So imagine my surprise when I couldn’t hear Evior telling me an area was unsafe and then stumbling on an enemy camp. As you wander the world, Eivor will speak about whether the water you’re in is dangerously cold, they’ll mention something about the raven, they’ll mention something about the area not being safe, they’ll say things while onboard the boat, but these are never subtitled. Subtitles that don’t even exist for when the protagonist is talking to the player about important information. But this could be down to a bug, and I can forgive that part of conversations would rarely be unsubtitled.īut what was frustrating for me, was the issue that spans across Assassin’s Creed Origins, and Assassin’s Creed Odyssey as well. Sometimes small spoken quips -such as a one or two word reply- felt too quick to read, and sometimes the subtitles didn’t appear at all during gameplay scenes. Characters would sometimes continue speaking with subtitles struggling to follow. This was massively helpful, but the next step would now be allowing players to see a “live preview” so they can see each option coming together to show exactly how the subtitles will look with all changes applied rather than separately.īut the huge improvement to their visual presentation was let down by the bugs of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and what felt like unfinished optimization. What’s more, is that subtitle options -and other customizable elements- offer a preview screen to the right-hand side, allowing you to see exactly what the differences between each option look like in comparison with one another. You can change how they’re presented with far greater customization, such as adjusting the size, enabling speaker names, and choosing how dark the background is with a slider. In Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, the presentation of dialogue from the previous two games is heavily present and actually builds on them by a lot. One of the first things I want to touch on is the subtitles, my favorite topic, and one with a lot of unpacking to do. There’s a mixture of presets as well as sliders so you can cater elements specifically. Obviously, navigating to the actual options menu will open up a much more diverse range of customization, with Ubisoft offering players a good level of customization. There are options for controls, icon sizes, text size, and basic subtitles and closed captions alongside a few others. Then you get to adjust some content options for blood, dismemberment, and other gross things. First up is the option to enable menu narration.
And given how the past two games in the series have gone above and beyond, I went into this new iteration with high hopes.Īs with Ubisoft games now, the game starts with options for accessibility before you reach the menu. And while the world looks gorgeous, and the story takes a nice turn back into becoming a game about being an assassin, we’re not here to touch on those, but instead how accessible the game is for those that are Deaf/Hard of Hearing. Instead, I probably deserve my afterlife spent in Helheim because of the number of times I “died” inside trying to understand the game.īut despite struggling with the game, I was at least able to travel back in time to an England in which we had Four Kingdoms and a time where we didn’t wash our feet as much. But in Ubisoft’s latest Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, even though I continued to die over and over in battle, I never felt worthy of Valhalla. Valhalla, the place a Viking goes should they die in battle, to sit and feast as they wait for Ragnarok.