Title pretty much says it all. I'm, well, just shocked. I'd understand shutting down online multiplayer servers for older titles (they're expensive and you probably have less than 100 people playing AC: Brotherhood multiplayer at this point),but removing the ability for customers to install and access the DLC content THEY'VE ACTUALLY PAID FOR is vile to me.

People paid actual cash for that content and the reward points they used to buy Uplay / UConnect items often derived from actual cash purchases (you get X number of points per Y number of dollars spent on the store), and you're not even grandfathering in people that bought these things while removing the ability for new people to buy them. No, you're just restricting EVERYONE from accessing them.

I've got to ask: are things that tight fiscally over at Ubisoft HQ? I know Far Cry 6 underperformed, I don't think Rider's Republic did too well, and game delays coupled with high turnover haven't helped the bottom line. You also have easing COVID restrictions, which probably reduces the captive at-home audience, and an upcoming global recession alongside pressures from shareholders to sell the company and cash out (which I hope you don't do. You've fought too hard to stay independent to give up now). So yeah, not great times to be alive and I'm sure you have strong motivation to tighten the proverbial belt... but how much bloody money will you even be saving by restricting access to DLC files for customers that have already PAID FOR THEM?

The Ezio Trilogy is one of your crown jewels. Decades from now, when game historians make videos about Ubisoft like they do about Midway or Acclaim (hopefully you won't be dead like them by then), the Ezio Trilogy will be one of the front-and-center topics. It's your magnum opus, and you're... pulling its DLC from your storefront, most likely pulling its Uplay rewards from the storefront too, and spitting on it? I'm... I don't understand you, at all.

Truth be told and at the risk of hyperbole, it makes me question the legitimacy of your digital storefront. I purposefully buy Ubisoft games on your custom launcher to support you and avoid giving a 30% cut to someone else. I love Steam, but your games bring me a lot of joy and so I try to throw a little more love your way... and now I'm sitting here wondering if I'm a fool. If you buy a game or DLC on Steam, it is YOURS. Steam won't pull your access to something you've purchased, ever. Even if a game gets delisted by the publisher, you still have your copy (Deadpool, the Transformer games, etc.) and you're fine. They would never treat the consumer the way you apparently intend to.

I dislike you making me regret my support. I've spent a lot of money on this store and now I have to worry about when I'll lose access to my Odyssey DLC, Freedom Cry, Syndicate's Jack the Ripper expansion, The Hidden Ones & Curse of the Pharaohs, the innumerable costumes and items I've purchased in the past three Assassin Creed games, and so on. Heck, it looks like you've even removed the weekly Trial of the Gods challenge from Origins on the very week you're using such said game to PROMOTE THE 15TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE FRANCHISE. Why? Was it really that expensive to have it up and running? Were the Trial of the Gods that much of a drain on the coffers?

Eh. Something is amiss over there. These are weird missteps. I'm not thrilled about what this portends, but at least I'm relatively sure that you're properly archiving your code and game files. Someday, posterity might regain access to what you're taking down.

I wanted to add a brief addendum: sorry if I seem REALLY negative here. It's just... wow. I've sunk a lot of money into this storefront. I assumed if there was any company that would care about Ubisoft games, it would be Ubisoft itself. If you were going to delist DLC, presumably you'd just bake it into the game first. "Well, we delisted Splinter Cell: Blacklist DLC and Uplay rewards to save on server costs and make our bottom line sexier to potential investors... but they're baked into the game now, so you're fine. It's our game. We made it. We're proud of it. Here's the full experience. Enjoy our 'Ubisoft Original.'"

Not "well, we delisted Splinter Cell: Blacklist DLC and Uplay rewards. TOUGH LUCK."

When Steam, a third-party storefront, is doing a better job maintaining access to Ubisoft titles and being pro-consumer than Ubisoft itself... isn't that a moment for self-reflection? Sure, you can always re-package old games in stuff like a new "Ubisoft Originals: The Splinter Cell Collection (Note: includes everything you already paid for that we took away your access to)" and sell them again to your customers, I guess... but I always thought the draw of an Anthology was supposed to be improved support for new controllers and modern drivers / hardware, not regaining access to stuff you've ALREADY PAID FOR.

Just... eh. You do not have to compete with EA and Activision Blizzard like this to see who can find the bottom of the anti-consumer barrel first.

Heya all.

Title pretty much says it all. I don’t know why, but it bothers me that for some reason all topless female Roman statues have either conveniently eroded-away bosoms or (much more rarely) incredibly low-res stone bras glued onto them (saw this at a ruin east of Jorvik and laughed in disgust). My ancestors were actually Puritans, and this is the kind of garbage I would expect them to do. Smash all erogenous zones off statues lest impure thoughts fester among the populace.

