Kassandra was the star in Odyssey but on Valhalla male Eivor is the better performance by far. Female Eivor is cringe and one note. After 30 hours with her I couldn't take it anymore and switched. I wish I had played as him from the start.

I was just playing Valhalla and I realized something. I am bored. Which is a first, since I've beaten every other game in the series at least twice. So why did this happen?

Well, the game doesn't really give me the reason to progress. In Odyssey I could (and I enjoyed) min-max. I could put all the skill points into archery (and then mastery points for each additional headshot dmg % or ranged dmg %). Sure, I sucked at melee, but I could one-shot almost anything (including mercenaries). In Valhalla I am currently 253 power (I didn't beat it, but maybe I'm half way through the story? Without spoiling, I just met Basim in the south) and I have no reason left to keep levelling. I play on the highest difficulty and I can already easily kill anything. Wouldn't even need my vikings to raid as I can take entire villages all by myself easily (if only I could open those doors and treasures by myself as well) and the AI is so stupid they don't even try to attack all at once, often just watching peacefully as I slaughter their friends. As much as I enjoy the combat system (and I do), it's just not challenging anymore.

I've spent skill points on stuff that I wanted and even on stuff I didn't want. So no more reason to progress character-wise.

Exploration-wise I have no reason to do anything either. I've already maxed out the gear set that boosts my play style (Huntsman). As I play as an archer, no other set gives me the same bonuses, so I no longer need resources. Some world activities grant skill points, but I don't need those anymore. Some (like clearing out cursed places) reward player with absolutely nothing, so there's that.

And the story alone is not good enough to keep me playing. Not saying it's bad, but in game like this players need a sense of character progression in order to keep playing. I have none of that.

So yeah, goodbye Valhalla. I'll keep an eye out for all the patch notes, of course, in case things should change. But for now, I'm done. I'm bored.

We went from no crashing, no stutters, no hitching, no freezing. To CONSTANT crashing, CONSTANT hitching, can play the game an hour without something going on. Game bloody closing itself without doing anything, hard locking the game, the memory leak is WORSE then it ever was. THE HELL did you guy do, you made everything worse with this update.

my rig is a 5700 DD ultra, 8 GB, 16GB of ram, 2700X 4.0ghz. I can run every other game 200+ fps, this game took a dive from 120 fps to 70 after this update.