 What's up everybody? I'm The Hook. And I'm The Blade. Or maybe I'm The Hook. I don't know. You can choose. Or you can let the animus choose for you. Welcome to The Hook Blade podcast or The Blade Hook podcast. Or they let the animus decide what it's called podcast. I'm your host Lawson. Joined as always by Tim. This week, Ubisoft, they woke up from a bad dream. They remembered that they had to do a marketing campaign for Valhalla. And they've dumped it all on us in the span of about 24 hours. So in this episode, we're kind of, we're responding and reacting to some of the things we've learned about Valhalla over the last few hours. We're going to talk about cool things, new things like the settlement or Asgard question mark or letting the animus decide. We're converting to a fully player choice podcast. So there'll be multiple choice options throughout the episode. You can choose what you want to hear us talk about. Anyway, let's talk about the news. So Tim, do you want to get us started and kind of, let's go through some of the juicy tidbits and exciting reveals and cool stuff that we've learned about Assassin's Creed Valhalla? Well, I'm sorry. I'm getting a little, I'm a little sick to my stomach. Yeah. It's not that bad. It's not, it's not that bad. Is it that bad? Do you think it's that bad? I don't know. Well, because I'm actually, I'm a little mixed. Is it that bad? No. But does it provide more questions and answers? Yes. Or it's like answering different questions than the ones we have. Yeah. It's like, I don't know. It's like questions that we haven't even thought of yet. Maybe I'm stupid, but I just, I don't know. They're certainly aiming at the goal of selling the game. And maybe it's just our unique expectations as fans of the franchise it belongs to, that we are finding it falls short. Maybe every single year they try really hard to target casual players and the marketing ends up not being super representative of the actual game. Obviously, we've seen that a bunch of times. Like maybe there's not as much cause for delirious concern as I feel like there is, but there's a lot of shit that's got me, I don't know, Tim, it's got me, it's got me scratching. No, it's got me shaking my damn head. The most bizarre thing I think is the marketing campaign by itself inherently, you know, it's not targeted to us, but unless you count Darby's tweets, which are targeted exclusively to us. Well, that's what I'm getting at. Like the whiplash that we're experiencing, I think is because of Darby who is single-handedly trying to sell us on this experience as an Assassin's Creed fan. So I wonder if seeing new trailers and stuff today took some weight off his shoulders at all. Perhaps. I mean, the thing is, is like Darby has to one play crowd control and quell our fears. Yeah. And he also has to explain like the nitty gritty Assassin's Creed stuff that the marketing campaign doesn't want to. So the questions and concerns that the marketing campaign provide Darby has to extinguish, but he also has to be like, Hey guys, there's actually Assassin's Creed stuff in this. They're hitting really hard the whole, it's a Viking, be a Viking, you're a Viking Viking simulator 2020, I feel like is the whole like a Viking. Did you see the fucking like a Viking video, dude? I knew it existed and I did not want to. It's got like Brett Gelman, I think is his name, the character actor on like, he was on Stranger Things and Fleabag. He's a good actor. But he's doing this, he's doing this character that's almost like a bad skit. It's really dumb. The thing is about this video, there's an extended joke about coffee related diarrhea, but I only got like three minutes into the six minute clusterfuck of bizarreness. It's six minutes. It's six minutes long. And it's like, who is this for? Who's going to watch this and say, I want to buy what this is selling me? Like what kind of tone deaf dumb motherfucker wrote that script for that video and got like Brett Gelman and said, this is going to be great. This is going to sell, this is going to move some copies. Who's going to do it? The bit of it that I saw some guy blindfolded shot some guy in the knee with an arrow. And I imagined, I didn't even get that far. Well, I imagined that they made like a Skyrim joke, but I have no idea. They probably did. You know what it, you know what it kind of looked like though muted as it played for two seconds in front of me? It looked like one, like those old call of duty commercials. I can't, I can't quite remember if they're like, if they're like Mountain Dew. Oh, I know exactly what you're talking about. I think they were like Mountain Dew call of duty commercials. And it was like, like a real like nerdy dude in like a war zone. Those were all directed by someone who's like a famous director now. I'm pretty sure I couldn't tell you who it is. Is it Christopher Nolan? No. Come and get your tenants. I'm glad we've been able to include our audience in on that stupid fucking inside joke. I know. Yeah, the whole Brett Gelman thing. I don't know. You know what it is, dude? It reminds me of they did similar ads for Odyssey where they had an actor playing Alex Cios and it was like a cross promotion with Amazon Alexa only instead of having a robot in your house that listens to you and spies on everything. You have a Spartan warrior from 400 BC live in your house and he talks to you. I thought those were kind of funny, but almost no attempted humor in this Valhalla like a Viking shit. None of it is actually funny in the slightest. It's actually really sad and pathetic and I feel personally bad and embarrassed on behalf of anyone involved with it. I take no mistake. That's a genuine sentiment. If anyone listening to this had anything to do with it, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry for you. We have a spot for you right here as a guest