Assassin's Creed Valhalla starts celebrating Yuletide today

Ubisoft's Viking adventure, Assassin's Creed Valhalla, adds some limited-time winter festivities today. Preparations for the Yule Festival have dropped alongside the game's 1.1.0 title update, which also lays the groundwork for the upcoming Settlement expansion. It all comes with a bundle of merry bug fixes and game improvements too - addressing the serious stuff like freezes and balancing, and the fun stuff such as floating Eivors and clingy NPCs.

"The Yule Festival is a time-limited event with several festivities to enjoy and rewards to obtain," Ubi say in the patch notes. "To bring this and future festivals to life, you'll see the arrival of the revellers just east of the current settlement."

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As for the rest of this big update, the devs have made a ton of improvements that should make life in ye olde England a bit nicer. For starters, they've addressed some annoying freezes on PC which could occur when players performed specific actions for the first time. They've also balanced NPC power levels across all difficulties, which alters a number of things:

• NPCs power will now be at a maximum difference of 51 below the player.
• NPCs that are 51 power below the player will be highlighted in green.
• World bosses will match the player's power level when the power exceeds the world bosses’ base level. (also applies to: Alpha animals, Zealots)

Various graphics and animation issues have been sorted out, including some delightfully silly ones. Here's a selection of my faves:

• Addressed an issue where NPCs that are being assassinated while being unconscious would sometimes get up during the animation.
• Addressed an issue that caused Tarben to follow Eivor everywhere when The Baker's Plaint wasn't completed.
• Addressed an issue where Eivor would sometimes be levitating during Assault outros.
• Addressed an issue in Cruel Destiny that prevented players from proceeding to the second phase of the boss fight. Quest name checks out.
• Addressed an issue that allowed players to shoot targets through walls.
• Addressed an issue where hitting a horse with a Saxon boat will cause it to disappear when mounting it.
• Addressed an issue where NPCs may randomly start pirouetting on a Saxon boat.

Tons more stuff has been altered as well, so do check out the full patch notes to see the rest. And if you haven't downloaded it already, the patch size is around 5.6GB.

Alice Bee made note of some of the bugs and janky bits in her Assassin's Creed Valhalla review, but they didn't ruin the experience too much: "Valhalla is a lively grab bag of all the best bits from Assassin’s Creed games past," she says. "For fans of the series it’s really entertaining. It might not set the world on fire, but you can set some virtual bits on fire yourself if you want."