Assassin's Creed Valhalla: Three Hundred Hours of Raiding

Ubisoft Montreal shipped Assassin’s Creed Valhalla in November 2020 as the third of its “RPG-era” Assassin’s Creed games, following Origins and Odyssey, and by the time the last of its three expansions landed in 2022 the whole package had quietly become one of the biggest single-player commitments in the industry’s mainstream. You play Eivor, a Viking raider who crosses the North Sea to carve out a settlement in England, and the base campaign alone runs past a hundred hours before you touch the DLC. Revisiting it now, away from the noise of launch week, the honest question isn’t whether it’s bloated. It obviously is. The question is why the one activity it centres — the raid — still works when almost everything built around it has gone soft.

The raid is the actual game

Strip away the map full of icons and Valhalla is built around a clean, old idea: sail a longship up a river, beach it near a monastery or a fort, and take the place apart with a small crew in a few minutes flat. You mark targets with Odin’s Sight, plan an entry point, and then it’s over almost as soon as it starts — loot carried out on your crew’s backs, a building or two burning, a notoriety tick you’ll pay down later. It’s compact, it’s readable, and it resolves. Compare that to the hundred-plus “wealth” icons scattered across every region, which resolve to nothing more than a chest and a stat bump, and you can see why the raid became the thing people actually remember.

What makes it land isn’t the combat, which is serviceable dual-wielding action with a light stealth option bolted on. It’s the shape of the encounter. A raid has a start, a middle with a real decision (go loud, go quiet, split the crew between two target buildings), and a definite end signalled by a burning building and a full loot bag. Most of Valhalla’s open-world filler has no shape at all — you walk to a marker, hold a button, walk to the next marker — and the contrast does the raid a favour it probably didn’t earn on its own merits. It’s a good fifteen-minute loop surrounded by a much longer game that forgot to build any other loop as good, and it’s also the one system the design team clearly iterated on across the three expansions, tightening the crew commands and the burn timer each time.

Ravensthorpe and the economy of return

The raid’s loot funds Ravensthorpe, your settlement, which you build up building by building — a tattoo parlour, a hidden ones bureau, a trading post — using resources you haul back from raiding, and this is the part of the design that actually justifies the travel. Ubisoft learned something from The Sims and every base-building game since: watching a place visibly change because of what you did is a stronger hook than a number going up in a menu. Ravensthorpe grows timber-plank by timber-plank, and there’s a real satisfaction in sailing home to a settlement that looks different from the one you left, its docks busier, its longhouse louder, allies you recruited standing around a fire that wasn’t there an hour ago.

The trouble is that the settlement is also where the game’s pacing problem is easiest to see. Once you’ve unlocked the handful of buildings that matter — the ones tied to gear and abilities — the rest of Ravensthorpe’s upgrade tree is cosmetic, and cosmetic upgrades in a game this size stop being an incentive and start being a checklist. Valhalla never quite decides whether it wants you building a home or completing a spreadsheet, and it hedges by doing both half-heartedly. A tighter game would have made every building matter mechanically; this one front-loads the meaningful ones and lets the back half of the tree exist purely so the settlement screen has more green ticks on it.

The skill web and the illusion of choice

Eivor’s ability screen is a constellation map — literally, a night sky of nodes shaped loosely like Norse motifs — and it’s a clever piece of UI that dresses up what’s underneath: a fairly standard RPG skill tree with a lot of small percentage bumps and a smaller number of nodes that change how you actually play (a stealth kill upgrade here, a dual-wield finisher there). The constellation framing makes the tree feel bigger and more personal than it is, and that’s not a criticism so much as an observation about how much of modern open-world design is presentation doing the work that mechanics used to do alone. Walk the same nodes on a plain grid and you’d see the padding immediately; scatter them across a starfield and the padding reads as scale.

The Order of the Ancients investigation board is the sharper idea buried in the same game — a detective layer where killing lower-ranked cultists reveals clues about their superiors, building toward named targets the way Watch Dogs’ hacking-web borrowed from Deus Ex’s conspiracy boards. It’s the one system in Valhalla that rewards attention rather than time spent, and it’s telling that it’s also the system most reviewers singled out as the highlight. Investigation beats grind, every time it’s tried properly, and the board’s slow reveal of a target’s identity does more narrative work in three lines of intercepted correspondence than most of the game’s scripted cutscenes manage in ten minutes.