on the Hookplayed podcast. If you ever want to talk about it, we're here to help. I have a reserved spot on my shoulder for you. Cry on. So something really fucking wacky though. They decided to blow their load completely on this one video where it was a deep dive. I liked that it said trailer because I woke up this morning was like, oh, guess I'll watch this trailer. Didn't realize I was making a seven minute commitment. Oh my Lord. Yeah. Well, before that, we did get some like concept art and stuff and they're talking about settlement functions. Yeah. Which are pretty much explored in this deep dive video. Yeah. The settlement system seems pretty robust. It does, but I don't, I just, I can't care. Dude, it's exactly what you've wanted. You said you wanted Monterey Gioni to be more in depth. That's what they're giving you. It's just for you, dude. It's what you want. Yeah, but you asked for it. Okay. It's like, it's literally like, yeah, but I'm not going to climb through a fucking, what, what kind of metaphor am I trying to do? I'm just, I'm not going, fuck me. What am I even trying to say here? I don't like it. It doesn't matter. Like it is what I want, but it's in a game that I, that I don't want. Okay. I guess that's fair. Look, if it was in any other game, I'd be super stoked about it. Yeah. You can build a bureau for assassins and then you can talk to Basim in there and he'll send you to kill people. That sounds fun. It seems like maybe those assassin missions might, like they're, they're based in the cities and they have more of a focus on social stealth. It's like they're taking a little assassin's creed game and they're putting it into, like it's 10% of a game that otherwise has nothing to do with assassin's creed. It's like, I never thought about it like that. Like, like, hey guys, do you want the assassin's creed part of this game? Well, go build the bureau in your settlement and we'll give you a tiny bit of it. It's going to be there. All the missions will probably be in the cities and they'll have social stealth primarily functions and it'll be like, here's a side of assassin's creed with your Viking simulator. And honestly, no, I give them no credit or praise for that. Like I would just want that to be the game, but beats the shit out of Odyssey with no assassins in it, right? Like, well, we've, we've hit rock bottom. This is not rock bottom that we're getting to right now. This is rock bottom plus two. There's certainly something to be said about how much they're going for this like a Viking thing that you have to consider is doing a like stealth like assassination type mission in the in like the main quest line. I know they're trying to say that everything is a main quest line, but that as you say, I will press X to doubt. There are things that are going to be more substantial than other things. That's obvious. If we have these big raids and all that and we're being a Viking, I just don't know if there's a lot of room for an actual assassination because as we've seen in the in that previous demo at UB forward, we know that it can be an assassination if you want to go stealthy, I guess. But otherwise, it's a boss battle with a choice at the end of it. So you have the option, I suppose, to turn it into an assassination if you want, but how many of those missions are going to be crafted to be an assassination, especially with the reliance on choice? I just don't see them giving you blinders and saying you have to be stealthy and you have to kill this guy with your head in blade, et cetera, et cetera, which I think is fine. I think if you go back to even the oldest Assassin's Creed games, typically there is a way to do it that's stealthy, and if you choose not to do it, congrats, you get to do the combat a bunch, and that's fine because you chose to do that. But it's still an assassination is the thing. The combat in those games, especially in the first game, punishes you for going that route. I don't think it ever did personally, but I respect your opinion. The combat, it wasn't like, especially in like where Maria Thorpe is disguised as Robert Asaba. I remember that mission. Well, okay, this example actually falls apart immediately because you can't do it stealthily, and I'm an idiot. That's all combat. Look, I totally get what you're saying. It's a little speculative. It entirely seems possible to me. If you're having dedicated, I'm an assassin for this one, missions that are given to you by Basim or whatever. Like, I would imagine they're designed to be stealthy, but we could be very wrong. I don't know. That's kind of where we're at on a lot of things. One thing I wanted to touch on is as kind of implied by a little bit by that like a Viking video. So I gotta, I threw up in my mouth a little bit just thinking about it right now. I've been reading like looking at IGN coverage and shit, which let's be real. IGN has a very strange relationship with this game, considering that actual that video, the like a Viking thing, I'm pretty sure was posted and maybe produced by IGN. Question mark. I'm pretty sure that you're right about that. But they talked about Valhalla and they're like, this game is really weird because you'll be in the main missions and there'll be these really deep, gritty, dark stories with, you know, themes of honor and glory or whatever the fuck. And it's all very serious, self important. And then there's like a side quest where you run into a prisoner and she's like, I need you to get a bunch of these eggs for me. And then you bring her the eggs and then she eats them so that she can fart really, really loud and hard and smelly to disrupt someone else in the prison. I think I didn't pay that close attention. But every everyone who's played like six hour hands on demo has said that the the side content they've come across, which is not side content, apparently, it's