Assassin’s Creed Valhalla approaches swiftly and in heavy Viking boots. Already tonight and for the rest of the week you will read more from me about the game I was allowed to play last week, because then the embargo on reporting falls. But I don’t want to withhold some of the useful information that our English colleagues recently put together on the new assassin adventure.
It’s about the new settlement called Ravensthorpe, which is your home base in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. From here, Eivor and his tribesmen pave their way to the surrounding area and gradually expand their wealth and sphere of influence in order to use this power to make Ravensthorpe bigger and more powerful. The settlement is a mirror of your progress and at the same time a safe haven for you, to which you like to return between nerve and resource-wracking missions. For Eivor, meanwhile, it’s a piece of home away from home.
A popular feature is returning: your own settlement
“ is the centerpiece “, quotes colleague Tom Phillips at SamaGame.net Ubisoft’s level designer David Bolle.” Everything falls back on this, including some major narrative turning points. “Which those are has of course not yet been shown, but a quick run through the development of the camp, which begins with just a long house, surrounded by a few tents and windy wooden shacks, and gradually becomes a lively village with sturdy wooden houses. And when you look at it that way, you really wonder why the series are the last games renounced a feature like this, when Monteriggioni in Assassin’s Creed 2 and the hometown in Assassin’s Creed 3 were among the best parts of the game.
In these games it was always remarkable what kind of bond you can build with a playful and narrative fixed point like this one. You always come home with a sigh of relief and think back to simpler days, to the beginnings of the adventure and how far you have come since then. I’ll go as far as to say: a home base makes almost every game better, that was already true in Suikoden and hasn’t changed in over 20 years.
“It was very important that you feel like you are coming home after a trip,” said Bolle. “There can be five or six hours between visits here. That’s why you want to meet the people you know to find out how they fared. It’s like living somewhere else and going back to your parents’ house. You want see. It’s a comforting feeling. “According to Bolle, Eivor expected sometimes happy, sometimes sad news every time they returned home – and sometimes just cultures here. The game should tell various stories that give depth and texture to its world.
How Ravensthorpe grows over the course of the campaign
But of course, in the case of Assassin’s Creed, various upgrade systems are also represented here by expanding the settlement, which is rarely more evident than by building a forge in which Eivor improves his weapons. The longhouse with which it all begins is, in a sense, the command center in which Eivor and his sister-in-law Randvi, who Bolle describes as the leader of the settlement (and bears an uncanny resemblance to Kassandra from Assassin’s Creed Odyssey), consult. That happens at a table with a map of the region on the east coast of Great Britain, from Northumberland down to the Isle of Wight. The English colleague compares the feature with the card table from Dragon Age Inquisition. Eivor also has his own room in the longhouse: If he sleeps in the bed, his health regenerates. He also has a mailbox there.
Gallery:
Ravensthorpe’s Evolution …
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If you want to build more buildings, you need resources that you can find on your raids through the game world. You generate a large part of your income by looting settlements and monasteries, which you find again and again along the widely branched rivers. In abbeys and underground crypts of ecclesiastical institutions one can find huge chests full of riches, which in turn are invested in building up one’s home. The residents of newly built facilities in turn bring their own stories and sometimes missions with them, during which you develop your relationship with them. Even romances can arise here.
Buildings that are available early on are, for example, a bird house and a stable in which a Saxon named Rowan sells horses that can be trained and – for certain resources – also improved, which not only results in more robust and persistent nags, but also in those who can swim better than others. A trading outpost is also among the early upgrades and allows targeted purchases of materials and cosmetic items, including tattoos. In the barracks you design your Jomsviking, in a sense your right hand, an NPC, which you can equip with equipment and who will then support you in raids on settlements (and which you can also lend to your real-life friends via the Internet) . Right next to the barracks, meanwhile, sits a Viking named Mundi, with whom you can play the Orlog dice game.
Picture-perfect. But the game leaves no room for doubt that Eivor and his friends are also invaders.
The end of the first stage, of which there are six in number, is the Hidden Ones office, in which a character named Hytham tells you about the one sinister conspiracy by the “Order of the Ancients”, a forerunner of the Templars keeps up to date. The colleague plays targets for you to assassinate these mean immigrants who are said to have “buried themselves deep in England”. The article from eg.net also mentions that there seems to be a kind of superhero whose identity is gradually being revealed. Exciting.
Later expansion stages of Ravensthorpe unlock a hunting lodge and a fishing lodge, a tattoo artist where you can decorate your or your egg, a shipyard to customize your longboat, a brewery, a bakery, a cartographer, a museum in which a certain Octavian den Reconstruction of local ruins promises a cemetery for fallen fellow Vikings and two farmsteads that determine how lush your feasts and thus the buffs of your troops for upcoming battles will be. There are also various houses for key characters in the campaign. Ornamental objects and monuments can be placed in Ravensthorpe and all cats and dogs that run around here can be petted.
Gameplay elements and storyline are represented in your base
In the seer’s hut, a woman named Valka brews potions with not exactly delicious ingredients, which Eivor is supposed to transport to “another time, another level”. Since some supernatural or literally fabulous elements have already been teased – even in Odyssey, everything wasn’t always down to earth, keyword: Atlantis, they should be related to Valka’s talents. It also sounded to the colleague as if one could also converse with Odin from the camp. Bolle called this part of the game “a completely new section” and “pretty big”.
Ravensthorpe is therefore not a mere representation of what could otherwise also happen in menus alone. New characters settle down here, offer romance options where you can also go on dates – and if you are tired of one person, you can also get intimate with other partners, according to Bolle. However, it will not be possible to have an existence together or to have children – see Fable.
What do you think of the return of a home base in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla? Are you just as wistful and nostalgic as I am in this regard, or is Ravensthorpe just window dressing and transparent gameplay progression for you?
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