Assassin's Creed Valhalla will link the lore of the series together, according to narrative director Darby McDevitt.
In Official PlayStation Magazine's next issue, #176, which goes on sale from Tuesday 2 June, the team spoke to McDevitt to get a behind-the-scenes look at the next game in the Assassin's Creed series.
One of the key questions that McDevitt answers is how Valhalla will fit into the series' deep lore, and he reveals that the Nordic adventure will be a key "bridge" for the series' lore between Assassin's Creed Origins and the original Assassin's Creed.
"We wanted to make a game that felt like it was starting to bridge the gap between [what] we created with The Hidden Ones and The Order of Ancients in Origins. That's because we have always wanted to be historically grounded with the origin of the Templars, even if these two groups have existed in our lore for thousands of years."
"So this game is going to try to serve as a kind of a bridge between Origins and [the original] Assassin's Creed in a way where some things that are happening are starting to set the stage for what comes in most of the games that follow."
Of course, with so many games in the series now, it can sometimes be hard tying all these elements together, but McDevitt wants to make sure that players also enjoy the connections they find between the games.
"I wanted fans to be able to wander through the world and almost at every turn really feel like they're discovering something that increases their knowledge of the whole [series], so it really feels like that there's not a wasted moment in this game, where you feel like every narrative discovery has a kind of a grand purpose. Hopefully there's quite a number of moments where your jaw drops because you're like, 'Oh, that's that connected to that. Okay, that's cool'."
The full feature in OPM also reveals plenty more details about the game, such as the way the narrative will unfold in Assassin's Creed Valhalla, and the importance of your settlement in England to the story. As McDevitt explains: “We have a few overlapping, parallel storylines in this game much like any film would have an A and a B plot. One of the continuous stories is the evolution of your settlement and the people within it. And as it grows, it experiences growing pains, and as one of the leaders you have to deal with that. And you have to make some tough decisions.”