But hey, they had the right idea, eh? We can’t have bare female breasts in this game (outside two witch bosses). It might corrupt our children and trigger our sensitive folk. No, best to remove the offensive content… which is anything that doesn’t involve massive amounts of murder. Because, in true Puritanical fashion, it’s okay to:

- cut off arms
- slice off legs
- behead people
- cave people’s skulls in via curb-stomping
- cave people’s skulls in via smashing them with giant hammers
- ram a spear through the back of someone’s head before using such said spear to snap their neck
- break someone’s back with a hidden blade and see the vertebrae and sinews be rent asunder in a lovingly rendered, slow-motion gore fest
- shove a knife through the bottom of someone’s jaw, pushing it through their entire head
- stab a sword into someone’s neck and cackle as they gasp in agony and fall to the ground
- shove a double-headed axe into someone’s head and then leave their limp body propped up on such-said axe like a tripod
- knock someone down, grab a shield, and crash it down on their windpipe so hard that you completely shatter their neck
- So on

That’s all fine, apparently. All of the above is cool, but we better hide those Roman statue tig ol’ bitties. Gotta respect our women-folk, right? I’ve played 62 hours and killed more people than I did in 140 hours in Origins. It’s been a raging festival of slaughter, but thank you for hiding un-sexualized cleavage. *sigh*

But yeah, that’s it. Again, it’s a small, petty detail… but I’m truthfully rather disgusted by it. I’ve gotten used to the weird direction this franchise has been heading in, what with my anachronistically LGBTQ+ friendly Viking village, my anachronistically 50/50 gender split raiding parties, my bizarre anime-golden armor and weapons, my anachronistically progressive clan in which gender is literally nothing more than a cosmetic aesthetic (there has never been a society in human history where this was the case), almost no assassinating / emphasis on assassination gameplay in a game series called ASSASSIN'S CREED, and every side-quest having been written and designed while under the influence of the most wild drugs known to mankind.

I’ve also spent the past two games being lectured to by Internet tough-guys for not playing the “real canon protagonist,” because apparently Ubisoft’s spin on the whole “choose your character” Skyrim thing is “you can choose whichever character model you want, but only one is canon and the other is you playing a fake animus ‘what-if’ scenario that never happened, scrub. Har har. Feel like those choices mattered now? Like there was anything at stake whatsoever? No, because you were just a meaningless 'what-if' scenario? Good.”

Heck, I’ve even gotten used to the relatively dull Dark-Souls combat which has zero combos (light light heavy) and seldom goes deeper than dodge + light attack spam. After 280 hours with Origins and 400+ with Odyssey, I’ve learned to accept a lot of revisionism, madness, and vapid internet abuse.

But this… lopping the “offensive” parts off female statues to appease God-knows-who is just so freaking weird and regressive. Regressive in the pursuit of pandering to progressives who have become so progressive that they are as backwards as my 400+ year dead ancestors. Bizarre. It makes me miss the Ezio trilogy all the more, which would never have been green-lighted if it was proposed nowadays. *sigh* "Only 20 hours long with no micro-transactions, no revisionist identity politics, no way to crap on the player for choosing a dude, and the statues haven't had their naughty bits chiseled off? GET OUT OF HERE."    

I think I'm getting burned out, haha.

Title pretty much says it all. An entire new zone and almost two hours of content for free is a stunning 35-year anniversary gift to the fans. I'm genuinely shocked by it; I assumed this would be part of a Season Pass 2, not free. Jeez.

But boy has the marketing and attempted fan service fallen flat for me.

"Assassin’s Creed Crossover Stories explores the ties between Eivor and Kassandra, featuring new environments to explore and a rich new narrative. Continue the journeys of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey’s and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla’s protagonists in two unique stories:

In Assassin’s Creed Odyssey’s “Those who are Treasured,” you will play as Kassandra or Alexios after the events of the main game. Friends from the past will set you on a new journey involving a piece of Eden, a ride that will forever change your destiny.

In Assassin’s Creed Valhalla’s “A Fated Encounter,” Eivor will travel to the Isle of Skye to investigate the root cause of terrible nightmares that appear to be caused by a close friend of hers. It is there that Eivor will cross paths with Kassandra and confront the legendary Misthios."

You know, 67% of your player-base chose Alexios as their protagonist, right? Your marketing was all Alexios. Your super-expensive foot and a half tall collector's edition statue was Alexios. Personally, I bought one of those because Alexios was so well-voiced and endearing; it's sitting in the family room on its own podium. I bought Odyssey on the PS4 and the PC (along with way too many cosmetic shop items for both copies) and I've put in 400 or so hours total. He was my choice and the one I spent inordinate amounts of time with in Greece. I loved that guy.

Thus, I'm personally not "continuing the journey of Assassin's Creed Odyssey's... protagonist in a [unique story]." No, I'm meeting Kassandra for the first time instead and feeling your passive disdain once more. I've watched the cutscenes for this DLC already; you have long gratuitous shots of Kassandra trying to look cool and callback dialogue that is clearly meant to make me go "yeah... Markos. Yeah... Barnabas. Good memories, good times." Except it isn't working, because those were good times with Alexios. This just feels off and alien.

Eh. You know, for a group that keeps talking inclusivity and fighting bias, excluding 67% of the player-base because they didn't pick the option you are personally biased towards is delightfully ironic. Oh, and I picked the male Eivor so "caused by a close friend of hers" is a great marketing line too. Marginalized twice in one press blurb. Thanks. I don't know why you do it, really. Picking a character has been a thing in Bioware games, Bethesda games, and so on for decades... and the trick is to just give the lead a cool gender-neutral title and make them a one-off. "The wastelander saved the capital wastes and wandered into the desert, never to be seen again." "Baby Tigre liberated the island of Yara from the Castillo family, only to gift it to Baby Espinosas that ran it right back into the ground. Eventually, Baby Tigre left for the warm beaches of Miami and gave up."

Here, you canonize one choice in comics and novels almost no one reads (virtue signal til it goes out of style!) and then pretend anyone that didn't pick your canonized choice doesn't exist. It's the least inclusive thing you could do outside of patching Alexios and male Eivor out of the games, haha. I'll never understand it.

