Assassin's Creed: Valhalla Officially Revealed.

In a partnership stream yesterday, Ubisoft and digital artist BossLogic, revealed that the next installment of the Assassin’s Creed franchise would be Viking flavored, confirming the rumor from last year. The artist, who is a big fan of the franchise, expressed his enjoyment from taking part in such a big reveal.

At the end of his stream, once the piece of artwork was finished, it was announced that the debut trailer would drop this morning, and it looks incredible. While the official gameplay reveal is still a ways off, we were treated to a cinematic trailer detailing an epic war between a tribe of Vikings and an opposing force, the Saxon resistance, looking to respond in a way they feel the Vikings would understand; War. The trailer is rather impressive with one very cool stand out moment that reinforces this as an Assassin’s Creed game.

Developed by Ubisoft Montreal, as well will support from over a dozen other studios, you’ll explore ninth-century Europe as Eivor, a Viking Raider who leads their people out of Norway. Also, while settlements are not exactly new to the series, they will play a huge factor in the overall game, as mentioned by Valhalla game director Ashraf Ismail, who had this to say to IGN:

“The settlement is a key feature of the game. It's quite grand in what we're trying to achieve with it. We want you to feel that this is your home, that you're building, that a lot of what you're doing in the game world is, at the end of the day, going to feed into the settlement so that it can grow, it can flourish. We have a ton of buildings that people can build. Each building comes with its own gameplay purpose,”

“There's a lot of effort that's gone into making sure that players can feel like this home that they're developing is really meaningful to them. It's meaningful to the journey that they're on. The people that they invite to their settlement have meaning to them. Lots of events and things happen based on how you decide to kind of grow this place. It's really core to the experience of the game.”

Eivor will have additional combat mechanics, such as dual-wielding, and you’ll need to become vastly proficient as Valhalla will contain far more enemy types than ever seen before in the series. You’ll be able to fully customize Eivor to be either male or female, with a vast selection of hair, tattoos, clothing, war paint, and gear. The title will also see dramatic changes to the story based on the choices you make during dialogue and political alliances. Ismail also had this to say on revamping the gear system:

“The gear system has been revamped quite a lot to really push a balance between having great gameplay-oriented gear, but also the look that players can really customize the look of that gear. In terms of the grander choices, it comes down to the journey and the settlement, and what do you want to leave behind in the settlement and what kind of impact do you want to have on the people that you're trying to take care of?”

Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla will launch on both current and next gen consoles and Ismail noted that his team is especially excited about the next gen verisons, largely due to the inclusion of significantly faster hard drives:

“Having significantly faster loading times, effectively means we’re able to remove some of the friction of the immersion we’re trying to go after. We’re trying to build the most immersive experiences we possibly can, so having extremely fast loading helps us out a lot with that. These worlds, the Dark Ages of England and Norway, these are breathtaking, living worlds. So to be able to push them to an incredible potential is wonderful for us,”

While an official release date is not given at this time, the game will launch fall 2020 and currently, there are a few versions of the game:

  • Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla Standard Edition.

  • Assassin's Creed: Valhalla Gold Edition: Which includes the base game and the season pass.

  • Assassin's Creed: Valhalla Ultimate Edition: Which includes the base game, the season pass, and the ultimate pack, which has exclusive customization content, like the Berserker Gear Pack, the Berserker Settlement Pack, the Berserker Longship Pack, as well as a set of Runes used to improve your weapons and gear.

  • Assassin's Creed Valhalla Collector's Edition: Which has everything included in the Ultimate edition, plus a replica of Eivor and their longship, a collector's case, a steel book, a numbered certificate of authenticity, a Viking statuette of Eivor with their raven and Dane axe, exclusive lithographs, and a selected soundtrack. This version will only be a Ubisoft store exclusive.

Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla releases on Xbox One, Xbox Series X, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Stadia, PC, and UPLay+.

Here is the trailer in full: