Well, no sense beating around the bush. My PS4 has been wiped completely clean and is now starting its new career sitting in the side of the room collecting dust. It was an easy decision…taking a loss on Divinity or Guitar Hero Live or Carnival Games is one thing, but when a title finds the garbage not a month after I said it was great (and I meant it!), it’s time to face reality and move the hell on. Funny thing, I was all set to give up console games forever before I found out about Valhalla. Now I’m doing it after.
First off, Hamtumscire and the death knell to the Order of the Ancients. The former is really nothing special…fight a ton of Saxons, see a few of your allies die (war has casualties, who knew), Aelfred hits the bricks, and after the funeral scene you have officially pacified all of England. Woo hoo. Incidentally, I got serious whiplash from Guthrum’s attitude here. I very distinctly remember him as a judgmental do-nothing nagging slug in Suthsexe, and he did absolutely nothing in the intervening arcs to change my opinion of him. Here, with zero explanation, he’s respectful of Eivor, even borderline detrimental, and there’s no friction whatsoever between them during the grand assault, even after three fine warriors bite the dust. (The fig-leaf justification was that Eivor was totally reckless in Suthsexe but she got better. Uh huh. 
) In any video game this large with a story this broad in scope, there are inevitably going to be some continuity hiccups, but seeing this 180 was absolutely jarring. It’s like Writer A was told Guthrum had to be an arrogant blowhard in this arc and Writer B was told Guthrum had to be a wise leader of men in that arc, and no serious effort was ever made by any party to coincide the two halves. On top of that, this final battle was supposed to seriously mess things up for Eivor and Ravensthorpe…Valka very strongly warns you about this before you set off…and…it doesn’t happen. At all. Nobody turns on you, nobody dies, nobody suffers, there’s no treachery, life goes on just as it did before. Curious.
Anyway. When you’ve pacified England and put the entire Order of the Ancients except for the Grand Magester to the sword…Hidden Blade, whatever…Hytham comes up to you with an urgent letter from that “Poor Fellow-Soldier of Christ” who’s been sending you missives throughout the game. It leads you to a quiet village in Hamtumscire, where…all right, this is kinda a big spoiler, so…
It’s ex-king Aelfred, now a humble baker. Despite his precipitous fall from grace, he’s happy that you accomplished what he couldn’t. See, he inherited the title of Grand Magester of the Order of the Ancients from his brother, but in a typical “right thing, wrong reason” move, he opposed them because their insistence on following their own rules was an obstacle to creating a Christian order. He was actually forming a plot to destroy them but it never got off the ground. (Supposedly great leaders who never actually do anything is something of a theme in this game.) After learning of the powerful Viking warrior who dispatched Kjotve the Cruel, he realized that she could do the job for him, only requiring some periodic prodding from a mysterious ally. After completing his tale, he surrenders his medallion and the key to his study without a fight, his status becomes officially “defeated” on the order screen, and the trophy is yours.
With that done, there is one last order of business, the wedding of Gunnar and Brigid. It’s a joyous occasion with, again, no conflict or treachery or other unpleasant twist. Everyone gets to share in the couple’s happiness (including Holgar, who’s in a surprisingly good mood considering how much crap he’s taken). During which time everyone gets behind Eivor as their leader, a very pleasant surprise after that Dag business. And there’s another very pleasant surprise at the end…if you’d broken up with Randvi earlier (maybe you were upset at not being able to romance her anymore after Sigurd’s return, maybe you wanted to kindle the flames with Petra…maybe water is wet 
), you get to make her your lover again! Even better, if you did take Petra as your lover, she remains your lover as well, with no negative repercussions whatsoever! This… 
Yeah, it caught me completely off guard. Everything we’ve seen of Eivor had led me to believe that not only was she utterly uncool, she was desperately fighting to remain in that state, and she’d die alone, despised, and forgotten in an unspecified location on the East Coast…and what actually happens is the polar opposite of that. Seriously, polar opposite. (Yeah, chalk up another bigtime continuity flub. It happens.)
All that’s left after that is mop-up of the tasks you didn’t get already. I still had three Codex pages to go (I scoured those Bureaus top to bottom and found nothing, I swear) and seven more Reda missions to complete the Viking for Hire…thing. And then the next big limited-time event, the Ostara Festival, along with any more trophies I felt like going after. I was ready to get started.
And then…the next big update. With yet another big-time “balancing”. And then I saw enemies doing something like ten times the damage they did before. I had changed nothing…same difficulty, same settings, same armor, same runes. And I was taking damage like paper.
I’ve mentioned numerous times how extreme difficulty is always the killer for me. I can deal with graphical glitches, long loading times, cornball dialogue, and grindy tasks, but if it is so outrageously difficult I can’t make any progress, I won’t touch it. In this thread, I mentioned how I dreaded the programmers’ ability to make updates at any time because of that meant they could make the game harder, harder, HARDER! If an NES game went out that was so easy a 5-year old could breeze through it one-handed, tough beans. Now at any time they can jack up the difficulty, make things more painful, more torturous, more aggravating…and now it seems like every game that doesn’t start out at this point is going to reach it. I already expressed my concerns about this +51 nonsense, and here it seems that Ubisoft finally decided to plunge the rest of the way into the abyss.
This is yet another symptom of the absolutely poisonous attitude that’s permeated video game culture in recent years, the notion that NOTHING can ever be easy, or relaxed, or just plain fun, and that EVERYTHING has to be CONSTANTLY murderous and painful and blisteringly “hardcore”. And this would have been bad enough if there were only one difficulty, but…wait for it…This is on the easiest difficulty! It says right in the description that it’s for players who want to get through the story without a hassle! My Eivor was made of iron and could carve up foes like so many racks of lamb (even after the initial “balancing”), and THAT IS HOW I LIKED IT! If that were not an option, I would not have touched this game. You know what, I don’t even mind the influence of Dark Souls. Those games were made for a specific type of player and have always been up front about being unforgiving. But when game provides a merciful option and then completely flips on it, that is unforgivable. I’d say that it fills me with rage, but my rage was spent some time ago; all I’m feeling right now is disappointment and the sobering realization that I can’t go on like this.
(And now another realization has come to me…this is exactly what happened to Origins as well. All that talk about OP shields tons of materials and Easy being easy, it actually was like that, before Ubisoft took it all out. I’ve rarely been the first to the party with big releases…gotta know for sure, looking for a better deal, waiting for the bugs to get worked out, etc. Now I realize that for the PS4, the order of the day is get it done before it becomes impossible.)
So yeah, screw Ubisoft forever. Just so you all know, I knew about the company’s woes…the sexism, the abysmal quality control, the brutal crunches…long before I got the game, but I was impressed enough by what TheRadBrad showed me to overlook it, just this once. I’ve been burned so many times on PS4 games that to find something fun and riveting again was a joy. To quote a previous AC game, “Dirty money builds clean hospitals.” All I ever wanted…the ONLY thing I EVER asked for…was a fun, riveting game (hopefully patching it so that it doesn’t crash so often…yeah, that’s another thing), and you couldn’t even stick to that! Well, consider my sympathy and patience officially at a permanent end. You have earned every damn drop of vitriol that’s coming your way. My bridge was just about impossible to burn, and for absolutely no good reason you took a nuke to it. Goddam pathetic. 
And with that, I bring this journal to a close. Hope you all got something out of it. Next thread, something that’s pleasant for its entire length. Hopefully.