Af﷽ter over 60 hours, I’m still not bored of beating up Saxons in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. Most of this time was admittedly spent before writing my 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:review, alt💯hough I still log in for an hour or so every couple of days to do a bit of exploring. Yesterday I signed in and it hit me like a f✤reight train fresh out of a wormhole: what I like best about Valhalla is ripped straight out of Dragon’s Dogma.
I’ve seen a lot of people pointing out similarities between the latest🎉 Assassin’s Creed game and The Witcher 3, and I’m inclined to agree with a lot of the comparisons that have cropped up so far. Valhalla’s England is remarkably similar to Velen, both in terms of atmosphere and overall aesthetic. Rolling hills, winding rivers, and relentlessly treacherous marshland mark this region as one that is harsh but beautiful - rewarding if you’re willing to get your trousers all muddied up. The people who live here have similar personalities as well - from Kaer Trolde to Ravensthorpe and Crow’s Perch to Jorvik, you can rest assured that the Irish and Northern accents will belong to the people picking fights.
But 🌺aesthetic and accents aren’t everything. Yesterday I was wandering around the west of Lunden, just sort of aimlessl♛y knocking about on my massive Dark Souls wolf. I’d selected the “follow the road” option that would bring me straight to my quest marker, but not via the fastest route. Sure, I could have manually cut corners by scaling mountains or swimming through rivers, but we’re living in post-Roman Britain here - we have roads!
That’s when it struck mꦅe. I have seen some critiques of Valhalla’s environmental design stating that it’s too samey (I would ask that you consider the scale of the whole world here and consider Norway, and Vinland, and Asgard, and Jotunheim). But yes, England is all quite green and hilly, and ther🍸e are lots of castles - that’s what Anglo-Saxon England looked like, by the way.
When I first visited Gransys in Dragon’s Dogma, I thought, “well this is a bit… er, dark.” I’d wander around at nighttime and complain that it𝓡 was too difficult to get anywhere - for what it’s worth, I turned 16 two days after Skyrim came out, so I’ve been a bit spoiled when it comes to hand-holding in large-scale RPGs. But then I remembered that in real life roads actually have a reason for existing - they connect places. There are roads and paths and whatever other kind of directional avenues you fancy inꦿ lots of games, but they don’t really matter all that much, because you can just glitch your horse over mountains, or choose one of approximately 8,423 fast travel waypoints.
Once I decided to follow the roads in Dragon’s Dogma, Gransys really o♍pened up for me. I know that might sound quite silly to people who played Dragon’s Dogma long before me, but it was a very weird experience for someone whose only real point of reference at the time was Bethesda and BioWare. I had grown up thinking that I could just walk in the direction of my quest marker completely unobstructed, where every single necessary journey could be completed by following the displacement line instead of plotting a strategic route based on topography (I still maintain that this is one of the primary reasons as to why Death Stranding is singularly brilliant). I had nඣo idea that there were games out there like Dragon’s Dogma, where venturing off the beaten track could easily lead to death or dead end.
In Valhalla it’s the same. It’s important to note that The Witcher 3 mak💫es good use of roads too, particularly in Skellige - if you attempt to head off through a forest, you’ll likely be ambushed by a pack of wolves. But this is a far more precarious ordeal in Valhalla, where there might be no way through said forest except back the way you came - plus the wolves here pack a particularly painful punch. In The Witcher 3 you use roads to avoid monsters - in Valhalla you use roads to make sure your arrival at your destination is guaranteed, lest you get lost in the maelstrom of some dimly-lit fo𒊎rest surrounded by Zealots or drunken bears.
The other main difference is that it’s particularly easy to remember the way from Novigrad to Oxenfurt in The Witcher 3. There are plenty of l🐽andmark𒆙s, while the land is largely barren and flat. You can just hightail it across in a straight line for the most part - in Valhalla, trying to do this would bring you even further from your destination than you were ten minutes beforehand, bringing you up a mountain that’s a pain in the arse to get back down from.
It’s a different kind of exploration-informed environmental design. A lot of areas look the same, but for good reason - this is alien land to Eivor, mind. Roads are about all you have to guide you on your journeys across Viking Age England, and unless you remember that you can take a shortcut by turning at the 57th tree on the left on the road 🦋south of Northwic, you’re probably going to need to stick to the path pretty religiously. The remarkable thing about this is that, eventually, Valhalla begins to revel in its sameness, because the omnidirectional functionality of its entire geographical framework becomes one of the absolute best bits of traversing its massive but manageable world.
Valhalla is a treat for eyes spoiled by modernity, but its slow, methodical traversal is far more aligned with the excellent world design of Dꦛragon’s Dogma’s Gransys than it is with any more recent open-world RPG. Ultimately, I think that’s its greatest strength - it’s a massive world, but it’s not as unwieldy as several maps smaller than it, because it justifies the connective tissue spanning its entire landmass by keeping it taut, as opposed to letting the strings loose and settling for bloat.
Also, your Jomsviking? Come on. That’s 100% ripped from Dragon’s Dogma’s pawn 🍨system, which has been criminally underused in RPG design since.