What I say in this post, I say with love, because this is my favourite game series and I just want to make it better... However I can't ignore the glaring problems with the stealth in Valhalla that are just, flat out, ignored in buglists and the known issues list.

Fundamental problems:

These issues have been here since launch and have had no TLC to make it any better. So here we go:

• There's no setup/utility in this game for stealth, ie. Proper smoke bombs, double assassination techniques, crowd blending (that works, or is readily available). You could argue there are smoke arrows and runes that do things like this, but most of the time using them just isn't feasible and will get you detected.

• Enemy detection speed is really quick, broken quick. Previous entries had phases of white-yellow-detected, which was great and fair, but this game seems to go instantaneously to yellow/detected even if the enemies cannot see you or saw you very briefly as you passed an open door frame. I don't know if this is intentional, or if it's a bug, but either way it sucks.

• Enemies are clumped together and situated in such a way that in some cases stealth is impossible, save for peaking over a roof with the bow, which gets old after 100 hours. This is further exacerbated by the first point, lack of setup makes these situations worse. The lack of a real means of taking out more than one enemy at a time also doesn't help when enemies readily travel in groups of 3 or more. Some people are able to do a janky combo of using the bow and air assassination to take down two enemies in quick succession, but this seems more of a workaround than a mechanic and is very sloppy.

• There's no way to disengage combat, once you're in, you're in, unless you run away. It would be nice if we had an option to stun enemies and have them stumble around in, say, a smoke bomb, giving the player an opportunity to hide and return to stealth without having to run away from the conflict zone and come back.

• Enemies can detect you through walls, and from across the map. This one speaks for itself, very frustrating!

• If one enemy knows where you are, they all do. There have been many instances where an enemy will spot me and the entire camp will run at me, even if they are definitely not within earshot of the enemy screaming.

• Hiding spots are fickle, sometimes moving slightly in a bush will push you out of "hidden" status temporarily, even if you're quite clearly in a bush. This mixed with the omniscient enemy detection makes me avoid using cover in any way as it's not reliable and a roll of the dice.

• The whistle, sometimes, doesn't work. The whistle is arguably the only real strategic setup you can use in this game for assassinations and whether it works or not seems to be RNG. Usually you have to resort to spamming the button until the enemy walks towards you, sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't.

• Eivor's animations are too slow, there's no quick way to use the hidden blade and it will usually result in a 3-5 second animation, giving the omniscient enemies the chance to spot you and begin combat.

Personal taste

• Relying on the bow as the only means of dealing with enemy groups is boring. Especially after 100 hours, the loop of peaking over a rooftop and using the bow to kill one enemy, crouch back down, rinse repeat, can get really old. It would be nice if we had something else that we could use, even if it was niche! Some of the more recent games, such as Unity/Syndicate, had weapons that you could use from range or close-ish to the targets that would give you a sense of accomplishment if you pulled it off without being spotted. Things like firecrackers, coin throws, that sort of thing. It would be nice to see this reappear in the series if it can't be implemented in Valhalla.

• The hood coming down in combat is very jarring and irritating, what's up with that - let me keep it up! The animations exist to attack and keep it up, you can do this anywhere in game, so I don't understand why it's absolutely necessary for it to come down during real combat, it doesn't make sense. More customisation in games is very rarely a bad thing, and this one just seems like a silly oversight.

Apologies if this is a common post, but frankly, if they just fixed the problems that people are constantly complaining about then they wouldn't get so many posts about it. It's Assassins' creed after all and they should really listen to these posts, especially if they're recurring.

@ubi-wheelyduck Hi wheelyduck, thanks so much for replying! I'm in the process of making a video with all the evidence I re-create in hopes that you might be able to identify why some things are the way they are.

Please bare with me, I'll get it done in the next day or so

@isaac02444 I can agree with enemy detection, especially with Level Scaling set to Nightmarish. It was supposed to bring more harder enemies, not ones who can spot you from miles away...

@ubistorm @Ubi-WheelyDuck

I've managed to get most of the issues I'm talking about in this video:

There are some things that are kinda hard to show, like the lack of setup for stealth, but I tried my best to show you what I mean. I hope this video helps you out, please keep me in the loop - I want to love this game but I just really don't feel like an assassin when the stealth breaks for me. This video is about 8 minutes long and took about 80 minutes to film, which gives you a bit of an insight as to how much this occurs, at least for me.

If I could choose only one thing I'd really love looking at, it's the detection speed. The video shows this happening full-on but it is, by far, the biggest hinderance and sometimes is downright ridiculous.

(Also nudging the devs to give us the ability to keep our hoods up in combat would be super neat! )

@isaac02444 I would add a skill that allows for double assassinations, Arno had one blade and did it just fine. But the video really points out the bs that I had grown accustomed to lol. I hope this goes through man.

@Ubi-WheelyDuck @UbiStorm I also mentioned this on the r/assassinscreed subreddit and it seems people over there also feel the same way. Do you think this is something the devs would, at the very least, consider? With year 2 of support coming round I'm hoping for some real QoL changes to the stealthy approach because, as fun as being a viking that storms in is, I'd love to be as close to as assassin as the game will let me

Link to the thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/assassinscreed/comments/oxzehf/ubisoft_repsonded_to_a_stealth_issues_list/

@hello653 me too! It would be nice to see some abilities that let us take out more than one at a time, it would open up a whole new way of playing!

