So to make it short:

It's the god damn controller.

Already in AC Odyssey I experienced weird crazy strong lags until I found out: it's the damn batteries inside my controller. They were on low power and after putting in new ones. Bam. Everything perfect. You can't make that [censored] up, like how is that even possible to have compatibility issues like that in your engine. So now on with Valhalla: Instead of fixing this ridiculous problem they somehow made it worse. Now the game isn't stuttering but just freezes instantly. I somehow got through the intro of the game without a freeze, however first mission: 5 freezes. I noticed my Nvidia drivers were pretty old. Updated and it worked for the rest of the session. Now today I couldn't even get into the game. I started the with with controller on and even the first loading screen "when this symbol appears the game is saving" (or something like that) loaded 5 minutes. I finally enter the game and instant freeze. I restarted 4 more times with the same result. Eventually the controller turned of and I just proceed with mouse and keyboard and everything worked. Then turned on the controller and again: instant freeze. Then it struck me and I remembered the Odyssey issue. So somehow they managed to go from weird performance issues with almost empty controller to just completely freezing.

maybe something with this new ubisoft connect overlay? i notived it popups whenever a controller is connected?

please ubisoft. fix this