Spoilers for the end of the East Anglia Oswald/Valdis story and some stuff at Ravensthorpe in Assassin's Creed: Valhalla

Butch:

Nothing new.

As I said, the wedding was not a dress ball, but got drunk and laid so it was still a pretty good party.

You?

Feminina:

I also got drunk and laid! Now that's a party.

Who did you lie with? I may have made multiple..."close friends."

Butch:

You could make multiple friends? 

Brodur.  I kinda love that it made you remember his name after.  And I did, thank you very much.  

Not a bad party at all.   

Feminina:

I loved that! This moment of "wait, which of the brothers were you?"

I also remembered. I wonder what happened if you called him the wrong name. Probably nothing major, but we would have felt bad.

My other friend was after the party.

Butch:

Who!?????

Oh, wait…..does this involve a trip to grandbridgeshire?

Feminina:

It might...

Butch:

Awwwwwwwwwwww

SNAP. 

I was hoping for that, but, you know, her being my sister in law.....

AWKWARD!

Didn't play last night, though.  Crazy children.  You're ahead of me.  Finally. 

Feminina:

Yeah, it promises to be extremely awkward at family dinners, if Sigurd ever comes home.

But hey, we gotta live for the moment! Life is fleeting, joy is precious! We could be dead tomorrow!

OK, so here's something I wanted to say about the East Anglia chapter: I was genuinely not sure if Oswald was actually dead or not. 

I mean, you don't THINK he is, right? He's a main character! (I even went down the cliff to look around and couldn't find any bodies, but of course they could have been swept out to sea.) But I wasn't sure, and I thought that would have been a pretty bold move for a game to pull, with its story: making you get to know and genuinely like this guy, and then just have him actually die. I was thinking I would kind of respect that move.

Then of course he wasn't actually dead, and I was happy for him because I like him, and his love story with Valdis is pretty sweet, but at the same time I was a LITTLE disappointed that the game didn't follow through with that bold move. Ah well. 

The wedding was very sweet, and his love notes to Valdis were adorable, and I wish them the best. I liked that he's comfortable with his wife seeming to be "a much more powerful woman," as Eivor put it. He has his own confidence in what he wants to do. They're cute together. I hope they represent a rich and flourishing Saxon-Dane nation to come! (I'm not going to consult the history books here.)

Oh, and then what do you know, we should have killed Rued! Odin warned us, man! I do wonder if someone else would have showed up to disrupt the festivities, if Rued were dead, or if everything would have gone smoothly (except, perhaps, for Oswald being unhappy with us for challenging his authority on the battlefield). 

I chose the sweetest and simplest toast when they called on me to speak: "Skald!"

And of course I got drunk (losing yet another drinking contest, because in this game I am terrible at drinking) and went to find someplace more comfortable (a...public dock?...OK) with Broder. I idly wonder if there was a situation where you could have slept with both of them...like, did you have to lose their contest before they felt confident enough to approach? Because I totally destroyed Brothir's pot-shooting challenge. But maybe it had nothing to do with that. 

But yeah, I did love that it made you remember which one of them you were with, that was pretty brilliant. I had to think about it for a few seconds, too. Good thing it wasn't a QTE.

Butch:

That's how I'm seeing it!  Eivor never knows if each night is her last! 

I agree.  Oswald's apparent death was a genuine shock. There would be ways to follow through, too, notably making Valdis queen and leaving it at that.  I was kinda disappointed, too.  

Hey, I don't have to read the history books, because I was watching this cheesy show on the Science channel (oh, who am I kidding, cheesy and Science channel are redundant) and they had a Viking fort in England!  Said that the Vikings there just kind of intermarried with the Saxons and they're all still kinda there!  There's even a big annual Viking fest in Eastern England!

Oswald and Valdis forever, man!

Yeah, we should have killed Rued.  It was interesting how Odin phrased that, too, when he was all "What about YOUR honor?" 

I've been kicking around a thought in my head here a while, and we'll discuss it later because I don't want a hard left while we're wrapping up a chapter, but I'll plant the seed now: 

When AC first hit oh those many moons ago, the good guys' creed, "Nothing is true, everything is permitted" was pretty liberal.  The idea of going for freedom over the tyranny of religious people who wanted to impose capital O Order was, at the time, something that resembled the struggles of the freedom loving left against the stodgy, religious right.   Nowadays, "Nothing is true, everything is permitted" makes you sound like the Governor of Florida, or worse.   "Fake news, do whatever" has a very different tilt today than it did back then.  Creed vs. Honor has more weight in this game, I think, more complexity. 

