Early game footage of Assasin’s Creed Valhalla has leaked, showing what the game could look like running on the Xbox Series X and PS5.
Some 30 minutes of in-game footage of Ubisoft’s upcoming Assassin’s Creed game popped up on Reddit, revealing what the game will look like and how it will play. Ubisoft has moved to get the videos taken down, but at the time of writing a trio of videos posted by Reddit user Deathlycz are live; best move quickly if you want an early glance at the game.
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The videos show what’s thought to be footage of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla running on what could be an Xbox Series X or PS5. We’d hazard a guess that it could be running on Xbox Series X hardware, given the game was teased at the May 7 Xbox games event. However, Valhalla is also slated to come to the current-gen PS4 and Xbox One consoles as well as PC and Google Stadia, so it's possible that this footage is from one of those platforms and not the new console.
We get to see the player character Eivor, who can be male or female, riding around on a horse to navigate villages, castles and the countryside of what is now Britain. And we also got a good look at combat from a costal landing and siege to a boss battle.
In some ways, the non-combat sections are a little reminiscent of The Witcher 3, especially when it comes to trotting on horseback through somewhat muddy Viking-era villages. Whereas the combat sections look similar to those in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, with sword and axe swinging action backed up by RPG-like stats and hitpoint damage numbers popping out of an enemy every time they are slashed or bludgeoned. Effectively, the game looks like an evolution of the Assassin’s Creed formula, which itself has been slowly changing and getting more in-depth with each game in the series.
What was difficult to tell was how big a step-up in graphics Assassin’s Creed Valhalla will have over its predecessor, especially given it’ll have 12 teraflops of power to tap into with the Xbox Series X. The footage we saw was at 720p resolution, so there’s a chance that some of the graphical effects might have been obscured through compression.
But we didn’t see any indication of ray-tracing in action or any particularly impressive graphics features. That’s not to say the game didn’t look very attractive, it just didn’t scream ‘next-generation gaming.’
But the footage does potentially showcase how many things the next-generation consoles could handle at once, with big battles between multiple non-player characters. And the seamless transition between action hints at the benefits of the PS5 and Xbox Series X using SSD storage rather than spinning disk drives.
We’re expecting to see a proper showcase of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla this month at the Ubisoft Forward event, which will showcase the publisher’s games on July 12. We’re also expecting to see more of the game at the upcoming Xbox 20/20 event slated for July 23, as well as game footage of Halo Infinite.