all main content. We don't have any side content in this game. It's all really fucking goofy. And some have said some of the goofiest shit they've ever seen in Assassin's Creed game happens in these rando side encounters. Now, I get tonally the like, if you look at it this way and you say origins was them trying to be the Witcher three. And you look at this now and you think it's them trying to be Red Dead Redemption to it's a staple of Rockstar game design across GTA and Red Dead Redemption to have those like strangers and freak situations where something weird happens. Hey, you're taking drugs and shooting hallucinated aliens now, just random shit like that. And it seems like that's exactly what they're doing in Valhalla. But I'm not sure I would expect tonally the consistency and its approach to pull that off. Because if you think back to playing Grand Theft Auto five, some of those main missions were pretty goofy. The whole tone was pretty tongue and cheek of that entire game. Valhalla maybe can't tell what it wants to be if every single piece of content we see advertising it is like experience the dark serious meditative Viking journey. Look up into the Aurora Borealis while you contemplate the nature of family. For this part, you're stacking stones and remembering your childhood. And then we don't even see that like 10 seconds later, I can help someone fart a bunch. Larson, you're missing something important here. Yeah, Avor is an historian, a poet, a warrior, an assassin, a Templar and a chiropractor. Okay, so all this makes sense because that's what Avor would do, Larson. It's the Viking fantasy where the fantasy of being a Viking is being a historian, warrior, poet, assassin, chiropractor, dentist, tattoo artist, NASCAR driver, rap battler. I don't know. I do. I want to allow for the distinct possibility that we're being too hard on this game. I think it's possible. I think it's possible. I don't know. I feel like I'm the kind of guy. It's going to be November 10th. I'm going to start playing it and you won't be because you don't want to. I'm going to get an hour or two into this game and I'm going to be like, Timothy, this is dope. And you're going to be like, what? You also have to consider, Larson, they throw another wrench into everything with you being able to fucking trip and go to Asgard. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, on one hand, it was really kind of funny seeing like pretty much a day after Darby's like, we're not doing any magic in this game. It's grounded. We do it the same way Origins did it. And the next day you've got a screenshot of Asgard and a video fighting a bunch of frost trolls, frost giants, I guess, I guess if it's purely contextualized as a drug trip. I'm question mark. I'm fine with it. I don't know. Well, also, is there nothing impactful to do in these Asgard sequences if it's just a drug trip? Yeah, if it's just a combat horde mode simulator or something, I would rather freeze my balls off actually. Yeah, like what is what is there like narratively to do in Asgard if none of it? What are going to be the stakes of any battle I have with frost giants? Well, yeah, because if I like, I'm not worried about Avor or I'm not also not worried about what Avor is going to do in this fictional drug trippy world. Am I going to get desynchronized for fighting poorly in a drug trip? Think about that for a second. Well, no, it's going to sober you up. And you're going to fall back into reality. Maybe it's like the watchdogs like minigames or you're fucking piloting a spider robot or something. And they're like, here's just something fun to do that we had some board developers that we had them on crunch time, but there was nothing for them to do because there are 15 studios working on this game and no one was on the same page. So we just developed a frost giant horde mode Jotunheim world. Like maybe that's all there is to it. I don't know. I don't care. It'll be fine. I'm dead inside. Assassin's Creed is dead inside. And we just got to deal with it. We just got to live with it. There's one more thing we got to mention. Oh, there's a couple more. No, I think there's just one more thing we got to mention. Oh, well, technically a couple. If you're counting male and female Avor as two things, which this game clearly isn't great question, dude, are we because it kind of fucking seems like we are, but it also seems like we aren't. And really what it is is nothing makes any fucking sense. Okay, just to quickly recap for anyone who's missing out on this information. We knew before you could switch between male and female Avor at any time in the story. Any time in the story. Any time. Any time. And you still can't. Now we are shown that there's a third option that basically says let God decide what gender you are. The animus will choose for you. How does the animus choose? Why does the animus choose? What is the animus choosing between are all great questions that apparently, according to Darby McDevitt and Stanislaw Kostiuk, are going to blow our balls off with how clever and cool they are. And I just want to stress that we literally have no framework whatsoever for how this concept makes a single lick of sense. If you think about it on any terms past what it tells you it is, how does it make sense that I guess we're supposed to believe you can watch a scene from the perspective of male Avor and it is canon, according to the animus, that Avor was a man during this scene and then could be the very next scene canonically in the past. According to the animus Avor was a woman. Now I'm pretty sure we could count on fewer than seven fingers. The number of explanations that are possible that would make this make sense, right? Like rapid fire. One possibility is there are two people named Avor in this game and one's a man and one's a woman and you can play as either