But yeah, thanks for the new zone. I look forward to future Valhalla / Whatever crossovers where male Eivor is treated like he never existed as a choice because I don't see this behavior stopping after three years of it.

edit addition: also, I'm being a little facetious. I understand why you do it. A. It wins you brownie points with a very politically-biased press corps. B. It likely caters to your own political biases. C. Ubisoft loves merchandising and multimedia hijinks. Comics, novels, board games, clothing trading cards, etc. It'd be too darn expensive, monetarily and intellectually, to go through all the effort to make the Raven Raider and then never include it in any future games / multimedia stories. So, Eivor Vannirsdottir and if a player didn't pick her, then to heck with 'em. Haha.

@dbgager Yeah... my Eivor has averaged 1.62 kills per minute and has slaughtered 3,879 beasts & men in the past 100 hours... and I have not gone out of my way to kill things. That's just his normal pace.

Also, I kind of wonder what you consider "homicidal maniac" at this point. I guess raiding an innocent village, burning every thatched hut and building to the ground, killing every local militia member in sight (you know, the brothers / sons / fathers / husbands of the community that vowed to protect their families & people), slaughtering the local leader, and looting everything of value that isn't nailed down doesn't count as homicidal or maniacal so long as you don't stab anyone that isn't actively wielding a weapon? *shrug* Lowest bar I've ever seen, morality-wise.

If ever there was an Assassin's Creed game in which the "desync for killing civilians" option made no sense, it would be this one... in which you belong to a faction that is literally conquering and colonizing a foreign realm while tormenting & pillaging every single indigenous settlement you can find. Haha.

Honestly, my title is the meat of this post.

It's just... so utterly absurd. Unless Ubisoft reversed course, didn't it actually restrict user access to already-owned DLC / Ubisoft Club rewards for a couple dozen games, including all the Assassin's Creed games predating AC: Black Flag? As such, neither existing AC: Brotherhood users nor new users can access the Copernicus missions, The Disappearance of Leonardo Da'Vinci, or any of the Ubisoft Club rewards (which, by the way, existing owners bought with their hard-earned money). All new users can buy is a pared down standard edition of AC: Brotherhood with no functioning multiplayer, yet the game description describes the multiplayer as still up and running. Enjoy that surprise, kids.

What kind of macabre 15th anniversary celebration is this? It just highlights a notable lack of digital preservation, exposes severe anti-consumer behavior, and encourages customers to waste money. For a few dollars more somewhere else, they could have the whole Ezio collection on a PlayStation or Xbox, at least for a few years before Ubisoft removes access to the Ubisoft Club rewards for that too.

Bleh. Just... profoundly odd and tone deaf. I'm befuddled by it.

Heya all. Wanted to ramble just a bit, now that I’m officially waiting for the next two or so patches before I try giving this game another round.

Credit where credit is due; this game by-and-large works. It has bugs, sure, and those bugs finally broke me. My personal last straw wasn’t the incredibly buggy Yuletide festival, nor the drunk Eivor loading bug. No, it was the “Taken for Granted” quest bug where if you choose “now is not the right time,” Randvi’s dialogue options glitch, the quest is removed from your completed list, and you potentially lose access to conversational options needed to beat the game. Great. I have a save 30 minutes back where I can choose to hump my brother’s gal and betray his trust in order to avoid this glitch (what a reason to have sex with your sister-in-law, eh?) … but you know what? No. Nope. Done for now. You’ve lost me.

But aside from the above, the game runs pretty well. The combat works. The music is nice, when it plays. It’s another Assassin’s Creed Action-RPG, and that’s all the enthusiasm I can muster after 100 hours. The law of diminishing returns, I guess.

Frankly, this is the third one of these that I have played. I have over 500 hours in Origins and Odyssey, so this is a breath of stale air at this point. The tweaks to gear, skills, and combat depth created a nice middle ground between Origin and Odyssey systems, but after a few dozen hours I found myself in the same rut doing the same loop over and over in a world that, frankly, is kind of oddly lifeless.

I can’t quite put my finger on it. Origin’s Egypt felt like a lived-in, real place that I was just visiting. You could readily discern the primary economic activity of each village by their fields and shops. They also had logical road structures, fort locations, grain depot sites, and docks. It was a nation wedged onto what little fertile land existed. It was a society, presented warts and all, with a degree of affection.

Odyssey was more fantastical and didn’t give a darn about historical accuracy outside architecture (the game played like an Assassin’s Creed version of Xena: Warrior Princess), but it still tried for the Origin level of detail. Given a minute or two, I could probably readily discern what each village relied on primarily for trade. The docks, roads, and sign posts linked these together logically. Ancient Greece was a land of nation-states, wedged wherever they could fit on an otherwise mountainous, hard-to-traverse peninsula.

I have no idea what Valhalla is going for. There is no structure. No sign of each kingdom being a functional state. I couldn’t for the life of me explain how Oxenfordscire works as a region. It feels like a bunch of copy-and-pasted buildings glued together at certain river junctures for the sake of making sure the player never goes more than 750 meters in the sandbox without finding another town to pillage. The sheer amount of rolling hills to ride across is mind-numbing after a while.

I don’t even have the character to fall back on to make up the difference in personality; this game kept the god-awful Bioware branching dialogue from Odyssey, so there is no consistent characterization of Eivor. Bayek and the other previous assassins grew over time. They developed and came to grips with their own foibles. Eivor just spins his wheels for over a hundred hours of nothing.

