An Assassin's Creed glitch is getting people wasted
It's been quite a month for hilarious game glitches.
If you're one of the many people who invested in Cyberpunk 2077 we can almost guarantee that you're sick of hearing the word "glitch" almost as much as you're sick of experiencing them.
Unfortunately, it seems glitches, like misery, love company. If you can bear with us for a moment, we have something to show you...
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Over the past month, players of Assassin's Creed: Valhalla have been reporting a persistent glitch that causes them to re-spawn drunk, meaning Eivor, the game's protagonist, momentarily stumbles and sways amid a blurred camera vantage.
According to the Ubisoft, the game's developers, the glitch is a product of a Yuletide celebration – an in-game party added in December that allows players to participate in some winter festivities, including lots of reveling drinking.
The glitch was pretty amusing in the grand scheme of game bugs – I mean, who can't appreciate a little drunken stumble here and there, right?
Wrong. A breakdown from Kotaku's Stephen Totilo details how the glitch has interacted with other facets of the game in ways that are maybe a little less amusing.
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For example, after completing a side quest in which Eivor becomes poisoned from drinking, the special status effect, which superimposes a contrast-heavy black and white filter on the game camera, refused to go away.
Sleeping reportedly fixes the bug, but as Totilo documented, dying and re-spawning just brings the whole thing back again. As of publication, there's not currently a patch to fix the bug.
Spawning with a status effect might not rise to the level of Cyberpunk 2077's disastrous roll out (we can safely assume Ubisoft's investors won't be suing over it), but definitely highlights a growing trend in games that are increasingly complex or rely on calendar-based code updates.
Let's just hope that 2021 brings us games that are glitch-free.