one. I don't think that's what it is. That would make a whole lot of sense, but that's one possibility. The other possibility Avor is trans or gender fluid or something of that nature that they are genuinely changing the entire presentation of their gender, which considering the technology available at the time to go from looking like male Avor to female Avor, that would be stretching the limits of not only historical accuracy, but also accuracy to what's possible today in the real world. Option three, I think those are the only two options. No, I mean option three, there are two alternate realities. One where it's male Avor, one where it's female Avor. Animus is sliding between those two realities. Possibility number four, no one knows what Avor actually was, so the animus is constantly guessing for whatever reason and can't make up its damn mind. Do you got any? What do you got? How many possibilities are there? What are the odds that the explanation falls outside of what we're describing right now? You also have to consider that in the animus choosing option that's supposed to be more canon than the others, you can still choose at any time. It's not like you're just giving it to the animus and then it spends the rest of the game choosing for you. Right. It is, but you can still change between them at any point. What makes choosing at any point within this third option any more canon than choosing at any point and either one of the options less canon, like it's madness. How does that make sense? Look, Darby promises when it happens, it's fairly clear why. So there is going to be an explanation, but is it just like a modern day garbage thing where it's like, hey, we have to recalibrate the animus and apparently choosing not to let the animus decide, you'll lose a tiny bit of the narrative logic. So it is going to be very core to the story that there are these two gender versions of Avor and you're switching between them for purposeful reasons. But they're completely interchangeable as the thing. It doesn't matter which one you are in any given scene because you have the same choices. It's purely cosmetic. Yeah, you have the same choices. The same exact play through can happen between male and female Avor. And like, so that to me, they're being completely interchangeable. So how does it matter if the animus decides which one it is? Someone asked, how can you get attached to a character that changes gender constantly? Darby says it doesn't change. It's Avor. Darby McDevitt, what the fuck does that mean? What are you saying, Darby? What are you talking about? I would love, I would love more than anything else in the world to boot up Valhalla and find out that there's this crazy, cool, interesting mystery at the heart of the whole game that centers around the gender choice. But anytime the gender of the character, like this defining trait of the character's life and existence is going to be the center of a mystery, how can the answer to that mystery be interesting? At the end of the game, you find out it's one or the other or it's both or it's neither or what I have you. How is that going to like recontextualize the story of the game in an interesting way? How am I going to go, whoa, Avor was both? You know, like whatever the answer is, it doesn't make sense to me. I have to just trust in Darby, keep my blind faith going, I guess, but well, this doesn't make any sense. Here's the thing too, right? To let the animus decide option gets you closest to understanding the full mystery behind Avor. And you have to come back to the fact that like Darby McDevitt and the developers of this game didn't wake up one morning in the early days of designing Valhalla and say, I have a really cool idea that the centerpiece of the mystery for this game is going to involve this idea that Avor could be one gender or the other. You know, that's not how it went. At some point, Serge Haskot or whomever the fuck says, we need gender options in this game, figure it out. And either at that point, Darby or someone else says, let's do it in a cool way, or let's do it in an interesting way, or let's, you know, mine it for more depth than what Odyssey provided us. But how compelling can that element be when it's so transparently a side effect or result of cynical executive meddling? Here's why I think Darby has made a mistake. The thing is coming off of Odyssey, it's very clear gender choices, and it doesn't give a fuck about what's canon, because you can see whatever version of Alexios or Cassandra in the modern day. So whichever you played as is whichever the fuck was throughout history the entire time. And I think coming off of Valhalla's like, you know, going that same route of having two gender options, I can appreciate Darby's perspective of trying to get us engaged with a cool mystery in a cool way that it's still canon, because that's what matters to Darby. The canon still matters to Darby. My issue, I think with his whole, with his strategy here, is while like noble, I guess you could say, I think he's kind of hyping us up about something that no one was questioning in the beginning. Like, obviously you and I are going to be like, yo, like gender choices, kind of whack, what's canon, you know? But, but now we are talking about this way more than we would ever have before, because Darby has been perpetuating that this is going to be the coolest fucking mystery in the world. And I'm not even saying I don't believe him. But at this point, we have gone through so many different like speculation and speculations and discussions about how like about how this is going to work, like thematically in the game. And I thought I just think it would have been better or more cathartic if we begrudgingly boot up the game. And there's actually a really cool explanation hidden away in the game. But now it's been brought to our attention