Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Will Have Less Grinding Than Odyssey

Creative director Ashraf Ismail confirms players can “play the content as they wish to play it.”

[Psychotica]

That's good to hear. I enjoyed the game but the grinding was a little ridiculous.

[UltraNova]

My prayers have been heard! Let's see what Ubi means by that.

[MajorLazer]

That and getting rid of the level mechanic makes me very hopeful this is a quality AC game.

[Prince-Ali]

Loooooool!! This is Ubisoft... This game will 10000% be less "grindy" than Odyssey but the grind will be amplified in different ways to pad the games length and coerce the player into spending money on helix points and 'timesavers' and shizz... watch!!!

[-Foxtrot]

I doubt that, Ubisoft knows the criticism but will want to try and reassure people so they'll buy this day one.

[Hellcat2020]

less grinding is good

[phoenixwing]

We will see. Odyssey was borderline for what I could accept grind wise.

[Saijahn]

Good. I loved origins and odyssey but they had stretches where it lost steam because you had to level up just to go do the next quest. Get back to some of the old gameplay, hopefully. Can’t wait for this game.

[lazyboyblue]

Thanks to new anti-grinding tech available exclusively on Xbox Series X. 😇
Sorry.
(Sony doesn't have it because AMD forgot to put it in RDNA 999 that PS5 is now rumoured to contain.)

[sushimama]

Yeah umm... leave the jokes to someone else, you're terrible at them.

[Thundercat77]

"less"

So the grind is still there. Grind and microtransactions were horrible on the previous 2 games. Not hyped about this one.

[Spenok]

I'm currently working through Origins and am almost done with it. I've literally seen no grind whatsoever. To be fair, I've done a decent amount of exploration (because the world is beautiful) and the camps and such on the map... but still. The grind has been nonexistent for me.

[Thundercat77]

Grind has been the number one complain on those games. I guess that in the dimension that you live, the game has no grind.

[Profchaos]

A Ubisoft game without pointless grinding to try and flesh out a 8 hour story to a 90 hour collectathon impossible. There's going to be grind in other forms otherwise the trade in rates of their games is to high they need to prevent as many people as possible from trading the game in after the first two weeks while sales are still in a prime position during the holidays

This is coming from the black flag team that had you travelling to pointless tiny islands to find treasure that meant nothing thousands of times over.

[TheProfessional]

I get what you're saying about the grind but the idea that they only add it to prevent people from trading it in is a little dumb. What do they care if they've already made the sale? The grind and bullet spongey enemies etc. are just ubisoft's foruma that they keep repeating over and over.

[Profchaos]

Its the same reason companies push online gameplay so much to prevent Trade ins.

Trade ins hurt new game sales and when people quickly finish a campaign and trade in the game within the first month the sale of the new game is lost to the purchaser of the used game.

Starting in the PS3 era there was a large push to try and prevent this practice or cash in on it mass effect 2 for example had a DLC code that game access to a special system in game on a single player title without it ea would charge $10 to unlock it.

Ubi didn't go down that route instead they pushed online integrations and tried to fill out their game worlds with enough side quests to keep people playing and avoid trading in

[Outlawzz]

Haven't played assassin's Creed since the first one lol I plan to play the whole series someday at a bargain price

[TheProfessional]

Then why even bother commenting? Posts like this and people talking about a game being in their "backlog" are the most useless on n4g.

[jznrpg]

They will find some way to sell you something you shouldn’t be buying in the first place

[BLUEKNIFE]

1% less grinding ?

[chicken_in_the_corn]

Thank God. The grind ruined Origins for me. Odyssey wasn't as bad because I bought the XP because of Origins.

[Games1st]

Praise Odin.

[Rachel_Alucard]

If you read the quote, he never states there's less grinding. He just says you won't be stopped by some sort of restriction that requires you to grind. However, I can assume they'll throw in some end game content like a Norse god or animal that will require you to be at endgame to fight.

[staticall]

This is the whole quote:
---
Q: A lot of people felt that Odyssey forced you to grind to certain parts of the game to take on certain enemies or missions. Has that been looked at and balanced here?

Ashraf Ismail: 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.
---

There's no confirmation it will be less grindy. And actually to me, it looks like this creative director dodged the question, there was no definitive «Yes» or «No», but «we built a really intriguing world» and «It’s really up to players to decide how they want to consume the content».

So i'm not sure why this article (not the source one) even exists, to be honest.

[Dark-soul]

What pisses me off is , just look at screenshot in Norway, how beautiful it is, but what i heard you will spend the most of the game in stupid England instead....

[Movefasta1993]

I actually prefer England as a setting.

[Dark-soul]

But Norway = polar lights, snow, fiords, norse architecture and many other cool things and in England what? Grass plains and snobs....

[Movefasta1993]

Polar lights are good to stare at for a couple of seconds, when I think of Norway I simply think of skyrim , lots of snow and mountains.