I have to say, I struggled to get into this game at first. 
As I’m coming off Ghost of Tsushima — which is a really polished game that plays really well.

So when I loaded up Valhalla, everything is so clunky. The combat, the control of the character the movement speed seems to be oversensitive, it’s very difficult to walk slow or to trot on your horse slowly. A lot of parkour animations and combat animations seem to quick.

But if you persist with the game through its clumsiness, and try to ignore some of the glitches. The experience really starts to open up. 

Exploration now feels fantastic. This is definitely the right direction for the franchise Ubisoft. 


Not only is the world and level design really very good, but exploration now feels organic and rewarding! Those two qualities are so important in any open world.
Finding a chest is actually genuinely exciting now. A lot of the loot fits a clear in game economy, so feels useful. Plus finding weapons, armour or abilities is great.

This is sadly something many of Ubisoft games lack. Most the loot in their open world games is superfluous dross! It made exploration feel ultimately hollow and meaningless.

This is absolutely one of the games strongest aspects so far.

It’s great, because more and more I really appreciate immersion.
And this game is by far the most immersive AC game to date IMO.

I hope that Ubisoft continue to double down on immersive features!

I love how the health is effectively tied to hunting and scavenging in the world. Hunting felt pointless in the other games.
I love to have an animation for skinning the animals though. Why is that not in there?

I would love to see more lite survival elements.

I’m gonna do a couple of videos just show casing what I mean about exploration.

But thank goodness they got rid of health regen!



However, that being said — this game really did deserve to be a better game. 

The combat is average so far. The enemy AI is average.

And what the hell? Why are the enemies tethered to their spawn location now?? Meaning they chase you only so far before they seem to hit an invisible wall and clearly can’t chase you further...
So if you’re trying to lure them away from the camp, they can’t physically move beyond this invisible boundary.
It’s a lame scripting thats in a lot of other games but not usually Ubisoft!?! Which is disappointing.


Unfortunately too — the game is filled with little graphical glitches and sound glitches. 
The camera is regularly going below the scenery when doing the charge an enemy to the ground ability.
When panning the camera around the camera gets pushed in by the scenery so your character disappears??
If you die and load back into an area the enemies seem to spawn in with you, so initially they’re all clumped together in a group and then they spread out back to their previous positions.
The sound sometimes cuts out when your swimming... on the surface of the water.

There’s a lot of little things like this in the game that seek to pull you out of the experience.


Which is sad as I have a feeling this will be my favourite AC so far — it’s a shame it’s not as polished as Origins.

I get a black screen after the first in game sequence talking about Ymir the giant. I usually get to see Elvor for a second in the animus style loading screen before it chucks you into gameplay, at this point the framerates drop ridiculously low and I get a black screen or it just freezes on kid Elvor when it seems like your about to take control of him.

I have tried completely reinstalling, Moving it to my SSD, verifying game files and updating drivers but nothing seems to work.

Was thinking it could possibly be my specs, but I am seeing alot of people with the same problem.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. My specs are listed below

Hey all. I wanted to throw some positivity out into the ether, so I thought I’d briefly chime in on Dawn of Ragnarok.

In short, I had a great time playing this. Ubisoft Sofia is one of my favorite studios; this might sound like awkward praise, but they have an amazing knack for emphasizing the best parts of a game while minimizing and/or removing the worst. I think Assassin’s Creed: Rogue was the best example of this. Black Flag was a masterpiece, but it had a bit too many tailing missions, those awkward underwater missions, and ship stealth (ugh). Rogue masterfully trimmed the fat and was better for it. It remains one of my favorite games of all time, so I had my hopes up for Dawn of Ragnarok (even though the “you can pick your Odin All-Father’s gender” trailer made me cringe hardcore).

And… my hopes weren’t misplaced. The stone cairns are nowhere to be found. There are MUCH less dialogue choices, so Odin has a definitive personality (what few dialogue choices there are just flavors of pure sassiness). The bizarre “we good guy, sugarcoated, colonialist Vikings. We burn your village, rob you blind, and steal your land for ourselves, but we not kill you directly. We leave winter and famine to do that, unless you want to be our slaves! SKAL!” tone of the base game is gone; you’re Asgardians on a guerilla war to HELP the dwarf civilians, so the tone fits the gameplay.

The different forts and occupied towns/cities are cleverly built with lots of choke points for combat, stealth opportunities, and archer perches. Instead of building a bloated map with content spread thin across it, you made a smaller map DENSELY packed with things to do, sights to see, and oddities to find.

I could just keep going on and on. I’m impressed by the decisions made here. Also, this franchise has been around for 15 years… and I’ve spent four of them being told my character choices weren’t canon and everything I did as male Eivor or Alexios were what-if Animus scenarios that had no bearing whatsoever on anything actually related to the franchise. I’m frankly sick of it. It makes me feel disjointed from the franchise’s lore and it’s a crappy way to treat customers. This is the first new release in four years where none of the above was an issue. Where I wasn’t treated like some [censored] that made the wrong choice. I can actually comment on this game without someone snidely going “WELL, you know in the novel that ODIN All-Father is THIS, RIGHT!?” It made a world of difference to me. It was a positive experience. 

So yeah, I liked this expansion enough that it got me back into the franchise. Heard about your 60 fps patch for the console versions of AC: Origins and bought that game a third time along with some Helix points for certain weapons and time-savers. If the goal of this expansion was to boost user engagement, I’d say it was a success (at least in my case). It got you another $80.00 out of my pocket, more or less. That’s not including the Dawn of Ragnarok soundtrack I bought, either. Well worth it.

Thank you, Ubisoft Sofia. It was a lovely experience and you've given me hope for the next Assassin's Creed entry (which, up until this expansion, I was preemptively flinching at. I'm still scared we'll get Woke Aztecs, Body Positive Samurai, or an Islam-era Persian game in which 50% of all characters are somehow LGBTQIA+ with anachronistic they/them neo-pronouns despite such said society REALLY not being cool with that at the time... but now I'll wait and see with less apprehension).

Note: I did have a few glitches, but they’re just standard AC: Valhalla glitches. I don’t fault Dawn of Ragnarok at all. The game crashed for me like a half dozen times, the rune duplication glitch came back and now I’m stuck with 7 Motsognir Clarity Runes stuck in my inventory forever, all the new seasonal festival event items from the past two events glitched out (no names, no abilities listed. Just totally broken), and every hour or so the game will automatically switch from fullscreen to borderless… which seems to break the vsync and results in wild framerate spikes that make the game awful to play until I restart it. Several of these issues have been in existence SINCE LAUNCH and I have no hope they’ll ever be fixed at this point, but again… they were before Ubisoft Sofia’s expansion and I think they’re just unavoidable parts of this game. It is what it is.

Now to hang out with Bayek. He’s like a Ptolemaic Egyptian Batman and it’s great to see him again.