The alliance system as regional pacing

Zoom out from any single raid or building and Valhalla’s real structural idea is the alliance map: England is carved into a dozen-odd regions, each with its own strongman or petty king Eivor needs to win over, and each resolves as a self-contained arc with its own cast and its own handful of hours. It’s a smart way to make a huge landmass feel like a sequence of stories rather than one undifferentiated slog, and a few of those arcs — Grantebridgescire’s rivalry plot, Sciropscire’s court intrigue — are genuinely well-told in miniature. The problem is that the game gives you no reason to prioritise one region over another beyond a suggested power level, so the alliance system’s pacing only works if you impose your own discipline on it. Left unchecked, it becomes just another category of icon on the map, competing with wealth chests and Odin’s Sight synchronisation points for the same attention.

What changed from Odyssey

Valhalla followed Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, which had leaned hard into Greek mercenary fantasy and a bounty system that turned every region into a low-stakes arms race against rival hunters. Valhalla mostly abandons that structure in favour of the raid-and-settle loop, and it’s the right call: Odyssey’s mercenaries were a treadmill dressed as a rivalry, spawning indefinitely to fill the same narrative slot regardless of what the player actually did. Valhalla’s raids at least have a fixed target and a resolution. What it keeps from Odyssey is the choice-driven dialogue wheel, which is largely cosmetic here — Eivor’s major story beats don’t bend meaningfully around what you pick, and the illusion of consequence is thinner than the series has previously managed. Where Odyssey let a handful of choices change which characters lived, Valhalla mostly changes which line of dialogue plays before the plot moves on regardless.

The launch itself was rocky in the way most releases of this scale now are — a wave of physics and pathing bugs, some severe enough to block quests, patched down over the following weeks and months rather than fixed before release. That’s become the industry’s default contract with players on games this size, and it’s worth naming rather than waving past: a hundred-hour open world shipped in November arrives, by design, still being finished in public.

Where the length stops paying for itself

Valhalla asks for genuinely enormous amounts of a player’s life — the base game, then Wrath of the Druids in Ireland, then The Siege of Paris, then the mythological detour of Dawn of Ragnarok — and across all of it the raid loop, the investigation board, and the alliance system remain reliably good. What sags is the connective tissue: fetch quests dressed as side content, a map so saturated with icons that exploring on your own initiative (the thing Elden Ring’s designers built a whole game around, as covered in Jay’s piece on that game’s sightline navigation) becomes functionally impossible, because there’s always a marker telling you where to look next.

That’s the deeper design argument Valhalla is worth revisiting for: it’s a case study in what happens when a studio has a genuinely great fifteen-minute loop and doesn’t trust it to carry a game on its own. The raid could have been the spine of a tighter thirty-hour game. Instead it’s one system among a dozen competing for the same hundred-plus hours, most of which exist because the marketing case for a triple-A open-world release still runs on hours-of-content as a headline number rather than density of good ideas. Jay’s essay on why the hundred-hour open world is a budgeting problem goes at that argument directly; Valhalla is close to its purest example, because the good game inside it is so easy to isolate from the padding around it.

What to play now

Ubisoft kept Valhalla alive with free updates for years after launch — a New Game Plus mode, difficulty options, transmog — which softened some of the pacing complaints without touching the structural ones. If you’re coming to it fresh, play the raids, build only the Ravensthorpe upgrades that unlock new gear, follow two or three alliance arcs to completion rather than grazing across all of them at once, and treat the map icons as optional rather than a to-do list. The game rewards that restraint far more than it rewards completion, and it’s the closest thing to advice a three-hundred-hour game can honestly give a new player.

Spoilers below

The Order of the Ancients plot resolves into a slow-burn reveal about who’s really pulling strings in England, tying Eivor’s story to the modern-day framing device the series has carried since the first game — a present-day researcher, Layla Hassad, extracting the memories through an Animus-adjacent device. The mythological sequences, framed as visions or dreams depending on how literally you take Eivor’s Norse faith, let you play as Odin himself in flashback, hunting his lost son through Asgard and Jotunheim — a structural trick the game repeats across the two smaller DLCs, letting you play Basim in ninth-century Baghdad, which retroactively recontextualises a supporting character from the main campaign as a far older and more consequential figure than the base game ever lets on.