The team behind Assassin’s Creed Valhalla has acknowledged that recent updates haven’t met expectations, and committed to longer testing periods for updates going forward.In a blog post about the update pipeline for Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, a spokesperson wrote: “Our community is at the heart of everything we do, and we always strive to provide you with great experiences. That said, we recognize that some of our recent title updates may not have met your expectations or been up to our standard.”

Updates to Valhalla have brought fan-requested features, but many players have reported new bugs appearing within those updates. Recently, Ubisoft added a fan-requested transmogrification feature to Valhalla, but its implementation didn’t go down too well with fans. Other title updates have brought crashes and glitches to the game too. In response, Ubisoft is changing its production pipeline to deliver “more robust updates,” and are shifting from a 4-week to a 5-week update release cycle so that new patches can be tested thoroughly.

Have you played Assassin’s Creed Valhalla?

YESNO

Responding to the blog post, community members on Reddit voiced their concerns and asked about the potential of Ubisoft implementing New Game Plus to increase Valhalla’s replayability. “The game is so broken lmao. Every update brings worse bugs than before. I was really looking forward to the [Wrath of the Druids] DLC since I beat the game way before the first patch, just to hear they pushed it back. If I had new game plus, I could at least enjoy everything without the game and audio crashing like it did before the patches,” said TheFirstAtom. “If they mess up another update it will be embarrassing,” said Arun1910.

The blog also digs into the multi-stage process of creating title updates for a game as expansive as Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, explaining each part of the pipeline in detail. It also offers timelines for a few major fixes. The full fix for an issue that sees fish disappear from the map (making related quests difficult to complete) will arrive in June, with a partial solution coming in the April update. The team is also looking into a number of issues with quests In the Absence of an Ealdorman and the Pig of Prophecy. Ubisoft plans to implement a fix for the latter in a forthcoming April title update.

The team touched on the game’s current roadmap and the delay of its major DLC expansion, Wrath of the Druids, which will now land on May 13. The roadmap seen below also reveals that a new free game mode called Mastery Challenge will land in late spring after the launch of Title Update 1.2.2.

Assassin’s Creed longtime narrative director, Darby McDevitt, recently announced his departure from Ubisoft after 10 years of work writing on the franchise. Ubisoft has also announced that Ubisoft Forward, its summer digital conference, is part of E3 2021.

Jordan Oloman is a freelance writer for IGN. Follow him on Twitter.