Assassin’s Creed Valhalla revealed: A Norse mythology adventure set in Viking territory

Assassin’s Creed's next journey will take players to the frozen Nordic wilds. Ubisoft unveiled the next mainline title in its massively popular franchise today as Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, teasing a Viking-themed adventure ahead of an expected new trailer slated to arrive on Thursday. 

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla emerged as the new game’s title following a marathon-length livestream on Wednesday, which served up bit-by-bit glimpses of concept art from digital artist BossLogic, who partnered with the studio to slowly uncover pieces of the overall setting. Ubisoft shared an image of poster art from the game via Twitter, teasing a bifurcated land-and-sea theme (also previewed during the livestream), separated by a rugged axe-wielding warrior:

A first trailer for the game is set to land on Thursday (April 30), hopefully bringing more details to flesh out what Ubisoft hasn’t yet revealed. So far, we still don’t know if Valhalla is being created to land on next-gen consoles as well as current ones, though the studio did disclose that it plans to have the game in fans’ hands before the end of this year. 

Valhalla marks the first major entry in the Assassin’s Creed franchise since 2018’s Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, which traversed the craggy terrain and mythic lore-verse of ancient Greece. Overall, the franchise has sold a reported 140 million games since 2007, when the original Assassin’s Creed introduced PS3 and Xbox 360 players to Altair and the epic, ongoing alt-history struggle between the Assassins and the Templars.

The myth-rich land of the Vikings is a setting that’s already scored big recently with video game fans, thanks to Sony Santa Monica’s God of War — which took Kratos out of his Greek homeland for an open-world PS4 adventure back in 2018. That game found a way to highight Thor and Odin as just two significant pieces in a much larger, heavily-populated Nordic pantheon, and offered up a distincitve complement to the Norse mythology already on many movie fans' minds thanks to the MCU's big-screen depictions of Thor, Odin, Freya, and Loki. Against that bigger backdrop, it'll be interesting to see Ubisoft's approach to Valhalla's obvious wealth of source material — including how, or whether, it enlists its biggest names.

So far, the new, possible-protagonist character that graces Valhalla’s poster hasn’t shown his face — only that mean-looking axe. Expect more details on Assassin’s Creed Valhalla on Thursday, when the game’s first trailer arrives at 11 a.m. ET.