I keep discovering more and more very cool things in this game. I recently discovered that after you beat one of the main missions, your boat crew will have a new song they can sing. The song they song is the tale of the mission you beat. Thats pretty awesome. Also, when you get new crew members, you can have those new crew members tell stories on your boat. This kind of stuff, I don't expect from Ubisoft games. Ubisoft needs to continue this in all of their games going forward. The past couple of years, Ubisoft games have been very bad and very disappointing but this is a very good game.

So, I saw the anniversary announcement about a rogue-lite mode coming to AC Valhalla and it perfectly exemplifies why nobody likes Ubisoft right now. That is, their obsession with chasing industry trends at the expense of whether it works for the game they’ve made. Firstly, much like dialogue choices, it goes against the premise of the animus. Historically, when died you would desync and reset to the last point before - important - BEFORE things went wrong. So losing equipment makes no sense.

Admittedly, I also have a personal gripe with rogue-lites and rogue-likes in general because they are inherently not fun, IMO, essentially padding out playtime by forcing the player to grind for [censored] they already obtained the first time round because of one mistake. They even admonish the player for *gasp* having the audacity to close the app! How dare we stop playing a video game and go about the rest of our day?! 

Seriously, I like a challenge but rogue-lites/likes are not challenging, they’re punishing and I don’t play video games to be punished. For example, I’m playing the villains DLC in Far Cry right now and I’ve 100% the Vaas one so far. I think I only died once so it wasn’t too bad but the constant stress and anxiety of having to play to perfection was not good for the mental health. Not to mention the A.I.  behaviour had to be tweaked to actually make it a challenge - and by “tweaked” I mean “cheat”, as enemies seemed to have aimbot, infinite knockdowns and rubber-banding that made the combat a chore.

But it's not as out of place in Far Cry which has always had the theme of survival and self development. The idea is that worlds like Rook Islands, Yara, Kyrat and Hope County are hostile to the player and will push back against you the more you make your way through it. Jason Brody, Dani Rojas, Ajay Ghale, and the sheriff are the underdogs.

That’s not Assassin’s Creed. 

Assassin’s Creed is about the power fantasy of being a one person army badass. You are the predator and the targets, whether it's templars or the cult or the ancients are your prey. Not the other way round.

Furthermore, flipping the script like this with Assassin’s Creed Valhalla will only be compounded by the fact that Valhalla is an unstable disaster barely being held together by each subsequent patch and the poor moderators who have to report all its problems. So now, not only does the player have to worry about their own perfection but you have to worry about the game's imperfections. All it takes is just one game breaking bug or one crash to ruin a perfect run and force a player to the beginning. 

Like the mastery challenges, this ill conceived idea is proof that whoever is greenlighting these things doesn’t actually care and is more concerned with the perception of having content rather than the quality of the content, itself. In short, Valhalla isn't polished enough to demand perfection of its players and, even if it was, a rogue-lite mode goes against the entire point of Assassin's Creed.

I liked the trailer and i can't wait to try the game out. But what i don't like is seeing my culture being depicted in things that don't relate to it at all.
Why is Ubisoft shamelessly using a Moroccan mosaic for a game that's supposed to be about Baghdad?