@isaac02444 and then the third one with an axe

@ubi-wheelyduck
I just want to second most of the OP's concerns. Specifically, the 'omniscient enemy' problem; when the OP calls detection "broken quick," it is not an exaggeration. I'll try to get some video but I have certainly been detected through walls and at ranges that make little sense. Similarly, the communication between enemies is improbably good. I actually don't mind if a significant number of enemies know my general direction (pointing and shouting works after all), but to know my exact position after moving extensively and taking cover is a little much.

The lack of double assassinations really hurts this game. As I am sure you are aware, the 'axe throw' option almost always leads to detection. Even if this is functioning 'as intended' the inability to even guess whether the target can be seen by another enemy makes it suboptimal. Without double assassinations, many arrangements of enemies go from "tricky" to "impossible."

There are hundreds of posts about this on reddit and other forums; these issues cannot or should not be a surprise. When they were not even mentioned, much less corrected, I simply assumed Assassin's Creed had given up on stealth - it's Vikings after all. I, like many other players, have just accepted open combat as unavoidable in most situations. I don't begrudge anyone their design choices, but, much like Prince of Persia spawned Assassin's Creed when design choices took it too far from the core of the franchise, perhaps we have moved beyond the core of what makes an Assassin's Creed game.

@doctordoom11235 this is fantastically summed up, I agree 100% and forgot to mention it in my original post. The axe throw always ends up in detection unless you are certain they are the only remaining enemy.

This ability would be so much more useful if:

1) The camera didn't follow it, allowing us to use it and move to cover faster

2) With the camera off, you could disable the clipping, as this ability often gets blocked by an obstacle when it's tracking the enemy.

Just my two cents

@Ubi-WheelyDuck I agree with everything OP said, this is a huge issue for a lot of us and we sincerely hope there will be change in the future, especially considering there will be another year of post launch support. Here are some additional things i've noticed:

Some abilites such as Berserker Trap or Man's Best Friend will put enemies in 'combat' mode, in this case not with the player but with each other or with the player's wolf side kick. When in combat mode, enemies don't need line of sight to detect the player, they'll do it based on proximity, so the player will be detected even when they're hidden behind a wall, altough the player never engaged in combat with the enemies. This makes these abilites completely useless for stealth. The way enemies detect players in combat mode is the same reason why it's so hard to return to stealth once spotted, enemies who have not returned to 'normal' mode will detect you as soon as you're anywhere around them. This once caused me to get detected over and over again while standing in a locked off room with no enemies inside. Also I think the enemy type "Woe Bringer" is in constant combat mode, as they will spot the player even when obscured by the Blinding Rush ability. Also there are some other bugged abilities. Enemies distracted by Raven Distract can sometimes be stunned out their stun (weird, right?) by shooting a smoke bomb at them. Two abilities to disctract enemies added together will result in instant detection. Also, they sometimes flat out don't work at all, with the raven either flying god knows where and the smoke bomb doing nothing at all.

Both detection speed and field of vision for guards is broken. I had enemies detect me at a 90° angle straight up while standing on a roof, they didn't even had to look up for me to be instantly detected. What's especially weird is that this crazy fast detection speed isn't even consistent. I had an enemy directly looking at me standing a few meters away at eye level who couldn't see me, only to be spotted instantly by another enemy standing in the yard a few meters below me. Also there were instances of me getting spotted instantly while being outside a restricted area. It also doesn't help that sometimes Eivor will jump out of a bush they're hiding in to perform an air assassination instead of a hiding spot assassination on a closeby guard.

I have some of the problems I just described on video, so I can edit them together if you require further examples.

Kind regards!

Stealth being completely broken in Valhalla is not news but thanks OP for putting it all together.
I know it has put off many many players that have just given up on finishing the game. It's really a shame it has been so long and nothing has been addressed. Stealth is the main attraction for many AC fans.
This episode made me warry of picking up the next AC game as I usually do.

@ubi-wheelyduck I've been having these issues since launch and they are why I'm not playing the game. The last time I played, I was instantly detected, so I broke line of sight and moved to a different part of the camp, the archer followed me and started to shoot arrows into the side of the building that was between us as if the building wasn't there.

Also something has to be done about chain assassinations. They need to be 100% successful even if the other target detects you. I'm only able to pull it off successfully half the time which means I don't use it.

People have been complaining about these very issues ad nauseam since the game released. It would mean something for Ubisoft to at least acknowledge that the stealth is broken.

Just wanted to say that I have encountered EVERY issue that the OP has and it turned me off the game entirely after 40+ hours. I was on UPlay+ at the time and I have previously bought Origins and Odyssey (that don't have these issues BTW - I have 200+ hours overall in those games), so this is actually costing you guys sales.

I made a Reddit thread a LONG time ago that includes these issues, here, just in-case there was any doubt about how significant these issues are and for how long the game has suffered from them.

@isaac02444 , @hello653 Amen to that! I'd love to see double assassination skill. Wouldn't even mind if that would consume adrenaline.

@ubi-wheelyduck can confirm I've also experienced all the issues described by @Isaac02444 on xBox One S. Stopped playing the game about halfway through in December due to these, among other, issues. Thanks for looking into it, please continue pursuing as deeply as possible. And thanks to Isaac for initiating.

Great work from @Isaac02444 I've been having the same issues with stealth in the game and I would love to see a fix (especially detection time and omniscient AI).

Hope you guys at Ubi will be prompt to correct these issues. Thanks.