(I can play RDR2 Ultra and is amazing) - GTX 1660Ti 6GB

I call BS ...... No way can you do ultra with a measly 1660Ti ........ I know because I had one and upgraded to a RX 5700 and still couldn't pull it off ......

@snakeeater49910

Well I'm 61 and I can remember back when you bought a product it actually worked as advertised ..... I'm an EE and if my work was this shoddy I'd be sued out of existence in no time at all ..... Software needs to be held to the same standards as hardware is and until it is things are only going to get worse and worse as I predicted 15 years ago when people started repeating the falsehood that "all software/games are buggy at release and we shouldn't expect them not to be"

We need to hold their feet to the fire otherwise they have ZERO incentive to do better ...... I predicted this over 15 years ago ..... The younger generations are too forgiving and that's how we got here ... If you and they had put your foot down 15 years ago things wouldn't be this bad today with nearly every single new release broken and buggy as a New York City crack house

All the archery challenge did is point out how utterly broken the Aim Assist and bows are in general .....

This is how bows should work ... Same studio, same game engine, same lead developer

It doesn't seem to do anything at all and I've tried it in all 4 modes Partial, Full, Light and Off ...... There is absolutely zero difference and you waste most of your arrows for nothing and you can't even craft more .....

Odyssey did it way better ..... Switching bows is clunky as hell, you have no way of knowing how many arrows you actually have unless you equip the bow and pull the right trigger and after 18 1/2 hours of gameplay I still haven't gotten any cloth for upgrade nor even a hint of how and where to find it .....

Other problems I've had was trying to take down a monastery on my own and of course running out of arrow in a matter of a couple of minutes because you can't lock on to anything making it almost impossible to hit anything moving I had to blow my horn 6 damn times before I could get any assistance, 5 times after I had killed everyone with the help of prisoners I released .... My guys were no where in sight and I wasted a lot of time because you can't loot anything without assistance and the prisoners you free just run off and are no help .... the ungrateful bastards ...... I kept having to blow the horn until they finally showed up .....

@yesin069 I played both Origins and Odyssey with a sword as my melee weapon and used the secondary melee weapon for it's engraving boosts only .... About the only time I ever used anything other that a sword for melee was the occasional weekly ori quests where they wanted you to kill 'x' number of solder with a spear or heavy blunt .... In Origins I got the Deluxe version and pretty much used the poisoned sword that came with it through the entire game and it also had a poisoned heavy blunt which I like to use on the Phylakes by ambushing them from behind and whacking them with it to start out, ride past turn and shoot a few arrows at them to stun them and then whack them again with it ..... I only used a shield against a couple of the bosses where it was a necessity ..... A good sword and a good bow and I'm set

@jmetch

If the Management of CDPR actually gave a monkey's behind they would have delayed the release on consoles ..... It is completely and utterly broken and unplayable on the PS4 and Xbox One and they lied to console games just 2 weeks before release that it ran remarkably well on consoles .... They lied to you .... They intentionally deceived you in a way I've never seen from a publisher ..... Not even EA has stooped as low as to tell a bald faced lie like that

They are no different than the average Swamp Creature Politician that knows they can lie and BS and their Cult will still forgive and praise them ..... Don't be a Simp for CDPR

@garbo3

Oh god, i am no expert but i know how PR for huge companies usually works. I am just assuming that it is the same with Ubisoft because i see exactly the same patterns here.

PS: PR stands for public relations and just means marketing when you break it down.

It feels like the game had to fit the marketing campaign and not the other side around. They wanted to sell the #LikeAViking, so the game should be more about vikings. Who cares about assassins in an AC game, right? Just some passionate devs like Darby McDevitt really wanted to add as much AC feeling as possible and give connections to every title before. In the end they wanted to market a viking game and the devs needed to implement as much viking-feel as possible. This is why i made the assumption that the marketing team has more power than even Creative Directors or Lead staff in the dev team.

When you want to make a hastag for an AC title, it should always be #LikeAnAssassin and nothing else. If we want to play as a brute-force viking we should get the option to do so but dont destroy this IP just to sell us things that would be better fitted in other games.