so much, at least you and I. And so now maybe the explanation doesn't satisfy us. And that's because we're so hyped about it, you know? I'm holding this, this whole concept to one very, very simple and clear standard, personally. If I play this game, and whatever the secret reveal or business is going on with Avor's private parts, whatever that is that we find out that is the context for all of this, where everything makes sense, and has a cool central mystery to Avor as a person or whatever. If I come away from the game thinking that that was so cool and so well done, that it was better than if I had just played a game where they said, here's your character, here's their gender, and it was not that deep at all. If I can think that this was better than if we'd just gotten a normal Assassin's Creed game, even especially with a strictly soul female protagonist. If I can think this was better than the most obvious and easy way of doing this that has ever existed, I'll be okay. But I do have the feeling that it's just going into so many deep levels of, like you said, there's mystery and there's hype over something as simple and obvious as like, what's the gender of the character I'm playing? It's like telling me that there's going to be a deep mystery behind what the true hair color is of my character. Like, this is not an element that deserves to be thought about this much outside of the context of what a character is, right? And if they say, here's a female character, cool, I'm all in, give me that. If they say, here's a male character, I'm going to be disappointed by the lack of quality representation, but I'll play it and it'll all make an internal cohesive sense. But if they're going to say, ooh, big mystery, what gender is the character? Will you figure it out? I'm like, do I want to? Is that a better mystery than any other of the mysteries you could have written instead about any other thing? Well, maybe something that we're missing, Lawson, is that the mystery isn't about what the gender is, but the mystery is why it is both genders, which either one, I mean, I'm just saying when I say what the gender is, I'm just writing in the simplest terms possible. I think you're totally right. Yeah, I'm just trying to rationalize what the actual fucking mystery is. I guess it's not like, is it female or male? It's both and why is that? But like I said, I genuinely feel like that explanation is going to be ruined by the amount of hype that has gone into it. Maybe I'm wrong. I hope I'm wrong. I think they should not have revealed the let the animus decide feature, because now we're in this place where we know too much, but not enough, you know, before this reveal. Yeah, we have more questions and answers. Exactly. That's not what you want to be in a marketing campaign. I personally, you want to be very in control of what people think about your game. And right now it's like, it's just you're being presented with an element that on face value does not make sense in any context that you could possibly have going into it. And then Darby is telling you, trust me, it'll all make sense. One, it's clear that Darby has no fucking control over what is how this marketing goes, which obviously, yeah, we know. Yeah. I'm not saying he should, but it's just Darby is constantly at the mercy of what they reveal that day. Yeah. And so Darby is running around like diner dash trying to put out fires and quell people's fears. And so some more Darby criticism, there's not enough of that in the community. So some Darby criticism, I would say, is when he says, like, I love the sound of everyone's heads exploding and whatnot, like, don't act like this explains anything, right? You know, we're still going to have to wait till November to find out. We know less now. Actually, Darby, our heads aren't exploding because we are so amazed and excited. Our heads are exploding from the fucking headache of trying to figure it out. I love you, but fuck me. Both literally and figuratively. And, you know, you've even got Stanislav, who's like, he's a game designer working on Watch Dogs Legion and from various Twitter interactions, it seems like he and Darby are good friends. So I would bet that that Stanislav like knows the skinny, like knows the deets. And he's also hyping it up. He's jumping out and he's been like, when you got, I think both of them have now said that you will eat your words and deeds or something. Like, we're all going to be so frustrated with ourselves forever doubting that this wasn't going to be the coolest mystery ever put to Assassin's Creed. I just can't imagine a mystery that deep or interesting, hinging on something so arbitrary is the character's gender. I'm not trying to say the gender doesn't matter. It absolutely does. But it is in the in the logic of this very game purely cosmetic. It doesn't change the personality. It doesn't change the backstory. It doesn't change what their dialogue options are. It changes their voice and their face. I'm not even convinced it changes the model of their body underneath the head, right? Their hair is the same half the time. Well, that's pretty much the kicker, right? Is if they weren't interchangeable vessels for you to make choices in, then it would it would be more impactful. But as it stands, I could go between male and female Avor to the point where the romance options don't change. Yeah. And like, let's say if I have a long term relationship, there's no marriage or kids. But if I have a long term relationship, as I have said before, and I switch genders in the middle of that romance option and no one cares, that is the definition of interchangeable. It's completely an expendable choice. And it doesn't. And look, I'm not doubting Darby necessarily, because I know this is all, like you said, a consequence of fucking Ubisoft. So like, I get it. And also what's what's