#Alexios and male!Eivor supremacy

[author-morgan]

thoughts on the AC crossovers?

First, let me preface this by saying Ubisoft’s quality control before releasing new content is absolutely horrendous. Every update with free content for Valhalla, this crossover included, has crashed the game back to my Xbox home screen, made loading times three times longer (it literally took 9 minutes and 24 seconds for the River Raids to load —yes, I timed it), and corrupted saves. Also, I think the autosave may be malfunctioning, but I am not 100% sure of that yet. But if I’m being frank, Valhalla has been a steaming pile of shit since launch with all the bugs, glitches, and corrupted saves, but that’s another rant for another day. I will never be buying another Ubisoft game at full price, though.

And to make things even better for the crossover, throughout my entire playthrough of the Isle of Skye arc, Kassandra’s lips never moved once for her dialogue, so that was certainly a bummer.

On to the actual crossover. I thought it was extremely lazy. It’s no secret Ubisoft’s storytelling capabilities have been in an exponential decline since the change to RPG and the loss of Desmond (Origins is still very good, though), and I couldn’t help but feel the entire time this was just something ripped from fan theories and thrown together rather hastily. To substantiate the importance of this arc to the continuation of Odyssey, I think there needed to be more content in Odyssey’s base game. The Korfu questline? Definitely should have existed in the main game and not as additional content tacked on almost four years later without ceremony. That said, I did enjoy the Korfu quest and the explanation for what happened to the Leonidas Spear for it to end up being buried with Herodotus. And at the end of the day, I just want more from Odyssey and its protagonist because there is so much potential to explore history than just doing crossover events.

I will say one of the prime reasons I did not like the Valhalla arc was the lack of emotional stakes and attachment I have toward Kassandra as the Eagle Bearer. At this point, it should come as no surprise if you’ve been following my Assassin’s Creed stories for the past three years, but I played as Alexios. He was my first choice and will continue to be the character I prefer no matter who Ubisoft says is ‘canon.’ The same goes for male!Eivor, I picked to play solely as him without a second thought. Neither of these was a hard choice.

If Ubisoft is going to continue giving us choices as to which gender we can play as the protagonist, then they need to make good on those choices for the duration of the series. And yes, this is entirely possible. My nemeses from Shadow of Mordor transferred over into Shadow of War. I have spent 300+ hours with Alexios. I have only done one 28-hour speed run with Kassandra through the family storyline for the sole reason of seeing Alexios as Deimos. It’s very jolting to have invested that kind of time into a game only to be told the character I chose is completely irrelevant because of ‘canon.’ Like cool, great job Ubisoft, you just alienated over 2/3rds of players who picked Alexios.

This same sentiment carries over with Valhalla. If you are going to give us a choice, then carry through it. It was so jarring to have male!Eivor misgendered (can you imagine if it had been the other way around 💀) repeatedly and then to have one of the final cutscenes of the main story feature female!Eivor, regardless of the 200 hours I just invested into the game playing as the other choice? It makes me wish they would go back to only having one protagonist with a fully developed story (like Bayek or even Ezio) or continue with what was set up with Jacob and Evie in Syndicate —both genders are canon and their storylines.