Ahead of its first major expansion, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla will receive a title update tomorrow introducing a raft of changes to the game, including the ability to (finally!) turn kill animations off.
Valhalla’s title update 1.2.1—which clocks in at 5.5 GB on PlayStation 5 and 16 GB on Xbox Series X—will add a toggle that turns kill animations off. To be crystal clear, the kill animations in Valhalla are cool as hel(heim). It’s just that, after 92 hours and 46 minutes, watching the same three-second cinematic over and over (and over and over) gets a little repetitive. The option to turn it off is a boon. To shamelessly steal a joke from erstwhile Kotaku EIC Stephen Totilo, with the cinematics off, that 92.75 hours might’ve been closer to 91.75.
Tomorrow’s update will also add three new skills to the game, all of which seem designed to prevent flinching in various circumstances. Cold Rage makes it so enemies can’t interrupt you while you’re performing successive melee attacks. Same goes for Eye of the North, which prevents flinching when you’re aiming your bow. Finally, Intense Rage allows you to ignore interruptions while parrying or special-attacking with your off-hand weapon.
As ever, the title update will fix more than two dozen minor bugs related to quests, world events, and side activities.
Valhalla’s first major expansion, the Ireland-set Wrath of the Druids, will come out May 13 for all platforms. It was initially planned for an April 29 release, but was delayed earlier this month, a move Ubisoft chalked up to a shift in how the company approaches Assassin’s Creed updates. Rather than introducing an update every four weeks, Ubisoft pivoted to a five-week schedule “to allow for more thorough testing and refinement,” which pushed back the timeline for both this title update and the Wrath of the Druids add-on.
