I don't understand why people bring up this argument trying to defend reasons why Eivor wouldn't kill civilians. Vikings didn't see the English as equals. They looked down on them for not worshipping their gods. A "real" Eivor would not view killing "innocents" as that. Killing them would be like smashing a fly to them, because they were not Norse. Many vikings considered it a service to their gods to kill Saxons even (since many converted to Christianity). You have to put yourselves in their head and try to understand it because it is not even remotely the same mindset that a modern person would have. Modern morals are things like charity, helping people, etc, and to a viking, killing someone would equate to that "good" moral if it were an enemy or sacrifice to their gods.

That said, vikings didn't slaughter regular peasants and farmers in swathes or anything, though. They would mostly kill people like Christian figures, monks and priests, or people perceived to have slighted their gods or denied them. Viking culture revolved around their gods and violence. They didn't have police or reeves like the Saxon had. Disputes were often settled with violence, even deadly violence, over something as small as a passing insult. Their legal system enabled righteous combat more than prevented it. So, a person who insisted their gods didn't exist would obviously be pretty low on the moral totem-pole when it came to mercy. They definitely wouldn't bat an eye at a random murder of a civilian that can't even speak their language.

The reputation for vikings being so terrifying and murderous is mainly due to their primary targets being Christians, and Christian monks and clergy also just happened to be the ones keeping all the records. So, history teaches a skewed view in some ways, but there is still truth that the vikings did kill many non-combatants for a variety of reasons. Their culture was violence.

Whenever trying to aim the bow, every time now, the aiming reticle gets stuck in a random spot for the first 1-2 seconds of the first draw. For example, if I'm fighting something then press L2 to pull out and aim the bow, it is impossible to look around or aim for a couple seconds when first pulling it out. This is seriously impacting gameplay because it essentially stuns me any time I want to switch to my bow. It seems to get stuck where ever I'm looking whenever switching to it, and moving around or standing still doesn't fix it. It's always stuck and can't be aimed for approx 2 seconds.

@klauskniffler On top of that, do you know what has never been recovered from a Viking burial site? A two-handed sword. Because they were stupid weapons that existed exclusively to counter pikes and were terrible for virtually everything else.

Agreed on the language issues. That was just, frankly, bizarre. After the lengths they went to in other parts of the game to represent different cultures more or less accurately, they seemingly decided to whitewash Scotland for what I can only guess were budgetary reasons.

The other stuff, maybe a bit exaggerated. Anglo-Saxons wouldn't have been killed on sight, but more likely just weren't really around. There was no reason for anyone besides Picts, Caledonians, and Scottish people to be up there. That's the main factor behind why even the Roman Empire never made more than a couple of attempts at incursions into the region. They went in, lost soldiers, and gained nothing. There was simply nothing there of value. Some people try to claim Hadrian's Wall was built to keep the Picts out of Roman Britain but this simply wasn't true, it was built as a sort of customs enforcement for traders entering Roman territory and as a rest stop. Which, ancient Scots did trade with the Romans of the time. Afterwards, Anglo-Saxons and others would have also traded with them just as frequently. Most Scotsman weren't openly hostile to foreigners in or around their land and I imagine they would have been viewed more as oddities than anything. Their economy revolved around trade (mainly slaves and agriculture) so being openly hostile to people from the south would have been directly detrimental to their survival as a people.

Kilts didn't come about for another few hundred years after the game's setting. The dirk you're talking about is the sgian-dubh, which I'm sure you're familiar with, and that was an even later tradition dated to around the 17th Century. However, this doesn't discount that many Scots probably did wear concealed knives in their armpits or hats much earlier than that. Particularly, the women did wear concealed weapons for a longer history, however it is unknown if that would have been back to the time of the Vikings.

Only nobility or members of a lord's warband would have been carrying swords at this time, much less every single person. The common weaponry of the time would have been the typical axes, pikes, spears, javelins, slings, and bows, with round shields or H-shields, and cloth or leather armor and helmets for the elite. Very few Scottish warriors carried two-handed swords at this time (if any at all? The two-handed swords in the game aren't historically accurate in the slightest), although later they'd obviously become synonymous with the basket-hilted broadsword. Swords of different varieties weren't quite proliferated to everyone yet, in fact there are very few actual physical examples remaining of Pictish swords outside of their artwork. It is known that Viking weapons were coveted at the time, particularly Viking swords, as they were apparently superior to the current Irish and Celtic swords they had available. Before that, Roman weapons were also very much in demand, so it's probably safe to say that the Picts, Gaels, and Scots weren't the greatest at swordsmithing at this time.

