Ubisoft Sofia cares about Assassin’s Creed. After leading development on the initially polarising Rogue — which has since aged rather gracefully — the studio took on the better of Origins’ two expansions, The Curse of the Pharaohs. Now spearheading development on Dawn of Ragnarok, which promises 35 hours of deific bombast in the seldom explored Norse region of Svartalfheim, the Bulgarian development house is aiming to build on the series’ most successful game to date: Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
“We have a well-defined place chronologically for when the events in Svartalfheim take place,” Dawn of Ragnarok director Georgi Popov tells GLHF. “After the events from Asgard and Jotunheim, this is our sliver of time when Odin goes on his quest to search for Baldr, and the invasion of the Muspels and the Jotnar into Svartalfheim happens.
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“All those events are imagined by Eivor. She has these troubling dreams that she’s trying to make sense of. Valka partakes in a ritual that helps her understand those visions and embrace them more deeply. So the majority of the expansion is focused on Odin and Odin’s story, but we also have a small sliver that is talking about Eivor and developing Eivor’s story. In terms of the canonical placement of the expansion, we’re making sure that Dawn of Ragnarok fits well into the whole Assassin’s Creed lore at large.”
This is a quintessential element of developing a game in this universe. With rumors of a new Assassin’s Creed game centered on Basim circulating at the moment, it’s becoming ever more likely that the connections between Valhalla’s reincarnated gods, the Isu, and the modern-day narrative will be further cemented. Popov says the team at Ubi Sofia are huge fans of the lore and have taken special care to plant seeds in Dawn of Ragnarok that will germinate into a greater narrative context across the series at large, with the important stipulation that “less is more.” The Sofia team is never open about what exactly happened in the Isu Age that pertains to Valhalla later on, but there’s “just enough to stoke the fires of imagination.”
While Dawn of Ragnarok’s influence on the overarching and ongoing narrative at the core of Assassin’s Creed is subtle, its mythological inspirations are much more apparent. It’s worth noting that for all of the series’ historical merits, one of the clearest demonstrations of how well it understands this history is its willingness to conflate it with the accepted mythology of the time. As Popov puts it, mythology and belief systems were the driving force for many cultures throughout the ages — with this latest expansion, Assassin’s Creed has the opportunity to grapple with what is arguably the defining moment of the Viking mythos.
“At the initial stage of Dawn of Ragnarok, we basically lived and breathed every material we could get our hands on,” Popov says. “All the myths and all the sagas we could read, we immersed ourselves totally in. An interesting thing is that the vast majority of Viking culture and those myths were a kind of oral tradition.
“A lot of the writings that we have are from a much later period by a monk by the name of Snorri. So in a way, scholars are not really sure what their actual beliefs were — we just have these fragmented pieces here and there. We were very heavily inspired by everything there and we wanted to put our own Assassin’s Creed spin on the events which happened. For me, the perspective is along the lines of, ‘This is the way the events are described by the sagas’, but the Assassin’s Creed way is to show the truth hidden just underneath. In Dawn of Ragnarok, players will experience the events as they really happened, and how this inspires the sagas to be written in the way they are written.”
According to Popov, this premise of integrating myth with Assassin’s Creed is quite literally interwoven into how Dawn of Ragnarok plays. As well as progressing the twin stories of Eivor and Odin, the expansion will introduce the Valkyrie Arena, a whole new gauntlet-style coliseum designed to facilitate build experimentation. While this is ostensibly a means of testing your prowess in combat, it also plays a fascinating role in developing Odin’s character.
The Valkyrie Arena is structured around ‘Tales’, which serve as vertical slices of Odin’s past disguised as difficult challenge runs. The ‘Tale’ moniker might seem a little misleading at first in that these accounts don’t advance the main story, but it’s actually quite accurate once you realize their function as brief vignettes Odin recites to Kara the Valkyrie. As well as being gradually unlocked over the course of Dawn of Ragnarok, some Tales have been retroactively added to Valhalla, too.
“So when key events happen in the main storyline, a new Tale will unlock for Odin,” Popov explains. “But each of those tales can be customized with ‘Boasts’, because Odin is a vain god. The way we imagined this is like, if Odin went fishing, he would say ‘I caught a fish that was this big’. He will add his embellishments and his exaggerations to those stories, which are the gameplay modifiers that players can select.
“They are mostly challenges, but they have this narrative connection to what Odin is saying — it’s our fantasy of Odin retelling the existing conventions. Internally when we talked about it, one of the jokes was like, and then Odin goes to Kara and says, ‘I had one hand tied behind my back. I was super drunk. There was lightning coming down from above and an unimaginable number of enemies’. And Kara’s like, ‘Yeah, I’m sure that happened, but okay, show me how it went’.”
Obviously this is quite a nuanced way of implementing not just the stories from the Norse Eddas into Valhalla, but adapting them to how personalities can be developed in video games. Sofia’s nuance extends beyond this, too. One thing we noticed during our preview session of Dawn of Ragnarok was that the dwarves didn’t have Scottish accents performed by evidently non-Scottish actors, which has become an infuriatingly prevalent trope in contemporary fantasy. If you’re four feet tall, have a ginger beard, and only ever lay your axe down to pick your pint up, you’re generally hovering around Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade territory.
