Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is a game so plagued with bugs and glitches that it’s hard to believe gamers are able to get through it. The game is fun, the world is beautiful, but none of that matters when the game does not function properly. Reviews from nearly every major site have noted these problems. The team at Ubisoft is doing everything they can to respond; they’ve already fixed one major bug that stopped players from being able to progress.
Even so, there is a lot of work to be done. This would be a disaster on par with Ubisoft’s own Assassin’s Creed Unity and BioWare’s Anthem, but unlike those games, thankfully, it seems like players enjoy the concept, artwork, music, and story elements enough to put up with this catastrophe. Everyone who plays is bound to find a bug unique to their experience, but there is a list of common culprits that Ubisoft should look into first.
10 Surround Sound
Unbelievably, no option for surround or headset sound exists in the game. That means that sword clanks might be happening behind Eivor, but the player doesn’t hear them from that direction. Instead, they’ve been replaced by text on the screen that announces the sound and points to the direction it is coming from.
For a AAA game, this is an absolutely unacceptable regression and hopefully a fix for it will be on the way. Gamers that are already thinking about what to play after they are done with this game will certainly be factoring in games with much better sound quality.
9 Eivor’s Speed
Eivor is the slowest Assassin so far and it’s not even close. Running on his feet, his 100 meter dash time is roughly 28 seconds. To put this in perspective, a 103-year-old runner managed to complete this same feat in 24.79 seconds. Mounted up, the time isn’t much better, getting down to about 20 seconds, which is still about twice as bad as a middle schooler.
It’s hard to say whether Ubisoft was trying to slow Eivor down due to his armor and items, but the slow that has been employed is overkill. Debate whether or not Eivor is as cool a personality as Ezio, but in terms of quickness, the latter absolutely steamrolls the current protagonist.
8 Climbing Mechanics
Flying pieces of paper are back, which many will remember fondly from Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag and its enigmatic star, Edward Kenway. Unfortunately, getting these tattoo designs is a total pain caused by the unforgivably broken climbing controls.
The creator of this design actually issued a funny self-deprecating apology for how bad the climbing had gotten in Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, but the current installment puts a very dark cloud over this humor. Eivor frequently gets stuck on steps, refuses to climb down a surface, or goes into parkour mode when players just need him to walk normally.
7 Hitboxes
The updated gameplay is already being widely panned and hitboxes have a lot to do with this issue. Taking a page out of the book of Ghost of Tsushima, it seems that the team for Assassin’s Creed Valhalla thought it would be fun to make it so that hits actually had to physically connect in order to count.
That dream isn’t necessarily wrong, but the execution failed in two ways. First, it is applied unevenly as Eivor gets hit and staggered even when the weapon is blocked or dodged. Second, weapons are clearly going through enemies who take no damage because of the buggy hitbox.
6 Destructible Environment
The first raid that players will go on is usually fun and memorable (provided the game does not glitch out). Smashing crates is a little bit clunky, but it feels wild and exciting, just like a Viking might experience in an actual raid on a real monastery.
This frantic swinging might look good in one of Assassin’s Creed‘s awesome trailers, but after one-hundred hours, it’s no longer fun to be swinging and missing objects. On top of that, several secret areas require precisely destroying a small area of a wall and, without a targeted way to break it down, the journey takes much longer than it should.
5 Clipping
One of the first things players will revile at is Eivor’s default hair and beard clipping right through their default gear. If this happens normally, one can imagine what happens with different styles of hair and different clothing.
And that guess is not wrong; it gets really ugly. Worse, this is true of basically every other character in the game. Good luck taking one of Assassin’s Creed‘s signature villains seriously when his beard keeps disappearing into his chest as he nods maniacally.
4 Spawns Inside The Planet
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla does a great job making a big world even bigger with underground and indoor areas like never before. So when a mission-critical item appears underground or inside, players don’t fret, they know to look for a passage that leads down and in.
The problem is that only about half of the time is this the case. These vital items sometimes spawn under the textured planet with no means of getting to them except for reloading and restarting, which is a huge slap in the face to players who spend hours trying to reach them.
3 Quest Registration
Escort quests have been a traditional problem for the video game industry as a whole, but this feels like the lowest of the low. Players will get locked into place after a conversation has finished and the game won’t let them move. Or they accomplish a goal and can move, but the game does not register the completion and so Eivor can’t do anything else.
This is already annoying after completing an entire questline only to have to reload it and do it all again, but it gets even worse. Some of these broken quests have corrupted entire save files and rendered all forward and backward progress moot.
2 Companion Activity
Most gamers will run into this issue after doing a handful of raids. They’ll be trying to open a raw materials chest or break down a two-man door and, as they do, the crew stands around and watches Eivor struggle in vain.
Having companions be integral to the gameplay is fine, but a decision like this means they need to work. One might fault bad teammates in a multi-player game, but in a single-player experience like Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, the teammates need to be polished before ever designing a process like this.
1 Cutscenes
The point of a cutscene is to add some dynamic sequences outside of just the usual hank-and-slash playing. The cutscenes in this game do not serve this function, mostly using character models within the existing world and trying to make them converse.
But other characters will sometimes run into a cutscene character and then the one is left talking to no one at all. The cutscenes in the wilderness are prone to provoking wild animal attacks and the characters will have a calm conversation while their crew and themselves are savagely devoured by a wolf pack in the meantime.
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