I'm digging the vastly improved environmental audio. Distant gunfights, radio chatter and NPC voices seem to be processed properly such as slightly muffled at distance. The same holds if the audio source, or the player, are in interior or exterior locations. The biggest audio improvement is in the game Options. Previous Far Cry titles had very limited audio channel separation. Now we can adjust the volume of Master, Radio Music, Dialog, Score Music and Sound Effects.

The only thing letting the game down now is Distant Object Detail. When you have a game that gives you binocular-type features you really need to make sure your LOD system doesn't drastically ruin textures and polygon detail of distant objects. It's like the Hubble Telescope. The deeper it looks into space the further back in time you're looking. Similarly, in games with poor quality LOD, looking at distant terrain and buildings through binoculars is like looking at a game from the early 2000s games era with muddy textures and PS2-level polygon detail

• Running should offer Hold to sprint in addition to Toggle.
• When hunting animals, show any corpses on the minimap. They get lost in the vegetation, especially if you end up fighting multiple attackers and are running around
• The choice for 1st-person or 3rd person views when in the car as well as at main camps.

Audio in the game is great. Distant radios, gunfire and chatter sound more realistic. I also dig the way roaming NPCs will detect distant gunfire and head in that direction to investigate. The greater separation of game audio volumes into Master, Radio Music, Dialog, Score Music and Sound Effects is greatly welcome and long overdue in the Far Cry series. The only thing letting this game now is the poor Distant Object Detail techniques. This is especially an issue with games that give you binoculars.

It's like the Hubble Telescope. As it looks further and further into deep space it's essentially looking back in time. It's the same for open-world games with binoculars. The further you look, the more the graphics look like they are approaching the early 2000s era of gaming with blurry textures and PS2-level polygon detail

I'm playing on PC and came back to the game after 4 months away. I swapped the bindings for Primary Interaction to F and Secondary Action to E from day one of release and never had issues. I now consistently find that the Primary Action key doesn't work for both single clicks or long-press interaction when I launch the game. If I quick save and quick load it seems to start working during play. Restoring default key binds also fixes it. I've also made sure to swap all the other actions that use the E (Assassinate, Smokescreen) and F keys to avoid conflicts. I assume a recent patch has introduced this annoying keyboard rebinding glitch. Any news when we can expect to see this glitch removed?

I see this consistently too on my PC system: i9 10900K, 32Gb Ram and a GeForce 2080 ti (driver 461.40 and previous version), regardless of graphics quality settings.

@ubi-raziel Patch 1.1.1 seems to have messed up boat songs for me. Pressing T to switch to stories is fine. Songs have been okay up until now.

@jeffmorgan1983 Aren't achievements called Challenges? In the Core section, I have 15 of 31 challenges completed. Am I missing something here? I never was one for achievements so I may be ignorant of the issues with Ubisoft achievements that I keep hearing people speak about.

@the-gremlin I agree somewhat but let's all be mindful to reserve the criticisms for the real people behind it, managers and those in the C-Suite. I really don't think developers are given enough resources and realistic deadlines to ensure things are working without glaringly apparent glitches at release. I'm not even sure there are enough QA testers in place to catch and report bugs. Like most corporate entities in modern businesses today, company strategy and decision-making is obsessively focused on maximising 'shareholder value' and operating on the dysfunctional 'shareholder primacy' mindset. Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy, yet pleasing faceless shareholders so those in the C-Suite can snatch their bonuses, is resulting in increasingly poorer quality products that are released too early and with every-increasing bugs, many of which go unfixed even as DLC starts to appear. Publishers have a duty to make sure bugs are fixed before moving developer resources onto creating DLC.

Continunally finding myself drunk upon launching the game and when loading is frustrating. There's also visual glitching in the Raventhorpe longhouse around the fire. The orange bloom/glow from the fire is very blocky. This never used to be the case. The biggest issue though is a noticeable increase in the game locking up. I barely encountered any crashes even through my more mammoth playthroughs of 4 or 5 hours prior to this update. Now I encounter one or two lock-ups within two hours.

