sense of participating in experiences of the period, exploring new parts of the ninth-century world of the Vikings in a way that opens up places in ways that are, as I said, both familiar and yet unfamiliar.”

“Historians and academics always work with the Assassin's Creed team in building the game, the environments, and the narrative,” Durand says. “To have these historians is really helpful, because they not only do factual checking, but they inspire and provide us with information that changes our perspective. With the first two Discovery Tours, the tours themselves were quite factual because they were based on a narrator speaking. With this new Discovery Tour, there is no narrator explaining while you're playing - you're really meeting people and engaging with a narrative that looks like something from the past.”

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Examples of this can be clearly seen in the individual areas Lavelle used his expertise to consult on: the workings of the witan; the meeting of the king’s counsellors; deciding who would determine or give their consent to a ruler’s decisions; and how all of these things and more could be integrated into a single cohesive experience that did its real-world historical inspirations justice.

“As well as checking with me that the texts for the historical markers conveyed information as accurately as possible, they also asked about game themes that linked into the story of Alfred’s Winchester, like the shape of the royal household,” Lavelle adds. “As by then I was familiar with AC’s interactive mechanisms, advising on how these issues could feed into gameplay made a lot of sense.

“I think the game conveys quite nicely how an early medieval ruler is likely to have found it difficult to assert authority across even a small realm, and how the face-to-face aspects of early politics played out. So, it is intriguing to see in the game how although Alfred’s victory over Guthrum in 878 is a major achievement for Alfred, it doesn’t give Alfred absolute power.”

All of this additional context was necessary for Viking Age’s transition to a more narrative-driven experience. While previous Discovery Tours were successful, Durand’s team wanted to shake up the formula a little - to reinvigorate it and lean further into the kind of engagement and investment that can only be achieved via the kind of interactivity you encounter in video games.

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“The inspiration came from three different elements,” Durand says. “First, it came from us wanting to adapt the formula. I think with this third Discovery Tour, we felt mature in the way we wanted to create these educational games. We [also] wanted to use some of the cool systems that were created for Assassin's Creed Valhalla.

“In addition to that, we were very encouraged by teachers and educators and academics. These teachers who are using games in schools were telling us, ‘What you've done with Discovery Tour is great, but you can even leverage more of the features from video games like empathy and player agency, and these would lead to better learning.’ That was the second part that inspired us. And then ultimately, we did have comments from gamers that the character is one of the things they look forward to most when there's a new Assassin's Creed game. They were hoping we could move to a formula that's closer to what they usually experience while playing, so we had all of these opportunities to craft a new experience.”

Despite this conscious pivot away from traditional Discovery Tours, Viking Age is still sure to retain the initiative’s core principle of being conflict-free. To Lavelle, this is a huge part of its success, particularly in terms of how it adheres to academia.

“To my mind, Viking Age is valuable educationally because it gives us the opportunity to explore without the sense of imminent danger that can arise when playing ACV,” he says. “I suppose a sense of imminent danger could be important for conveying the stresses of the life of a visitor to a place in the ninth century, but there have to be some ways of making the Discovery Tour work as a practical educational tool and we can’t have our students getting chopped down by rogue Vikings in the middle of a class.

“Viking Age opens up the possibilities of immersive exploration. Because it uses historical markers as part of the quest, telling us of the significance of items and facets of contemporary life in an educational manner while not being too heavy on text, linking these to things the learner-gamer actually searches for, the learning actually takes on a level of gameplay.”

valhalla viking age

As an example of this, Durand cites an all-new Viking Age quest set in a monastery. Here, the team really wanted to to leverage whatever historical information they could gather. The academic who worked on this, Alison Hudson, inspired them by showing them real medieval manuscripts and texts, some of which actually made it into the game. As a result, the monk’s questline in Viking Age isn’t just some fictional take on a ninth-century monastery - the stories it contains were sourced and provided by a historian before being implemented by the team.

Elsewhere, work on Viking Age was more difficult. Origins and Odyssey’s respective versions of the mode were obviously successful despite their commitment to non-violence, but Valhalla’s integration of a full narrative combined with the real-life history of the Vikings meant that this iteration of the project faced a whole new variety of challenges.

“Arguably, all of these time periods were quite violent for some people,” Durand says. “And for us, that was a motivation in the three Discovery Tours - to create something that could lead to an engaging narrative without feeling like the removal of violence is forced.”

“One of the significant aspects of the Viking Age was the shock-and-awe of a Viking attack,” Lavelle explains. “It is activity which gives the name to ‘Vikings’, not any biological concept of ‘race’, and in this manner, Vikings cannot be entirely disassociated from the violent activities of the period. A Viking longship might be a fantastic ocean-going vessel, it might vaunt the status of its owner, but it could also be a killing machine - or at least a means to delivering death and destruction rapidly and often unexpectedly. There isn’t really a way around this; though obviously the Discovery Tour does need to ensure that this isn’t shown in a graphic fashion, the fear of Vikings for contemporaries can still be alluded to.

