Not only is it creepy but not everyone has the means to record a video, it’s QA’s job to test and try to recreate bugs reported and honestly when it’s applied to every single report no matter how prevalent, obvious or simple and clear the explanation it feels like it’s being used as a means to raise the bar for entry to avoid getting bugs reported and fixed around here.

This isn’t the right way to treat customers who go to the effort of reporting bugs. I don’t believe anyone here wants to join a beta team or join QA themselves, most have other jobs and this is what we do for pleasure with what little free time is available to us. Please just look into the bugs, test and see if you can reproduce, then if you really are unable to follow or reproduce the bug ask more questions and eventually if all else fails then ask for the video. If you can reproduce then also please communicate with us. Just leave videos for the last option, not first.

@Ubi-Perseids then they should fix that. They’re simply describing a bug, it’s not suddenly “a feature”. Having to restart your game multiple times (you cannot change scaling without exit and reload) in order to get all your due daily quests is not a valid workflow or intended workaround. It’s emblematic of a broken game.

It’s quite simple, the finely tuned and balanced “logic” is clearly trash, there is nothing stopping selection apart from faulty logic or buggy code. All you need are two default local quests on each map (or ideally close to each vendor location) that do not exist in the randomized quest pool. Then if one slot fails it defaults to that rather than empty.

Socialism is only a cynical and pernicious attempt to reassert feudalist hegemony by convincing serfs that they don’t really want to be journeymen, what’s best for them is being looked after by the lords, by working together for the system all boats rise! And that the world is different now, we have technology and medicine and a military to look after them all they have to do is work for the lor… system.

There need not be bloodshed to get there, idiots will sell themselves out, they already try to emulate the atrocities of the GRU on social media, social credit. The real bloodshed will happen at the next peasants revolt. Each time eventually the populace rises up, they don’t always win, but in the end one way or another change occurs and freedoms are won. No-one (but a fool) fights for their own oppression. Which is also why education is a dangerous thing to oppressive states and political regimes and they have a tendency to try and infiltrate and subvert it into indoctrination, and why those who work for the state should be very careful of their actions and what they are asked to do. They fight only for privilege which is not the same thing as freedom; guard dogs have chains, wolves don’t.

There is absolutely no need to do an AC either lionizing or antagonizing Russia right now. The world doesn’t need or want the propaganda. Frankly even posting that here at this time sounds like a shallow attempt.

As a gamer right now what I crave is escapist fantasy. We have enough problems with our smorgasbord of nightmare apocalypse options.

I like the sound of this one, Baghdad is a great and rich setting. Hopefully it will have proper night time, you know, because stealth…

+1 on wanting horseback weapons back. It’s such a small thing but it feels like the game is incomplete somehow without it. You’re more vulnerable on horseback but can do more damage, it’s a glass cannon.

The following bugs I've noticed.

• On the archery challenge where you have to blow up enemies, poison them and get headshots often one of the oil urns will explode on spawn in killing the guard next to it by fire (not explosion)
• If you set poison traps they are only triggered and only kill if you stick around keeping the poisoned NPC in view, otherwise they lose their status and instantly gain all health back
• All enemies seem to have a re-gen effect (is this intentional?), you knock them down to a sliver of health in order to complete mastery challenges involving specific death types (as the character isn't strong enough to kill them from full health or even half sometimes) and turn around, a minute later their health is back up. Sometimes this shows as a dual health gauge split vertically, with a red portion refilling.
• Enemy crit points are randomized (is this intentional?), archers left or right hand may be the crit point, on some challenges this makes it luck as to whether you'll have an easy or hard run.
• Enemy archers are really dumb. They will literally shoot their own platform to try and hit you which will kill them from fall damage if you are under them.
• Death from secondary action doesn't count when it should. e.g. knocking an enemy into an oil urn causing them to die from the explosion should count as an explosion kill.
• UX is poor. It should display the number of enemies required for each death type rather than a points system which is arbitrary and requires you to kill first before calculating how many enemies it will require to complete.
• Enemy alert system is poorly implemented based on radius rather than line of sight, this causes enemies who should have no idea what is going on being alerted and rushing you. Maybe I'll have to do my own little example of how this should work to demonstrate how enemy AI should handle alerting, but I'd hope you'd get the picture from the feedback here and in many other threads.
• Restart times are too long. We don't need a not so fancy (headache inducing actually) texture fade. Just jump right back in to make it more fun and less punishing for restarting/failing.
• Path-finding seems broken for enemies in the combat kills by fire level. Often enemies will not follow you into another area (where there's fire) and will stand looking at you gormlessly till you get within a very short radius, then they will try to do a short range attack.
• Heavy enemies occasionally rubber band/teleport. Especially noticeable on the archery missions, this seems to be an issue to do with animation LOD handling?
• On the same call hotboxes for enemies when using the guided arrow shot seem to be janky. I've had arrows go right through an enemy and cause no damage.
• This also applies to normal shots with the same bow, enemies are marked as they will take damage, take the shot and they will not.
• After you press the left trigger to ADS pulling the right trigger too soon will not notch the arrow and it will not fire, you must release and then press again even though the ADS animation has finished.
• Same occurs if you try to fire again too soon after the last arrow. This is especially noticeable with the "guided" arrow.
• When firing the "guided arrow" time slows down during the flight in the camera view... but not for enemies attacking you out of the cameras FOV. They attack and move at full speed, so the time dilation effect doesn't work correctly across the entire arena.
• There is no indication of direction damage is coming from while ADS with the bow (and really there ought to be proximity warning too).
• The location to meditate in front of the totems is incorrectly placed for several of the totems off to the side and in a very small hit zone. This should be adjusted to be in front facing the totem or just within a radius of the totem.

