Assassin's Creed Valhalla does have sidequests, but they're a bit different

There have been a lot of claims over the last day that Assassin's Creed Valhalla won't have sidequests. Depending on where you were looking, it won't have any, it won't have any traditional ones or it just won't have many of them. This all seems to have stemmed from a single Gamespot article. And semantics.

Valhalla will have sidequests. Wes even wrote about them in his Assassin's Creed Valhalla hands-on!

"Where Valhalla falls short of The Witcher, at least from the limited bit I played, is in its sidequests," he wrote. "I only ran into a couple, but they were very short. In one, I helped a kid find a cat. In another, I helped a kid recover a horse from the other side of a river. They were two-minute diversions, not the rich, unpredictable quests that rooted Geralt in his world so effectively."

From what we've seen, you won't be looking for icons on the map that denote a quest giver, instead encountering them when you're wandering around. Ubisoft calls them world events, and they're not unique to Valhalla. The Red Dead Redemption series is full of them. It's certainly a different approach from Odyssey's sidequests, and it doesn't sound like it's for the better, but these are definitely still sidequests.

You'll be able to search for missing animals and whatever else Valhalla throws at you on November 17.

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Fraser is the UK online editor and has actually met The Internet in person. With over a decade of experience, he's been around the block a few times, serving as a freelancer, news editor and prolific reviewer. Strategy games have been a 30-year-long obsession, from tiny RTSs to sprawling political sims, and he never turns down the chance to rave about Total War or Crusader Kings. He's also been known to set up shop in the latest MMO and likes to wind down with an endlessly deep, systemic RPG. These days, when he's not editing, he can usually be found writing features that are 1,000 words too long or talking about his dog.