Setting it during the era of the Great Heathen Army and the Danelaw make sense. It’s a defining and fairly well documented part of the Viking era and the beginning of English national identity. Importantly for the series it’s a period of very rapid political and cultural change so you can have a pretty dynamic map to interact with. It was also a period of constant low grade violence so being a walking blender won’t feel weird the way it did in Syndicate or Unity.
My personal issue is that it wasn’t a part of the world with a lot of big interesting cities or major historical monuments. Reconstructions of London and Jorvik will be interesting but there’s nothing quite on the scale of Alexandria or Athens. One of the joys of the series is seeing digital recreations of historic architecture. And northern Europe in the 9th century didn’t really have anything on the scale of the Pyramids of Giza or Florence’s Duomo.
This might be the first Assassin’s Cred that I have picked up at release, ever. I played Odyssey and Origins a year or so after release, but both of those games were really great, so I’m pretty confident this one will be good too!
Also, I’m interested to see how they handle the fact that both the female and male protagonists seem to be the same character. Kassandra worked because it felt like the narrative factored her being a woman into the equation, and I hope that isn’t lost.
Ah, that looks better there! Maybe it was just the cinematic. I like that there is a helmsman, unlike the AC:O ships that just steered magically. Where are you seeing the screenshots?
Unfortunately due to being made of wood anglo-saxon and viking architecture has been largely lost. And I understand that there there is a bias among historian towards cultures that create stone monuments simply because there is more material evidence. But London was just not a particularly big or important city even by the pretty low standards of northern Europe in the 8th century. It had a population of at most 12,000 and that made it far and away the largest city in Great Britain or Scandinavia.
One of the reasons the anglo-saxons hated the danes was because the danes combed their hair daily, changed their clothing frequently, and bathed once a week. This made them way too appealing to anglo-saxon wives.
The english names of the days of the week derive from germanic peoples converting roman mythology to norse mythology, e.g. wednesday- woden (odin). Except saturday is still named after the roman god saturn. Is this because the scandinavian word for saturday, Lordag, comes from old norse laugardagr which means “washing-day” and that offended filth-covered anglo-saxon sensibilities? Who can really say.
You’re totally correct. I’d go so far as to say that from a global perspective Britain wasn’t a particularly important corner of the world at this time - a lot of the importance placed on this period is after the fact, from the English mythologizing their own past for nationalist and imperialist purposes. Not that it isn’t an interesting period, because it definitely is.
I have to say the Anglo-Saxons are giving off a real Norman vibe in the released material so far. All those ruined Norman-ish castles in the backgrounds of the screenshots are weird too. There would be plenty of Roman ruins around, but the ruins in the screenshots do not look particularly Roman. Wonder what they are actually supposed to be. Anyways, AC is definitely Historical Fantasy so while it’s interesting to point these things out I’m still looking forward to it.
Oh, yay, Vikings. Maybe they’ll reveal that the cover of the Book of Kells was a Piece of Eden all along they had to raid for to stop the Templars. Yeah, I’m bringing up that esoteric and irrelevant grievance.
Ughh…just saw a Youtube comment saying something along the lines of “can’t wait until Kotaku or Polygon write a piece complaining about all the white dudes”. The gamergaters and white supremacists are going to be out in force for this one.
There’s a disappointing lack of shield walls in the trailer’s battle scene. You never know what historic details the AC series will get right or focus on. They’ll get very simple things dead wrong but also go into great detail on often overlooked aspects. I loved the depiction of ptolemaic egyptians relationship with their history in Origins. Or the surprisingly nuanced take on the Revolutionaries’ relationship with the Iroquois in III.
One feature I hope is there is the ability to recruit and customize your group of Housecarls.
Listening to Austin Walker talk is waking up from having fallen asleep in your Philosophy class to the realization that you missed half the semester and haven’t done the reading and Dr. Walker is just gonna move on because it’s college and you’re supposed to be on top of that kind of thing by now.
I’m having that feeling right now with medieval studies.
The game will use Dragon’s Dogma’s pawn system and I am very happy. More games need that sort of mechanic where you create a mercenary and send them out in the world for your friends and others to recruit and teach them horrible habits they bring back to your game.
All this has got me wanting to revisit all the AC games, I definitely didn’t want to break out my 360 to do so thought. I looked this morning and somehow I ended up with almost all the AC games on Uplay’s launcher? I’ve never spent a dime on Uplay, I only did the 1 month free trial of Uplay+ so maybe that’s how they ended up on my account? I downloaded and launched Odyssey so they appear to work.
I definitely have a lot more UPlay games than I have ever so much as clicked ‘add to library’ for. I think I only even have it on PC because I couldn’t launch Child of Light without it.
The DLC possibilities for this are as wild and variable as Odyssey’s and Origins’s were. You’re definitely going to Valhalla to fight Thor, Odin and the rest of the boys. I hope someone’s suggestion of travelling to Constantinople features. I want to meet that member of the Varangian Guard who graffiti’d Hagia Sophia with something like “Halfdan wrote this”. King.