important to point out here before we change up too much is that within the logic of this very game, as it has been presented and communicated to us, gender is both pretty meaningless to the extent that it doesn't materially affect the gameplay or options or even aesthetics beyond again, the characters face and voice. Gender is like almost purely a binary cosmetic thing that has no bearing on the gameplay itself. But we're also supposed to believe that it's the most important central facet of a deep mystery about the character. Like, does the gender matter not at all? Or completely? The game right now says both until we learn otherwise. So there's no way to interpret any of this information in a context where it's consistent with itself. If they just said you can choose male Avor or female Avor, and it's purely cosmetic, we've complained about the pitfalls of that at length. And those complaints are still valid, I think, but it'd be a lot less of a head fuck than to say that that one gender will be canon in some parts of the game and another gender will be canon to other parts of the game. Why does it matter which one is canon over the other if it is completely cosmetic? Why is a cosmetic decision canon over something else? And the fact that you can just choose at any point even still, it's just like and also something that I think that we forget about when when because we've gotten very focused on the canon gender. You can still make choices in this game. You can still there are probably being multiple endings. The animus choice does not decide for you a canon ending. So the fact that you can there's a canon gender, there's a canon gender, sure, there's not a canon ending. There's not a canon ending to that boss fight you just did. So what the fuck doesn't matter? Why are we squabbling over the canon gender when it doesn't make choices for you? Yeah, no, that's a great point. I didn't even think about it that way. Like, we're going to go through this this process of having this very confusing situation of where we're switching these genders, you know, during the game. And that'll be the only element that is controlled for canon accuracy. Everything else will be up to your choice. Yeah, it's like we're getting really we're getting so psyched about there's a canon option. If I can let the animus choose what gender I am, why can't I let the animus choose what I say in a dialogue scene? Right? Yeah, pretty much. And get a canon storyline. Pretty much. Like, that's the thing, right? Is the mystery now we know also is again, just hinging on the cosmetic differences between the two. Like, huh, is one ending that happens in the game? Any more canon than another? No, because you can still choose that. So I mean, look, there might be a canon ending. I think Odyssey had a canon ending. But it'll be weird that like, did you do the canon ending as the canon gender for that ending? Or did you do it? Well, yeah, that's what I'm saying, right? Is it can't both be canon that you're letting the animus decide. But also within that decision, you're just making whatever fuck off decision in the story you want to because it's only 50% can at that point, I feel a little goofy for caring this much. That's my thing right now. You know what I mean? Well, Lawson, do you know why I think we care this much? Why? Because Darby has made us care this much. I support plan everything is Darby's fault blame Darby. I love them. I love them for every other episode of this podcast. But now, I don't know, man, fuck Darby McDevitt. You know what? Fuck Darby. I'm not I'm just annoyed. I'm not like angry. Yeah, I think I'm annoyed because I applaud Darby for, you know, speaking to me and you specifically in terms of us being big fans. Yeah, it's just frustrating because I know that he's only having to go to these lengths, the lengths because, you know, as you said before, restrictions that you was off to put on to him and the team. Yeah, like, I don't think anyone gets out of bed and decides I'm going to design a fantabulous, shocking, cool Assassin's Creed mystery around whether or not my main character is a boy or girl. Consider that let's just say, okay, let's say Ubisoft isn't a terrible company and Lady Avor was the main character throughout this mystery no longer exists. It's completely a reaction to the sexism at Ubisoft. And, you know, I can't help but think that no matter what the better option would have been just to have one main character, you know. Yeah, that's exactly my point. Like if if this is so good that it just makes me go, I would never trade this in for a more conventional game with a straightforward player choice or straightforward, you know, protagonist gender. Yeah, that would make a difference to my perception. The funny thing is too, like Darby could listen to this episode in like a hypothetical alternate universe where Darby listens to our show. He could just he could pop up in the comments and say, you'll see you'll eat your words, boys. And we just have to be like, I guess, but that's the shit that we're really talking about right now. It's not everything else. It's the idea that like, we're being promised this crazy explanation to something that seems to defy every bit of sense that you could possibly have. I think it's also worth mentioning that our exact complaints Darby has said that very thing to you on Twitter, our exact complaints he has said, you'll see, you know, you're going to regret what you're saying, et cetera, et cetera. And I think some of it is kind of, there is something that that's like purposely ominous about in almost tongue in cheek when he's saying like, you know, you'll regret your words and, you know, it's on purpose clearly, but just it's like, what what possible answer could stack up to the like the hype that's being seeded? That's the thing is it all comes back to if Darby had never