Trivia / Assassin's Creed: Valhalla

• Accidentally-Correct Writing: There is an actual English village known as Ravensthorpe which is located roughly in the same region as its fictional counterpart, something that the developers didn't know about until others brought it up.
• Acting for Two:
  • Magnus Bruun voices three characters — male Eivor, Odin, and Varin.
  • Simon Lee Philips voices Octavian/Obsert and Brendan of Clonfert.
  • Cecilie Stenspil plays female Eivor/Eivor Varinsdottir and Rosta.
  • Idun Mealor Olsen voices no less than four characters — young Eivor, Asta, Kaija, and Ratatosk.
  • Sandra Yi Sencindiver voices Yanli and Ljufvina Bjarmasdottir.
• Adored By The Studio: Compared to some of the other games in the Assassin's Creed franchise, Valhalla has received the lion's share of spin-off material in the form of a prequel comic series, multiple novels (including an entire graphic novel trilogy), two manhwa series, a webcomic and a children's book starring Eivor. And that's not getting into the seasonal updates released around specific holidays such as Christmas or Easter.
• Content Leak: 30 minutes of gameplay was leaked online on July 5, 2020.
• Defictionalization: A real-life version of the orlog dice game will be made available in December 2021 thanks to a massively successful Kickstarter campaign.
• Development Gag:
  • After the film's release, Ubisoft expressed interest in bringing its claw-like Animus design to the games in some form. The Yggdrasil works almost exactly like it, although with a different purpose in mind, and the bodies hanging from it don't move.
  • Shaun and Rebecca are playable in Discovery Mode, after being shafted from being playable in favor of Basim in the modern day epilogue.
• Dueling Works:
  • With Valhalla hitting the stores just one month before the release of Cyberpunk 2077, another huge, highly anticipated triple-A Wide-Open Sandbox Action RPG with a customizable protagonist, it was vying for a broadly similar clientele's attention from the outset despite their wildly disparate settings. Cyberpunk being Christmas Rushed didn't play in its favor.
  • Another example is the Vikings sequel series also titled Valhalla, which like the game involves a group of Vikings moving away from Scandinavia to find a new home elsewhere in Dark Age Europe while England is trying to stave off an invasion from hostile forces.
• Fake Nationality:
  • The Arabic Basim ibn Ishaq is played by Carlo Rota, an Italian-Canadian chef and actor.
  • The male and female versions of the Norwegian Eivor are voiced by Danish actors Magnus Brunn and Cecilie Stenspil respectively. Same with their parents Varin and Rosta.
  • Similar to his adopted sibling, Sigurd Styrbjornsson is Norwegian but he's played by the Icelandic Gudmundur Throvaldsson.
  • Sandra Yi Sencindiver, an actress of Danish and Korean descent, voices the Chinese Yanli and the Siberian/Mongol Ljufvina Bjarmsdottir.
• Follow the Leader:
  • Valhalla would have never existed at all it without the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Thor in the 2010s which sparked renewed interest in Norse mythology as well as its two biggest influences: Vikings and especially The Last Kingdom.
  • While Origins and Odyssey had already taken noticeable inspiration from the Dark Souls series in terms of combat design, this one takes it up a notch, to the point where the first serious fight in the game is against an enemy who at default difficulty can slaughter Eivor with just two hits while being able to take an great deal of damage in return. Fortunately, the game features a great deal of flexibility in terms of its difficulty settings, as opposed to the fixed Nintendo Hard difficulty of most FromSoftware games.
• Inspiration for the Work: Ashraf Ismail has said that the game drew a lot of influence from Eaters of the Dead, a historical adventure novel by Michael Crichton about Ahmad ibn Fadlan's travels to Russia where he meets Buliwyf (aka Beowulf) and his warriors. Indeed, Basim ibn Ishaq's interactions with Eivor and the Raven Clan are directly taken from the novel with even a special mission called "The Legend of Beowulf" that's inspired by the myth.
• Lying Creator: Despite Ubisoft's claims to the contrary during the pre-release phase, Valhalla still locks its world and main story behind Beef Gates, forcing players to grind a fair amount of side content on a regular basis, although nowhere near as bad as its immediate predecessor. Ubisoft also claimed to have dialed down the number of side quests in comparison to Odyssey, and in a strictly numerical sense that might be true, but measured against the scope of the game at large, side content still makes up the vast majority of its total play time.
• The Other Darrin: Ezio Auditore's quick vocal cameo was done by an imitator, although few can tell the difference. Also qualifies as a case of Flashback with the Other Darrin given the nature of the line.