I want that the devs get more power and creative freedom for their games. Let them make the game they want and think about how to market this after the fundamentals are in place.

The sad part about that is games like Witcher 3 (especially Skellige) and Skyrim seems to have more of a Norse/Viking feel to them than Valhalla does despite having more a fantasy/magic element to them .... and of course elves .....

@lysvander A real archery challenge would be getting all insta-kill headshots .... I'm intentionally supposed to not kill them in one shot? For me that only happens when I screw up

That's got to be the dumbest archery challenge I've ever heard of ..... And I've been shooting bows since I was 10 (That's over 50 years experience)

@fedorpepel18 Actually you hit the nail on the head with the problem of a lot of this game ..... Ubisoft takes the opinion of a few loud vocal players and thinks it is what the majority wanted .... So we ended up with a game with no loot and only a handful of armors that can't be mixed and matched very well, lame events that are unrewarding instead of better side quests, goofy puzzles to get into nearly every building, a nearly useless bird that can't flag/highlight anything ..... a lame version of followers with a dumb AI that isn't even as good as the ones in 10 year old Skyrim, a leveling system that doesn't make any sense, and bloated ability web that doesn't make any worldly sense instead of a simple well targeted ability tree like Origins and Odyssey. Runes that are so weak or just broken that you can't actually tell any difference with or without them to replace the engravings system that just worked

All because they listened to a loud vocal minority and in the end didn't please most of them either ..... It's a problem with the entire Internet really, it amplifies a vocal minority and gives corporations and leaders the false impression they represent a majority of people when it's not even close

In the codex, Viking is spelled Vikingr.

That's not a mistake ..... That's the proto-germanic spelling

@mescalito12 They all are affected to one degree or another it just seems that Intel CPU's especially without Hyperthreading are affected more. The problem is DX12 uses CPU cores and SMT/Hyperthreading differently than DX11 and this is a game engine from 2014 built around DX11 where Valhalla is the first time they tried to implement DX12 and it's just not working .... The core CPU and memory handling of this game engine needs a complete rewrite from the ground up because the problems are systemic

@p4r4d0x5297 If you get the DLC make sure you get it from the same source as you got the main game from .... In other words if you got the main game from Ubisoft get the DLC from Ubisoft, if Steam get the DLC from Steam, if Epic then get the DLC from Epic

As far as getting the Gold Edition from Microsoft it would likely replace your old game including your saves forcing you to start over ..... However if you really enjoy the game that's really not that bad as you find you'll make a lot better build the second time and not make the same early game mistakes you made just trying to figure the game out .... Most people myself included tend to rush through the early parts and try to get out of Athens as quickly as possible but it actually pays to slow your roll and get all the Cultists as they become available and do the side quests in Athens that expose several before you leave the first time .... If you do it right you can level up your spear twice before you get to Athens and again shortly after you leave which makes a big difference. You can get an idea of the path I took through the game just by looking at the titles in my YouTube playlist for the game ... By the time I made these I had already played through the entire game twice, once as Kassandra and once as Alexios

Kassandra - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkdqp16ufvSmNh-rghHLyvuedc0NIWM0e - This one also shows all the Ostraka clues and solutions with timestamps

Alexios - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkdqp16ufvSns8cbio9i9EOlBdAiuhN5t

@tosk406 It's been a known problem for about a year and a half ..... The engravings list size is limited to 2 digits, 0 - 99 or 100 engravings and the only way to fix that is a rewrite of the underlying code and that's just never going to happen on a game that's effectively dead. Once you exceed 100 engravings some get pushed off the list to make room for the new ones and it seems that +30% Armor Penetration is the first one to go or at least the first one important enough to notice

There is no fix, there is no workaround other than using a 3rd party program to delete armors and their engravings which Ubisoft doesn't want anyone to use even though it fixes this bug

@longjohn119 The graphics options you see in a PC game aren't set by the developer, it's what is allowed in the Graphics drivers, it's the setting the drivers allow access to .... However both Microsoft and Sony write their own drivers and they don't open up those settings to be manipulated .... Basically Microsoft only allows two modes of operation in their graphics drivers, Graphical Fidelity and Performance and that's it. There is simply no access in the drivers to make individual settings for the user

