Assassins Creed Valhalla

[Grogan]

This game gets terrible reviews complaining about things that would make me like it more (e.g. "the parkour isn't very challenging" good! I hate frustrating jumping and climbing lol). "Waaah, the world is too big" too (people complaining about the RPG style that Assasin's Creed games have evolved into... the latest one Mirage is more like the old style. They can keep it)

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2208 ... _Valhalla/

My nephew said I shouldn't buy it a while back, but he hadn't played it either (just going by negative receptions). It looks to be what I like, a huge, gorgeous open world. A lot of cut scenes is another complaint though, but I don't know if that's typical or more than usual. (someone always complains about cut scenes).

Anyway, 80% off in the summer sale made the Standard edition $15 and the Complete Edition (with Season Pass content and DLC added later) $35 so I went for the Complete.

I actually won't know anything for a good 2 hours. 158 Fucking Gigabytes... I literally didn't have enough space (got an error trying to start the install). I had about 146 Gb free on my Steam drive. I had to take off games I've been meaning to play again but haven't, including High On Life that I actually fought with to get working and only played it for an hour or so lol

I also moved a few Lutris prefixes to /storage2 where I compile and stuff. There's about 700 Gb free there, but you have to keep large tracts of free space somewhere to dump data in an emergency too. I really don't want to add any more storage.

[Grogan]

Well, so far so good. It's a beautiful game, with pretty much the same mechanics as Assassin's Creed Odyssey. Instead of an eagle, you have a raven and you chop people to bits with axes (and shoot them with arrows) and it's in a Norse setting.

I started to make a bunch of screenshots. Steam's new screenshot manager (Beta client) is bollocks, they took away the button to open the directory in a file manager and now all you can do is save the files individually. They make you name and browse for a location for each one. So fuck that, I just find the files on my own now with the find utility. As long as I keep "screenshots" directories in userdata cleaned out, jpgs will be easy to find. Not only that, Select All and delete doesn't seem to delete anything, though deleting a single image seems to work. So I need to manually find them anyway.

Anyway, loverly screenshots. As usual I'll probably add more as I go.

http://www.mikeserv.org/coppermine/thum ... p?album=22

Also, there are settings that make the game easier, for example you can turn off "quick time events" altogether. No button tapping or anything. There's a setting called "guaranteed assassination" where you get a one hit kill regardless of level. I think that's for an assassination kill, where you kill an unaware enemy. So far the combat has not been difficult.

The camera has an offset angle... you can turn off the camera offset so your player is in the middle of the screen like normal (I did). The game actually presents a bunch of settings when you start a game for the first time, which was a good thing to do.

[Zema Bus]

Sounds good!

[Grogan]

It seems only the start of the game is snowy, nordic mountain terrain... I've just landed in England, where we are going to build our clan anew.

It's gorgeous here. It was a cut scene so there's a bit of motion, but it depicts the colours etc. well.
http://www.mikeserv.org/coppermine/disp ... 22&pid=509

I pressed F12 a bit too late, but while we were traveling on the boat we went past some Saxons practicing "ritual drowning" (it was explained by someone wiser that it was called "baptism" and we shouldn't mock their religious customs etc. )

[Zema Bus]

I went ahead at the last minute and picked this one up while it's on sale.

[Grogan]

I wish upon you the time to play it, so far it's been wonderful. I was looking at map legends last night and there are some different symbols for different areas. I noticed I'm going to Ireland, Francia and while it didn't show any symbols, the realm of Svartalfheim (In Norse mythology, it's the realm of dark elves).

The combat has been relatively easy. I'm using this heavy Dane axe. So far I've only run into one enemy I couldn't fight, it was level 90 and I had to flee (I forget what they call the levels, but I'm level 30 already... you gain them quickly in this game, they changed it). It was a cultist mercenary type enemy on the road. I attacked him, I didn't have to... but eventually those are all targets. Even that though, if I wouldn't have run out of arrows I could have worn him down. Too ouchy for close combat, and he was too slow to damage.

[Zema Bus]

I got some time in on it tonight. I chose the female character since that was the closest thing to Kassandra, but not by enough. I later read that the male character is better in this game. I might switch to that if so. Which one did you go with?

[Grogan]

I'm using the male character, Eivor. I figured I'd rather be a male Viking. He's a good character, I like his voice. A soft spoken, noble sounding voice, like Obi Wan Kenobi (the younger).

This is the first game I've ever heard of that lets you change your character like that at any time in the menu, though, so there's no consequence.

[Zema Bus]

I'll go ahead and change it then.

[Grogan]

I'm in green Ireland now, as it was the quest line that was just a little above my power level and really ought to have been done soon. So far none of the enemies have been too far above me in the whole area, so I think it was a good call to start that DLC (while everything else in the game seems over leveled according to map areas). I accidentally started DLC where I went to Asgard but that's over leveled for now, so I took a few screenshots and went back to a save.

In Ireland, one of the quest lines is to do quests to appease the regional kings, to get them to sign on with the high king, sort of thing. Things like go into this camp and murder all the bandits etc. The job boards for these quests are pigeon posts

valhallapigeonpost.jpg (205.93 KiB) Viewed 96842 times

[Zema Bus]

I wasn't able to change characters, the option is grayed out for some reason. I don't know if it was just a glitch, or you have to be in a certain place to do that. I was on a boat at the time. Then I tried it on an island but it was still disabled.

[Grogan]

Maybe not in the prologue or something, more like. You have to be able to access the Animus in your Inventory menu.

