Over the last decade, choice has become an increasingly important part of an RPG experience. When playing a game, players want their choices to matter, somehow affecting the gameplay or the world around them. In response to this, developers have included more and more player agency in recent games, but how much agency works well is always a big question. In Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, players get to choose almost everything that the main character, Eivor, says. Despite this, the choice made by players usually doesn’t end up affecting the outcome of a situation in any real way, leaving some players disappointed by the poorly implemented system. NOTE: This article contains SPOILERS regarding the game’s ending.
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is a great game in many ways. Though it continues to take the series down the RPG path, it includes enough elements from the older games to satisfy those fans as well. As a viking RPG game, it’s up there with the greats, but that doesn’t mean that it has no flaws. Players have already been encountering tons of inconvenient bugs, and the recent Yule Season update added even more to the game. Likewise, the way choices affect the world around players is lackluster to say the least, as most choices don’t matter at all.
One perfect example of this issue is in the Sciropescire arc. Players find themselves in a church trying to manage heated negotiations between a western Briton king and their good friend Ceolbert. At one point, the acting Ealdorman of Sciropescire, Bishop Deorlaf, gives Eivor a heap of silver in hopes that they can use it to smooth the negotiation process. At this point, the player talks to everyone in the room and must decide who to give the silver to. With how complex the situation is, it seems like a quest that should have multiple branches and different ways it could play out based on this singular choice, but instead Ivarr starts a fight and the negotiations fall apart no matter what players choose.
Another instance of choices not mattering is after the Ledecestrescire arc. When players return to report to Randvi, they are attacked by a rival clan of Danes from East Anglia. After pushing back the attackers, it’s revealed that the Raven Clan has taken a prisoner. The game lets Eivor and the player decide whether he should die or be used for information, but regardless of this choice the prisoner dies anyway. Even if players decide they want to let him go and track him back to his base, Dag kills him instead. The resulting dialogue is slightly different, but more than anything players feel as though their decision didn’t matter.
While the above choices and many others reinforce the lack of player agency in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, there are some instances where choice does matter. Perhaps the most chilling example of this is during the Grantebridgescire arc. Players are tasked with finding out which of Soma’s advisors betrayed her, and in the end, they get to decide who Soma kills.
After gathering clues and doing some thorough searching, players can eventually reveal the actual traitor amongst Soma’s ranks. Choosing correctly sees Soma kill the traitor and the rest of the quest play out as normal, but choosing incorrectly will cause Soma to kill an innocent person. Later on, the still living traitor will reveal himself, killing more people before Eivor and Soma are able to take him down. This result causes players to feel real guilt for their mistake and imbues the choice with true moral consequences, but moments like this are few and far between.
Perhaps the worst part of the whole situation is the inconsistency of how choices matter in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. In a game where it’s preordained that choices aren’t going to have any major effects on the story, players can feel free to make choices as they see fit. There’s no anxiety that goes into choosing what a character says because it’s clear that it won’t come back to bite players in the butt later. By contrast, games with consequences to choices force players to carefully consider what they are doing, and the most cautious players will even look up the outcomes of certain choices before following through.
In Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, players are forced to consider choices carefully as in the latter situation because they never know when a choice will matter. When looking up if a choice matters, more often than not the answer is no. On the other hand, players that get tired of stressing about choices and decide to just go with their gut have the potential to miss out on certain things. This puts players in a weird spot where they’re taking the worst of both scenarios. They have all the anxiety of a consequence heavy game without any of the freedom of the opposite.
All of this comes together to determine which of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla‘s two endings players get. If they disagree with Sigurd too much, then they’ll get what some refer to as the bad ending. Alternatively, agreeing with him leads to the supposed true ending of the game. In truth, there’s no black and white answer as to which ending is better, but calling one the true ending is a manipulation of players in and of itself, even if it is unintentional. Many will feel they have to agree with Sigurd even when they don’t want to in order to get this true ending.
It seems that what Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is trying to do is give players the illusion of choice. If someone were to play through the game without any outside context other than what’s happening in their playthrough, it would likely feel as though their choices mattered. Players would be left thinking “What if I gave the silver to Ivarr? Would he still attack?” and other questions. Since players can simply look up the alternative outcomes, though, this doesn’t really work. Games don’t necessarily need to have choices and consequences to be good, but they should be up front about the concept.
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is available now on PC, PS4, PS5, Stadia, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
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