'Assassin's Creed: Valhalla' is set in the Viking Age
Engadget watched digital paint dry to save you time.
Following a full-day livestream, we now have a better idea of when and where the next game in Ubisoft’s long-running Assassin’s Creed franchise will take place. In Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, you’ll play an assassin at some point during the Viking Age, which took place between 793 and 1066 CE.
Publisher and developer Ubisoft picked the unconventional route of announcing the new game through a Photoshop livestream. An artist slowly and painstakingly built out the image you see above while fans speculated about the setting and classic songs from the series like “Ezio’s Family” played in the background. At one point in the stream, more than 50,000 people across Twitch and YouTube tuned in to watch artist Kode Abdo work his craft.
The Viking Age setting was rumored ahead of today’s stream, but the way in which Abdo built out the scene left some doubt about as to game’s timeframe for a good part of the day. For instance, the ruin you see in the foreground started the day as a castle, leading some gaming chair historians to speculate the title would take place closer to the time of the Norman conquest of England.
The two most recent Assassin’s Creed games, Odyessy and Origins, saw players visit Ptolemaic Egypt and Peloponnesian War-era Greece. The last time the franchise visited the British Isles was in 2015’s Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, which was set at the tail end of the industrial revolution. We’ll learn more about Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla tomorrow when Ubisoft premiers the first trailer for the game at 8AM PDT.
