By Jhaan Elker
"Assassin's Creed: Valhalla" may seem like old news: a four-month-old game supplanted in excitement by another viking-based open world game. But it has been a four-month-long frustration, because a game-breaking bug Ubisoft still has not fixed - even in its latest update.
The new 1.2 patch is a big one (12 or more GBs for most systems), bringing several new features like the ability to change the look of your weapons and equipment ala "Odyssey." There are also three new skills, a "close camera" option and the groundwork for Valhalla's next big event, the Ostara Festival, taking place March 18 to April 8.
While the patch also offers some bug fixes for graphics problems and smaller quests, a giant, game-breaking bug first reported in November 2020 still exists in Valhalla. The bug, which takes place during an unskippable main story quest, prevents players from interacting with any nonplayer character (NPC) in your village, Ravensthorpe - including Randvi, your main quest giver that allows you to pledge to new areas of the world map and gain access to more content.
Essentially, if you get this bug, you are stuck in a permanent game state where you cannot progress the main story line and basically cannot do anything except roam the empty-feeling map. Side quests such as Reda's timed quests, Valka's quests and river raids cannot be activated, because they require you to interact with a Ravensthorpe NPC to start.
The bug occurs around the halfway point of the game, and no one knows what triggers it, including Ubisoft. Typical workarounds for Valhalla quest bugs, such as reloading an earlier autosave, do not fix the bug. For some players, they'll get the bug 50-plus hours into the experience, with their only options to fix it being to restart the entire experience or wait for an Ubisoft fix.
"We are aware of this specific issue, and our teams are working on finding a fix," an Ubisoft representative wrote in an email to The Washington Post. "While we could not reproduce the issue on our end, we have been able to analyze some of the save data from affected players and are developing a fix that will be included in a forthcoming update."
(Editor's note: Minor spoilers ahead.)
The bug happens in the main quest "A Brewing Storm." After completing the Cent area main quests, you are supposed to report back to Randvi, and "A Brewing Storm" immediately triggers. The quest tells players to rest in their bed. After resting, a cutscene is supposed to play. In it, one of your now estranged compatriots, Dag, challenges you, Eivor, to a duel to see who should control your growing village while its de facto leader, Sigurd, is away.
However, if you get the bug, your game skips this cutscene entirely and leaves you in a bugged-out ghost-town version of Ravensthorpe. The quest description under "A Brewing Storm" never updates and is left blank, and Dag does not appear where he's supposed to. Because this is where you'd normally get into a fight with Dag, the game prevents you from interacting with NPCs . . . which is bad because the game also cannot advance the "Brewing Storm" questline without Dag present to kill.
You can find Dag in this bugged state in the northwestern corner of the village. But even if you kill him, he revives and the quest remains stuck.
The Washington Post