Settlement in AC Valhalla Was to Help Make Characters Memorable

In a recent interview, Julien Laferriere - producer of AC: Valhalla - gave an account of the game's development process. Among other things, we learned where the idea for the settlement came from and why sea battles were abandoned.

IN A NUTSHELL:

Settlement mechanics in AC: Valhalla was introduced to enable the players to interact more often with NPCs and make them easier to remember;
The developers gave up naval battles after analyzing how the Vikings fought.

Game Informer interviewed Julien Laferriere from Ubisoft, the producer responsible for the latest installment of the Assassin's Creed series, AC: Valhalla. In the interview the creator discussed the settlement, which we are building, and then gradually expand across the game. It turns out that the aim of this mechanics was to make NPCs more memorable to players.

"'We created all these characters, and some of them are not memorable. Why is that? They look cool, their script is cool, their performances are cool. Why don’t they get their hooks in players?' We found that because of the way Origins was built – and Odyssey was the same – you unfog the map progressively, and usually you never go back to a part of the map you’ve explored. And the characters are tied to those specific areas of the map.

So we were like, 'What if we added a place which is a sort of anchor, where you could see the consequences of the decisions you’ve made, and the NPCs you met? For me, it started with trying to have more memorable characters. Obviously, they could always have more impressive clothes and amazing resolution in their faces, but that’s not really the issue. The issue is that they need more screen time. They need closure – a beginning and an end – and the settlement was perfect for that,'" said the developer.

Laferriere also explained why Assassin's Creed: "Valhalla does not feature naval battles, which appeared in many other installments.

"One thing I can say that didn’t make it through that we thought might work very early on was naval combat. We actually found out that Vikings were not doing much naval combat; we thought they might be shooting flaming arrows like in Odyssey. But they just didn’t do that. So, we said, “There’s no sea in our map, only rivers ... we’re going to treat the ship more like a vehicle," said the creator.

AC: Valhalla is available on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X / S. The title was warmly received by the reviewers (our editor gave it 8/10).