Fans that have been chomping at the bit for the next iteration of wherever the story of Templars versus Assassin’s has crashed are a little stymied today as a ‘leak’ of footage from the upcoming Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla has made its way public onto the internet today.
With a ‘Work in Progress’ snippet seen in the bottom-right corner, some are arguing that Ubisoft is testing the waters with this leak regarding what the gameplay shows, and truth be told, it may surprise some by how closely elements are matched to those of the most recent title, Odyssey.
The abilities appear to work much how they did in Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey with a compass-window shown in the bottom left for your bow abilities and bottom right for your melee abilities. The snippet shows the heroine Eivor locking on and circle-strafing around a boss Cordelia while they each throw various abilities at each other.
The slow chunks of health being cut away from the boss imply that we can well expect that this iteration will prominently feature the same hack & slash action that the series has leaned towards in recent history.
Some critics have noted that this is one of the more frustrating features within modern Assassin’s Creed titles, where your successful assassinations would simply start the fight with the enemy missing a part of their health, and you’d be there mashing buttons for a solid 60-seconds until the enemy finally acquiesced to your patience.
This could also be considered a bit of a jump from the original titles of the franchise, where the largest part of some bosses was figuring out how to get close to your target while maintaining your cover or concealment.
Not necessarily that one era of the franchise is factually better than the other; merely that fans of the older titles that have been frustrated with mechanics of the newer ones might want to steer clear, based on how this leaked footage appears; like-wise, fans of the hack & slash combat are likely salivating at the video.
Additionally, we see a blue stamina bar in the bottom left, which drops when Eivor dodges.
Arguably, the greatest change seen between Odyssey and Valhalla, based on this leaked clip (which may or may not be an accurate representation of the development of the title at the moment, pardon the CYA), is that the skill tree now has various astrology symbols that you use to gain skill points and further your character. Although they promise they won’t wall players anymore to try to get them to purchase microtransactions in a single-player game, so…that’s a victory.
Beyond that, and some may argue that this looks more like Odyssey then they would have expected; skill hotkeys prominently displayed in either corner correlating to weapons, RPG-style upgrades that slowly increase your strength, and enough wandering interspersed with hack & slash combat to fill up a few weeks of space in your life.