Ubisoft can't give you a graphics option that they don't have access to in the drivers provided by Microsoft or Sony .... They both do that for one reason alone, to make the systems simpler to use and to cut down the need for support at their end

You can get mad at me for pointing that out but it's not going to change the FACTS one iota .... It is what it is

@tyranusvader The problem isn't your computers, the problem is Ubisoft isn't implementing the DX12 APIs correctly ..... This is a 2014 game engine written for DX11 and Valhalla is the first game that tried to use the DX12 APIs and it's just not working ......

I doubt it will ever work without a complete rewrite of the game engine from the core up ......

@animuslover Ubisoft can only work with the tools Microsoft and Sony provide it and neither allows them much in the way of choices because they and they alone control the OS .... It's a locked proprietary system

If you want a more open system you buy a PC, it's as simple as that and that has been true for 30 years

@thenorfolkian Actually the spin off to Black Flag was Rogue which came out at the same time as Unity

@crimsonwolf-yt It's caused by an improper implementation of DX12 which uses both CPU cores as well as GPU memory transfers differently. This is a DX11 Game Engine from 2014 and Valhalla is the first game to try to use DX12 with this ancient game engine and it's obviously not working

One of the core advantages of low-level APIs like DirectX 12 and Vulkan is improved CPU utilization. Traditionally with DirectX 9 and 11 based games, most games only used 2-4 cores for the various mechanics: Physics, AI, draw-calls, etc. Some games were even limited to one. With DirectX 12 that has changed. The load is more evenly distributed across all cores, making multi-core CPUs more relevant for gamers.

Another major advantage of DirectX 12 is that developers have more control over how their game utilizes the hardware. Earlier this was more abstract and was mostly taken care of by the drivers and the API (although some engines like Frostbyte and Unreal provided low-level tools as well). Now the task falls to the developers. They have closer to metal access, meaning that most of the rendering responsibilities and resource allocation are handled by the game engines with some help from the graphics drivers.

In DirectX 11, the objects in the GPU pipeline exist across a wide range of states such as Vertex Shader, Hull Shader, Geometry shader, etc. These states are at times inter-dependent on one another and the next successive one can’t progress unless the previous stage is defined.
Each of the objects in DirectX 11 needs to be defined individually (at runtime) and the next state can’t be executed until the previous one has been finalized as they require different hardware units (shaders vs ROPs, TMUs, etc). This effectively leaves the hardware under-utilized resulting in increased overhead and reduced draw calls.

DirectX 12 replaces the various states with Pipeline State Objects (PSO) which are finalized upon creation itself. These PSOs include the bytecode for all shaders including, vertex, pixel, domain, hull, and geometry shader and can be converted into any state as per requirement without depending on any other object or state. The PSOs can be dynamically switched to and fro from the registers by transferring a small amount of data.

@yazx_ GPU hardware scheduling for AMD GPUs is disabled in the driver and not available to toggle in Windows. I guess that AMD noticed that it created more problems than it solved. It was only available in the 20.5.1 driver. Nothing after that. I'll let you know if increasing the TDR timeout has any effect. Thanks for your input!

That's because AMD graphics cards have a hardware scheduler built in already and have for a number of years now .... I suspect they decided their hardware solution works better than Microsoft's software solution .....

@mapimoon9 Whenever you come up across a rare bug like this (I've killed him probably 10 times without issue) the best thing to do is **immediately** go back to your oldest autosave and I do mean immediately because they'll get overwritten in no time .... It's too late for that now so your only other solution is to go back to an older save ..... There is a Cultist in Messara that one time I blasted so hard with a Devastating Shot he got stuck in the wall and I couldn't confirm the kill but I immediately went to the oldest autosave and redid it and everything was fine after that ... I have a picture of it around here somewhere

Also it is prudent to make a quick save before you quit out of the game every day that way the worst you'll have to do is repeat a day's worth of play time