my issues with the game playing on PC

So many bugs, I've lost count of the times I have had to save and reload to get something to complete and still several things are completely borked in my game as the quest has stalled for no apparent reason (in latest one killed the person i was supposed to kill, body has vanished, area can't be cleared from being cursed because game doesn't recognise protagonist is dead in spite of me getting the quest reward, so I can't complete the mysteries for that area and am having to reload a save from nearly 10 hours previous to give it another go) .

My bird is a complete waste of time, no idea why its even there any more. I loved the system in both Origin and Odyssey where you could send your bird to scout - properly scout not just take a quick glance in the appropriate direction - and then mark your enemy, work out your routes to get from a to b in full stealth hit your target and vanish into the mist. Completely impossible in Valhalla. Far as I can see the raven might just as well be a bit of jewellery.

The sound is awful, most esp in snow. Stealth in snow sounds like you are stomping around in army boots and jumping up and down on crisp packets and bubble wrap. Boat songs are dire, so many really good viking/norse folk/rock groups out there and we get what sounds like 2 maybe 3 fairly generic dirgy things that all sound much the same compared to Odyssey where some proper research and proper music were evident. In fact the entire sound track for anything other than ambient is poor quality and underwhelming.

Collision is dire. I keep seeing NPC's happily standing 5 feet above ground. 
They still haven't fixed the half hour pee, I assume bladder issues must have been endemic in Anglo Saxon times? Or the bandy legs, apparently the entire world suffered from bad knees back then, who knew?

And something that completely baffles me, you stealth your way into a place for a quest and run across prisoners. Locked behind wicker doors you can basically breathe heavily on to demolish - and all of these poor prisoners are still fully armed with two handed and one handed axes etc.
Erm Right... Does no one at Ubi think there might be something wrong there? You found prisoners in Origins/Odyssey and when you released them they went off to ostensibly find weapons or they ran away they didn't have them in the cages. 

Valhalla smacks of a lot of lazy and rushed programming
Now I get it, they wanted to rush it out to beat CDPR to the punch, they wanted to take advantage of everyone being stuck in various stages of lockdown but really the game needed several more months of polish, what we have now is nowhere near as good at Odyssey was on release day.

She's Welsh. I live there and much of what she says is a mixture of Welsh and English. Also geographically Wales borders Shropshire and the border regions have always had cross overs living on both sides.

I hunted the threads a bit for this bug a couple of days ago.
Found a load of posts regarding pets missing, the first I could find was from the 16th Nov regarding the Fox being missing. 9 - 10 weeks ago.
Fox and wolf missing seem to be related as as far as anyone one of us laypeople can tell they both end up to the west of the settlement, on the hillside above Swanburrows house and towards the river from there.
Forum mods have responded on various threads about it so its known, there have been save games, maps and photos sent so they have sufficient info from players.

And yet its still not on the list of what the developers are working on.
Might not seem important in the scheme of things maybe and I completely understand that bugs which break the game for people need to be resolved first.
However, if you have a known issue, reported umpteen times by different people with proofs sent, the very least you could do is get it on a list at the top of the forum, so that the rest of us lesser mortals can see its known and being worked on (applies to all bugs not just this one) instead of having to check back endlessly rereading old posts and hunting the forums and bumping old threads to make sure the issue doesn't get forgotten about.

shouldn't be cobra type snakes in the UK (as far as I know not in Norway either).
Vipers/Adders (same species just different names) are the only snakes in the British Isles and they certainly aren't the rearing up and spitting in your face variety, they are the slither away fast variety of snakes and would only attack if you got right on top of them before they saw you otherwise they get as far away as possible.
Snakes are reptiles Ubi - they wouldn't survive long in a cold snow covered landscape and any that got there by mistake would be torpid and half dead already..
Honestly this sort of thing really irritates me as its just a copy paste from previous games - an easy get out.

@locoporkko
In my case the event was about 100 levels ago, so I won't be doing that, nor restarting due to the amount of bugs still not fixed we'd all most likely simply run into other game breaking issues

Not sure how much fast travel is supposed to fix this bug. I went back to Norway and nothing changed when I returned to the pig. I try every now and again after doing a ruck of other stuff which includes meditating, fast travelling, throwing rocks at it etc. Nada - pig just makes pig noises.
Ubi need to fix this, it's so well known that if you google Pig of Prophecy a description of the bug is the first thing that comes up.

