I recently sat down to remotely play three hours of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, in advance of its holiday 2020 launch. It’s incredibly difficult to get a handle on a game like this in only three hours. In Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, it was easy to spend six or seven hours on the first island alone, and Valhalla is supposed to be “even bigger,” which is unimaginable and seems like it will not scale if the series stays on its two-year release schedule.
But there you have it: In my three hours, I played what Ubisoft describes as “half a story arc,” in one region of the map. By the time I was done, I’d seen only a fraction of this world, and new map markers kept popping up.
What’s happening here?
The demo was mostly concerned with introducing the political intrigue of East Anglia. As is typical for Ubisoft’s PR strategy, larger questions about topics like Assassin lore, how the game explains its dual protagonists, and the modern storyline have been tabled, probably until Valhalla’s release. Apologies to everyone who still mourns Desmond Miles’ death-day.
Those god rays!!Image: Ubisoft Montreal/Ubisoft
I’m allowed a choice between a male or female Eivor, and I choose to play as a woman. Eivor’s Raven Clan hopes to settle in England, but wouldn’t you know, there is some tension between the Danes and the English, as well as between rival Viking clans. Eivor seems more even-keel than some previous Assassin’s Creed protagonists. At this point in the story, she’s well-established as a respected warrior and leader. If she has messier personality traits — like Bayek’s drive for vengeance, or Kassandra’s dirtbag humor — they don’t come through here. It might be that Eivor is simply stoic, unsentimental, and dutiful. Certainly the series has plenty of rambunctious hotheads, so why not feature someone who has their shit together?
Still, when attending a wedding during my playthrough, Eivor loosens up a bit to participate in the festivities, aka minigames. She drinks straight from a barrel of mead, and says it’s a “fool’s wager” to challenge her in a drinking game. She brags, but her confidence is quiet and clearly earned.
(Though not, it should be pointed out, by me: I fail at target practice, and at the rhythm-based drinking game.)
I also could not pass up the chance to try what Ubisoft has termed “Viking rap battles.” Flyting was just one of many, many activities available in East Anglia: Aside from the target practice and drinking game, there was also a meditative stone-stacking exercise. This gave me the feeling of being at a county fair, trying to decide between Whack-A-Mole or the milk bottle toss. Eivor is as confident about flyting as she is about everything else. In a match, my rival issues a spoken-word insult. I have a limited amount of time to select a rhyming comeback, which Eivor delivers with her husky voice. I crushed this.
I am good at flyting.
When I’m propositioned by a beardy Viking at the wedding, the demoist watching me play says that the same interaction will happen no matter what gender my character is. To this I say: hell yeah. In retrospect, I should have chosen to bone down so that I could report how the game handles sex scenes, but I was too shy to do that in front of a stranger.
The nugget of plot I’m given in the demo — a clash between Eivor and another Viking clan over who is the rightful king of East Anglia — doesn’t sing for me. I’ve been dropped into the game in media res, so whatever the political stakes are, I don’t have a great reason to care. What does sing is the setting.
A darker England
Assassin’s Creed has always been tied up in religion, and one of the things I appreciate about Origins, Odyssey, and now Valhalla is that ancient beliefs are as vital to the stories as the Catholic church is in the Ezio trilogy. As I’ve written before, in a world where people know less than we do about everything — science, navigation, their own bodies — it makes sense that myth feels tangibly real. This is not Miss Marple’s pastoral England. It’s more like Agatha Christie’s Murder is Easy, where danger lurks in the fields and someone might be a witch.
Valhalla takes place in 873 CE, at a time when England’s future as a Christian kingdom was by no means certain (and when the country that would go on to brutally colonize much of the world was itself being colonized). Norse, Christian, and Pagan elements mingle. Eivor speaks naturally of Odin, and at one point tangles with a fiendishly difficult boss, a woman decked in fur and skulls, her entire body tattooed: She’s Cordelia, one of the daughters of King Lerion. The king’s desiccated corpse is strung between two nearby trees.
Cordelia summons lightning strikes, and a mystical fog shrouds the shallow pool in which we fight. Earlier, in a spectacular set piece, my fleet of Viking longships sailed through a storm to besiege the castle stronghold of Rued, an enemy Viking. Every so often a flash of lightning would illuminate the castle’s craggy silhouette against the sky. As I drew nearer, flaming arrows fell on my ships in a blinding golden rain. It ruled, my dudes.
Making everyone watch this for the rest of my life.
Elsewhere, a village of thatched cottages is decked out with flowers for the wedding. There are sheep in a pen by the road, and pigs have wandered into the churchyard for lie-down.