However, I'm someone that comes from strong Scottish heritage and I'm also very disappointed in the state of this DLC. I had hoped they would do something unique at least, but it seems to just be "more of England but there's cliffs".

Since there's no way to actually know what a piece of gear will look like before you upgrade it, some of the gear turns into something significantly altered from the original appearance. For example, the Galloglach armor starts out looking really nice and practical with the second appearance also reflecting the original appearance, with silver trim and darker colors, nice for sneaking around. Then the third appearance of the Galloglach armor is an absolute mess, it turns blue and gold with super gaudy accents and a massive "shoulder adornment" (it's definitely not a shoulder pad because it's sitting on top of the cloak...) that looks like fantasy MMO equipment. If I had known what it looked like beforehand, I would have just kept it at tier 2 instead of ever upgrading it because the upgrade isn't worth how terrible and different it looks. And now, since there's no way to get a second set of the same armor, I'm stuck looking like the "max level gear preview" from MMO character creation screens.

Some of the armor designs are extremely tacky and ugly even though their lower tiers look great. We should be able to use those lower tier armor appearances on our gear if we want to, and the game already demonstrates that it can be done by allowing you to use any appearance for your Jomsvikings. Just put it in the game, it needs it.

@ebonzone I made a post about this too. I hate the way the fully upgraded gear looks in this game. All of it looks like garbage fantasy MMO equipment, massive shoulder pads included. Vikings hoarded or spent their gold, they didn't wear it.

Not to mention things like equipment with mysteriously magically glowing accents... one of the nicer looking shields in the game has a glowing boss for some reason. And the ship cosmetics are even more guilty of tacky, stupid designs, including both glowing and weird cartoony bits.

This game needs a LOT of work. There are bugs at every level of it. Not just some here or there, bugs are literally the norm for the function of this game. There are bugs with the UI on nearly every screen. There are bugs with climbing and pathing. There are bugs with riding mounts. There are bugs with the combat, hitboxes, and tons of enemy i-frames. There are bugs with multiple skills. There are bugs with the NPCs interacting with objects and the player. There are bugs with the audio and music. There are bugs with the graphics displaying incorrectly and physics wonking out. There are bugs with questing and story advancement. There are various bugs that are serious and potentially gamebreaking or derogatory to the core experience of the game, making it very difficult to avoid them at all. Even if you don't get a bug that effects your gameplay directly by causing a death that can set you back 20-30 minutes of time in some cases, there are annoyances that can happen like the menu UI breaking and displaying the top bar directly across the center of the menu, or NPCs breaking and forcing you to directly fix the issue by shooting them out of an object they clipped into, or for the worst case, you get a bug that breaks a quest and you literally have to start the game over entirely.

People that paid pre-order price for this game or bought extremely expensive editions of the game deserve better. This is a AAA game that feels worse than an indie title in a lot of way. There is good here that deserves to be represented much better, too. Yet right from the beginning rather than releasing a game with minimal bugs, instead it's riddled with them but somehow there was time to put together a fully-functional in-game real money shop with tons of equipment, mounts, and cosmetics? It's almost as if the QA period was skipped entirely in lieu of making sure the game would have real money purchases on release. It's insulting.

So, as a matter of respect for the people that have bought the game: I request that no microtransaction items be released until the game is in a much more playable and complete state. You know what's better than a stupid looking rainbow longship? Having a $70 game that's actually finished.

They didn't include any gameplay bugs at all besides ones related to quests or progression the last time I checked. However, they did fix the bow aiming issue which was the most major gameplay issue before patch without ever adding it to the known bugs, and also fixed NPCs getting stuck inside of wealth chests and some other issues. I wouldn't take it as a comprehensive list. I reported a lot of bugs with video examples and all of them were fixed without being added to the last as far as I know, short of the weird glitch I had with the missile reversal animation being stuck.

@gothicenigma The shielded zealots are the epitome of everything wrong with the combat design in this game. The other worst offenders are any of the bear boss fights and a certain boss in Asgard. It all just seems so poorly thought out in general. Zealots that heal themselves constantly and that bear that heals itself too were the only enemies in the game that made me turn the difficulty down from Very Hard to Normal to just get it over with because I was sick of the [censored].

@ubi-baron Do you know if other more serious issues, like the camera getting stuck when first aiming the bow during combat, are being looked into as well? I've reported tons of bugs with video evidence and it seems many bugs that actually effect gameplay are either being overlooked or buried. I'd rather the game be more playable than having eye candy added to a location I visit for probably less than 1% of the time playing.

Agreed on the language issues. That was just, frankly, bizarre. After the lengths they went to in other parts of the game to represent different cultures more or less accurately, they seemingly decided to whitewash Scotland for what I can only guess were budgetary reasons.