“As I mentioned, though, the Viking Age was a long period, and there’s a lot going on in it. AC Valhalla doesn’t skirt around the violence but then neither does violence take up the whole game. For me, I actually find it’s the bits of the game where there isn’t a Viking raid when I find the game more of an enjoyable experience. Maybe I’m simply not a born gamer, but it’s those cerebral parts of the game which allow the period to be explored more fully which excite me, and the possibility of building up a contemporary settlement, with all its associated arts and crafts, is great. So, I suppose, yes, in that manner it allows a balance to be struck.”

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Durand continues to explain the conscious avoidance of violence by explaining that Viking Age is separated into eight quests, all of which follow the lives of illustrious Vikings like Torstein and Gunnhild, as well as Saxons such as Elrich and King Alfred himself. In his eyes, these perspectives allow the team to develop an enticing game with an engaging story without needing to resort to conflict - to explain history in a way that also explains human behavior.

“But of course, it's so much more than that,” he adds. “We can explain the elements that craft the time period of the Viking Age. For instance, the Vikings themselves, or the Scandinavians we should say, were very good with silversmithing and delicate crafting. They also had very complex concepts of mythological aspects. So although I think entertainment has quite a violent vision of the Viking Age, it’s so much more complex than that, and the Discovery Tour leverages this complexity and tries to explain it.”

It’s interesting that Durand mentions mythology here, as this is also something Lavelle obviously feels strongly about and is an expert on. In his eyes, while the myths of Odin and Thor are important for understanding the context of this historical period, it’s essential that we remember our knowledge of this mythology is inherently limited due to the small number of associated texts and artefacts we have access to. Simply put, our pool of evidence is relatively shallow and can’t purport to serve as definitive evidence.

“Some really nuanced readings of the evidence, especially the archaeological evidence - such as in, for example, Neil Price’s recent The Children of Ash and Elm - are helping us to understand that the absolute certainties that are sometimes read from the limited evidence are not quite as fixed as is sometimes made out,” Lavelle says. “With that in mind, I’d be careful not to be too dogmatic about thinking about ‘the Viking mind’. There are many Viking minds in a period that essentially reached between the late eighth and late 11th centuries.”

To compensate for this, Durand explains that sagas provided crucial inspiration for Viking Age, predominantly because the team always wanted the story to be told from the perspectives of both the Vikings and the Anglo Saxons.

valhalla viking age discovery tour

“We really started with the idea that the story of Torstein and Gunnhild would be a saga itself,” Durand says. “It would be something with great aspirations and big challenges. And also, this want from people from the past to change their faith - with sagas, what we can learn is that they can never change their faith, and it pretty much always ends up dramatically. On the other side, with Elrich in the Anglo Saxon chronicle, we wanted to show the story from that perspective, which was not something we typically see in Assassin's Creed Valhalla.”

The relationship between Durand’s core team and academic consultants like Lavelle was evidently symbiotic from the pair’s independent responses to my questions. The former has great respect for the latter and his peers, while the latter thoroughly enjoyed his time as a supervisor for the project’s historical touchpoints. That being said, it’s no surprise that both parties are already excited for the future of Discovery Tour.

“A year ago I was only just starting to become familiar with the possibilities of the representation of the Viking world in ACV,” Lavelle says. “The interactivity of gaming [and] the exploration of the early medieval past as an educational tool are full of possibilities. It can’t replace books as the primary means of study but it should certainly help. Knowledge is nothing without imagination and this is a great aid to the imagination which I hope can open up a distant past in the way that illustrated books and museum exhibits did for me almost three decades ago. It’s not so much a case of thinking what could be done better but it strikes me that as new discoveries are made, particularly new objects or perhaps even new settlements, it would be great to see these patched into future updates to the Discovery Tour. The past, after all, is always changing.

“[The developers’] work came in on time; we were very clear about what they wanted from me and when, and they read my feedback and responded to it. So in that sense they were simply in my work portfolio as one set of well-informed and highly motivated students among the various students who I teach and supervise - and who can often be well-informed and highly-motivated - in my day-to-day job. Would I do it again? Naturally, I would love to. Being so involved in representing the past for a wider public is one of the great joys of this job.”

“With Discovery Tours, we have something that's great in the fact that when we launch the game itself, it's the final product,” Durand says. “There are no further updates to content. So we're very lucky because in previous discovery tours, we only had featured one world - Egypt and Greece - but we didn't have all these side worlds and activities that were in the game. With Discovery Tour: Viking Age we are for the first time having these four worlds of England, Norway, Jotunheim, and Asgard, which was a good technical challenge, but also a great opportunity to tell these different stories and play with the elements that have been built by Assassin's Creed.”

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Discovery Tour: Viking Age is available now for anyone who owns Valhalla. It’s also available to download as a standalone game on PC, either from Ubisoft Connect or the Epic Games Store.

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