said a word about it, you and I would have been like, you know, it kind of sucks, there's not a canon option, or there's not a rhyme or reason to there being multiple choices between Avor and then we would have played the game because, OK, are any fans that also played Odyssey going to say no to Valhalla because their gender option, probably not. They're going to say no to Valhalla if like, and I also think Darby writing on this game and advising on it is a selling point for fans itself. They could have been completely silent about a lot of this or Darby could have been completely silent about this, I mean, and they still would have played it and then people would have taken to Twitter and then their their heads would have been exploding. They're not exploding now. That's now we have to preemptively explode our heads exactly, but only but only with the promise that our heads will explode. I'm going to go ahead and draw a line in the sand right now. If Valhalla comes out and I play it and it blows my dick and balls off with how good this mystery and how good this story is, I will I will delete this episode from everywhere it's available. I promise you that right now you'll never be able to listen to this episode again. It'll be the first thing I do the morning of November 11th after playing the game for for however many hours it takes me to figure out what this mystery is. When I go, damn, that's so cool. I'm going to delete this episode. It will be gone from anchor. It'll be gone from Spotify, YouTube, Apple, everything. And you'll just have to wonder what was episode 18 of the hookway podcast because it'll go from 17 to 19 and you'll never see this again. Unless it gets like a thousand views on YouTube, then I'll leave it up. But you got you catch my drift, of course. And you know, look, at the end of the day, there's also other things that I'm worried about from Valhalla that are completely separate from this whole gender shenanigan thing. It does look better. Graphically, visually, amazingly, it looks beautiful. Like I went from being like this game looks kind of trash to being like, oh, actually that is breathtaking in a lot of the videos and pictures we've seen. 100%. Even the kind of updated female like motion capture or whatever like it looks. Yeah, it looks like it looks like they've kind of given both Avor as a facelift actually, I think they've they've given female Avor some mystique, I think I think she has slightly more feminine features. She's maybe more it does look like that it does. Yeah, almost looks more like her voice actors too. Just in general, the models just look so much better now. And there's there are definitely like bits and pieces that I have seen from like the deep dive and just other other sources. This game, like you said, it looks breathtaking. It looks amazing. Like yeah, I think this is the first Assassin's Creed game to actually like kind of like take on Unity's graphics. I'm not there. I'm not there quite quite yet. But well, what I'm saying is, I think it has the potential is what I mean, like there are there are bits and pieces that I see of the world and we won't really know until we are playing it on our own televisions and whatnot. But yeah, it's more of a compliment to Unity because it's taken us this long to even get close, you know, right? I think that's all in all. And you know, I have to be fair, I talked earlier about how some of these early reviewers and people who've had this pre access gameplay, they're like, wow, these side content things are so fucking goofy and stupid. They're also pretty universally like the main characters and the actual story going on here might be the best that Assassin's Creed has ever done. That's a real thing people are saying right now. It seems very possible to me, we could just be in another AC4 situation where everyone was crying about how it wasn't an assassin game. And then we still get a story that that blows us away. Well, speak for yourself. I will. I am. I'm speaking for myself. And Timothy, fuck you. Because I'm still I still haven't forgiven you for what we for last week. I just haven't because you talk like you talk shit on the ending of AC4. And we've disagreed on so many things in our on our decades long friendship. But that one, I just I feel like you want to hurt me is what it is. You just sat in front of a mirror and you're like, how can I fuck with Lawson on this week's episode of the hook word podcast? Look, you want to talk about hurting you. You know what hurt me? I saw Nick bearish's resume printed out in your printer. You fuck. Well, yeah, desperate times call for desperate measures, son. I I just don't know how we can go on. Look, Nick, Nick was a great applicant, but we're I have to announce are actually moving forward with Wolf as the new cohost. Tim, it's been great having you these past 18 episodes. For anyone who didn't listen to last week's episode, Tim doesn't like the ending of AC4. We don't have to elaborate on it. We don't have to go into any more detail. If you want to know why he has these opinions, I actually still don't know. I I edited last week's episode and I still don't get it. But you can you can listen and see if you can figure out. It's actually the core mystery of Tim's character in that episode. And if you think it won't be mind blowing, you're going to eat your words and deeds. Yeah, it's true. I don't like it. Oh, man, this is tough. It's going to take me a while to get past this. I'm going to be ending every episode like and this has been the hookblade podcast hosted by Lawson and the guy who doesn't like the ending of AC4. Look, Lawson, the only way that we can get through this is together. In these troubled times, we need unity, not division. Both buggy 2014 Ubisoft titles, but that's besides the point. Get it? Unity and the division? Yes, I got it. I fucking hate