The other stuff, maybe a bit exaggerated. Anglo-Saxons wouldn't have been killed on sight, but more likely just weren't really around. There was no reason for anyone besides Picts, Caledonians, and Scottish people to be up there. That's the main factor behind why even the Roman Empire never made more than a couple of attempts at incursions into the region. They went in, lost soldiers, and gained nothing. There was simply nothing there of value. Some people try to claim Hadrian's Wall was built to keep the Picts out of Roman Britain but this simply wasn't true, it was built as a sort of customs enforcement for traders entering Roman territory and as a rest stop. Which, ancient Scots did trade with the Romans of the time. Afterwards, Anglo-Saxons and others would have also traded with them just as frequently. Most Scotsman weren't openly hostile to foreigners in or around their land and I imagine they would have been viewed more as oddities than anything. Their economy revolved around trade (mainly slaves and agriculture) so being openly hostile to people from the south would have been directly detrimental to their survival as a people.

Kilts didn't come about for another few hundred years after the game's setting. The dirk you're talking about is the sgian-dubh, which I'm sure you're familiar with, and that was an even later tradition dated to around the 17th Century. However, this doesn't discount that many Scots probably did wear concealed knives in their armpits or hats much earlier than that. Particularly, the women did wear concealed weapons for a longer history, however it is unknown if that would have been back to the time of the Vikings.

Only nobility or members of a lord's warband would have been carrying swords at this time, much less every single person. The common weaponry of the time would have been the typical axes, pikes, spears, javelins, slings, and bows, with round shields or H-shields, and cloth or leather armor and helmets for the elite. Very few Scottish warriors carried two-handed swords at this time (if any at all? The two-handed swords in the game aren't historically accurate in the slightest), although later they'd obviously become synonymous with the basket-hilted broadsword. Swords of different varieties weren't quite proliferated to everyone yet, in fact there are very few actual physical examples remaining of Pictish swords outside of their artwork. It is known that Viking weapons were coveted at the time, particularly Viking swords, as they were apparently superior to the current Irish and Celtic swords they had available. Before that, Roman weapons were also very much in demand, so it's probably safe to say that the Picts, Gaels, and Scots weren't the greatest at swordsmithing at this time.

However, I'm someone that comes from strong Scottish heritage and I'm also very disappointed in the state of this DLC. I had hoped they would do something unique at least, but it seems to just be "more of England but there's cliffs".

I stopped playing the game last around November 24th 2020 based on my save file dates. I have a near-100% completion playthrough that I can't load. Is this due to patches breaking saved games? Or should I be able to still load these files? I'd rather not start an entirely new game but I suspect that patches have probably broken them..

When attempting to load any of my old saved games, I get a never-ending loading screen, including when loading as Basim outside the animus.

Progression-locked. You need to advance in the story or The Order content more. Or talk to Hytham.

Gungnir and Mjolnir both have special abilities. Gungnir's is that it has VERY long reach. If you do a full combo with it of both light or heavy attacks, it actually does a 360 degree sweep that is massive, too. Gungnir has such long reach that you're practically untouchable to a lot of enemies. Mjolnir's ability is that it does AOE stun damage when you land a stun hit. You can abuse it by using a heavy attack combo because the final hit of a heavy combo is always a stun. Or you can just do a light combo then end with a heavy attack which does the same thing.

Both of their abilities are actually quite strong and unique to only those weapons, so adding more seems a bit excessive.

I have a feeling this might be an intentional joke, I reported this way back on the day after the game launched.

It wasn't until VERY far into the game before the Dice Master contract gave me a target that wasn't the same training dummy in Raventhorpe. It seems like there's a certain point in the story you need to reach before the pool of targets opens up. One of the targets is actually in a totally different zone that Reda never could have gone to, even. More than likely, it's just a glitched out randomized pool of targets.

@strayngel I finished the game already and was never able to get him back in my crew.

He also started disappearing from the Raventhorpe dock spot. The reason he disappears from the dock is because he appears in a random Jomsviking recruitment location, I discovered. I found him randomly in different towns sometimes but was still unable to recruit him again. I think I was able to use him maybe 3-4 times before the game just completely wonked out and would never let me recruit him and removed him from the crew list.

@bob__gnarly I think the problem is people are trying to square-peg-round-hole it by not actually listening to the game and trying to play it some weird way. Like I fail to see how someone can struggle with basic shielded enemies. They literally break their shields on their own most of the time. If they don't do it for you then all you have to do is press the dedicated shield-breaking button: heavy attack. If I had to guess it's because people are trying to pick a dedicated playstyle of some sort and neglecting everything else, like only using bows. Which is viable and works, but unless you learn how to shoot feet on shielded enemies then I can see shields being a major issue. One that isn't the GAME'S issue, though. Just an issue of not doing what it takes to win.

