Assassin's Creed Valhalla players have translated its fictional language

Assassin's Creed Valhalla contains within it a fictional language, one used by the Isu, the ancient and highly advanced civilization that predates humanity within the series' lore. Now some dedicated players have worked out how to translate some of that language into English.

The translation was worked out by folks at fan site Access The Animus, and they explain the process in the video below.

In brief, there are some examples of the Isu language in-game with corresponding translations into English. From those translations, they then extrapolated rules for the language, and used that to help them decipher otherwise untranslated text that appears on items within the Collector's Edition of the game. The translations aren't revelatory on their own - though there's more to come in a second video - but I found the process of it being deciphered interesting to watch. It reminded me that I need to finally get round to playing Heaven's Vault, a whole game about doing this.

Stories of game communities translating and inventing their own fictional languages are always fascinating to me. For example, our own Imogen's story for Eurogamer about Hollow Knight players building a real language from its in-game gibberish.

Assassin's Creed Valhalla also recently got a new patch, which among many other small fixes fixes an issue whereby "whales would sometimes start their fleeing behavior mid-air".