In 60 hours, I met Ezio as a baby and I watched him die of a heart attack as an old man. I watched him mature over the course of three curated, well-crafted narratives from a brash, lusty teen to a battle-hardened, wizened Master Assassin full of unspoken regrets. I miss that.

Bayek only had one game, albeit a 140 hour long one, but gods did he grow from an angry, vengeance-fueled Medjay to a thoughtful Hidden One at peace with himself and his life. The juxtaposition between himself and Aya, who never moves on from her vengeance, was kind of sad and poignant. The more Bayek grew and developed, the more you realized he was never going to have a happy ending with her.

I have nothing of the sort here. Nothing. It’s the same Odyssey problem; you can’t do a lot of foreshadowing and character development in a game where the player can veer wildly between diametrically opposed decisions. Heck, you can’t even maintain a consistent main quest narrative; Dag’s anger makes sense if you’re always sitting on Sigurd’s throne, contradicting Sigurd every chance you get, striking Sigurd and Basim physically, insulting Dag whenever able, and openly screwing Sigurd’s wife. I didn’t do any of those things, but hey… gotta have that Dag fight, right?

I could keep going. Why do I get desynchronized for killing civilians when I clearly show no qualms raiding their village, burning all their homes to the ground, murdering all their brothers/ fathers/ husbands/ sons who enlisted in the local militia, assassinating their leaders, and pillaging all their valuables? What kind of selective morality system is the Raven Clan using, for God’s sake?

I caught myself wandering an old, ruined Roman tower. I had just killed a bandit with a single spear thrust and his head, severed from his neck with a comical geyser of blood, had rolled down a hill towards it. Figured I’d follow it and look around for another chest. Along the way I found another bandit and my heavy attack ripped off one of his legs as he died. Blood squirted into a thick puddle around the stump as the severed limb bounced along the ground, defying gravity.

Then I noticed that every female Roman statue had poorly textured, low-resolution clamshell bra cups glued over their breasts. Thank goodness, right? Bare breasts in my murder simulator is where I draw the line, after all! Gotta have my selective morality system respected.

I know some Puritan-minded Ubisoft committee censored the model before it was copy-and-pasted all over the map, but in my head I pictured some Anglo-Saxon proto-Puritan wandering the land, gluing these on to every single Roman statue in the ENTIRETY OF ENGLAND. He must have had as little life as me, but he chose this over murdering 3,879 creatures & animals in 100 hours (1.62 things killed per minute). He even glued mermaid bras onto the statues in the hidden witch lair. Such pure dedication to progressive conservatism. “Take that, male gaze!” Truly stunning.

A hundred hours in and that’s the most connected I’ve felt to this game world. It makes me sad to think about. I came away from Origins stunned, and Odyssey amused but worried about the direction of this franchise. I come away from this game (for the time being) with memories of dismemberment, The Little Mermaid, and a sense of exhaustion. I never thought I’d sing the praises of Immortals: Fenyx Rising over Assassin’s Creed, but here we are and I wish the loose, baggy monster format would get some truncation and refinement.  

Then again, who am I to talk? Look at this stupid post, and I’ve shown zero character development throughout. Guffaw. 

Haha. I'm not mad about it, really. I just think it sucks on multiple levels.

A. It is utterly disingenuous and repugnantly cynical to market the game with the male version, focus on the male lead in gameplay previews, and then use the novelization and comics (which almost no one reads, for good reason) to canonize the female version and pander to "progressives." They did this with Odyssey, too.

B. There has never been a society in human history where gender was a mere cosmetic option. A female Eagle Bearer would have faced major societal barriers in Athens, wouldn't have even been allowed to watch the Olympics, and would have discovered that her greatest and most vital duty within Spartan society would be... to get knocked up and raise fighting sons for the army. But nope. Not in Odyssey. Gender has as little significance as what color shirt you picked this morning.

It makes the storytelling kind of... well, insipid. I don't want some woke, overly dramatized "oh, being a woman REALLY sucked back then guys. Patriarchy and men = bad. sob sob" narrative, but it should matter. It's flavor for the character. It's context. Without it, there's a real disconnect between the heaps of effort put into historical accuracy for the setting and the complete LACK THEREOF regarding the lead.

Same goes with Valhalla. Vikings had women on their crews, but usually it was because a male raider was sick and if no one from his family participated, no one from his family got anything. So his wife or his sister would get some armor, a weapon, and take his place. There's evidence of this... and a goodly amount of evidence that such said wife or sister would get... boat guarding duty. Women are, on average, slimmer and smaller than men. They weren't put on the front lines of a raid. They kept the getaway longboat safe.

It would be interesting to see Isu-blooded female Eivor buck the trend. Maybe she'd flex her demigod blood, like Kassandra, to break through historical gender norms and go against the proverbial current. Maybe there would be some character-building moments resulting from that for both female-Eivor and the supporting cast. Maybe it could be a story beat or two; enemies underestimating a female vikingr, not realizing at first that it was a demigod female vikingr.