The main thing I’ve realized from mastery is just how underdeveloped archery and stealth are compared to melee combat. All the combat challenges are easy outside of waiting for enemies to die from fire, the archery and stealth are much harder, or rather require much more patience.

They also highlight glitches in the game, e.g. a map where you need to kill a certain number of enemies using explosives, but where some of the oil urns required instantly smash on spawn in killing some enemies with fire that you would need to gold master the game. Or they die from an explosion but it doesn’t count because it was caused by knocking them into the urn rather than firing an arrow at it. And if you’d played previous games you’d assume poison + any fire source = explosive, not the case in Valhalla. Or the not so much glitch as behavior of enemy AI and alerting, occasional random rubber banding of distant enemies, poison not working if you don’t hang around and keep enemies in view etc. You kind of see the janky edges of the game engine with this mode more than with the game itself.

Also this is really bad game design - You have exactly the number of enemies required to do each challenge. The challenges are framed as within an area designed with one solution to get gold you have to get x points doing y deed. Spot the UX problem? You have no way of knowing how many enemies need to die a specific way until you kill one in that way and then pause, see how many points that cost and do the math, at which point you may have made it impossible to complete this challenge for gold. Better design would be “you need to kill x number of people y way”.

In general the mode makes me think someone at Ubisoft wanted to point out how bad things were in the past and get players to agree by frustrating them with examples that basically are like hardcore versions of previous AC game mechanics.

@bielik01 hah, good one! That’s a solid nope from me. I’m not being paid to do this and having completed these challenges a few days ago have little desire to go back. It’s up to Ubisoft to look into and fix for other players.

AC a has always been a visual feast and testament to the artistry of Ubisoft and its employees, but the hardware lags behind the vision. So with absolute respect because I know how much goes into this stuff here are a few visual things I would love to see opened up and improved upon now that we have next gen consoles with more memory and processing power as the baseline.

Skybox

• Lighting - in Valhalla there’s separate shadow gobos from the sky and while it gives great distance effect on the ground the fact that it doesn’t match the clouds is really jarring, you’re in shade, you look up the sun is in a clear blue sky, or conversely you’re in bright sunlight and you look up into storm clouds, speaking of…
• Localized weather, there are foggy regions but no other localized weather effects, it would be nice if when you rode towards a storm it would continue to get darker and murkier and more wet.
• Sun through clouds, should not be visible beyond at the very edge of cumulonimbus clouds, they're thick with great dispersion, storm clouds often fail to obscure the sun and act more like thin stratus cloud cover.
• Moon light source volumetric, it’s jarring to look at the moon and actually see the center of the spotlight used, it would be better if the volumetric didn’t go all the way to the tip of the cone but stopped at the point where it visually just covers the moon.
• Occluded specular, would be a big step up. It’s very weird to look across the snow-pack in mountains at where the sun went down 5 minutes ago and still see specular reflections of the sun light source. With ray tracing turned on this eventually dithers itself out but you could also use the primary shadowmap used on diffuse to mask the specular at the same time (and should).
• Semi-accurate night sky, just phases of the moon with respective lighting strength and stars rotating with the sky would be a step up.
• Dark mode for night sky, same as in breakpoint. Makes a big difference to the look as well as improving night gameplay.

