For Eivor's little adventure, the developers had to create a ton of unique assets.
In Assassin's Creed Valhalla, there is a moment when Eivor, hunting for members of the Order of the Ancients, leaves England and travels far to the West - to Vinland, North America. It is a separate region for a very small adventure while also linking Valhalla to one of the early games in the series.
The idea to send Eyvor to Vinland, recalls lead screenwriter Darby McDevitt, came from Yves Guillemot, the head of Ubisoft, at a very early stage in the development of the project - when the general concept of Valhalla was just presented to the management. There was a problem: a time gap.
Real Vikings reached North America around 1000 AD, the events of Assassin's Creed Valhalla took place almost one and a half hundred years before. Since it was impossible to talk about real Vikings, continues McDevitt, the developers decided to focus on the Assassins and Templars.
Thinking about how we can fit Vinland into the timeline of Assassin's Creed Valhalla, we realized that if you look at the issue through the prism of the confrontation between the Assassins and the Templars, then everything will turn out fine. In our games, these groups are consistently one step ahead of real history.
It was decided to postpone Vinland's implementation itself. At first, the developers wanted to deal with the main part of Valhalla: decide on the mechanics, think over and polish the game systems, and debug the pipeline.
For Vinland, design director Philippe Bergeron recalls, the team hoped to prepare something special. Eyvor's adventures in North America were supposed to be noticeably different from those in Norway and England: the game was planned to be turned into a kind of survival for some time.
We wanted one of the regions [of the game world] to give the player a feeling like the Naked and Scared reality show.
Vinland was implemented by Ubisoft Singapore, which has worked on many games in the series. The task was set as follows: Vinland will become a level where Eivor needs to eliminate only one target; in fact, this is one very large mission, where you can reach the goal in many ways.
It was necessary to allocate a studio for the location, and not a separate team because of the scale. Purely visually, Vinland had to be very different from what players saw in Norway and England: artists and designers had to create a lot of unique assets that appear only in this location.
When designing the level, Ubisoft Singapore proceeded from the fact that it was a stealth mission. Eyvor ends up in Vinland without equipment, so the locations should have made it possible not to enter into direct confrontation.
This approach, the developers believed, will successfully dilute the usual pace of passing Assassin's Creed Valhalla and will become an interesting one-time adventure, designed for several hours. For this, it was necessary to try not only the designers but also the scriptwriters.
In Ubisoft, Darby McDevitt recalls, they did not want to interfere with history much, so there was no talk of any construction of a Viking settlement in America. Eyvor's appearance in Vinland had to be made as discreet as possible: any friction between the protagonist and the locals had to be avoided.
We have tried our best to make sure that Eyvor does not look like a savior or an enemy of the inhabitants of Vinland. His task has always been to find and eliminate the only enemy.
At the same time, Philippe Bergeron explains, it was decided to make Vinland a hermetic adventure. Not only could the players not bring equipment to the new location from the outside - it was also impossible to take some souvenirs from Vinland with them.
We wanted Vinland to be such an autonomous survival. In order not to spoil this feeling, I had to send you there without equipment. If the player left Vinland with the equipment and then improved it, then the impression would not be the same.
The natives that Eyvor meets in Vinland are representatives of the same ethnic group as Conor, the protagonist of Assassin's Creed 3. To accurately portray the American Indians in the game, the developers turned to the consultant Aquirateka Martin, who participated in the work on Assassin's Creed 3.
At the same time, Philippe Bergeron recalls, the idea came up to link the events of Valhalla with the storyline of Assassin's Creed 3. When the designers studied the coast of North America, figuring out where the Vikings could land, one of the places turned out to be very close to the village of Conora from Assassin's Creed 3.
As a result, the following plot was invented. Gorm, a member of the Order of the Ancients whom Eivor is tracking down in Vinland, tries to find a way to the ancient temple; After eliminating Gorm, Eyvor finds a mysterious artifact sphere with him - and leaves it in the care of local residents.
The developers explain that Conor finds the same sphere in Assassin's Creed 3. The temple that Gorm is trying in vain to get into is the same one that appears in the third part of the series.
At the same time, Darby McDevitt recalls, at the time of the development of Assassin's Creed 3, the writers very successfully did not think about where the artifact of the First Civilization came from, which Conor stumbled upon. This allowed the Valhalla team to quite gracefully explain the events of the game that was released eight years ago.
0 Comments