But nope. Gender means as little as picking a purple shirt or a green shirt in the morning. Bland, insipid, meaningless drivel. All this effort at historical accuracy in setting undercut by game characters and writing (ironically, Eivor's enemies don't get this treatment. The Anglo-Saxon armies are all male and societal gender norms are predominantly maintained. Guess you're meant to hate them? Weird)

C. It makes most playthroughs meaningless what-if scenarios. I had no trouble getting invested in Ezio, Haythem, Shay, Bayek, Jacob & Evie, and so on... but since I didn't pick "the canon character" in Odyssey, my playthrough was just an Animus "what-if" scenario. Same here. It strips my immersion of any lore significance whatsoever. By comparison, this is not a problem with most RPGs like Skyrim or Cyperpunk 2077, because they aren't churning out mountains of unwanted novels and comics that canonize "The Dragonborn" or "V." The Dragonborn saved Tamriel. "Who was the Dragonborn?" No one knows; the Dragonborn is shrouded in mystery. Done. Everyone's Dragonborn is The Dragonborn. There is no non-canonical wrong choice.

Not here. Who fought the Order of the Ancients? Kassandra. Who led the Raven Clan? Female Eivor of the Chain Smoker Clan. In essence... if you didn't pick an Argonian berserker lesbian Stormcloak, then you didn't pick the canonical Dragonborn and your playthrough was a "Skyrim what-if" scenario. Scrub.

So yeah, not mad. I just think it's cynical, kind of lame from a story-telling perspective, and indirectly tells 67% or so of the playerbase that their playthroughs were non-canonical animus tomfoolery that never happened. Pick a gender for the lead and stick with it.

I don’t know if this is necessarily the praise you are looking for, but in terms of engagement… I have finally beaten this game after ten months and I couldn't have done it without the seasonal events. They brought me back in every couple months to get the rewards (being a completionist is a bizarre thing), and afterwards I’d have enough left in me to complete a few more zones before my will drained anew. Rinse and repeat four times and I've done it at last.

 I just… I don’t know. Sometime didn’t click here for me. You did fine darn work. I’m not trying to disparage your achievements here. If I had to put a finger on it though, the game launched pretty buggy (not blaming you at all, by the way. Senior leadership leaving due to scandals and COVID disruptions are not conducive to AAA game development). It crashed too much, had performance issues, and it gave me a lot of downtime to see the proverbial trees in the forest… which in aggregate irked me.

Why are the Anglo-Saxon fighters historically accurate but the Viking soldiers are even-split between male and female? What Yankee Puritans on your teams decided to censure the breasts on every single statue but add a dozen new dismemberment animations? Since when were Vikings a pro-LGBTQIA society in which half of all relationships were openly gay? What kind of revisionist bandwagon did you jump on? When did you decide to smooth out history’s blemishes for your favored causes / factions?

These are the most sugar-coated, Batman-esque Vikings that I have ever seen. “I’m going to raid your village with my multiethnic, diverse, inclusive war band that even includes a non-binary Iranian. SKAL! We’ll steal all your valuables, murder all your fathers/husbands/brothers/sons who try to defend your town, blow up your grain silos (?!?!), burn down your cottages, and leave you to die of exposure when winter comes… but we won’t ever stab an unarmed civilian lest we desync… cause we don’t roll THAT WAY. Remember, the real bad guys are Aelfred Rex and his intolerant Christianity. Be better!”  

Does any of the above stuff really matter? Not really, but when my game crashed for the sixth time in an hour and I had seen the same scene one too many times, I noticed… and I sighed. Then I noticed that I couldn’t preview any of the Helix shop armors on Male Eivor, because I’m apparently non-canonical scrub tier. I noticed that even Eivor’s beard selections were modeled on female Eivor face.

I went to read the Wikia to see what I couldn’t see for myself, and every article made an overt point to emphasize Vannirsdottir. I realized that once again I was playing a what-if scenario that had no bearing on anything whatsoever… oh, and thanks to the Ubisoft reps who expressed open disappointment to the media regarding how many players picked the male option yet again (you expressed the same sentiment about Alexios getting 68% of all players). Very sweet of you. We feel so supported.

I’ve been a fan of this franchise since 2007. Heck, my first international travel was to Canada to see an Assassin’s Creed symphony (got rescheduled from October 2019 to March 2020 and then Covid did it in. Oh well, I still had my fun celebrating Diwali in Brampton). I own most of these games on multiple systems and I have put over 1,200 hours into all of them. This game made me realize that OVER 50% OF MY TIME with the franchise has been spent on Odyssey and Valhalla alone, and in both cases my playthroughs were MEANINGLESS. Utterly meaningless what-if scenarios. What was the point of any of it? Just killing for killing’s sake to see some numbers go up on a virtual avatar?

Just broke my motivation to continue, really. I honestly wasn’t going to bother beating this game, but again… your strategists are pretty shrewd. The fear of missing out on timed events, when paired with the completionist zeal engrained in me by too many open world games, dragged me back in.

Each time, the game was a little less buggy and I was able to ignore your revisionist politics and subtle disdain for just a bit longer. I managed to do six zones in a one-week fell swoop after the pre-Siege of Paris festival and hit the finish line (with only about 12 crashes total. 2 per zone is a lot better than it used to be). You even got an additional $29.99 in micro-currency transactions out of me and Magnus Bruun Nielsen’s moving performances in some of the final zones actually touched me emotionally. He's darned good.

So yeah… I rambled too much but such it is. Your events worked on me. I’ve gone from a pretty negative opinion of this game to a “well… their politics and historical revisionist fever-dreams drive me up the wall, and I feel like I’ve wasted yet another 200 hours of my life on nothing but pointless, vapid slaughter… but try it in mid-2022 when they’ve ironed out the lingering bugs and its on sale for %50 off, Steve.”

