The Assassin's Hidden Blade returns in the action moves to the Nordic land of vikings, with players placed in the shoes of series newcomer Eivor, who finds himself (or herself) thrust into the seemingly endless war between the Assassins and their sworn enemies, the Templars.
Starting with 2017's Assassin's Creed: Origins, the series has eschewed its stealth/action roots and leaned more into being a straight-up RPG. While the approach has led to commercial and critical success, many old-school fans of the series continue to lament the move away from moment-to-moment tense gameplay situations in favor of the trendy gameplay loop of earning loot and XP to upgrade the player character. While Assassin's Creed: Valhalla is continuing in this direction, the team at Ubisoft Montreal are also taking steps to make sure the game has distinct ties with the series' roots.
To that end, the iconic Hidden Blade is returning in Assassin's Creed: Valhalla. In an interview with Kotaku, Creative Director Ashraf Ismail stated that Eivor will acquire the Assassin's signature weapon. Furthermore, they will learn a technique that Eivor can employ to, "with the right timing," Ismail insists, "one-shot-kill virtually anybody."
Back in the pre-RPG era of Assassin's Creed, enemies weren't damage sponges and the player could reasonably take on pretty much any enemy in the game and have at least a reasonable chance of getting out alive. The Hidden Blade was arguably over-powered in those days, capable of killing instantaneously while being exceptionally useful in combat. In Assassin's Creed: Origins, however, the effectiveness of the Hidden Blade was diminished, and it lost the ability to take down tougher enemies with a single blow. Assassin's Creed: Odyssey didn't feature the Hidden Blade at all (save for an unusable version in a DLC chapter), and the ability to instantly kill tough enemies required players to invest heavily in the game's myriad skill trees - and even then, there wasn't a genuine guarantee of success.
It seems likely Valhalla's version of the Hidden Blade won't be quite as overpowered as the old-school versions of the weapon. Ismail's statement suggests it will take a particular in-game skill to unlock the weapon's full potential. That means players shouldn't expect to play Assassin's Creed Valhalla quite like the older entries in the series. This next-gen Assassin's Creed title is still very much an RPG experience, but it also contains fixes like a renewed focus on the Assassin's Creed modern story that will surely please longtime fans of the history-spanning stealth series.
Source: Kotaku
