Assassin’s Creed Valhalla won’t have traditional side quests
If you watched yesterday’s in-depth demo of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla during Ubisoft Forward, you would be excused if you thought the game looked a lot like Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. But there’s one way in which the upcoming title will distinguish itself from the previous two, RPG-focused entries in the series, and that’s by eliminating traditional side quests.
Narrative director Darby McDevitt told GameSpot that Ubisoft is phasing out traditional side quests in favor of “world events” that will pop up during the game. These world events aren’t part of the main story, and they won’t be marked by icons that you have to discover on the map. They’ll just happen.
The turn away from side quests seems like a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the overwhelming amount of side quests in Odyssey was patience-testing. On the other hand, we know that Valhalla will have an XP and leveling system consistent with Assassin’s Creed Origins and Odyssey, so it’ll be interesting to see how that works when you can’t just grind a bunch of side quests.
One of the activities that is seemingly replacing traditional side quests is raiding villages, which was shown off during the Ubisoft Forward demo. Some of these raids seem tied to the main story arc, in which protagonist Eivor and his or her Viking clan settle in (or invade, depending on your perspective) Ye Olde England.
However, it seems that players can decide to raid smaller villages on their own and use the spoils from these raids to build their own settlement. We suspect that players can spend a lot of time building the settlement and recruiting new soldiers.
We’re also guessing that there will be a ton of collectibles scattered throughout the map, as well as animals to hunt and berries to pick, so don’t worry about that.
It’ll be interesting to see how this shift away from side questing impacts the overall flow of this RPG era of the series. We’re sure we’ll find out more before the game launches on November 17th for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC, with Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 versions also coming.