That’s better than “buy AC: Origins, the Ezio Trilogy, or Black Flag, get the AC Valhalla soundtrack for a glorious achievement in musical composition, and pretend the actual game doesn’t exist.” Victory for you, I suppose.

Also: to the whole “Boo hoo. Don’t like being a what-if scenario? Pick the female character, you patriarch cisgender! Be Better!!!” crowd… I tried. Kassandra’s voice actress channeled too much Gal Gadot seriousness into what was effectively a campy Charles Heston game (I murdered your mater and slept with your pater, Estupido!) and Female Eivor sounds like a chain-smoker and tries too hard to be butch and tough at the expense of nuance. Not the voice actresses’ faults, by the way; both ladies have great range and talent… but voice direction DOES matter. I have limits. Loved female Fenyx.  Eh. Events = Thumbs up. Identity Politics in 9th century England = Thumbs down.

Thank you for the head's up! I already had the Valkyrie Ship style, but I didn't have the settlement style yet. You just saved me 500 Helix Credits.

Also, thank goodness I already had the Valkyrie Ship style. I couldn't take another 2 hours of watching an inept streamer flail away at this game. She made it look like Dark Souls and no, she was not on nightmare difficulty. It made me wince. I had to put her on mute and just let the video run in the background until an hour had passed.

But enough of that. Thank you again!

Honestly, my title is the meat of this post.

It's just... so utterly absurd. Unless Ubisoft reversed course, didn't it actually restrict user access to already-owned DLC / Ubisoft Club rewards for a couple dozen games, including all the Assassin's Creed games predating AC: Black Flag? As such, neither existing AC: Brotherhood users nor new users can access the Copernicus missions, The Disappearance of Leonardo Da'Vinci, or any of the Ubisoft Club rewards (which, by the way, existing owners bought with their hard-earned money). All new users can buy is a pared down standard edition of AC: Brotherhood with no functioning multiplayer, yet the game description describes the multiplayer as still up and running. Enjoy that surprise, kids.

What kind of macabre 15th anniversary celebration is this? It just highlights a notable lack of digital preservation, exposes severe anti-consumer behavior, and encourages customers to waste money. For a few dollars more somewhere else, they could have the whole Ezio collection on a PlayStation or Xbox, at least for a few years before Ubisoft removes access to the Ubisoft Club rewards for that too.

Bleh. Just... profoundly odd and tone deaf. I'm befuddled by it.

@kormac67 Ivar is treated like an exception to the rule, and he wasn't. Vikings were pirates, and pirates aren't good guys. Never have been.

The Raven Clan besieges monasteries and villages, raiding and pillaging to their hearts' content. Taking anything that isn't nailed down while burning down cottages, exploding grain silos (which... sure), and murdering any adult male that tries to defend his people. But hey, they don't DIRECTLY kill women and children. They're the "good guys" and they'd never directly hurt the innocent, unless the innocent are local male militia members, and then who cares? Otherwise, they'll just leave their victims destitute, homeless, and ruined to die of starvation or wolf attacks... because Anglo-Saxon lives have no worth. GOOD GUYS!

It's tonally inconsistent and bizarre. A "have your cake and eat it, too" kind of writing issue. They wanted the sexiness of raiding, pillaging, and slaughtering without the moral conundrum that Edward Kenway successfully provided (i.e. Edward was actually a really bad guy who hurt a lot of innocent people, but he was OUR bad guy and we liked him anyway... but should we?).

Dawn of Ragnarok sidestepped the whole issue by having Havi attacking and raiding invaders, and I think it works better. You're doing all the naughty stuff Eivor did, but for a better cause than "time to build a tattoo parlor made of Anglo-Saxon orphan tears and church bells."

So no, I didn't miss Ivar.

@AnimusLover "Dude" is a gender-neutral term, so eh? Also, I'd love to know how I've purportedly misused the term "woke." Feel free to PM me, since this is way off-topic at this point. As to me being bigoted? Sure, sure. *shrug* You know, this franchise has always delved into the more obscure corners of society. It was always inclusive, because this IP's templar and assassin factions value talent above appearance; if you can get the job done, they don't give a darn what you are. They're basically secret-society meritocracies, and it's charming.

What this franchise wasn't was brutally anachronistic. They took liberties, sure, but explainable liberties that were less about THE MESSAGE and more about practicalities (actual 18th century Parisian roofs would suck for parkour so we tweaked them; it would suck to shoot cannons you can't see so we put some on top of the ship even though that would be a very bad idea in real life; boats travel pretty slow in real life but that would be dull, so here's your 30 knot 18th century vessel; etc). Trying to not offend people and please your diversity, equity, and inclusion committees by re-writing history and passing off fiction as fact (Discovery Tour ahoy) is, to me, vile. Valhalla made me cringe; Dawn of Ragnarok did not... so I guess that makes me a bigot? Eh, whatever.

I get the feeling anyone that disagrees with you is automatically a bigot in your eyes and fine, I'll wear that badge for you if it makes you feel better. I don't care.

I wanted to add a brief addendum: sorry if I seem REALLY negative here. It's just... wow. I've sunk a lot of money into this storefront. I assumed if there was any company that would care about Ubisoft games, it would be Ubisoft itself. If you were going to delist DLC, presumably you'd just bake it into the game first. "Well, we delisted Splinter Cell: Blacklist DLC and Uplay rewards to save on server costs and make our bottom line sexier to potential investors... but they're baked into the game now, so you're fine. It's our game. We made it. We're proud of it. Here's the full experience. Enjoy our 'Ubisoft Original.'"

