Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is a beautiful game, to be sure, but it certainly doesn’t push next generation consoles as hard as it could. Unlike Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs: Legion itself, the game has no ray tracing and does not offer true native 4K on the PS5 or Xbox Series X. Well, it looks like more improvements are on the way for cutting-edge platforms.
Sure, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla has the usual range of paid and free content updates coming in 2021, but in a recent Game Informer interview, Ubisoft producer Julien Laferrière suggested some of the other improvements in progress.
When looking at Valhalla’s post-launch plans, it was important for me to have quality of life solutions there, and also to be able to react to the new platforms, because they keep improving. We have great reception on PS5, X Series and PC too – people are definitely taking advantage of the game’s cutting edge capabilities, so we want to continue to capitalize on that. This does not mean bullshit or cliché, but for me, it is about listening to what the player base is saying and reacting to it, in addition to the extra content and resources.
Unfortunately, if you expect sea battles to be one of the things added to Valhalla, you will be disappointed. Laferrière explains that leaving them out was an intentional creative decision based on Ubisoft’s Viking research …
One thing I can say that didn’t pass and we thought it could work very early was naval combat. In fact, we found that Vikings did not do many naval battles; we think they could be shooting arrows in flames, as in the Odyssey. But they just didn’t do it. So, we said: “There is no sea on our map, just rivers … we will treat the ship more like a vehicle”.
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is now available for PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X / S, PS4 and PS5.