I've never tried it myself.

[Zema Bus]

That would make sense, I'm still in the prologue.

[Grogan]

I checked it tonight and mine wasn't greyed out. I didn't proceed to change it, but it was active. I'm in Ireland.

[Zema Bus]

After reaching my first destination I checked and it was enabled.

Eivor.jpg (100.08 KiB) Viewed 96286 times

[Grogan]

Are you enjoying the male character better? As I said, I quite like his voice. I love playing a noble character, too (well, somewhat noble for a viking... honourable at least)

Oh, one thing you can't do is kill innocent civilians in a raid. If you kill two of them, you desynchronize (die). No problem, most of the time they flee, it's when you force open a little door and they are sequestered in a little church with high level enemies.

[Zema Bus]

Yeah so far I do like this character better. Good to know about the civilians, in AC Odyssey I tried to avoid killing them but sometimes it was unavoidable and then occasionally I'd have other civilians coming after me.

[Grogan]

In Odyssey, they made you do that, so you would get bounty. You couldn't so much as fight off a dog (or a chicken lol!) that's attacking you in the city without people in robes coming up and incessantly hitting you with sticks and brooms (or lamely with weapons or other hurty things like hoes and pitchforks). I really didn't like that, it goes against my nature. Those kinds of people wouldn't do that.

[Zema Bus]

Sigurd's wife looks a lot like Kassandra.

[Grogan]

You'll see Kassandra if you play the Isle of Sky (Scotland) story Arc. You fight with her etc. She doesn't reveal to you that she's been walking the earth for hundreds of years, but recognizes that you are similar. (The deal in Assassin's Creed is that you'll have the same DNA somewhere down the line etc.)

This is a wonderful game, eh? Where are you in the game, England? It's really beautiful countryside and terrain, with heavenly autumn colours.

P.S. It occurred to me that you didn't get all that far in Assassin's Creed Odyssey, so you might not know Kassandra's fate. As someone half Isu (the Greek gods are of that race), and the keeper of the Staff of Hermes Tresmigustis (I may have the spelling wrong lol), passed on to her by her father, Pythagoras, she is ageless until she passes the staff on to the next keeper, when the time is right. That next keeper is Layla, Kassandra passed the staff to her in modern day, at the end of the story arc and died and vanished. That saddened me to see it.

[Zema Bus]

I'm on my way to England now, just left in Sigurd's boat (but currently in the cabin in the future after being pulled out due to a generator failure).

[Grogan]

There isn't much of that modern day Animus/Layla bullshit in this game. It's kind of nice scenery there, so I didn't mind it, and they kept it brief. I'm sure there's going to be at least one more interlude later, but so far it hasn't annoyed me with that again in 87+ hours.

I wish I had control of the Universe at the subatomic level... I'd grant you more time to play these games

[Zema Bus]

lol! I think I'll have more time in the not too distant future when all the real estate stuff is finally over with. I'm often in envy of Flopps when I see him playing a Steam game while I'm off to work

I have the Raven clan established in England now, it does look really nice.

[Grogan]

The Francia story arc (DLC) was a long, neverending slog, I just wanted it to be over. I nearly abandoned it, but had time invested and wanted the quest completion rewards etc.

You'd think France would be beautiful, but they ruined it by making it foggy and dull most of the time. The cities were all slummy too. Everything was a plot twist that made me walk half way around the country, and they made me search for keys to unlock things for just about every quest. Despicable people that I just wanted to kill but no... they made me jump through hoops to try to negotiate (and usually it ended up in killing them later)

Cut scenes taking control away just when I'm aggravated and wanting to finish a quest etc. too.

So don't worry if you don't make it to doing that one

[Zema Bus]

Sounds like a fun DLC lol!

[Zema Bus]

"Charles The Fat"

[Grogan]

Oh, so you're in France now? That's going to be ruinous to your rectum if you're way underleveled.

[Zema Bus]

Yeah that's what happened, I was leveled in the 30's going up against level 200 enemies and getting wrecked immediately so I turned and ran away and went back to Ravensthorpe to do other quests first.

[Grogan]

It's a very long game, there's a lot of stuff to do. I'm still not finished after 155 hours, so don't try to rush it. I thought I was going to finish the main game tonight, but there's still another story arc left after I thought it was the end.

VERY irritating boss fights, then a very irritating climbing mission as Layla.

The first boss fight with Odin, he's undefeatable. It takes away all your gear and you just have a small axe. I was just wearing myself down until I died, so I said what the fuck and went and looked it up. I wouldn't have guessed that the only way to finish that was to UNEQUIP your axe from the inventory menu. I guess the clue was Odin was latching onto your axe with this thing that was pulling you back. Anyway, without the axe I was able to run to the exit of the arena and join my friends and get pulled out of the realm (actually a simulation, we weren't really in Valhalla)

The second boss fight with Basim, you just have to persevere. He doesn't have a health bar, but strike him enough and you get a "press R for a stun attack" prompt. Then back to the fight, and eventually there will be another that weakens him and he gets trapped.

So now I'm back in Ravensthorpe, heading for another area in England. After that, I still have some Asgard story arcs (going back as Odin)... the missions you get by drinking potions from the seer, Valka.

[Zema Bus]

There was one quest I was going to do before quitting for the night, it was to go to a tree for a nap and to have a vision. I thought it'd be something simple like the one from early in the game, but then I'm confronted by this giant boss enemy I wasn't in the mood for so I chose to "wake up".