When I fired up Assassin’s Creed Valhalla for the very first time, I was met with some tough decisions. No, character gender wasn’t a problem for me. I often struggle over whether to play as a male or female character in video games, but with all the sweet beards in Valhalla, that wasn’t something I even thought twice about. Besides, you have the option to switch genders during gameplay if you’d like (and really, you won’t even have to make a selection until after you’ve played a little bit of the game).
No, I’m referring to all of the setup you have to go through to even get to the first gameplay section. Brightness settings, narration style, accessibility options. That’s all fine and good. It’s nice to see that game developers are starting to take these things more seriously.
Which reminds me… I actually used to play Lord of the Rings Online with a guy who only had one arm. At least, he claimed to only have one arm. There’s no real way for me to know, because I never met the guy in person. In fact, maybe he wasn’t even a guy at all. Perhaps he was an elderly woman, or three small children stacked up inside a trench coat. Maybe he had like six arms and was overcompensating with all this one-arm talk.
But ever since then, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about accessibility options in video games. It’s really, really cool that people like my LotRO friend could enjoy gaming despite having a disability that game developers don’t generally consider.
But that’s a whole different topic…
Anyway, while making my way through all of these options in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, I saw something called “Sensitive Content.” When I first read these options, I think I actually laughed out loud.
Of course I want to see these brutal assassination sequences. And yes, give me blood and dismemberment, please! And nudity? Why not?
And then I started worrying about myself just a little bit. Am I becoming a monster? Has this seemingly unending COVID-19 quarantine turned me into something sinister, something so hideous that I would laugh off horrible acts of violence like some sort of medieval supervillain?
But, I mean, there’s really only one acceptable choice for any of these options. So feast, my brothers, on blood, gore, and nudity! This is the Viking way, after all!
I’m sure I’m fine. Really I am.