Water

• Improved ocean shader. The bump/displacement often synchronizes into coherence showing obvious tiling, it would be really nice if this didn’t happen.
• Water edge interaction and “wetting”, I would love to see this extended to sand and porous materials not just the cloth on the lead character. Also an even faster fading “glisten” map for where things have just been splashed on all materials interacting with water.
• Better water edge tension shader, uses an iso bevel to mimic the water tension effect at the edge of water, puddles, streams etc
• Improved flow map on rivers and streams. RDR2 has water running faster at the center of rivers than at the edges and this helps sell the illusion. Bonus pints if you can do eddies and whirlpools that you get at more turbulent areas so rivers.
• Foam effect, both in rivers and oceans. This can be simulated effectively with 2D particles.
• Tides. Not so easy to add, but would really help sell the sense of passage of time in port areas.
• Underwater shader, it was good in Odyssey, but Valhalla shows the limits of this engine, check out the underwater in the next Horizon Zero Dawn. Lovely stuff.

Humans

• All dialog scenes need major improvement on animation, either full Motion capture for NPCs in all dialog cutscenes (and camera moves), or a lot more involved facial animation.
• Improve facial rigs and shading, get rid of creepy dead Skyrim eyes.

@yvzslmatc even with odyssey and origins people were complaining about the cloth physics being simplified. At least they made horse mains and tails work.

I hope ubisoft will update their engine with good cloth and strand physics. It feels like they’ve been cutting things back every release since Origins. Simplified water and wet maps, simplified and now non-existent cloth physics, no water debris, no particle effects on climbing, skies and ground lighting completely separated (blue skies during thunderstorms, shadows unrelated to cloud positions), overlit interior spaces where there should be no lighting, camera ground intersection bugs, self intersecting geometry on characters and their clothing, audio bugs…

@longjohn119 ah, well yeah with mods you can do anything. But for us console players we’re stuck with washed out Skyrim graphics.

Are you playing with HDR? That look like LDR output which has increased contrast and saturation over Ubisofts implementation of HDR which washes out and applies massively over-strong exposure compensation.

Ubisoft need to look into the exposure compensation with HDR (and reduce it a lot) and also based on how grey everything looks they’re still using traditional sRGB linear color workflow and should include a better tone mapping algorithm. Ideally use the ACES pipeline for color handling.

Thank you for fixing this!

None of the caves are remotely dark in Odyssey, in Origins though they went pitch black and it was much better for it.

There was never a need to use the torch in Odyssey unless you calibrated so that daytime brightness is so dark as to make Greece appear permanently muddy and like it’s heavily overcast.

@AnimusLover caves haven’t been dark since Origins and the torch light spread is so low as to be meaningless, it’s like standing next to a lit match. Even enemies don’t notice it. The only use I’ve had for torches from Odyssey onwards is for a weak fire element attack.

It’s just a request. With good lighting design and functional gameplay you don’t need to resort to washing everything out at night in order that players can tell what they’re doing.

If they’re not going to have night time that’s dark they should remove the torch, which would free up control for something useful.

The request is for a true night time mode. One where a torch actually matters, and shadows are strategically important for stealth.

Also because the games would look so much better if you could defeat the ridiculously over-zealous HDR auto-exposure/brightness behavior.

Night time looks very washed out and bad and adds so little to AC’s that I almost feel it’s either do it right or don’t have a day/night cycle. This is an opportunity, the city at night could be amazing and not just a thing to meditate through,

I’d love to see that but please fix the lighting, otherwise it’ll result in epileptic fits.

At some point I expect him to break the fourth wall, or at least the animus wall. Maybe he’s a glitch in the animus itself rather than an Isu. Perhaps he’s the final big bad, or just a rogue agent programming himself in with false memories to gather the artifacts today with the unwitting help of the assassins.

To be honest I like him being mysterious, no matter what he is, just some inside joke at Ubisoft most likely, like any mcguffin any real explanation would be less satisfying than our imaginations, and less fun than the journey and clues.

This is a general problem, but especially prevalent in Valhalla that the sky doesn’t match what’s going on around Eivor. Neither rain or the cloud shadows.

You can be in full Sunlight but look up and the sun is obscured by a huge cloud and vice-versa.

Rain rarely occurs when there are clouds overhead, there might be a few clouds somewhere in the sky but almost never in a convincing way. When it does rain it’s almost always sunny at the same time with very rare full grey sky and ground, and even when the sky is grey the ground can still magically be sunny.

It’s actually very jarring and breaks immersion hard.