A video of captured Assassin's Creed Valhalla gameplay footage leaked on Youtไube today, showing a version of the game that evidently still needs a lot of work.
The meaty slice of the game shown in the video shows a pretty substantial amount of the standard Assassin's Creed gameplay loop. It begins with some open-world exploration on horseback, conti𝕴nues into a large-scale battle story mission, and ends with a bit of post-quest upgrading and gear maintenance.
The open-world region shown here could easily be mistaken for a region in The Witcher 3 like Velen or Novigrad. The sparse wilderness, thatch-roofed huts, and stone bridges work together to create a medieval fantasy-style setting that is immediately recognizable as Assassin's Creed, but perhaps not as obviously a 🐟Norse setting. Eventually, Eivor is attacked by wolves and thrown from her horse. That's the first indication, other than the watermark at the bottom of the screen, that t♋he footage is of a work in progress.
Looking A Little Janky
Eivor's attack animations are stiff and repetitive. Every character and enemy seems practically weightless too, including the horse that goes flying when it is attacked by a wolf. Every hit sends Eivor or her target flying༺ back, sometimes leading to awkward collisions with the environment as we seeꦕ later in the video.
After the fight, Eivor gets back on her horse and continues traveling towards the quest marker. The camera goes into a cinematic mode that we've seen in other open-world horse riding games, but for some reason, it's extremely close to the horse and jꦰumps around to a bunch of awkward, disorienting angles. Eivor eventually reaches the quest bearer and initiates a cutscene, but not before awkwardly moving in close behind him and awkwardly twitching between different animations.
Then It Gets Worse
After the scene where Eivor delivers a rousing speech to her troops, the mission begins. It's a siege on a castle after a short boat trip, and t🍷his is where things really start coming apart at the seams.
While operating a battering ram, Eivor's arms turn into spaghetti and start flopping all over the machine𒁏. Several times, Eivor and other characters are engulfed in flames that surround them like the human torch, though they don't react at all nor do they take any damage. In battle, Eivor's attacks send enemies tumbling into walls and rocks that they sometimes get stuck on or unnaturally bounce off of. There's even a point after climbing a wall where Eivor gets stuck running in place and has to jump out of it.
There's no way to know when this footage was captured or how much the game has changed since then, so the only thing to do is wait for more official gameplay to come out. Assassin's Creed Valhalla is scheduled for a holiday release and will be going up against major AAA open-world games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Spider-Man: Miles Morales at launch.