Overview

Hello everyone.

A few weeks ago, as I was playing Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, I kept going back to how the game is structured and what it means for players. A few sleepless nights later — thanks to a painful tooth — I worked a bit on the structure to get what worked so well and how we could use that knowledge with our team at actezéro to create a solid and meaningful story structure.

Please note that I will try to be as spoiler-free as possible as I will discuss the structure and not the actual content.

Wait, Who Are You?

Why Did You Do This?

For myself first, as I am a big Assassin’s Creed fan in general and absolutely obsessed by structures in stories. When a game offers more than 80 hours of content and sells million of copies, I have to investigate and understand why it works so “well”, in my opinion.

(and your mileage may vary a lot)

General Structure

To work on this analysis I:

• played the game,
• tweeted about it,
• read extensively about the quests through various wikis (here is my main source),
• organized everything into yEd,
• wrote this piece.

My first tweets about it were actually about the size of the narrative content in the game:

https://twitter.com/iamleyeti/status/1479457890540924933?s=20&t=YiXQnM4WQh0x9KP_Mr4LYw

What was striking for me was that the main content was organized differently than in Odyssey as I tried to showed it in this amazing drawing: