Gold, Blue, and White Orbs: What They Are & How Best to Explore
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Tips
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla introduces a completely new navigation and quest system that revolves around glowing orbs across the map:
- Gold – “Wealth” items like new gear, rare resources used to upgrade gear, and “books of knowledge” to learn new abilities.
- Blue – “Mysteries” that include mini-quests, puzzles, challenges, hidden secrets, Animus Anomalies, and more.
- White – “Artifacts” such as Roman artifacts, Zealots, Flying Paper, and more.
For the most part, that’s all fairly straight forward to understand and, but the game never really does a great job of explaining that to really soak up the most XP and level Eivor quickly, it’s pretty crucial to make sure you keep discovering and completing blue orb “Mysteries.”
These are second only to main and side quest content in leveling Eivor quickly, which is important if you want to raise Eivor’s power level quickly. Without taking the proper time to tick at least a few of these off every once in a while you’ll find yourself limited in where you can from the Alliance Map.
The Alliance Map Is for Show Only Until the Mid Game
That brings us nicely to the Alliance Map, which essentially serves as a chapter selection menu in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. Here’s the thing, though: until about 20 hours into the game it’s nothing more than a fancy overview of your progress so far.
Why? Because unless you’ve been exploring and raiding very thoroughly then you’re going to be under-leveled to go anywhere else but the next most obvious region. Do not make the mistake of visiting, say, Lunden, when your power level is only suitable for East Anglia.
Valhalla is a little flawed in the sense that it offers you the chance to go places you’re simply not ready for. It’s an illusion of choice…
Only the brave or stupid would venture outside of where the game wants you to go. We fell into the latter category during our review playthrough and paid for it with a very unenjoyable five or so hours in Lunden cheesing and stealthing our way through areas of the game where we were outclassed in every combat encounter.
The Alliance Map more or less works as intended later in the game. But for the first four or five occasions, Randvi asks you to “pledge” to a region; choose the obvious option, and don’t try to be clever!
Upgrade Your Horse to Swim
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Tips
The stables and aviary was the first building we built at Ravensthorpe, but it wasn’t until later that we realized the Riding Training tab offers one vital upgrade that everyone else should absolutely prioritize getting: your horse’s ability to swim.
We cannot overstate how much easier it makes exploration when you don’t have to continually dismount and swim across England’s dozens of rivers. Not only is it just a hell of a lot more convenient but your horse is really zippy across the water and speeds up traversal in a huge way.
Raids & Assaults Can Be Won Without Killing Everybody
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Tips
This is a big one because raids and castle assaults are often some of the trickiest gameplay segments, and there are no checkpoints. Too many times we got to the final area of a raid and then died in an attempt to fend off dozens of Saxons at the same time.
But the trick is that rather like some of the cinematic moments of the game which also feature largescale battles, there’s actually no need to fight even half the enemy soldiers you see.
In fact, it’s possible to actually run past almost everyone and just beeline to your objective.
Now, whether you want to spoil the immersion of the battle for yourself to that extent is up to you. Just know that it’s always possible to simply ignore the enemy or lead them away from an objective before returning to quickly grab the supplies and finish the raid/assault.
Plundering supplies and raw materials, and finishing the castle assaults was a heck of a lot less arduous once we’d worked this out.
The Skill Tree Only Makes Sense Later
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Tips
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla’s progression system isn’t a traditional level mechanic as in Origins and Odyssey. Instead of the game automatically improving your character’s stats and buffs as you reach XP milestones, you literally choose every single one manually.
In one sense, this adds a massive amount of depth to Valhalla’s role-playing systems. But on the other hand, there’s so much to take in that it’s completely overwhelming at first.
In fact, because the additional skills you pick up along the way –like, say, gaining an adrenaline slot, or damaging enemies when you parry– are hidden until you have reached a certain point on the tree; it’s really quite impossibly to properly plan your build.
You can, however, respec your character at any moment, simply pressing a button to reverse a skill point spend for something else. And it’s because of this that the skill tree only truly comes into its own about 20 hours into the game. From then on, you can really start to experiment.
So, put simply, just spend up willy nilly and worry about the tree later.
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