@ubiexcellent

Thank you for responding and letting us have an update. Much appreciated

@ubiexcellent

Thanks for responding.
However might I suggest putting this bug onto the Known Issues list.
It might alleviate some anxiety when people come to report this bug if they can see its known and being worked on.
Without it on the list a player has no way of knowing other than scrolling back through endless pages

So 4 months and 6 days later ( 126 days) and we get Cats not a fix for a game breaker.
'Under investigation' ? Investigated by whom? Tintin? Scooby Doo and Shaggy?
Certainly not by anyone competent

From my memories of Norse mythology I never really saw Loki as evil, mischievous yes, misguided sometimes and what starts out as mischievous pranks tend to get well out of hand for him sometimes, but not evil in a Christian sense - he's the chaos to balance out the order, there's no real good v evil thing in Norse myths. 
Whereas I always felt Odin for a so called god of wisdom showed a startling lack of it. The whole business with Fenrir in the old myths was more or less a self fulfilling prophecy. You treat someone badly enough for no reason (except a dubious prophecy of what they may possibly do in the future) and sooner or later they will give you a reason.
I think this was portrayed well in the game, I have some sympathy for someone who actually didn't turn fully against Odin until his son (and presumably his other children from what he says) were treated appallingly badly. I would imagine Shaun and Rebecca feel as similarly conflicted by Loki/Basim as I do.
Loki had no real beef with Tyr, who had actually treated Fenrir comparatively well and was as much in the dark about Odins' intentions as Fenrir was, he had no reason to want revenge against Tyr/Sigurd. 
What suddenly sparked Basim/Loki into realising for certain Eivor was Odin I don't know, its never explained in game, maybe Basim had his own set of dreams to deal with, after all he's a reincarnation himself not actually Loki in the flesh so to speak.
However until Basim/Loki goes into the animus himself to experience things as Eivor he may have thought Eivor had known they were Odin all along and were deceiving everyone again, being in the animus and realising Eivor turned their back on Odin preferring to be just Eivor may change his preconceptions a bit, if you take Basim/Loki out of the animus after the final game segments and take him outside to sit on one of the benches facing the sea by the firepit there's a very brief tiny scene which may back up that idea.
As far as Shaun and Rebecca are concerned Basim/Loki didn't kill Layla, the radiation and her dropping the staff did that, although they know he tried to kill Eivor that event happened millennia ago as far as they are concerned and Basim/Loki simply took advantage of the staff dropping at his feet. We know as onlookers, and from what Basim/Loki said in game, that some or all of it was planned (even then we don't know that Layla's death was part of the plan or simply to get her to bring the staff into the temple) but Shaun and Rebecca wouldn't have that knowledge at all.
I'm suprised the game ignored Juhani Berg from Rogue, his abstergo animus revealed he was a Viking raider at Lindisfarne so he could have fitted in well
Wanting to bring his family back means Loki needs a living world - without world breaking end of times events - into which they can be reincarnated and I think he fits into the Assassin side of the game pretty well and will either make a good player character or a good enemy for a future game (especially if they manage to fix the bandy legged knees permanently bent thing finally).

neither my fox or my wolf have reappeared at any point. Wolf was in longhouse for ages, then started being just outside the door then departed completely to the woods on the west after I built Swanburrows House, far as I can tell Fox has either never been there or is singularly good at being invisible.

Is there any update on when we can expect the fix? I see its been at least mentioned that the devs are working on it, but that was in April

So 4 months and 6 days later ( 126 days) and we get Cats not a fix for a game breaker.
'Under investigation' ? Investigated by whom? Tintin? Scooby Doo and Shaggy?
Certainly not by anyone competent

Still bugged? Its now mid March and its still bl++dy bugged. [censored] Ubisoft.
You should be fixing bugs which mess with completing the game before you release new content that's also bugged.
Clearly no concept of customer service and satisfaction.
Pedantic repeats of the same ol' "We're aware of the issue" messages does not cut it.
Game was a buggy mess at release and those of us loyal AC fans that paid full price or pre ordered and acted as your unpaid beta testers are the ones paying the price in satisfaction.

What price for loyalty?

3 months and counting........

@guest-dppeknxo

Still nothing on any of the known issue/things we are working on threads. This is now from 16th Nov when a post first reported the Fox being missing so over 3 months and apparently the issue doesn't exist in Ubisofts's worldview.
Nice
Explains a lot really,
I only pop back in every now and again now to check if the pig of prophecy has been fixed and if my pets have reappeared - honestly not sure why I even bother.

Ubi fubarred the game AGAIN?
Good grief

2 and 3 for me
Fox has totally disappeared and Wolf is living on the hillside behind Swanburrows house and not in the settlement, never comes in it at all

This issue is now weeks old. I found the first report of the fox being missing from 16h Nov just by simply putting Fox into the search bar and that poster also mentioned wolf being missing.

So basically pet wolf and fox missing in settlements has been a reported issue since then. Two months ago.

Game saves have been sent, photos and maps attached to various posts and moderators have replied and yet this issue is still not on the list of things they are working on, or even on the known issues. And on newer posts from people I still see mods replying asking for more save games and info in spite of them having all of this from weeks back.

If it was on a list somewhere we wouldn't feel obliged to keep reiterating stuff in posts, I'm watching 3 forum threads on this issue - or I was - until all those threads vanished off my list of watched and I had to go hunting back through to re watch the threads again.

No mention of it being fixed in update today either. I think there are some issues in your thread management that need addressing here - possibly a bug report about your bug reporting thread management might be a bit overkill but it does feel like the management of this aspect is almost as frustrating to deal with as the initial bug is.

@asgardian02

Reading back on your previous . I'm with you on Red Dead. I tried it , gave it a good shot and was ridiculously bored by feeling railroaded into playing things the way the developers wanted instead of doing what i wanted to do. As one example - I'm not daft, I could see an ambush coming but the game wouldn't let me avoid it and that sort of thing infuriates me. So I just stopped playing. I guess it was too linear for my taste, a failing AC has as well but its much less obvious.
And yeah I play Witcher 3 on the hardest difficulty but my point was that most of the necessary research progresses as the game progresses, you aren't forced into doing a ton of research straight out the starting gates and can manage with quite low levels of research initially, it's a natural progression that doesn't make itself into a chore unless that's what you want to do. I play mainly swords and signs though and alchemy even at the highest ;levels of difficulty isn't as important as it probably should be lol As an example - I still forget to put the relevant oils on my sword sometimes but then to compensate I carry an extra sword of each type as fully levelled as my main one, so it doesn't matter, I just switch out swords
And I want the bird back from Odyssey or even Origins. raven is pointless.

@acid_villain

Regarding Witcher 3. I'm a witcher fan and played all three games just to let you know :). However I have many friends who came into the franchise at Witcher 3 and were not familiar. They all had the same issues you are describing. From things I was saying and others they took the plunge and pushed through the learning curve and now without exception they all love the game. Once it clicks with you its a joy to play. PS I seldom bother too much about the alchemy, you can make a handful of potions and bombs which deal with almost every basic situation and not get too swamped with choices and once that clicks with you the rest of it just comes naturally as the game progresses. Same with the monsters, they don't throw them all at you all at once , you find new ones by progressing so the research on them is spread out and seems natural
Cyberpunk 2077 still has thousands playing it, still one of the highest figures and CDPR and their investors might not have made oodles of dosh off of it but they aren't hurting either. I think it was a question of too much hype. They have already pushed out a lot of fixes and from previous experience with their other games they will continue to do so. From what I understand from people who have played it it doesn't have game breaking bugs, you don't get stopped in your tracks. Just niggles and gremlins which they will doubtless iron out and its missing some features which again they will probably add it as and when they can get them working. I have friends on 3rd playthroughs of it so it can't be that bad

Regarding UBI and AC. Well I played a few of the early games and came back to the series properly with Origins and Odyssey. Valhalla was a bit of a disappointment to me really, I'm one of those who was lucky enough to push through the main game without hitting a bug which stopped me in my tracks due to a long habit of making multiple hard saves and therefore usually being able to go back and try again but some things were ridiculously frustrating when you did exactly the same and took three + goes at it before it would actually complete a quest etc I don't think there were many quests I managed to get through first time without doing at least one save and reload due to its bad habit of not completing a quest which worked perfectly up till that point. Quest required NPC's being killable is ridiculous for example. But I managed - still can't complete the entire game due to some daft thing with a talking pig that doesn't but that's a world event not the main game so its liveable with if annoying.
But it seems to me that Valhalla is missing the level of polish that Odyssey had and even Origins felt more 'finished' overall. I feel many games companies were hard hit by covid lock downs etc but still for some reason felt they had to rush out unpolished games, no idea why, it wasn't as if their audience could go anywhere.