I also see Bjorn the Berserker still refuses to remain permanently assigned on my raiding boat crew. Every time I start the game or die and reload last save, he's gone from the crew and replaced by one of the other available members. I always have to remember to assign him again. He's pretty hard to miss given he's as big as a house. This bug has been around since day one and it's annoying it's not in the known issues list and remains unfixed.

When are we going to see these problems seemingly introduced with the Yule Festival patch fixed so I can get back to enjoying this game without annoying lock-ups?

I'm running this game on a 10900K, 32Gb Ram, GeForce 2080 Ti (460.89 driver) and it's installed on a Samsung 970 EVO Plus SSD.

Tarben is waiting in the settlement pacing around and when I speak to him to start the quest he goes through some dialogue but then simply ends up going back to pacing around and does not set off to lead me to the bandit camp and I can no longer speak to him. The quest is also updated and says "Follow Tarben to the bandit camp".

I've saved and reloaded a game but he just stays in one spot packing around as though waiting for me to speak to him before setting off. Wondering now if the Yule Festival DLC is causing this issue because I also keep getting the drunk status whenever I load a save game. Maybe this should be called the Bug Festival?

I cannot permanently assign Bjorn the Berserker to my crew from the Crew management screen. When I do assign him everything is fine for a while but as I play I'll suddenly realise he's not on the boat and has been replaced by another character from the Barracks. I then have to go back to Crew management and re-assign him but he eventually gets unassigned again at random.

@rustymelvin Well it sure wasn't fixed in patch 1.04 released on 25 November. I also have Birna in the crew and, once assigned, she remains there. It's hard to miss the fact Bjorn's missing considering how big he is. Ah well, maybe the next patch will fix this annoying bug that, frankly, should easily have been caught by even the most rudimentary game testing process

I was just going to post about this problem too. Really annoying.

Even the white ship's cat I just found and is now always on the boat is angry about this

@truejynxed I just posted about this too. I'm power 54 and questing in Asgard was such a frustrating chore I reloaded to just before starting the In Dreams quest at Valka's hut. It's design flaws like this, coupled with a lot of animation glitches, quest bugs and LOD pop-in graphical jank that shows that Ubisoft game design, quest design and level design teams don't really put very much effort into 'attention to detail' refinement passes of gameplay during development before releasing their title.

@darren_evans Also, this new main area shows as Suggested Power 90 but you only find this out once you arrive and there's seemingly no way back. So fighting in this area is again nothing but a frustration. The In Dreams quest text should warn you that you'll be taken to a Power level 90 area.

Without spoiling too much this quest begins with a long run towards the main fighting force beforehand. Then as you progress towards the gate, if you get killed you are sent right back to a start position where you have to make that long run towards the fighting again. This type of restart point punishment is not a challenge, it's a chore and is a gameplay mechanic that only adds frustration and nothing else. Don't ever put this kind of cheesy time-wasting stuff in quests, it's lazy.

@ubi-spud Cloud IaaS (Infrastructure As A Service) offerings from Amazon, Google and Microsoft can make scaling up and down server infrastructure trivial with dynamically saleable server provisioning technology. There's no excuse for underestimating server infrastructures with excuses of 'launch day busy' in this day and age. Is Ubisoft trying to provision, host and manage their own servers? If so they are failing the player base with online service errors like this and should leave it to the Cloud experts, especially when the corporate business model is Games As A Service, or Games As A Disservice when so many online service failures like this keep happening. Looking at the board of directors there appears to be no CTO-type position at Ubisoft. Maybe there should be one?

Speaking to various people in the city I get a message saying New Intel and to open the map. The problem is the map shows nothing and the quest descriptions remain unchanged. Just where is this new intel recorded? Do you actually have to write these clues down on paper? This seems like a clumsy oversight in terms of in-game quest descriptions and recording progress, or am I missing somethintg?

Ubisoft Connect is showing Challenges available for Valhalla. I have 9 out of 31 and there appear to be two types of challenges, Core and Time-limited.