settlements etc
No, not tower defense, so raiding, it’s really going out into the world. You’re out into England to attack various enemies, various factions to weaken them to gain resources using your raiding party and you bring back those resources to your settlement, and you use those resources to grow your settlement. Growing the settlement is really about the people, it’s about the relationships, it’s about the buildings that you put in that a lot of gameplay features rely on. There’s customization that you can do in the settlement itself. The settlement is part of the the personal journey of Eivor and we want players to make it their home and to make it a place that they can come back to feel comfortable in and know every single face in the community, to be able to have a relationship with these people.
Eivor has a very similar role which is to settle people and to grow a thriving settlement. So all of a sudden the settlement is a big new feature of the game that is at the heart of the motivation of the journey, the character. As an example, every building that we can place in the settlement, has a gameplay value. You can invite people to arrive into your settlement and they bring something along with them.
But at this time, England is not very welcoming to Vikings, so players to succeed, players will go on raids. So you have a long ship you have a raiding party, your Raiders are people that you can find in the world, they are people that you go on journeys with, there’s characters within the raiding party that you can customize as well. So the raiding party, raiding itself, the longship these are all big new features of the game. This is based on a lot of battles that happened during this time period, the players will go on these epic fortification attacks.
combat
The combat itself, if you’re going to do a game that represents a Viking and the Viking experience, you have to nail combat in all its visceral nature. So the weaponry, the feeling of impact, the feeling of that thump when axe hits into something we needed to deliver on that, so combat has had a huge reinvention towards that sort of more brutal weighty angle.
You wouldn’t be a Viking raider without raids, and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla lets you lead surprise longship attacks to pillage enemy territories for much-needed resources, or launch massive assaults against rival Saxon strongholds. Raids will be more action-packed and brutal than anything Assassin’s Creed has seen before, thanks to a visceral new combat system that lets you bash, dismember, and decapitate your foes. Eivor will be able to dual-wield axes, swords, and even shields against the greatest variety of enemy types ever seen in Assassin’s Creed. And if you want to mix it up, the return of the Hidden Blade allows Eivor to assassinate targets with deadly precision.
The third element to combat improvement is the effort we’ve put into the variety of enemies, that are incredible unique using the environment and using one another against the hero. We wanted to make sure that if you’d been playing for 15-20 hours, that you were still seeing stuff you’ve never seen before so a lot of effort has gone into the enemy side of combat.
skill system / rpg system,
So in terms of RPG and progression, our goal was to actually bring in kind of a fresh new take on it. Something that is much more anchored into the world itself and into the concepts of skills and so on. We do have a very different take than what we’ve previously done, all in the hopes of actually making the Viking experience shine a bit more.
so an example, we have this giant skill graph. It’s a really large skill tree where players can really customise the kind of Viking they that they want to play as. Hopefully people see a lot more play style customisation within that. Our angle is much more about letting players, sort of, enjoy the experience of the game as they want. In terms of of the RPG progression. So a lot of effort has gone into these skills. We have the return of abilities, but of course all the abilities are again anchored and rooted and very Viking themed We’ve gotten rid of the idea of levels as well. Instead we now have power, so again power is something that is rooted in the skill set of the hero. So based on the skills you’ve learned you gain power, and so there’s been a shift in the way we handle RPG and progression to make it a more play-style centered and focused on what players out there want to do in the game.
Well, with Valhalla, with the balancing of the game, it’s our angle, our goal is to just let players play the content they want. Again we built a really intriguing world that takes place in Dark Ages England and Norway. By the way, when you leave Norway to England, you can always go back to Norway, so we built these really beautiful breathtaking living worlds, and we want players to play the content as they wish to play it. That’s the way the game is being balanced. So, people want to focus on narrative, there’s no issue there, people want to focus on their settlement, again, no issue there. It’s really up to players to decide how they want to consume the content. That’s always been our angle and again, this, we’re showcasing Eivos’ personal journey, we’re really focused on that. So again, if people want to focus on that personal journey and the relationships that come out of that they can do that.