Is it just me, or does Ubisoft’s ongoing crawl back to Steam sometimes feel a little grudging? Sure, the company is returning to day-one Steam releases with February 14’s Assassin’s Creed Shadows, but you’re still going to have to launch Ubisoft Connect using Steam in a horrifying ouroboros of perpetual initialisation, aren’t you?
Almost as if Ubi would rather you just bought the game directly on its own platform and cut out the middleman. Perhaps that reticence about fully embracing Steam also explains why it’s taken two years for Assassin’s Creed Valhalla to get Steam Achievements.
But lo, the day has come. In an update posted earlier on Steam (and spotted even earlier than that via SteamDB), Ubisoft announced that it was twiddling the knobs and dials such that Valhalla now has a bevy of Steam cheevos. Thrill! At killing an enemy with a scythe while wearing a full Reaper armour set. Be amazed! As you enter the Assassin bureau in Francia. Gaze in wonder! At the possibility of reaching maximum Dublin renown.
You’re either normal, in which case the presence or lack of Steam achievements for a videogame has absolutely zero bearing on your life, or you’re a freak like me, and you’re having actual feelings about the whole thing.
Although Steam’s cheevos are, unequivocally, the least valuable of all videogame baubles (there are plenty of ways to unlock them all at once using third-party tools), I do enjoy the neolithic, idiot thrill of hearing the UI give a chirrup and telling me I’ve done a thing. Plus, I like hoovering up every possible achievement in games I really enjoy. Is Valhalla on that list? Well, no. But it’s probably on someone’s.
In an ideal world this’d be a move toward Ubisoft ditching off launcher bloat entirely: Letting those of us who buy our Ubi games on Steam use Steam’s features and services exclusively while the 12 people who still stick to Ubisoft Connect could just that one, with none of this ‘launchers launching launchers’ nonsense we have today. A bit like how Blizzard doesn’t make you fire up Battle.net to play Diablo on Steam. I think the wish might be father to the thought on that one, though. Enjoy your Steam cheevos, folks, I think we’re still gonna be stuck with Ubi Connect for some time to come yet.