Not "well, we delisted Splinter Cell: Blacklist DLC and Uplay rewards. TOUGH LUCK."

When Steam, a third-party storefront, is doing a better job maintaining access to Ubisoft titles and being pro-consumer than Ubisoft itself... isn't that a moment for self-reflection? Sure, you can always re-package old games in stuff like a new "Ubisoft Originals: The Splinter Cell Collection (Note: includes everything you already paid for that we took away your access to)" and sell them again to your customers, I guess... but I always thought the draw of an Anthology was supposed to be improved support for new controllers and modern drivers / hardware, not regaining access to stuff you've ALREADY PAID FOR.

Just... eh. You do not have to compete with EA and Activision Blizzard like this to see who can find the bottom of the anti-consumer barrel first.

Title pretty much says it all. I'm, well, just shocked. I'd understand shutting down online multiplayer servers for older titles (they're expensive and you probably have less than 100 people playing AC: Brotherhood multiplayer at this point),but removing the ability for customers to install and access the DLC content THEY'VE ACTUALLY PAID FOR is vile to me.

People paid actual cash for that content and the reward points they used to buy Uplay / UConnect items often derived from actual cash purchases (you get X number of points per Y number of dollars spent on the store), and you're not even grandfathering in people that bought these things while removing the ability for new people to buy them. No, you're just restricting EVERYONE from accessing them.

I've got to ask: are things that tight fiscally over at Ubisoft HQ? I know Far Cry 6 underperformed, I don't think Rider's Republic did too well, and game delays coupled with high turnover haven't helped the bottom line. You also have easing COVID restrictions, which probably reduces the captive at-home audience, and an upcoming global recession alongside pressures from shareholders to sell the company and cash out (which I hope you don't do. You've fought too hard to stay independent to give up now). So yeah, not great times to be alive and I'm sure you have strong motivation to tighten the proverbial belt... but how much bloody money will you even be saving by restricting access to DLC files for customers that have already PAID FOR THEM?

The Ezio Trilogy is one of your crown jewels. Decades from now, when game historians make videos about Ubisoft like they do about Midway or Acclaim (hopefully you won't be dead like them by then), the Ezio Trilogy will be one of the front-and-center topics. It's your magnum opus, and you're... pulling its DLC from your storefront, most likely pulling its Uplay rewards from the storefront too, and spitting on it? I'm... I don't understand you, at all.

Truth be told and at the risk of hyperbole, it makes me question the legitimacy of your digital storefront. I purposefully buy Ubisoft games on your custom launcher to support you and avoid giving a 30% cut to someone else. I love Steam, but your games bring me a lot of joy and so I try to throw a little more love your way... and now I'm sitting here wondering if I'm a fool. If you buy a game or DLC on Steam, it is YOURS. Steam won't pull your access to something you've purchased, ever. Even if a game gets delisted by the publisher, you still have your copy (Deadpool, the Transformer games, etc.) and you're fine. They would never treat the consumer the way you apparently intend to.

I dislike you making me regret my support. I've spent a lot of money on this store and now I have to worry about when I'll lose access to my Odyssey DLC, Freedom Cry, Syndicate's Jack the Ripper expansion, The Hidden Ones & Curse of the Pharaohs, the innumerable costumes and items I've purchased in the past three Assassin Creed games, and so on. Heck, it looks like you've even removed the weekly Trial of the Gods challenge from Origins on the very week you're using such said game to PROMOTE THE 15TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE FRANCHISE. Why? Was it really that expensive to have it up and running? Were the Trial of the Gods that much of a drain on the coffers?

Eh. Something is amiss over there. These are weird missteps. I'm not thrilled about what this portends, but at least I'm relatively sure that you're properly archiving your code and game files. Someday, posterity might regain access to what you're taking down.

@thenorfolkian I know you're teasing me, but sure. I'll bite.

I bought Origins on the PS4 first. I ended up finding out after buying it that it was over 100 hours long and, well, I don't usually have the time for that kind of thing. So, I ended up not playing it very much until after Odyssey, which hooked me pretty darn well. After 190+ hours in Odyssey, Origins seemed more reasonable and I delved into it. It was really fun.

Later on when I built a new gaming PC, I decided to buy it again. See it in higher resolution with a 60 fps framerate. It was a great time, again, and I beat it another time.

So yeah, I used the FPS boost as an excuse to do it a third time on the Xbox Series X, and it's still a great time.

But hey, if it wins me any points with you: I've played Assassin's Creed 2 three times and Brotherhood about 2.75 times. I love the American trilogy and I've beaten Unity twice. I love the classics and base AC: Valhalla broke my heart. Haha.

@AnimusLover: Oh, I didn't misuse the term, dude. Also, it does genuinely worry me. I've often thought an Aztecs-themed Assassin's Creed game would be interesting, but now I'm more worried than anything. I picture LGBTQIA+ friendly, good-guy, intersectional Aztecs (with African and Asian tribal members, because why not?) that only ritualistically murder people who WANT to be murdered to the corn god... and it makes me sad. The Aztecs weren't pure evil, but they definitely weren't good either (which is why so many Amerindian tribes allied with the Spanish). Shades of grey, man, and base AC: Valhalla left me doubting if the current teams can pull that off. The neutered, milquetoast Vikings we got in this game made me cringe over and over. The endless sugarcoating... oi vei.

