Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Drunk Glitch keeps getting weirder

Every time my Viking hero Eivor dies Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, she returns to life drunk. This is a known bug that the developers seem to have ready to patch, but just putting it up last night made it worse somehow. But in this case ‘worse’ also means ‘better’. And now I am in conflict over whether I want this to be resolved.

Here’s how the glitch initially came out Valhalla a few weeks ago. I loaded the save file on my Xbox and saw a loading screen. Then part of 9th century England would appear, along with Eivor, who would wiggle. The graphics become blurry and then sharper. Then Eivor would wobble a bit.

This was weird, but acceptable. The drunken effect fades away quickly. In addition, the game’s designers had indicated to Ubisoft Valhallaofficial support page that this was an unintended side effect of Valhalla’s new one Yuletide celebration, a party that Ubisoft added to the game’s central Viking settlement in mid-December.

Drunk status effect applied during and after loading screen?

Workaround: Meditating or sleeping in your bed should get rid of the status effect. (or you can just walk it away ..) “

The celebration adds a big tree, a horde of revelers, an archery challenge, and an option for drunken brawls. Somehow all this drink-based game code got knocked down, but I thought it would be fixed by the time the celebration ended on January 7th. At least that’s what I hoped.

This constant mild intoxication seemed, if not well, at least an interesting, fleeting inconvenience, something akin to a passing storm. It’s also an example of the kind of outage that’s becoming more common as more games run more and more on a calendar with updates: the seasonal outage.

And that’s where I was last night, after writing a draft of this post while waiting to share with Kotaku readers a funny, harmless disturbance. I planned to publish the article in the morning and that would be.

But last night, after I finished work and put the kids to bed, I loaded Valhalla make a backup. I decided to explore the Hamtunscire region, which is tailored for players with power level 340. My Eivor was only 170, but I thought it would be interesting to explore.

On the outskirts, I found an enemy encampment to loot and tried to take it down for half an hour. Indeed, the enemies were much more cordial than my usual opponents. They killed me a lot. Eivor kept coming back temporarily drunk, but eventually cleared the bases. During the process, I fired all my arrows and didn’t refill. (This will be important).

I ventured deeper into Hamtunscire and saw a marker for a side quest. It involved Eivor taking something to drink, except that the drink was poisoned, and suddenly I got the worst drunken effect I had seen in the game. My screen didn’t just get blurry. It turned black and white. While this was happening, an enemy attacked. It was too high for me, but I drew my bow and aimed for a weak point, except… no arrows.

I ran. The black and white poison drunken effect persisted. I kept running. The normal drunken effect would have faded by now. This had not. I hopped on my horse and galloped to the town of Wincestre. The effect finally ended. The haze stopped. The colors returned.

I approached some of Wincestre’s guards. They didn’t like my face and killed me.

Eivor came back to life, but she was not only drunk. She was – oh no! – poison drunk. Everything was black and white and wobbly.

This wasn’t that funny. And it did not fade. At least not fast enough.

I had read that sleeping causes the normal drunken status to disappear, so I teleported Eivor back to her settlement, let her go to sleep. She woke up sober, the colors recovered.

I quickly traveled back to Wincestre, told myself to play carefully, and climbed a tall building to survey the city.

Then I jumped off, hoping to land in a haystack, but I misunderstood and died.

Eivor came back to life on top of the tall building and, you guessed it, she was poisoned again.

This was annoying, but I had an idea. Maybe the game remembered my most recent state of intoxication. Maybe if I got drunk (without poison), at least I could come back to life wobbly, but without the world having bleached its color. But it didn’t work. She continued to relive from subsequent deaths in the poisoned state.

I could continue to travel quickly to the settlement after each death, but that would be too cumbersome. I could try to die less? I probably should have stopped playing in such a treacherous region, but what’s the fun in that? No, I had to find a way to quickly heal myself from being poison-drunk while stubbornly playing more missions I wasn’t ready for.

I let Eivor meditate. But that didn’t work.

Then I agreed to listen to a man talk about Jesus. That worked!

While doing all of this, I noticed something unexpected. Every time I’ve been poisoned Valhalla achieved a sober beauty. The game looks great overall, but removing the colors allows the light to more sharply define the protagonist and the scenery around her.

I started taking more screenshots.

I take a lot of screenshots of it Valhalla, and usually do this using the game’s photo mode. I like to use that in-game tool to pause the action, reframe a scene, maybe zoom in or out, even though I’d never used any of the filters, including a black and white one. Instead, I just ran around with the entire game world in this gif-drunken black and white state and then stopped to go into photo mode. When I lined up one of my photos, I found out how the magicians who created the game did this black and white trick.

The effect drunk by poison was an illusion. The game world hadn’t turned black and white after all. The developers had just placed a filter between my character and the camera. And with the photo mode, I could see exactly how they pulled this rabbit out of the hat.

Astonishing!

I could have fun with this. That filter can play a role in my screenshots.

It can also make for some cool / interesting GIFs:

Suddenly I had too much fun. I realized I would miss this. I wouldn’t want to miss the game falter, but I would miss it through this filter. I would miss playing with some unexpected visual trick, and I would miss the feeling that I broke the game’s code and found something beautiful in a glitch.

However, I would like Eivor to come back to life without the whole world getting blurry. So bring that patch.