If the predominant color scheme of Assassin’s Creed Origins was gold and blue, then this game is gold and green. Green ponds that I want to dip my toes in, green ponds that are fetid and cursed. Stone bridges that sit low on the green rivers, forcing my crew to lower the mast of our longship when we sail under. The sun bursts through the trees or a stained glass window and breaks into distinct rays of gold. If the state of global tourism hasn’t improved by “holiday 2020,” this game is going to upset me.
Eivor surveys a lake with a ruin in the center.Image: Ubisoft Montreal/Ubisoft
Actually talking about gameplay
The last three years of Assassin’s Creed have been a steady progression (ha! This is an RPG joke!) into RPG-land. Like Odyssey before it, Valhalla lets me unlock abilities that I can map to the face buttons on my controller. Depending on the weapon I’m using, these abilities correspond to the bow or to the rest of my general melee situation (in my demo, I was allowed to choose between axes of various sizes, a flail, and a spear).
There is a Viking equivalent to Odyssey’s Spartan Kick, and another ability that lets me charge enemies and crush them into walls. With my bow, one option lets me fire a burst of arrows that can target multiple enemies — or, in the case of a difficult boss, I can choose to absolutely light up one enemy. These abilities, as well as heavy attacks, are crucial for dealing with enemies who carry shields.
Valhalla’s Ability menu is more sparse than the sprawling web that was in Origins, but it lacks the perfect clarity of Odyssey’s neat rows. But just in case you thought we hadn’t hit RPG bingo with a vast open world, dialogue choice, weapon customization, and an ability tree, fear not. There is a new menu in this game: the Skill tree. I can increase my skills in three areas and get results such as higher attack power, more damage done in an assassination, and so on. But some skills are also activated with a button press, such as my Dual Swap skill that lets me swap weapons in my hands when I’m dual-wielding.
Everything the light touches, Simba.Image: Ubisoft Montreal/Ubisoft via Polygon
The Skill menu appears as a vast and interminable net of constellations, with stars corresponding to different skills, and more appearing when I zoom in. This menu is bigger than God, and is evil. At one point, I acquired a new skill and another branch of the already huge skill-zodiac unfurled, and I made an agonized sound. Three hours of gameplay was nowhere near enough time to wrangle with this beast, not even remotely.
Now that you’ve read 300 words about menus, a subject on which I apparently have a lot of opinions, let me tell you how the game plays: pretty good!
Eivor doesn’t feel particularly weighty with the basic hand ax and shield combo. The combat at first put me in mind of chopping firewood, and dodging when I’m locked onto a target is hyper fast.
At its best, Valhalla has a rhythm of parrying with the shield to disarm a foe, and then hacking away at them with the ax. Sneaking in a special ability, like the one where Eivor launches in the air and then drives her enemy into the ground, is super-duper satisfying.
I never quite became confident with this rhythm in my time with the game. It’s tempting to put that down to latency in the remote play setup, or maybe my 113 hours in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey have ruined me for the very slight mechanical changes of Valhalla. Either way, I experienced moments of ecstasy, followed by moments of absolute embarrassment when I mistimed a crucial parry, or got caught by an attack instead of dodging.
Ready for a wedding!Image: Ubisoft Montreal/Ubisoft
Fortunately, I can heal, and it’s innate now. Eivor needs to gather things like mushrooms or berries to replenish her rations, which she can munch during battle to recover health at the push of a button. The Witcher-esque aesthetic, the mushroom gathering, and the skill tree all added up to a moment where I needed to get to the top of a church and genuinely forgot that I could just climb there because I’m playing Assassin’s Creed.
Players who feel that the game’s traditional assassinations are being sidelined may not be swayed by Valhalla. Certainly we’ve been told that what we might consider the franchise’s calling cards are still a feature, but the story missions that I played were all castle-taking brawls, at one point complete with battering ram.
I still believe the franchise’s changes are for the best. As I’ve written before, the series cannot sustain itself simply by offering different variations of large buildings for me to sneak into. What’s being delivered to me now is apparently a mist-ringed bisexual Viking adventure that I will sink one hundred hours into.
Although no one likes a know-it-all, they dominate the Internet.
The Internet began as a vast repository of information. It quickly became a breeding ground for self-proclaimed experts seeking what most people desire: recognition and money.
Today, anyone with an Internet connection and some typing skills can position themselves, regardless of their education or experience, as a subject matter expert (SME). From relationship advice, career coaching, and health and nutrition tips to citizen journalists practicing pseudo-journalism, the Internet is awash with individuals—Internet talking heads—sharing their “insights,” which are, in large part, essentially educated guesses without the education or experience.
The Internet has become a 24/7/365 sitcom where armchair experts think they’re the star.