myself. God, what was it like working for Ubisoft in 2014? That had to be the worst time. That had to be the most the most Ubisoft because that was before they'd even had really the unity problem of like someone said they couldn't animate women, you know? That was before, that was the beginning of this big house of cards of sexism come crashing down. That was the most, that was the time of greatest impunity at Ubisoft. Fuck, I, I like. It can't spell impunity without unity. I like, I forgot that they said that. Yeah, they were like, we don't want to animate women. It's a lot of work. Someone pointed out to it like very accurately, women have been animated since fucking brotherhood with the multiplayer characters. Yeah. In fact, not to the extent of unity's animation, you might be surprised that you can pretty much just take a female character model and put the male animations on it and it'll still look like a fucking person. They did it in Syndicate. They did it in Odyssey. They're doing it again in Valhalla. It was a dumb excuse. It was totally made up too. And I was, I was so frustrated with them at the time because if they were just honest about how the co-op worked and they were just like, well, everyone is represented as Arno. They'd already done this dog and watch dogs. You look like Aiden. Everyone else looks like someone else. You go into their games, you fuck with their shit. And everyone's like, whoa, this random grandma on the street is hacking my shit. But the person playing the grandma sees Aiden Pierce. It's very simple. You're all Arno. It's all Arno. Everyone is next generation Arno. So all you have to say when Polygon or Kotaku or whomever the fuck says, why can't I play multiplayer as a woman is you go, because that's not how the multiplayer works. You play yourself. You play Arno. And they go, oh, I get it. Like watch dogs. You go, yeah, you get a gold star. You figured it out. And then they were like, you know what sucks? Ketimating women. Yeah, they made it harder for themselves. They literally dug themselves deeper, because it was 2014. And Ubisoft existed in a bubble universe where sexism was still very cool. And they've been there until pretty much this year. And they're struggling now that the truth is just a reminder to make it all feel on topic and cohesive. I have a very strong feeling that would be I think very difficult to disprove that if we were in an alternate universe where Ubisoft wasn't a hot garbage bin full of sexism and disgusting behavior, like there would not be a necessity for this bizarre, Darby concocted gender mystery. I've been the hook. Jesus fuck me. On this week's episode of the hookplay podcast, Tim and Lawson unleashed their inner fanboy rage. I mean, it's all in good fun because at the end of the day, if it does blow our dicks off, it's not like I'm buying the game. So yeah, you're pretty much you're well on record at this point, like you're not buying it. Every time that I come around to the idea of buying it, they then release something to the equivalent of there being frost trolls in the game. And this time it was actually frost trolls. So and I do say that. And yet I'm probably going to buy it eventually. And if not on launch, which on launch is still a possibility because I sometimes forget that I co-host an Assassin's Creed podcast. And talking about Assassin's Creed is kind of a thing on there. Yeah. So how it comes out and we can't talk about it. It's like, is it going to be I'm explaining everything to you while I review the game? I don't know. But you also have to consider that or one viewer will understand my pain of not wanting to play Vahala. I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of the people listening to this podcast right now, whether or not you're enjoying yourselves, maybe you typically don't leave a comment. Well, if you're one of those people who never talks to us, but listens to the podcast, we would really like to hear from you. Since we can't get paid in real money, we can only get paid in like internet appreciation from people. So do your part to keep this podcast afloat by inflating our egos in the comment section on YouTube. If you're on Spotify, Apple, Google, somewhere else without a comment section, you can reach us at hookblade on Twitter and you can tell us what you thought. We would really appreciate hearing from any and all of you who listen to those. What are your thoughts on this whole gender kerfuffle shenanigans chicanery bullshit? What's what do you think? Like, are you stoked that there's something approaching anybody in the game giving a shit about what is or isn't canon? Because I get that. Like, I understand that could be exciting that like, wow, I can choose to play in a canon way. Neato burrito. How do you feel? Are you confused? Are you more excited? Do you buy the idea that we're going to get this mind blowing central mystery to Avor's character as part of that whole system? Let us know. I guess that wraps it up for this week. Well, I've been the hook. Or have you? I've been the blade, perhaps. Decide in the comments. Let us know. And stay tuned for answers to the deep thrilling mystery of who is the hook and who is the blade. If you think about it, we've been switching off every episode. So we have not truly answered the question yet of who is the hook or who is the blade? We have kept consistent with the animus decision. We've stayed canon by letting the animus change every episode, whether or not we're the hook or the blade. I think we should make a permanent final decision after Valhalla comes out if it's a good game. If not, we'll keep doing what we've always done and we'll change it every week. All right. Good night, everyone. See you next week. It's just frustrating because I know that he's only having to go to these lengths, lengths, the lengths of Jesus, fuck, length, lengths.