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Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Makes Wonderful Use of Color
Style matters more than realism
Last month, Ubisoft finally launched their long-awaited Assassin’s Creed Shadows, allowing players to live out their samurai and ninja fantasies in one of the most technologically capable games ever made. Its landscapes are packed with astounding amounts of detail. Its world is filled with tons of interactive physics objects that sway in the wind and get crushed during battles. Its ray traced lighting is some of the most accurate and pristine ever used in a modern game, setting a new bar for realistic graphics on consoles and PCs.
However, in the pursuit of all this technical beauty, I think it might have lost a meaningful sense of visual style.
I booted up 2020’s Assassin’s Creed Valhalla again not meaning to play through it or marvel at its well-designed aesthetics, but to check on a couple of mundane elements to make sure I wasn’t misremembering some things. My checklist: was its sometimes-clunky sound design still frustrating to me? Yes! Was its UI/UX design somehow much better than in Shadows? Also yes! I went off to opine about those things on the internet, like all over-enthused fans would, and thought that’d be the end of it.
With my quest for past game design details complete, I went back and kept slogging my way…