Not long ago, years, sometimes decades, of dedicated work and acquiring education in one’s field was once required to be recognized as an expert. The knowledge and opinions of doctors, scientists, historians, et al. were respected due to their education and experience. Today, a social media account and a knack for hyperbole are all it takes to present oneself as an “expert” to achieve Internet fame that can be monetized.
On the Internet, nearly every piece of content is self-serving in some way.
The line between actual expertise and self-professed knowledge has become blurry as an out-of-focus selfie. Inadvertently, social media platforms have created an informal degree program where likes and shares are equivalent to degrees. After reading selective articles, they’ve found via and watching some TikTok videos, a person can post a video claiming they’re an herbal medicine expert. Their new “knowledge,” which their followers will absorb, claims that Panda dung tea—one of the most expensive teas in the world and isn’t what its name implies—cures everything from hypertension to existential crisis. Meanwhile, registered dietitians are shaking their heads, wondering how to compete against all the misinformation their clients are exposed to.
More disturbing are individuals obsessed with evangelizing their beliefs or conspiracy theories. These people write in-depth blog posts, such as Elvis Is Alive and the Moon Landings Were Staged, with links to obscure YouTube videos, websites, social media accounts, and blogs. Regardless of your beliefs, someone or a group on the Internet shares them, thus confirming your beliefs.
Misinformation is the Internet’s currency used to get likes, shares, and engagement; thus, it often spreads like a cosmic joke. Consider the prevalence of clickbait headlines:
You Won’t Believe What Taylor Swift Says About Climate Change!
This Bedtime Drink Melts Belly Fat While You Sleep!
In One Week, I Turned $10 Into $1 Million!
Titles that make outrageous claims are how the content creator gets reads and views, which generates revenue via affiliate marketing, product placement, and pay-per-click (PPC) ads. Clickbait headlines are how you end up watching a TikTok video by a purported nutrition expert adamantly asserting you can lose belly fat while you sleep by drinking, for 14 consecutive days, a concoction of raw eggs, cinnamon, and apple cider vinegar 15 minutes before going to bed.
Our constant search for answers that’ll explain our convoluted world and our desire for shortcuts to success is how Internet talking heads achieve influencer status. Because we tend to seek low-hanging fruits, we listen to those with little experience or knowledge of the topics they discuss yet are astute enough to know what most people want to hear.
There’s a trend, more disturbing than spreading misinformation, that needs to be called out: individuals who’ve never achieved significant wealth or traded stocks giving how-to-make-easy-money advice, the appeal of which is undeniable. Several people I know have lost substantial money by following the “advice” of Internet talking heads.
Anyone on social media claiming to have a foolproof money-making strategy is lying. They wouldn’t be peddling their money-making strategy if they could make easy money.
Successful people tend to be secretive.
Social media companies design their respective algorithms to serve their advertisers—their source of revenue—interest; hence, content from Internet talking heads appears most prominent in your feeds. When a video of a self-professed expert goes viral, likely because it pressed an emotional button, the more people see it, the more engagement it receives, such as likes, shares and comments, creating a cycle akin to a tornado.
Imagine scrolling through your TikTok feed and stumbling upon a “scientist” who claims they can predict the weather using only aluminum foil, copper wire, sea salt and baking soda. You chuckle, but you notice his video got over 7,000 likes, has been shared over 600 times and received over 400 comments. You think to yourself, “Maybe this guy is onto something.” What started as a quest to achieve Internet fame evolved into an Internet-wide belief that weather forecasting can be as easy as DIY crafts.
Since anyone can call themselves “an expert,” you must cultivate critical thinking skills to distinguish genuine expertise from self-professed experts’ self-promoting nonsense. While the absurdity of the Internet can be entertaining, misinformation has serious consequences. The next time you read a headline that sounds too good to be true, it’s probably an Internet talking head making an educated guess; without the education seeking Internet fame, they can monetize.
TORONTO – A new survey says a majority of software engineers and developers feel tight project deadlines can put safety at risk.
Seventy-five per cent of the 1,000 global workers who responded to the survey released Tuesday say pressure to deliver projects on time and on budget could be compromising critical aspects like safety.
The concern is even higher among engineers and developers in North America, with 77 per cent of those surveyed on the continent reporting the urgency of projects could be straining safety.
The study was conducted between July and September by research agency Coleman Parkes and commissioned by BlackBerry Ltd.’s QNX division, which builds connected-car technology.
The results reflect a timeless tug of war engineers and developers grapple with as they balance the need to meet project deadlines with regulations and safety checks that can slow down the process.
Finding that balance is an issue that developers of even the simplest appliances face because of advancements in technology, said John Wall, a senior vice-president at BlackBerry and head of QNX.
