Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is a nice-looking game, no doubt about it, but it arguably doesn't push next-gen consoles quite as hard as it could. Unlike Ubisoft’s own Watch Dogs: Legion, the game doesn’t feature ray tracing, and doesn’t offer true native 4K on either PS5 or Xbox Series X. Well, it seems more improvements are on the way for the high-end platforms.

　　Of course, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla has the usual array of paid and free content updates coming in 2021, but in a recent Game Informer interview, Ubisoft producer Julien Laferrière hinted at some of the other improvements in the works.

　　When looking at Valhalla’s post-launch plans, it was important to me to have quality-of-life fixes in there, and also be able to react to the new platforms, because they continue improving. We’ve got great reception on PS5, Series X, and PC as well -- people are definitely enjoying the high-end capabilities of the game, so we want to continue to capitalize on that. This isn’t meant to sound like bullshit or cliché, but for me, it’s about hearing what the player base is saying and reacting to that, on top of the extra content and the features.

　　Unfortunately, if you’re expecting naval battles to be one of the things added to Valhalla, you’re going to be disappointed. Laferrière explains leaving them out was an intentional creative decision based on Ubisoft’s Viking research…

　　One thing I can say that didn’t make it through that we thought might work very early on was naval combat. We actually found out that Vikings were not doing much naval combat; we thought they might be shooting flaming arrows like in Odyssey. But they just didn’t do that. So, we said, “There’s no sea in our map, only rivers...we’re going to treat the ship more like a vehicle.”

　　Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is available now on PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, and PS5.