“In general, we wanted to avoid all of the cliches that are known from fantasy,” Popov says. “We wanted to find our own footing and our own place to put Assassin’s Creed into this mythology, not to just do another generic fantasy place where we have the stereotypical dwarves that everybody knows. To this extent, this propagated not only to the dwarves in their accents, but the way we structured the architecture, the enemies, and the stories we told.
“We wanted to show the dwarves as different. There are some that enjoy drinking and there are some that are master craftsmen — this is how they were told in the sagas and we are respectful of this heritage. But there are different kinds of dwarves and players can find a huge variety of different characters. Some of them are married; some are a bit sullen, melancholic; some are eccentric and weird; and some are romantic and reminiscent of the old times. We wanted to avoid the one-dimensionality of saying ‘all dwarves are the same’, and for players to meet a different person and say, ‘Okay, this person feels like this, he’s alive and vivid’ — he has his own personal story that players can understand and relate to.”
This blend of old and new — of the established mythos behind the material and the push against cookie-cutter fantasy — is also apparent in Dawn of Ragnarok’s treatment of what it means to be an Assassin’s Creed game. During our preview, we saw Svartalfheim’s juxtaposition of magnificent brutalist architecture with sprawling networks of bioluminescent flora. This is to say that the region places an emphasis on verticality, which clearly illustrates Odin’s resonance with more old-school assassins — a premise that is quite fitting considering his penchant for calculation, deception, and the long game. There are also new opportunities for the series’ long-lamented social stealth, as well as entire builds that revolve around keeping to the shadows.
“I wouldn’t say our goal was to be reminiscent of the older Assassins,” Popov says. “However, we understand there are a great deal of players that are interested in different aspects of the game. Some players enjoy the fighting aspect, some enjoy the stealth aspect. Others enjoy exploring and figuring out everything around them, solving deep mysteries and immersing themselves in the world. We wanted Dawn of Ragnarok to provide an opportunity for all those players to find their own thing inside our expansion. No matter if you like exploring, climbing architecture, fighting, or stealth gameplay, we wanted Dawn of Ragnarok to fulfill those needs.”
Ultimately, the team at Ubi Sofia wanted Dawn of Ragnarok to be “really different to Valhalla without being disruptive of the Valhalla experience.” Making mythology paramount is one of the ways in which this was most obviously accomplished, while facilitating experimental blends of old and new Assassin’s Creed via the Valkyrie Arena allows the expansion to pull up its own chair in the Hall of the Fallen. But it’s what Popov mentions above that has the largest impact on how the experience has been reshaped for Odin: providing an opportunity for you to find your “own thing.”
According to Popov, Dawn of Ragnarok doesn’t overhaul Valhalla’s systems as much as it enhances them — in his words, it “injects a modification here and there that makes them play differently.” This is mostly achieved through the implementation of the Hugr-Rip, an all-new bracer that Odin receives as a gift from the dwarves. With this unique armor, the Allfather is able to steal the powers of fallen enemies. With the Power of the Raven, he can fly; with the Power of Jotunheim, he can teleport to inaccessible places; with the Power of Rebirth, he can reanimate vanquished foes to fight for him; and with the Power of Muspelheim, he can walk across molten lava.
“This naturally lends itself to the environment having a bigger importance and impact on the second-to-second gameplay,” Popov explains. “We made these dangerous pieces of the land where players have to be constantly aware of ‘Where am I stepping exactly?’ You can climb the same way as before, but if you’re climbing in a river of lava, that’s a very different experience that you have to overcome in a new way.
“For combat, the thinking behind it was kind of the same — we don’t want to fundamentally change how combat works, because players know it, they will have spent tens, maybe hundreds of hours inside Valhalla already. We don’t want to pull the rug from underneath them and force them into totally unfamiliar territory. But we wanted to change the experience for them to find something unique. I think a very good example is the arena we have created. Our goal was to push our players outside of their comfort zone, outside of the boundaries they have set for themselves and the playstyle they have selected, and say to them, ‘Okay, what you’re doing is cool, and it works, it’s great — but there is more to exploring the combat of Valhalla’. Why don’t you try playing this way or this way? But you have to invent it on your own.”
All in all, Dawn of Ragnarok is a direct continuation of Eivor’s story after realizing their true identity as Odin, but one that seeks to further iterate on that revelation by allowing it to have its due impact on their beliefs and behaviors. It is a fantasy story that is heavily based on myth and intentionally averse to cliche. It is an Assassin’s Creed experience that grapples with all of the various different conveniences and caveats that come with that identity. It is, from what we have been told, an ambitious first step in the series’ first-ever second year of support for an individual game.
“If you’re a fan of Assassin’s Creed, I’m certain that you’re going to love Dawn of Ragnarok,” Popov says. “We have tried our best to cater to all different kinds of fan expectations. You’re going to find a solid chunk of story that’s going to trail Odin in a very human experience of trying to save his son, but also explore the godly aspect of his character and how this evolves.
“For our players that love exploring the world, we have made an absolutely beautiful place full of many stories and many secrets. And for the people that love the stealth and combat experience of the game, the architecture of the dwarves and their realm is a thing you haven’t seen before that will certainly bring joy to your eyes. I’m looking forward to seeing the community combine the new powers of the Hugr-Rip, explore the realm, and discover all the secrets that we have planted.”
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla: Dawn of Ragnarok launches for PC, Xbox Series X/S, PS5, Xbox One, and PS4 on March 10, 2022.
Written by Cian Maher on behalf of GLHF.
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