• Promoted Fanboy: Jeppe Beck Laursen, Halfdan's voice actor, was a big fan of the series prior to being picked for the part.
• Prop Recycling: Randvi's hairstyle is Kassandra's recycled hairstyle from Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, and a few other female side characters also wear it. Funnily enough, this actually becomes a minor plot point in the Odyssey-Valhalla crossover, where several characters assume the "warrior with a braid" is Randvi before they meet Kassandra.
• Recycled Script:
  • The modern-day plot shares many beats with Assassin's Creed III. Namely, the protagonist is manipulated by an Isu, whose husband was reincarnated into a Sage, to access a Temple and stop a cataclysm that would wipe humanity. This process leaves the protagonist dead with their consciousness trapped into the Grey. Juno and Aletheia even have similar appearances. This is possibly intentional, as Layla and the Reader discuss both events in the epilogue.
  • An idea from Assassin's Creed: Odyssey was also recycled, namely the head of the Cult/Order turning against their organization.
• Refitted for Sequel: Towards the end of Valhalla's DLC life cycle, a particular piece of DLC would have taken players into the shoes of Basim during his life prior to meeting Sigurd, showing his life in Baghdad and his growth into the person he'd become by the events of the game. However, this DLC would end up being made into the next full installment of the franchise, Assassin's Creed: Mirage, due to the developers feeling that the opportunities presented by the idea were too intriguing to limit to DLC.
• Voice-Only Cameo:
  • Octavian/Osbert's actor Simon Lee Philips voices Brendan of Clonfert when Eivor reads the carvings on the Standing stones that document his interactions with the Isu.
  • Abubakar Salim reprises his role as Bayek for a voice-only cameo appearance in the mission "A Brief History of the Hidden Ones" when Eivor finds the pages of the Magas Codex.
  • Ezio Auditore's voice is heard by Gunlodr/Minerva while trying to communicate with the future. However it isn't Roger Craig Smith but instead a soundalike imitator
• What Could Have Been:
  • A shield wall feature was planned, but it fell through because of a combination of being unintuitive for players and being too technically difficult to pull off in a timely manner.
  • Flyting:
    • Figuring out rhymes for flyting would've been a bit more complex and involve doing observations on the person in question, but this was deemed as too esoteric.
    • 9th Century flyting involved a lot of alliteration, kennings, and a particular meter, so rhyming was chosen because it was deemed more intuitive for the average modern player even if it wasn't very accurate to the time period.
  • Eivor's name:
    • Eivor was originally going to be named Jora, as according to the dev team's research it meant "kingly", hinting at Eivor's connection to Odin as a Sage, but when Dr. Jackson Crawford came to see their research about four weeks before audio recordings were to begin, they learned it actually means "horse"^note They theorize one of the sources they used was using "Jora" as a figurative name to describe a king. It ends up getting referenced as a Mythology Gag when Eivor needs a fake name while in Vinland and the oddity of being called that gets lampshaded.
    • A runner-up was Valdis, which ended up being the name of Oswald's Love Interest.
  • One-handed swords were scrapped for the base game despite being accurate to the time period because mechanically they were too similar to axes. Due to popular demand, they were eventually added to the game through DLC.
  • Naval combat was considered early on, but was scrapped because the Vikings didn't partake in it very often.
  • When it came to deciding how to integrate both male and female protagonists into the historical section of the game, the two original ideas were either that A) Eivor was male and Layla could optionally superimpose herself into the simulation (Like how Altair was mostly just Desmond in a robe in the first game), or B) Eivor was female and a Sage of Aita like every Sage beforehand. It was then decided that Eivor being Odin's reincarnation would be a much cooler idea.
  • The original idea for the prophecy was Eivor being told that no matter what they did in life, they would never go to Valhalla in death, before it was deemed uncompelling.
  • Basim replacing Layla in the modern day was a relatively late idea, and originally Basim would just disappear into the world and the player could choose to play as Shaun and/or Rebecca after Layla's story is completed. It was then realized that playing as Basim would be more interesting.
  • The final game only features two of the Nine Realms, Asgard and Jotunheim. However, one of the Discovery Mode nodes in Asgard ("The Nine Realms") features concept art for Muspelheim, "The blazing Realm of Fire", suggesting that there was at least some interest in representing it in-game as well.^note That said, the complete lack of details on the realm's potential role could also mean it's planned to be future content.
• Working Title: The codename for Assassin's Creed: Valhalla in its developmental stage was Assassin's Creed: Kingdoms.
• You Sound Familiar: Paul Amos, voice actor for King Rhodri, also played Jacob Frye.

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