The combat definitely feels a little bit slower and more deliberate than in Origins / Odyssey. It feels good, but enemies kind of seem to live longer than I’d expect
It’s always kind of felt like the climbing controls get a little bit worse every game

it seems like it’s mostly based on the land you’re running over, then you also have this sprint toggle, which barely does anything on uneven terrain
There’s a whole sprint bar, but you can only start using it when the horse says

It seems like you can cancel out of more animations with your dodge than you can with your block, which feels a little weird to wrap my head around
I don’t know why takedowns are on R3, I have literally never locked on to an enemy on purpose, but man have I locked on to a lot of enemies by accident
Tying block/parry to L1 feels really weird when the player is wielding an offhand weapon or 2 handed weapon

You create a scenario where a tap is a low lag defensive move, but a hold is an attack that commits you to an attack animation
You want them both to be quickly and easily available, but the hold threshold has to be long enough that you don’t accidentally use the wrong one
At least in Valhalla, I find I end up using the wrong one constantly (usually using the L1 attack when I’m trying to parry)

I’m not really sure why they brought back the need for a sprint button, at least so far it seems like it just adds thumb pain for no gain, because I just always want to be sprinting

I guess they have now added a new state (ie. Sprinting > crouch-sprinting > walking > crouch-walking), but I’m not sure what need there was for it

I don’t really mind the anomaly segments where you play as Layla, they’re super otherworldly, and not too complicated, is at least how I initially feel

I feel this way about all the other “weird” activities, but the anomalies feel worth calling out specifically because normally the “real world” sections in AC suck and nobody wants them, but these anomalies feel really inoffensive

It feels like main story quests are decidedly much faster than world exploration, when it comes to leveling up your character
It feels like they’ve managed to really show raiding from this perspective of, it being this most glorious way to get resources, and it feels fun to do them, even despite the villagers screaming and the buildings burning
It feels like this game suffers, like Odyssey did, from the curse of having too much to do, there are just so many side collectibles to get, and most of them are just not worth the time

It feels like there isn’t a ton of variety in them, and most don’t offer much by way of gameplay
If you want to get everything, SO MUCH of your game time is spent just playing “where is the hidden entrance”
It’s to the point that I almost feel like the open world detracts from this game’s appeal, it tries so hard to push players to its least interesting content
It’s just so weird to place a marker on the map and say “here is your next objective, between here and there represents anywhere from 2 minutes, to dozens of hours worth of gameplay”, how do you pace that game well?

I think one of the big issues with the world content in this game is that, it really lacks a punchy reward

This isn’t a universal rule, but in general the exp rewards you get are small, and the resources you get appear A LOT. Only new gear feels significant
It’s more of a UX thing, but it also doesn’t feel like there isn’t a big “moment” for these rewards. Some of them glow a bit, but even then, the element UI is still displayed way off in the corner of the screen

THEN you see the little territory UI show up to cross off one of the squares for that region, and if anything, it kind of makes me feel worse, because you’re just showing me how more times I need to repeat this task to clear out the region

It’s very interesting having separate difficulty levels for stealth/combat/exploration
It feels like things appear on your compass from way too far away, it starts to look very crowded when you have things on there that are like 1km away or more, which typically means it’s probably not even on the same land mass
I really wish there was an easy way to opt out of the photo mode markers on my map, I can’t remember if there was a way to do this in Origins/Odyssey

I can turn photo mode off for myself, but I can’t turn off seeing other peoples’ photos???

It feels like World Events could use a lot of help as far as signage, it becomes very easy to completely lose where your objective is

The event isn’t seemingly tracked in any meaningful way
The event icon ONLY ever displays where the event STARTS
So if a character moves away, or they instruct you to go somewhere else, you’re just completely on your own (even with exploration difficulty set to easy)
I don’t even really mind if there aren’t more functional markers for these, but you often can’t even talk to the NPC again or something as a reminder, it’s kind of down to, pay attention when you arrive, or get lost forever

It feels like the UI is constantly pinging and shooting particles at me, and I don’t know what it actually means half the time
I find it really weird that your cursor can’t actually snap to many things on the map, it makes it hard to acquire information as to what the icon actually represents
There isn’t really a good way to associate a quest in the quest screen with a quest marker on the map

There’s no way to jump directly to the quest marker
Even after you track the mission, you just have to find what on the map has changed
You’re only real recourse is to zoom in on some water and see which markers are clamped
AC Origins and Odyssey both had this problem as well

It feels like they are very aggressive when it comes to hiding on-screen controls

A common situation is, I enter some altered control state (say, I pick up a jar), I move to my target (say, a cracked floor), and now that I want to “do the thing”, the controls have long since been hidden, so now I don’t know what they are

It’s a little weird to me that L2/R2 work to zoom in/out on the map, but not the skill tree (right stick up/down works for both screens)

I get that they want you to use the right stick, but L2/R2 are better buttons for this imo
The fact that I CAN do it on the map, is constantly re-conditioning my brain to think I can ALSO do it on the skill tree, so I’m never getting used to what the actual controls are

For whatever reason, it feels like this game has so many random awkward pauses and animations

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