I was very excited to dive into the Viking world in assassin's creed valhalla after enjoy 200+ hours in the world of Odyssey. Initially I was very impressed with the graphics, gameplay and the new skill tree and how they reworked how abilities are found in the world. After arriving at the settlement I was excited to start raiding and acquiring all of the materials to start reconstructing my encampment. After doing several raids I found them to be very lackluster and boring. The combat is simple as you can just run around slashing guys in the back while your crew distracts them and simply staying alive will generally always win the raid as there's no real objectives, time limit, and your crew mates can't really die or stay dead. After collecting my materials I made my way back to the settlement to start making some renovations. The shipyard and barracks were my top priorities as it seemed that they would both play a huge roll in both raiding and adventuring the world. I was extremely disappointed when I realized that the shipyard was purely cosmetic and added absolutely nothing of substance to the actual mechanics of the longboat rather just another way to kill time collecting useless skins for your boat... I was greeted by further disappointment went I built my barracks. I thought there would be a customizable raiding combat system where you would be able to customize the play style of your raiding party or that by recruiting certain people it would add bonuses or they would have certain key abilities (similar to the buffs from recruits in odyssey) that could be used in a raid or assault that may be essential to winning however it also appears to be purely cosmetic where you simply just kill time decorating your squad. I am so far disappointed in what seems to be a Viking game sculped completely around killing time by collecting useless cosmetics.. did we learn nothing from the previous generations of the feather collecting history of assassin's creed? After odyssey I really thought the world of assassin's creed had evolved passed the concept of mundane ways of wasting a players time to make the main story seem longer. I hope I'm not wrong and there is more meaningful content to come down the road.

@xelajeb Yes I feel the same, the hoard map give you cosmetics. Most reward for exploration is cosmetics If it continue with so much cosmetics the next one will be The Sims: Assassin's Creed.

@xelajeb

I am with your, i liked upgrading my boat in Odyssey as in that game i felt being rewarded for my time invested.
Since i liked Odyssey so much i had high hopes for valhalla, only to find out that many of the things that made Odyssey fun were completely left out in valhalla.

Transmog system, u want to look good when spending time in a game.
Bird has been downgraded severely
There is a woodworking shop in your settlement, supposedly for your defenses, yet it doesnt do anything
Raids were way to easy, because your teammates couldnt die, they were perfect cannonfodder to even overcome raids way above your lvl.
getting settlement to lvl6 didnt provide any cool features, just more and more cosmetics that you then have to buy in the shop for silver.
Silver droprate are very slow and u almost get nothing, but this is on purpose so you might be inclined to get silver from their helixstore.
All armor and weapons is obtainable through looting chest. killing enemies just gives you flowers [censored] is that.
basically you dont get rewarded for anything, and instead have to get your rewards from chest.
Now at max level you dont even get much xp from killing high target enemies anymore, but yeah they want you to get an xp boost right from their helix store.