I'm playing out of sync. I did Valhalla Odyssey and now I'm playing through origin. I enjoyed a lot of Valhalla. I can see how they tweaked and polished from origins. I think I preferred the scenery in Odyssey and maybe the story and people. Valhalla had best fighting and slo mo. Graphics were outstanding and voice acting was pristine by Valhalla.
Valhalla has easily the worst combat of the three full on RPG AC games. Long attack animations every other time you finish an enemy off whilst all the others stand there patiently, for example.
Then there's the unbelievably terrible barred doors that are absolutely everywhere (they are in mirage as well) which is the shittest, lowest effort puzzle they could have ever thought of and they repeated it every fifteen feet. Good luck maintaining stealth whilst you have to go back outside and circle the building looking for a hole in the wall to shoot an arrow through in a completely plausible and not at all deliriously stupid way.
Then there's the offensively shallow side missions, the barely having anything to do with assassins for the vast majority of the shockingly bloated game, the sheer bugginess (tall grass used to disappear when I got close to it, all the way through the game), spending twenty minutes finding a chest that you spotted with your bird only to discover it's impossible to access until you're on or have completed a specific story mission. Having to wait for your raiders to open bloody chests, despite them being buggy idiots who will stand around ignoring you for five seconds before moving towards it as slowly as possible - all this, including three horrendous barred doors, in the middle of a Viking raid, because a Viking is incapable of breaking open a door somehow. Awful.
I love assassin's creed, I've played all of them. Valhalla ruined the RPGs.
I liked Origins a lot and thought Odyssey got much better mechanically even if the story wasn't quite as good, but Valhalla took a lot of those improvements and ruined them. It felt like Origins/Odyssey had vision behind them whilst Valhalla was just another one that had to be made, full of inconsistency and poorly considered choices.
Don't get me started on the different "endings" of the game. Such a strange choice, considering that if you want the whole Assassin's Creed story, you'll have to pay it again, it just watch the different endings online.
I didn't know it had multiple ending to be honest, because I didn't finish it. I did the basim bit towards the end and just uninstalled in disgust when I realised it was still going.
Valhalla is a nice action game but it’s no AC game. Especially the stealth part and name-sake Assassination gameplay take up too little space.
And the skill tree they copied from PoE is just ridiculously overloaded - symptomatic for Ubisoft‘s approach to the whole game: it’s so convoluted.
I really enjoyed Valhalla but as an AC entry it disappoints.
The first 10 hours or so of Valhalla are great too. Learning the new systems and making your first parts of the settlement are pretty engaging. It's the other 60+ hours that become a slog. You quickly realise that the main quest chain that was kinda outstaying its welcome is what you can expect for every single kingdom. Yeah, there's some variety, but they're really a slog to get through. The settlement upgrades were pretty good, but your mainly unlock things that would have been 'free' in other games. As the gear system leans towards microtransactions nothing you unlock is really mind-blowing. Especially as you'll have to raid yet a other generic copy-and-paste monastery for the materials to upgrade.
If we look back to a game like ACII's Villa upgrades, they provided access to things that would be behind a perk point today. I remember grinding out my capacity upgrades etc. There was direct tie from my effort to the upgrade. With Valhalla, and the other recent games, I feel like I've got to gring out the lootbox/heka chest(or whatever the premium currency is in a particular game)
That's not to say Mirage is perfect. I really hate the token system and it feels so tacked on. I am enjoying being stealthy again though. I used a cheat trainer to add in one hit kills to Odyssey a while back and it improved the game so much.
Oh there's no stealth. I basically just run around melee fighting everything. Valhalla was great for double spearing. Odyssey was a giant club and origin seems to be swordfish.
Unity was only bad due to QA launch issues and a weak Romeo and Juliet story. The gameplay, black boxes, and tight detailed city was the best direction for the game to go and instead they threw it out the window for an open world RPG. "You were this close to greatness" and all that.