But eh, I'm getting negative and wanted to be positive here. Genuinely loved Dawn of Ragnarok. Still do. It was a very fun time, even if it did crash too much and have weird framerate issues.

Sorry for cluttering up the forums, but I wanted to say thank you for the 60 fps patch. I have already beaten Assassin’s Creed: Origins on the PlayStation 4 and the PC; it’s a genuine masterpiece, and I’ve used the patch to justify playing it a third time on the Xbox Series X. I’m glad I did, too. It’s just as fun as ever and the game now holds steady at 60 fps more than 99.9% of the time. I get occasional dips in heavy-load areas (Alexandria [especially in the canals under the royal palace], Memphis, etc.), but nothing too egregious. It’s pretty darn solid!

I’m normally a bit of a negative [censored], truth be told, but racking my brain about AC: Origins only results in: A. I wish you could lock weapons so they didn’t appear in the sell / deconstruct menus and B. I wish there was a little more soft-target lock so that Bayek didn’t swing at air so much in melee combat (the target lock-on alleviates the swinging at air, but it’s really only good for one-on-one fights).

That’s it. The gameplay, the graphics, the soundtrack, the voice acting, the face captures, the character animations (it's simply stunning how many side-quests have custom motion-capture animations), the custom locations (no two camps or hideouts are the same), the ambitious scope, and the overall level of polish… Ubisoft Montreal did an incredibly job with this game and I’m profoundly grateful to experience it a third bloody time.

It’s a shame the trial of the gods community challenges are now turned off and new players will never be able to get the associated three weapons and shield, but maybe you’ll make a relatively cheap DLC for that to make them available to new customers while raking in another $1.99 per purchase. One can hope.

Regardless, thank you again. Man, seeing Bayek again was a good time. I can’t sing your praises enough on this title. Just amazing, even after a collective 300+ hours. When Ubisoft is firing on all cylinders, I don’t think it has an equal.

But enough of my fanboy rubbish. Whole-hearted thanks and good-day!

Edit addition: also, as a silly addition, if you ever do create a second Bayek game, consider me first in line for pre-ordering. He is such a full-fledged, complex character. A genuinely good dude, if you'll pardon my slang. I adored my time with that man. The voice actor really nailed the role and the writers did a great job with the dialogue.

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.

@spirantcrayon22 Honestly, I'm glad you liked the tone of the story. I thought it was awful, but I was coming off of a second playthrough of Assassin's Creed: Black Flag... which was a high note of this franchise.

Vikings were Scandinavian pirates. To go "vikingr" was to go pirating. They weren't good guys. They were ravagers, looters, and pillagers. They took slaves. They violated people physically in every single way imaginable. They only agreed that Anglo-Saxon lives had actual worth due to a peace treaty, which didn't include Britons so hurrah to more slavery.

But... you can be a slaving, thieving, unscrupulous monster and still have your good points. Black Flag showed that. You liked Edward, Blackbeard, Calico Jack, and the others... even though they were horrible people. Almost all of them deserved their untimely demises, but you still felt bad to see it because you'd seen them off the clock. The game humanized buccaneers without condoning or sugarcoating them. They were fun dudes, when you weren't their prey.

Not this. Not this at all. I cringed over and over playing this and it took me a year to beat the base game. I kept getting to the point where I literally had no will to continue and stopped playing. The only things that brought me back were seasonal events due to FOMO, and even then I'd burn out in two to three weeks. A year. It took me a year to FORCE my way through this. So I'm not there with you.

But yeah, Black Flag had everything that kept me playing AC. I miss those days.

Honestly, I think the high-fantasy cosmetics aren't nearly as corrosive to the "historical tourism" angle as the incessant anachronisms and intentional historical revisionism.

These games have always had silly optional outfits, but they used to care a LOT more about getting the setting right. When they deviated, they'd even leave bloody notes in the database (ex: "Cannons would never be on the decks of ships because they'd obstruct crew movement and cause weight imbalances, but it's no fun to fire something you can't see and how else will you know they're actually reloading?").

Now we have sugar-coated Vikings raiders that are 50% male / 50% female, 50% LGBTQIA+, super diverse, and 100% inoffensive to Diversity, Inclusion, & Equity committees. Oh, and they'd NEVER hurt civilians. Sure, they'd rob them, murder their enlisted men-folk, set fire to their homes, and dance with glee in the reddish hellscape lighting of a burning monastery... but remember, they're the GOOD guys. They're just migrants looking for a better life. Check your privilege, Anglo-Saxons!

Compared to all of the above, I find it hard to care about a non-binary unicorn bear in dire need of therapy being ridden by a burly lesbian Sauron wielding two glowing Japanese katanas? At least I can opt out of wearing / using any of the above. They're less Orwellian and more innocently puerile.

Thanks for your post, Bielik01.

I wanted to chime in and say yeah... this is happening to me, too. I'm up to 7 duplicates now in my inventory... which I apparently can never sell or get rid of. I'm about halfway through Dawn of Ragnarok and I've been having a great time, but I'm going to table this for now until the glitch is addressed. I'm in no mood to have my inventory cluttered with a horde of useless Motsognir's Clarity runes.

Sigh. I could have sworn the duplicate rune glitch was fixed eons ago. At least it used to be beneficial; you could sell the duplicates for silver. Bleh.