'Assassin's Creed Valhalla' Sidequests Are The Best The Series Has Ever Done

Assassin's Creed Valhalla is an absolutely massive game. At the time of writing, I've sunk something like 30-40 hours into the open-world RPG, and I still feel I've barely scratched the surface of everything it has to offer. I'm shocked at how smitten I am with it, in all honesty. For a series that has never really pulled me in that much, Valhalla managed to win my heart and what little free time I have with ease.

Part of it is the fact that I'm from the Midlands, and am completely fascinated by this gorgeous digital replication of the towns, forests, and fields of my homeland. It's rare you get to see Nottingham in a video game, and even though it's a completely unrecognisable version of the city I'm from (apart from the drunk people and the fighting), it's thrilling to have been provided this window into the past - or at least a highly fictionalised version of it.

It's also achingly beautiful. I could sit and stare at the quiet English countryside for hours - especially on next-gen consoles. But that isn't what keeps me coming back, nor is my fascination with local history.

No, what I love about Assassin's Creed Valhalla hit me somewhere between chasing down a soldier who refused to clean off the shit he'd been rolling around in and watching an old Norse yeet himself off a cliff to appease the Gods. On the long, long list of everything Valhalla gets right, sidequests are 100% at the very top.

It's no secret that Ubisoft has a pretty rigid formula for open-world games, and it's one that it dutifully carries out across its franchises. I had a ton of fun with games like Asassin's Creed Odyssey and Far Cry 5, but at a certain point you almost feel like you've seen everything it has to offer. Optional missions in particular would typically start to feel more like a chore than anything else, as you approach a character to start a mission, travel to a point on the map, do the thing you were asked to do (usually kill X amount of people), and return - typically with little reason to care about why you just did what you did beyond the reward.

The genius of Assassin's Creed Valhalla is that it changes things up massively and bakes 99% of its sidequests into exploration. In the same way that Red Dead Redemption II would throw these utterly bizarre Stranger Missions in front of you as you trekked across the world, so too does Valhalla introduce you to its diversions only when you stumble across them organically.

You're not talking to some man in a town who happens to know someone half the world away needs you to go and do something - you're climbing a mountain and finding a young girl at the top waiting for her missing dad to come home. Why is she here? What's her story? Nobody told you she was there, and unless you looked a guide, you found this person and discovered her story and situation all on your own. It feels natural, and that makes me so much more invested in helping these characters with their problems. I feel more connected to them because of the way I found them. That, and the sheer variety of the problems and tasks that the people of England have for you.

The fact is most of the sidequests in Valhalla are funny. Like, really, actually funny in a way that Assassin's Creed games very rarely are. There's a real playfulness to most of the missions, whether you've ended up trying to guide someone through an accidental acid trip or have agreed to burn a couple's house down so they can pretend they're in the middle of a raid and spice things up in the bedroom.

One of the GAMINGbible team actually said that Valhalla reminded them a lot of the Fable games, and I totally see that playful irreverence in almost all of the game's sidequests. In between starting this article and wrapping it up I came across a woman living in the sewers who asked me to feed her eggs till she did a massive fart. Childish? Yes. But that doesn't mean it's not brilliant.

Not only are the sidequests genuinely entertaining, but less than half of the ones I've played so far involve combat, which I love. I get my fill of crushing skulls and removing heads from the raids and main quests, after all. The best sidequests place more emphasis on paying attention to your surroundings and solving some kind of environmental puzzle after really listening to what the characters have to say. Other games make sidequests too easy to switch off from by presenting with you endless cutscenes to skip and markers to blindly follow. In Valhalla, you have to really pay attention. I like that a lot.

Very, very few of the sidequests outstay their welcome, either. I'd say the vast majority of these quests will last around ten minutes (if that), and will rarely ask you to go miles out of your way. If you were heading to an objective marker, you know you can safely engage with these diversions without being steered way off course or having another quest clogging up your log.

That's what it all boils down to for me. Assassin's Creed Valhalla approaches its sidequests in a smart and entirely unobtrusive way that respects the player's time and intelligence. They don't insist themselves upon you, are far from necessary to complete the game, and are simply there for you to find if you want to find them.

I guess it's a good thing, then, that the sidequests in this game are the best sidequests in any Assassin's Creed game to date, and such a huge part of what makes it so special. I guarantee you'll seek them all out - not because you need to level up, but because you want to have fun. And want to see a random sewer lady eat too many eggs and do a massive fart, but mostly the fun thing.

Featured Image Credit: Ubisoft

Topics: News, Assassin's Creed, Ubisoft