Assassin's Creed Valhalla (Ep 15) - a podcast by Icel Media

In this episode of THE BURN, hosts Aviv Icel Manoach and Omer Timetwister Kaplan talk about Assassin's Creed Valhalla, the new open-world action-adventure set in early medieval England, as well as new products featured at CES 2021.

Original recording date - January 13th, 2021.

Game of the Show: Assassin's Creed Valhalla

Valhalla is the newest instalment of the AC series and a continuation of the Layla saga that started in Origins. Like it’s two predecessors, its an open-world adventure game, this time taking part mostly in 7th century England during the height of the Nordic wars of conquest.

When I found out the game took place in England and not in Scandinavia (besides a small part in Norway), I was disappointed. But the English environments are exceptional, so I stopped caring about that. They also did a lousy job with the Norway map that really made you not want to explore it.

I like a lot of the decisions they took for this game: Getting back to the original Desmond storyline; bring back the Animus anomalies; reduce dialogue options to only 1-2 per conversation and reduce the amount of equipment and resources you have to collect.

One of the great things they did with the game is to divide its challenge setting across three topics: Combat, Exploration and Stealth. I picked combat on easy, exploration and stealth on medium, since those are the things I enjoy most in the game.

The skills and abilities system is an improvement over the previous games, but it takes a few hours of playtime to see that. At first glance, it looks like they remove some of the cool things in past games. But then you find out they were not removed, they were moved from the skill tree (that is entirely passive) to the ability screen and sometimes require specific quests to get them.

One thing I don’t like is that all abilities are tied to adrenaline.

When I started playing the game, there were a variety of bugs and issues. Some may have been fixed over the last month or so. Those include input delay when pressing controller keys, animation delays which cause them to activate in mid-air, desync voice-over and periodical game crashes (that I manage to prevent by closing down the game every ~2 hours).

News

CES 2021 is live these days, going full virtual, and just like every year, there are tons of weird conceptual stuff coming out - the highlight for me so far is this nursing home gamer chair by Razor (link) so if you ever wondered what the future of streaming looks like, it’s living in your chair pretty much.

What I really wanted to talk about is that we’re getting a new Mario game! (link) it’ll be an expansion to the Mario 3d port to the switch, the story as always is ludicrous (“Bowser just got bigger and out of control!”) but on the other end we have cat Mario so...sure.

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