Based of this website review of these reviews they are not worth listening to.
Assassin's Creed Valhalla - Impressions @Upper Echelon Gamers
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Based of this website review of these reviews they are not worth listening to.
Honestly if you played any recent Assassin's Creed games you know what you're getting into. Sure the game has a few changes and additions, but it's Odyssey 2.0 basically.
SSIGuy
An Islander Returned
It's kind of the opposite for me... I don't like worlds (small or large) where there is stuff everywhere. I like having moments of "empty" landscapes that I have to travel through to reach interesting areas and encounters. I think that's one of the reasons I liked the Gothics so much but Risen 1 and 2 less so - and the recent AC games. Too much stuff all crammed around you... it feels a bit artificial to me. And maybe that's because in the real world I've spent lots of time adventuring through remote areas (Himalayan mountains, the Sahara, remote parts of China and Tibet, the Rocky mountain) and enjoy that kind of travel and then find the encounters that punctuate those journeys all the more rewarding.
So I guess it's not so much small vs large worlds in games - but the relative density of the content within them and how that's balanced against the rest of the environment. To me, this kind of design is as important as traditional level design in FPS and other genres - and I think great RPGs are able to nail this balance really well.
JFarrell71
SasqWatch
I think Valhalla with all the map markers turned off would really fit the bill for you. If you have them on and can see where everything is it would feel like a lot, but in reality there is a lot of landscape (highly varied landscape, too) in between all of it.
I think I have played the game enough to make my opinion of it. While I am enjoying the game a lot, it also saddens me to see the lost potential in it. I have not played AC games since the second entry but played a Ubisoft game lately. This game suffers from the same flaws: the game is *very* gamey. It saddens me to think how good a game this had been, had they had a CDProjekt Red or Rockstar level writing team on board. They have tried to copy Cornwell's novels, but, sadly, they did not have a Cornwell-level writer in charge of the game design.
The game feels like a game, not a simulation of something that could exist. You start with a character that is feeling overpowered from the start with an ability to sneak in bright daylight making enemies feel like game-puppets similar to Skyrim rather than in-game characters. You can also climb mountains with all your gear like Alex Honnold. The difference being that Honnold has trained his art all his life pretty much 24/7, while you play a Viking who supposedly should have a thousand better things to do than practicing climbing…And then you have that magic raven, which comes from AC lore but there is really no other given in-game reason to be able to see through the eyes of a raven. Why not give this raven a bit later as a meaningful guest reward?
On the other hand, you are an excellent fighter who everyone appears to know without a good reason. You storm your way through battles hacking and slashing magically hitting only enemies while there are many allies around. You can die but it takes many hits to kill you. Often too many for the enemies to have the time before you have killed them. This until you reach England and randomly find a level 90 enemy who kills you with one hit. This level 90 enemy did not even look that different. It just happened to be a higher level than you. You also see the map warning you that a region is level 240. That means that you probably should not go there yet. Why? The game gives no reason except that the region is a higher level than you. I expect this goes the other way too and that similar-looking warriors in different regions have drastically different stats depending on the level of the region.
In other words, they have picked the gamiest elements from RPGs to be able to call their game an RPG, which it is not, by the way. There is no choice and consequence, the character development is there and is kind of fun, but why did they not start from zero? They could have made the player to learn to climb with the character instead of this being a pre-learned ability without a good reason. The list goes on and on. You walk around the world looking for things to loot. Fair enough, but no-one seems to own these things. You can walk in houses owned by whoever (even a king) and take whatever you desire. You can even break their belongings leaving a mess without nobody caring. This is not a theft, no. It's just looting. Here they could have made the looting robbing instead of just go-and-pick type of game thing. I see that they want to show the player their beautifully crafted world by placing loot and markers everywhere, but exploring and robbing people would have worked better lore-wise.
There is also this "made by multicultural team of various beliefs, sexual orientations, and gender identities" thing shining through the game. I get it that not every work has to portrait Vikings as psychopaths but that you cannot kill civilians while raiding is only one of the "nice Vikings" feats the game forces you to follow. Anyway, I was not living through the Viking ages and it is possible that they did not kill and rape civilians…
All in all, it is lots of fun to climb mountains, trees, and buildings, to sneak around in villages looking for houses to rob, to assassinate people, and to fight like a Viking. The controls in and out of combat are well implemented. Only that the game feels like a game, not a simulation of something that could exist. The writing is mediocre at best. The level system and map with every treasure marked on it make exploration gamey looting rather than an exciting experience. Whether the game is worth your money or not depends on what other things you have to do at the moment. With CP2077 delayed, I see myself playing this game quite a lot and will enjoy that time. Therefore I see it worth my money.
The game feels like a game, not a simulation of something that could exist. You start with a character that is feeling overpowered from the start with an ability to sneak in bright daylight making enemies feel like game-puppets similar to Skyrim rather than in-game characters. You can also climb mountains with all your gear like Alex Honnold. The difference being that Honnold has trained his art all his life pretty much 24/7, while you play a Viking who supposedly should have a thousand better things to do than practicing climbing…And then you have that magic raven, which comes from AC lore but there is really no other given in-game reason to be able to see through the eyes of a raven. Why not give this raven a bit later as a meaningful guest reward?
On the other hand, you are an excellent fighter who everyone appears to know without a good reason. You storm your way through battles hacking and slashing magically hitting only enemies while there are many allies around. You can die but it takes many hits to kill you. Often too many for the enemies to have the time before you have killed them. This until you reach England and randomly find a level 90 enemy who kills you with one hit. This level 90 enemy did not even look that different. It just happened to be a higher level than you. You also see the map warning you that a region is level 240. That means that you probably should not go there yet. Why? The game gives no reason except that the region is a higher level than you. I expect this goes the other way too and that similar-looking warriors in different regions have drastically different stats depending on the level of the region.
In other words, they have picked the gamiest elements from RPGs to be able to call their game an RPG, which it is not, by the way. There is no choice and consequence, the character development is there and is kind of fun, but why did they not start from zero? They could have made the player to learn to climb with the character instead of this being a pre-learned ability without a good reason. The list goes on and on. You walk around the world looking for things to loot. Fair enough, but no-one seems to own these things. You can walk in houses owned by whoever (even a king) and take whatever you desire. You can even break their belongings leaving a mess without nobody caring. This is not a theft, no. It's just looting. Here they could have made the looting robbing instead of just go-and-pick type of game thing. I see that they want to show the player their beautifully crafted world by placing loot and markers everywhere, but exploring and robbing people would have worked better lore-wise.
There is also this "made by multicultural team of various beliefs, sexual orientations, and gender identities" thing shining through the game. I get it that not every work has to portrait Vikings as psychopaths but that you cannot kill civilians while raiding is only one of the "nice Vikings" feats the game forces you to follow. Anyway, I was not living through the Viking ages and it is possible that they did not kill and rape civilians…
All in all, it is lots of fun to climb mountains, trees, and buildings, to sneak around in villages looking for houses to rob, to assassinate people, and to fight like a Viking. The controls in and out of combat are well implemented. Only that the game feels like a game, not a simulation of something that could exist. The writing is mediocre at best. The level system and map with every treasure marked on it make exploration gamey looting rather than an exciting experience. Whether the game is worth your money or not depends on what other things you have to do at the moment. With CP2077 delayed, I see myself playing this game quite a lot and will enjoy that time. Therefore I see it worth my money.