In Odyssey we had those war for land missions called Conquest Battles where you picked a side and had amazing replay ability and were often very challenging and difficult!

I really hope we get something like this in Valhalla. Those castle/fort raids we were able to do in the story were absolutely amazing. Imagine if we were able to replay these with objective based quests!

Wouldn't that be amazing!

Thats the only thing im missing from odyssey in this game!

Please Ubisoft let it happen! 

Will conquest battles come to Valhalla? no

pratict point of view it's too late you can't pass from a one time game into a repeatable game, you should reencoded the entire game for that ( I'm french so i'm not sure that my sentence is understable )

the good question is why don't make a repeatable game from the start with a living map like odyssey
ex : the english take back some region and you have to once again fight to control the area

a few years ago I would enjoy the post launch of valhalla but after Odyssey it feel empty

The conquest battles had a functional part of the story and atmosphere of Odyssey. They were metaphorical expressions of the push-and-pull struggle for hegemony at a critical stage of the Peloponnesian War, or what scholars sometimes call the Archidamian War. The game never concludes the war, as the main storyline stops with the Battle of Amphipolis in 422, just prior to the Peace of Nicias in 421, which apparently doesn’t happen. So, following the main story, the gameplay is set in that margin of time before the brief peace between Sparta and Athens, allowing for the repetition of the conquest battles. To evolve the nature of conquest battles in Odyssey, it sure would have been pretty cool if Ubisoft put out another expansion chronicling the concluding period of the Peloponnesian War between 415 and 404 BCE, and it could have started with the Misthios joining Alcibiades on his botched expedition to Sicily.

Any way... conquest battles wouldn’t work in Valhalla unless the main story had been originally conceived with that in mind. Hypothetically, it would have been really cool if the game had actually established the four main kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England in opposition with each other, and you as the player could ally yourself with one of these kingdoms or otherwise invade one of them with the sons of Ragnar Lothbrok. Alliances or invasions would create their own consequences and make for more nuanced choices in the game than what is already presented. However, because the game made Eivor and the Raven Clan a neutral party that forms non-conflicting alliances with all of the kingdoms by the end of the story, there’s no impetus or reasoning to have conquest battles.

I wish they had expanded upon this rather than doing river raids which are just slightly more rural forts.

In fact I wish they’d have brought in some real strategy/political elements, not just a linear story. Being an invader trying to expand your land and prosperity at the cost of the existing hegemony would have been a fantastic opportunity to do something like that, it needn’t be a “nemesis” system. But rallying your own troops, improving supply routes, damaging opponents resources, joining in with skirmishes and battles as you encounter them, during your travels or even instigating them, and slowly pushing the battle line forward and backward on the map, have sieges, maybe even using a little strategy to cut off anstrong opponent. And then using stealth to cross the line and subvert from the other side, make alliances… that would have been a really interesting AC and backdrop to the main story as well as expansion of the better RPG elements…

pratict point of view it's too late you can't pass from a one time game into a repeatable game

this. word for word.
Valhalla is an old school game à la 80s: you start the game, you play the main story arc, you finish the game and .... it's over.
It isnt build around repeatable content like Odyssey was (contract boards, conquest battles...)
I was myself also waiting for a game with repeatable content but it seems that Ubisoft dont know how to do it (anymore...) or does not want to do it.
The last time they promised us a so called "highly repeatable content" they released ... River raids. *sigh*

@torfinr I agree. With Valhalla, it seems like Ubisoft is more concerned with innovating rather than perfecting. I too expected Valhalla to be a further evolution of improvement, like Odyssey was to Origins, but it is certainly disappointing in many respects.

Regarding repeat-able content (correct me if I am wrong):

AC1: none
AC2: none
ACB: yes, there is an Animus room for players to practise combo chains to get the best no. of consecutive kills
ACR: yes, but the den defense battles can be easily avoided once they are protected by fully trained assassins
AC3: none
AC4 Black Flag: none
AC Chronicles: yes, but there are not many challenge rooms and it takes very little time to reach the highest medals
AC Rogue: none
AC Unity: yes, but all the random street events lack variation
AC Syndicate: yes, but same as above
AC Origins: kind of because you can keep getting XP to boost Bayek's stats
AC Odyssey: yes, and admittedly a lot, esp. when they added Mastery points
AC Valhalla: yes, but the Mastery Challenges are like those in Chronicles and once you get 1000 points you need not play them anymore.

Odyssey seems the only game having repeat-able content in mind during its design. However, I am not complaining, and in fact I also like games which I can truly complete everything so that I can move on to other games.

@imaginaryruins How about the mini-games in AC3 and AC4? I went through a phase where I eventually defeated all of the computer tactics in Black Flag. I actually found Fanorona addictively engaging and was surprised they didn’t feature it in AC Rogue.

Speaking of mini-games, it would have been nice to include a period-specific game like chess in Unity and Syndicate. I honestly expected to be able to play some version of Senet in Origins, and an adaptation of Petteia in Odyssey. We have Orlog in Valhalla, but it’s kind of annoying to see the occasional board of Hnefatafl (or any variation of Tafl) and not be able to play it. It’s even more annoying when you discover that Orlog is made up. I think the devs at Ubisoft were playing Dice Poker in Witcher 2 and Gwent in Witcher 3, and then decided to combine aspects of both.

@thenorfolkian I actually forgot all about that sub game in Valhalla, as I recall you’re forced to play a round as part of a tutorial which to me isn’t a good way to be introduced to sub games. I really resent that, especially as the sub game takes so very very long to play out regardless of how quickly you react, for similar reasons I also didn’t like the “date” in GTA4 which was the tutorial for their sub games too.

Having said that, when they’re not artificially inserted into the narrative such subgames are great (Gwent in the Witcher, Poker in RDR etc) and being able to interact with NPCs doing their activities is a great way to flesh out the world even if perhaps it’s not that repeatable, you beat it once you’re not likely to come back for seconds.

@thenorfolkian Oh you mean those chess games? Personally I would not regard them as replayable content, since they do not record fastest time or highest scores - once you win, that is it. To me, replayable content is like games like Freelancer and Transport Tycoon Deluxe, where there is simply no ending.

I too consider Gwent to be replayable since it has far more variation compared to Fanorona and Orlog. I remember that the very old game Digimon World 2, it is a dungeon crawler, and most mazes kind of randomise a bit each time you go back to them. To me that is also replayability.

Of course these all are only my personal opinion.

The repeatability of Odyssey is why I will probably be playing that long after I get around to finishing Valhalla. I get that it’s a double edged sword for Ubisoft - they make a game everyone plays forever, how can they sell them the next game? The answer of course is not to worry about it, games are not like other products, people always want the next new world to explore, the latest graphics etc, and even if they stick around in an older game there are ways to monetize that (GTA online, WoW etc).