Assassin's Creed Valhalla patch will make you redownload the game to get performance gains
Welcome improvements but a big download!
The next patch for Assassin's Creed Valhalla is a big one: 78GB big. Ubisoft today announced that next week's patch "will "will require players to re-download the entire game as part of a data restructuring." The whole base game, downloaded all over again. It's for a good cause, at least. This should make the game load faster and generally run better, which is a nice change for a game to still have the motivation to deliver a year after launch, but maybe not such welcome news if you're on a slow, throttled, or metered connection.
"The upcoming Title Update consolidates the game files, resulting in a smaller overall game size on all platforms," Ubisoft explain in the announcement. "Additionally, performance should improve with this data restructuring, with faster loading screen times, improved world data streaming, and overall runtime performance."
So, the download to go from 1.4.0 to 1.4.1 is 78GB on PC. Once that's installed, the whole game will take up 77GB, and Ubisoft say you'll be saving 34GB. And get those other perks. Different numbers for the console versions and different languages, obvs.
The update is due sometime next week. As someone with a decent Internet connection, 78GB isn't a huge download for me. I can take that. That'll happily tick over in the background while I'm working. But for some people, 78GB won't just be slow, it'll be expensive.
Ubisoft explain that the restructuring is part of their plan "to continue supporting Assassin's Creed Valhalla with future content and game updates," so I guess that's promising too. But again, big download. The latest big addition was the Valhalla Discovery Tour, an edutaintment experience like they've released for the last few AssCreed games, this time with more guided playable quests.