Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Drunk Glitch gets weirder and weirder

Every time my Viking hero Eivor dies in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, she comes back to life drunk. This is a known bug that developers seem to be prepared to fix, but by trying to support it last night, I somehow made it worse. Although, in this case, “worse” also means “better”. And now I’m at odds over whether I want it fixed.

See how the fault initially worked on Valhalla a few weeks ago. I would upload the saved file to my Xbox and see a loading screen. Then, some part of 9th century England would appear, along with Eivor, who would stagger. The graphics would be blurry and then sharper then Eivor would falter a little more.

This was strange, but tolerable. The effect of the drink wears off quickly. In addition, Ubisoft game designers have indicated Valhallaofficial support page for that this was an unintended side effect of the new Valhalla Christmas celebration, a party that Ubisoft added to the game’s central Viking settlement in mid-December.

“Drunk status effect applied during and after the loading screen?

Workaround: Meditating or sleeping in your bed should remove the status effect. (or you can just walk away ..) ”

The celebration adds a large tree, a horde of revelers, a bow and arrow challenge and an option for drunken fights. Somehow, all of this drink-based game code was a bug, but, I figured, it would be resolved by the time the celebration is scheduled to end on January 7. Or so I expected.

This light and perpetual drunkenness seemed, if not good, at least an interesting and fleeting inconvenience, something like a fleeting storm. It is also an example of the type of failure that may be more common as more games operate on an update schedule: seasonal malfunction.

And that’s where I was last night, after writing a draft of this post, before sharing it with Kotaku readers a fun and harmless flaw. I planned to publish the article in the morning and that’s it.

But last night, after I finished my job and put the kids to sleep, I loaded Valhalla backup. I decided to explore the Hamtunscire region, which is tailored for players with power level 340. My Eivor was only 170, but I thought it would be interesting to explore.

In the vicinity, I found an enemy camp to attack and spent half an hour trying to take it down. The enemies were in fact much more courageous than my usual opponents. They killed me a bunch. Eivor continued to come back temporarily drunk, but ended up cleaning the base. In the process, I shot all my arrows and did not refuel. (This will be important).

I ventured deeper into Hamtunscire and located a marker for a side mission. It involved Eivor taking a sip, except that the drink was poisoned, and suddenly I had the most severe drunkenness I have ever seen in the game. My screen was not just blurred. It was black and white. When that happened, an enemy attacked. He was too high for me, but I pulled out my bow and aimed at a weak point, except … without arrows.

I ran. The black and white effect of poisonous drunkenness persisted. I kept running. The normal effect of drunkenness would already be gone. It hadn’t. I jumped on my horse, galloped towards the town of Wincestre. The effect is finally over. The blur stopped. The colors came back.

I approached some of Wincestre’s guards. They didn’t like my face and they killed me.

Eivor came back to life, but she was not just drunk. She was – oh no! – drunk with poison. Everything was black and white and wobbly.

That was not so funny. And it was not disappearing. At least, not fast enough.

I had read that sleeping makes the normal drunk state disappear, so I teleported Eivor back to her settlement, and made her sleep. She woke up sober, the colors restored.

I quickly traveled back to Wincestre, told myself to play carefully and climbed a tall building to examine the city.

So I jumped, hoping to land on a haystack, but I misjudged and died.

Eivor came back to life at the top of the tall building and, you guessed it, she was drunk with poison again.

That was annoying, but I had an idea. Perhaps the game remembered my most recent drunken state. Maybe if I got drunk (without poison) I could at least go back to life wavering, but without the discolored world. But it did not work. She continued to relive of subsequent deaths in the drunken state.

I could continue traveling quickly to the settlement to get some sleep after each death, but that would be very complicated. Could I try to die less? I probably should have abandoned the game in such a treacherous region, but what’s so funny about that? No, I needed to find a way to quickly cure poison drunkenness while stubbornly playing more missions for which I was not ready.

I made Eivor meditate. But it didn’t work.

So I agreed to hear a man talk about Jesus. That worked!

While doing all this, I noticed something unexpected. Whenever I was drunk with poison, Valhalla achieved austere beauty. The game looks great in general, but removing the colors allows the light to more clearly define your protagonist and the scene around you.

I started taking more screenshots.

I take lots of pictures of Valhalla, and generally do so using the game’s photo mode. I like to use this in-game tool to pause the action, refram a scene, perhaps zoom in or out, although I have never used any of its filters, which include black and white. Instead, I just ran with the entire game world in this poisonous black-and-white state, so I stopped to enter photo mode. When lining up one of my shots, I discovered how the magicians who made the game did this black and white trick.

The effect of drunkenness was an illusion. The game world hadn’t gone black and white, after all. The developers just put a filter between my character and the camera. And using the photo mode, I could see exactly how they got that rabbit out of the hat.

Amazing!

I could have fun with that. This filter can co-star in my images.

You can also generate some cool / interesting GIFs:

Suddenly, I was having a great time. I realized that I would miss it. I would not lose the game to be unstable, but I would miss seeing it through this filter. I would miss playing with an unexpected visual trick and would miss the feeling of having broken the game code and found something beautiful in a flaw.

I would like Eivor to come back to life without the whole world becoming blurry, however. So bring this patch.