“The software is getting more complicated and there is more software whether it’s in a vehicle, robotics, a toaster, you name it… so being able to patch vulnerabilities, to prevent bad actors from doing malicious acts is becoming more and more important,” he said.
The medical, industrial and automotive industries have standardized safety measures and anything they produce undergoes rigorous testing, but that work doesn’t happen overnight. It has to be carried out from the start and then at every step of the development process.
“What makes safety and security difficult is it’s an ongoing thing,” Wall said. “It’s not something where you’ve done it, and you are finished.”
The Waterloo, Ont.-based business found 90 per cent of its survey respondents reported that organizations are prioritizing safety.
However, when asked about why safety may not be a priority for their organization, 46 per cent of those surveyed answered cost pressures and 35 per cent said a lack of resources.
That doesn’t surprise Wall. Delays have become rampant in the development of tech, and in some cases, stand to push back the launch of vehicle lines by two years, he said.
“We have to make sure that people don’t compromise on safety and security to be able to get products out quicker,” he said.
“What we don’t want to see is people cutting corners and creating unsafe situations.”
The survey also took a peek at security breaches, which have hit major companies like London Drugs, Indigo Books & Music, Giant Tiger and Ticketmaster in recent years.
About 40 per cent of the survey’s respondents said they have encountered a security breach in their employer’s operating system. Those breaches resulted in major impacts for 27 per cent of respondents, moderate impacts for 42 per cent and minor impacts for 27 per cent.
“There are vulnerabilities all the time and this is what makes the job very difficult because when you ship the software, presumably the software has no security vulnerabilities, but things get discovered after the fact,” Wall said.
Security issues, he added, have really come to the forefront of the problems developers face, so “really without security, you have no safety.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 8, 2024.
As online shoppers hunt for bargains offered by Amazon during its annual fall sale this week, cybersecurity researchers are warning Canadians to beware of an influx of scammers posing as the tech giant.
In the 30 days leading up to Amazon’s Prime Big Deal Days, taking place Tuesday and Wednesday, there were more than 1,000 newly registered Amazon-related web domains, according to Check Point Software Technologies, a company that offers cybersecurity solutions.
The company said it deemed 88 per cent of those domains malicious or suspicious, suggesting they could have been set up by scammers to prey on vulnerable consumers. One in every 54 newly created Amazon-related domain included the phrase “Amazon Prime.”
“They’re almost indiscernible from the real Amazon domain,” said Robert Falzon, head of engineering at Check Point in Canada.
“With all these domains registered that look so similar, it’s tricking a lot of people. And that’s the whole intent here.”
Falzon said Check Point Research sees an uptick in attempted scams around big online shopping days throughout the year, including Prime Days.
Scams often come in the form of phishing emails, which are deceptive messages that appear to be from a reputable source in attempt to steal sensitive information.
In this case, he said scammers posing as Amazon commonly offer “outrageous” deals that appear to be associated with Prime Days, in order to trick recipients into clicking on a malicious link.
The cybersecurity firm said it has identified and blocked 100 unique Amazon Prime-themed scam emails targeting organizations and consumers over the past two weeks.
Scammers also target Prime members with unsolicited calls, claiming urgent account issues and requesting payment information.
“It’s like Christmas for them,” said Falzon.
“People expect there to be significant savings on Prime Day, so they’re not shocked that they see something of significant value. Usually, the old adage applies: If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.”
Amazon’s website lists a number of red flags that it recommends customers watch for to identify a potential impersonation scam.
Those include false urgency, requests for personal information, or indications that the sender prefers to complete the purchase outside of the Amazon website or mobile app.
Scammers may also request that customers exclusively pay with gift cards, a claim code or PIN. Any notifications about an order or delivery for an unexpected item should also raise alarm bells, the company says.
“During busy shopping moments, we tend to see a rise in impersonation scams reported by customers,” said Amazon spokeswoman Octavia Roufogalis in a statement.
“We will continue to invest in protecting consumers and educating the public on scam avoidance. We encourage consumers to report suspected scams to us so that we can protect their accounts and refer bad actors to law enforcement to help keep consumers safe.”
Falzon added that these scams are more successful than people might think.
As of June 30, the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre said there had been $284 million lost to fraud so far this year, affecting 15,941 victims.
But Falzon said many incidents go unreported, as some Canadians who are targeted do not know how or where to flag a scam, or may choose not to out of embarrassment.
Check Point recommends Amazon customers take precautions while shopping on Prime Days, including by checking URLs carefully, creating strong passwords on their accounts, and avoiding personal information being shared such as their birthday or social security number.
The cybersecurity company said consumers should also look for “https” at the beginning of a website URL, which indicates a secure connection, and use credit cards rather than debit cards for online shopping, which offer better protection and less liability if stolen.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 8, 2024.
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