Oooooof course you picked 'Skald!'.  We're the same!

Ooo, I don't know about Brodur and Brothir and the challenges!  Interesting!  I, too, hit all the pots and lost the drinking.  Because we are the same person. 

HA! Making the dialogue timed would've been the only thing more awesome.  

This was a very good story arc.  I really am liking the game dividing it all up like this.  It's really avoiding the traps that long games can fall into, being either a) boring because it's the same story forever or b) weird, because you don't touch anything even vaguely main story related for forty hours.  

I dunno, man, I'm really digging this game. 

Feminina:

Right! Who knows if we'll ever have the chance to love again?! 

Plus, I noticed Odin didn't have any comments about how sleeping with my brother's wife could damage my honor, so I can only assume he approves. 

Naked Zeus certainly would.

Man, this could be a mess later if Sigurd doesn't see it that way, though. I could totally see this choice coming back to bite me. Good thing I like to live dangerously. 

Speaking of honor, I did notice how Odin framed letting Rued live as a matter of Oswald's honor vs. mine, and that honor was also mentioned when we killed or spared Leofrith--how in that case it honorable to die for a cause, and by taking his cause away from him, we might not be doing him any favors. Honor is clearly a big deal for Odin/Vikings, and perhaps we're not taking it as seriously as we should...but we can only do what seems right in any given moment, and I thought it would be more helpful for us to have Oswald as a strong ally, than for me to look tough in that moment. Especially since Dag (and potentially others, if he speaks for some group of the drengr) already thinks I'm after Sigurd's seat. No need to feed the rumors of my ambition!

I'm after Sigurd's wife, but not his leadership of the Raven clan. Ha.

That's awesome that Oswald and Valdis' spirit live on! Thanks, Science Channel!

I agree that this is a good way to manage story in a big game. The fact that you can only 'pledge' one territory at a time keeps us focused on specific quest sequences rather than bopping all over the map trying to do a little of this and a little of that, and the lack of an overwhelming, enormously long quest list is kind of awesome. There's pretty much just whatever part of the story we're working on, a few optional side ventures, and of course hundreds and hundreds of viewpoints and sparkly dots to satisfy our urge to poke around the country when we don't feel like doing the main quest. I'm into it. 

And it's a good point that "nothing is true; everything is permitted" reads a bit differently depending on how close groups with which you disagree have come to overthrowing the government at any given time. It's all fun and games until somebody stages a coup. Hm.

Butch:

Oh Dag is gonna have a field day!  

I do like that I found a note that was all "I've been wondering what it would be like if Eivor was across the table," and I assumed she meant "in charge," not ACROSS THE TABLE HELLO! 

The one thing I'm confused about, arc wise, is that, if you're going to organize it this way, why give the player the choice of which order the arcs go in? 

Feminina:

Yeah, I was thinking "so are you just wondering, or are you WONDERING, if you know what I mean..."

As for the order of the chapters, it's partly dependent on power level (at first we only had two options, then two more, etc.) so I feel like it's letting us pick from a limited selection but not leapfrog way ahead to, like, "I'm going to Paris!" or wherever the final step is, so they're presumably letting us decide the order only of certain chapters, and only in a way that has limited impact on the overall narrative. Like, we could go to Ledecestre or Grantebridge first, but whichever one we picked, we still ended up doing them both, and the order didn't really have any significance (Mr. O' picked the opposite of the one I did and the overall story we're both getting seems to be the same, so I am reasonably confident about this).

Butch:

Hmm.  Sort of figured.  The way was going to be the way.  

If anything, though, that makes it more odd.  If everyone is going to do everything and end up in the same place, then it's just an illusion of choice.  I'm all for illusions of choice in games (they're everywhere), but why here? Why not just do "chapter one, chapter two, etc." in a set order? I don't think I'd mind.  

Feminina:

Enh, maybe they figured some people (like you, or me) wouldn't mind that level of linearity, but others would. If it's easy enough to present your story in cohesive little blocks that sometimes need to come before other blocks but sometimes don't, why not let people pick sometimes? People like choices!