You don't win rock-paper-scissors by "maining rock" and only throwing rock every time. Sometimes you have to use the other two to win.

@longjohn119 Very cool humblebrag. Killing overleveled enemies in Odyssey isn't exactly an achievement with any method, ranged, melee, or stealth once you get past the initial hump of low level skills. Valhalla actually makes it easier. Killing level 300+ enemies in Valhalla is doable as soon as you have Last Chance Healing and Grit with reasonable enough damage stats for it to not take forever (and ideally some cheese damage abilities like fire damage). So, it's possible to abuse the mechanics and kill higher leveled enemies in Valhalla sooner than in Odyssey even. In fact, the same tricks in Odyssey mostly carried over, like kicking enemies off high ledges. It looks like you're more interested in cheesing enemies, which there are a huge variety of methods to do in Valhalla, including with bows. As I've said many times, just unlock Charged Shot.

I'm not really sure what any of your post is supposed to validate, besides being upset that you can't turn on aim-assist and sit out of reach of enemies while they stand in the open and eat [censored] then die. Valhalla has aim-assist too. I don't know how well it works because I don't use it and have never needed to, in neither Origins or Odyssey before that. So, the criticism of aim-assist seems like a personal issue. Really, most of your claimed struggle all sounds like a personal issue, not a gameplay one.

Still not sure what your criticism or point is, though. Saying aim lock doesn't work is a personal problem. Going to cast major doubt that you know "how bows are supposed to work in Assassin's Creed" when your main issue is "game doesn't aim for me, it is bad". You are correct that Horizon is a much better game for bow fantasies though.

@souldrinkerlp I'm a former MMO player so the loot barrage was something I naturally tuned out, so I never had a particular issue with Odyssey's loot. I'm used to junk filling up my inventory and then needing to sort it out later. In fact, I enjoyed it because it rewarded going out of your way to kill enemies or explore certain areas in ways that Valhalla doesn't do. Valhalla feels almost barren because you eventually know that you've gotten every piece of equipment in the game and there's nothing else for you. That lack of meaningful loot is a definite issue. Ubisoft is a great anomaly of a studio that seems to be entirely incapable of getting its [censored] together to not regress their game mechanics. The equipment selection in this game is almost as barren as the selection that Syndicate had. It's like they take feedback and then overcorrect to the point that they create brand new issues. The Unity-Syndicate situation is a good example of it already having happened before.

@longjohn119 Honestly I'm finding it difficult to believe people that are complaining about difficulty have even played the game for very long, with opinions like this. The bow damage is well-known to be very imbalanced.

Bows are obscenely overpowered on every difficulty. Unlock Charged Shot. Charged Shot headshots can one-shot even some bosses and Zealots if you're high enough level and have an upgraded bow. On Very Hard, Charged Shot knocks off 1/4th to 1/3rd of an on-level (or even higher leveled) Zealot's health and since you find them in the world it's easy to get a first shot in before they're even able to react. By endgame, Charged Shot regularly hits for ~2000 damage on Very Hard.

Focus of the Nornir is also extremely busted, giving you infinite arrow shots during slow-mo. A literal cheat code.

Flaming arrows do absurd amounts of damage to most enemies and can even force them to panic since you set them on fire.

Missile Reversal makes you nigh invincible at range as well, because it works on EVERY normal projectile in the game, even the bolts from Arbalests and scorpios (although I think they might have patched out the scorpio reversals in the latest patch, I uninstalled the game so I haven't tried it). That's on top of it dealing ridiculous amounts of damage without you even needing to use your own ammunition. Zealots that throw javelins with LITERALLY KILL THEMSELVES if you abuse their AI with Missile Reversal by staying a certain distance away, even. The same goes for Flag-Bearer enemies that throw javelins and even Woe-bringers when they throw their axe at you. Yes, you can catch a massive 2-handed axe and throw it back. Also enemies that throw their shields at you, or rocks, everything.

Ammo is quite literally littered all over the game world. I'm not sure how it's possible to run out unless your aim is poor and you're not getting headshots or not using Charged Shot. On top of that you have THREE bows with three separate ammo pools, so if one runs out then just switch to another.

And yes, at the very beginning of BOTH games when you're fighting level 1 enemies, bows can one-shot them. Very impressive, I guess. Bow damage in Odyssey falls off considerably compared to Valhalla, though. This is a L2P issue, not a "too difficult" one.