It was considered and likely, but that doesn’t make the sting any less. The newest foray into the Assassin’s Creed franchise has many excited due to, if nothing else, the limitation of buildings to climb implying that perhaps we won’t spend hours ascending buildings as we’ve done with the franchise in the last two decades. Assassin’s Creed Valhalla looks to bring users into the lush and barbaric world of Viking’s, although a unique world where the women and children apparently aren’t slaughtered along with the men.
Unfortunately, Assassin’s Creed won’t be launching immediately on the beloved Steam platform, at least when the game first initially launches. Instead, they’ll be bringing Valhalla to the uPlay store, along with the Epic Game Store, much akin to how Ubisoft launched The Division 2 on EGS. It’s a move that obviously won’t be popular with anyone that prefers a bit more meat to their launchers, or the vast majority of PC gamers, but as of this moment, it’s simple fact.
If you are looking at a Day One purchase, unfortunately, the Epic Game Store will likely be your first bet if the launcher is actually included in the EGS release. uPlay has a tendency to consistently crash when they release titles, leaving the entirety of the store unusable unless you’ve already prepared a game for offline mode.
Wars will rage. Kingdoms will fall. This is the age of the Vikings. Assassin’s Creed Valhalla will be available Holiday 2020.
— Assassin's Creed (@assassinscreed) April 30, 2020
If you’ve never played the game before, you’ll be attempting to elbow your way past thousands of other users all trying to access the system. When The Division launched, uPlay was down for roughly eight hours, and reports of users having difficulty logging in continued for the next couple of days until traffic died down.
If the Epic Game Store doesn’t have its own included launcher, and it’s worth noting that at least as far as purchases on Steam are concerned, they’re simply redirected to uPlay, then it’s all a bit of a moot point.
Still, if empirical data is anything to go off of, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla will most likely arrive on the Steam platform one day.
The vast majority of PC users are familiar with the Steam platform that has recently surpassed 23 million concurrent users, and that’s a very difficult demographic to ignore for developers and publishers, agreements be darned. As with everything, patience will likely be rewarded as the titles typically come in ‘Game of the Year’ editions that include not only all of the ugly bug fixes, but also some DLC for a lower price than picking it up on day one. Plus it gives us time to deduce precisely how much Ubisoft is willing to stray from the tired tropes of the franchise.