Butch:

They do.  I also wonder, and I doubt we'll have direct knowledge of this as I, you and Mr. O all intend to play all the arcs (and the thirty or forty hours that are likely after the game allegedly "ends"), if you can skip arcs and, if so, what happens?  I don't know WHY anyone would do that, but maybe you can.   You can certainly skip Asgard.  Maybe there's more. 

Not that we'll know, as we're going to do what we do. 

Speaking of now knowing, I assume you finally did that climby puzzle?  The hell was THAT? 

Feminina:

More climby puzzling! I assume that at some point we'll do enough of these to get enough snippets of that video to actually...see something? Probably something extremely cryptic. 

But there's no way to know for sure without continuing to collect data packets from climby puzzles, which I will do whenever I see one. There aren't that many of them so far though, are there? 

Of course, it's a big game. 

Butch:

Well, I've done exactly two.  This last one had, what, a bunch of similarly dressed people and a screen like in that old mac ad?  What WAS that? What did you see? 

And there's the voice from the arctic!  Remember that?  "Find Eivor the wolf kissed, find the mad one, find me!" that Layla had?  Now here he is again, on about some serum and how to keep it from the Mad One or something? 

Or....something?  

The hell is that? 

Feminina:

Yeah, that's what I saw and heard. And I don't know! It's all a cryptic mystery wrapped in an enigmatic riddle! Wrapped in a really cool hood. 

That's how Assassin's Creed rolls. 

Butch:

It does....but I just had a thought....

Here's where my lack of knowledge about Norse mythology starts to hurt me, but isn't Loki the Mad One or something or other?  We've met Loki in Asgard already, so he's around, and...well...for bloggage, go take another crack at that wolf and we'll talk.  Later. 

Feminina:

Hm. He's the god of mischief, and a trickster/troublemaker sort--I don't know about him being mad, but maybe. He did seem a quirky sort.

Butch:

I'd google but I fear game spoilers.  

Go kill wolfie.  Should be easy for Ms. "which boss fight? Can't be rued. So easy, that one." 

Feminina:

Now watch, the wolf will be impossible for me for another two weeks, just to be contrary. 

But yeah, I do need to get back to Asgard. I was just a little busy sleeping with my sister-in-law the last time I was in Ravensthorpe, and didn't get to it.

Butch:

Hey it happens.  Understandable. Delays occur.  

Feminina:

Just one of those things that happens...like weather, or traffic, or the need to stop on the way somewhere to murder 50 dudes and loot a chest...

Butch:

Exactly!  

Shit happens to me all the damn time. 

Almost was late dropping Nugget off at school today because a raven was all "Dude, there's iron over there" so I had to go get it.  Then I missed a bunch of times, you know how it goes. 

School was very understanding. 

Speaking of iron....

I have more than enough iron and leather to upgrade my bag and quiver, but I do not have fabric. 

Now....

Eivor kills a wolf, and BOOM.  Leather.  Hits a rock?  BOOM.  Iron.  But she can't take Kevin's pants or some shit? 

C'mon, game. 

Feminina:

I JUST upgraded my bag last night! I have no idea where I got the fabric, it just showed up at some point, looted from somewhere. Maybe in a raid? I did raid an abbey the other night, seeking more building materials for the settlement.

Of course, I then didn't build anything because I got distracted by Randvi. Sorry, folks! I'll get you that hunting lodge another time.

Butch:

Ah, man!  I lack fabric.  All the Kevins...all the banners I've climbed....all the flags....

Eivor.  It is even more common than berries.  Get on that shit. 

Feminina:

Eivor has EXACTING specifications when it comes to fabric. Moldy flags, Kevin pants, old sails: none of these are good enough. Not for...the Ration Bag.

Butch:

I suppose she does eat out of that.  I guess you don't want to store your food in Kevin's pants. 

Probably why she keeps that in a different bag than the maps and eels.  Wise, really.  Don't want to cross contaminate. 

Feminina:

Yeah. One must have standards. 

Butch:

One must.  If one of my ridiculous wines, someday, has notes of "Kevin's Pants," even I might hesitate.  

Moldy flags and old sails?  Let me at it. 

 

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