Ah, what could be more festive than getting very drunk and starting a brawl?

Valhalla's Yule Festival is now live, and brings with it some festive changes to your Viking settlement from 17th December to 7th January. You can expect lots of snow in Ravensthorpe, along with revellers and a variety of Yuletide activities to keep you entertained, including drunken brawls, archery challenges "and more". Taking part in these activities earns you Yule Tokens which can be redeemed for a range of goodies in the Festival Shop. You can take a peek at the list here.

It's worth noting, however, that this event only unlocks once you've completed one of the story arcs (such as Grantebridgescire or Ledecestrescire), and the rewards can only be redeemed during up until 7th January. The items range from 15 to 150 tokens in price, with the sum total of all the items reaching 775. Players have found that the maximum you can earn in a challenge is 70 tokens by doing a full round of brawling, so if you want everything, you could be there a while.

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Assassin's Creed Valhalla launched in November with a shop selling cosmetic extras for real money, but to the surprise of many, the XP boost packs sold in Assassin's Creed Odyssey were conspicuously absent. Not to worry, everyone: the controversial microtransactions have now arrived.

A recent update from Ubisoft has introduced the XP boosts to Valhalla's Helix store. The boost grants a 50 per cent increase to XP progression and can be used across all save files. It'll cost you, though: the boost can be bought for 1000 Helix credits, equivalent to £8.58. A similar pack can be bought to earn 50 per cent more silver, while a pack combining both the silver and XP boosts will cost you 1500 Helix credits (or £12.88 if you buy the 500 and 1050 packs).

The XP boost was controversial in Assassin's Creed Odyssey, not only because players felt microtransactions didn't belong in a full-price single-player title, but due to Odyssey's slow levelling process and level gates. This led some fans to claim the grind was there to deliberately encourage players to buy boost packs.

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By now, you have hopefully reached at least one of Assassin's Creed Valhalla's many endings, depending how far and wide you have ventured through the game's various intricately-woven narrative threads.

As with Odyssey, you'll see different endings at different points as you polish off Valhalla's main Viking campaign, delve into its dreamlike mythical worlds of Asgard and Jotunheim, and hunt down every Order of Ancient target to unlock the game's final epilogue.

Valhalla arguably does a better job than Odyssey of tying all these various strands together, but there's still much to discuss, and further secrets to be found by hunting down collectibles such as the video pieces gleaned from the game's Animus glitch puzzles. So, here, we'll try and tie everything together. There's a lot going on.

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With the arrival of the next console generation, it's inevitable that the hardware requirements for PC software will rise as graphical quality and complexity increases. The baseline is reset with the arrival of Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5, and we wanted to get an outline of what kind of PC graphics kit is required to match or even exceed console hardware. To do this, we broke down the visual make-up of Assassin's Creed Valhalla, matching PS5 and PC in terms of quality settings - getting a good grip on optimised settings in the process, where we measure the bang for the buck of every preset and suggest the most optimal settings for PC users.

First of all, it's worth pointing out that we may well see very different results for very different games. In assessing Watch Dogs Legion, I came to the conclusion that Xbox Series X could be matched by a PC running an Nvidia RTX 2060 Super - mostly owing to the onerous demands of ray tracing, an area where GeForce hardware has a clear advantage. With Assassin's Creed Valhalla, we see something very different. First of all, the game doesn't seem to run that well on Nvidia kit, and there's no RT in use, nullifying a key GeForce advantage. Meanwhile, AMD seems to fare significantly better. By our reckoning a Radeon RX 5700XT should get very close to the PS5 experience.

It's worth pointing out that some of this comparison work is theoretical as there are no like-for-like settings between consoles and PC. For example, the dynamic resolution scaling system is very different. PS5 spends most of its time between 1440p and 1728p in our pixel count measurements, with many areas and cutscenes locked to 1440p. PC is different - bizarrely perhaps, the anti-aliasing system is also the DRS system, with the adaptive setting giving between 85 per cent to 100 per cent of resolution on each axis, according to load. Put simply, PC has a lower DRS window. So to get an idea of relative performance between PC and consoles, I used an area of the game that drops beneath 60fps on PlayStation 5, and does so while rendering at 1440p resolution.

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Well, that didn't take long. Assassin's Creed Valhalla has been out for less than a month, and PC players have already figured out how to access premium cosmetics for free - including some that haven't even been released yet.

Over on Nexus Mods, users are sharing a table for Cheat Engine (free memory scanning software - download at your own risk) that allows players to gain access to sets such as the Berserker, Valkyrie, Draugr and Huldufolk packs on PC. I tried it out myself, and after a bit of tinkering found I had suddenly acquired pretty much all the premium packs, which would normally cost around 2000 Helix credits each to unlock (a pack of 2300 Helix credits costs £16.99, if you're wondering). Or a lot of grinding for opals and waiting for Reda to sell each item individually, I suppose.

While this is already a little bit naughty, others have taken things a step further, using Cheat Engine to load currently unreleased items. On some forums users are sharing images such as this fiery wolf, along with Ezio's Brotherhood Outfit, which has not yet been made available in Valhalla. Judging by the hash lists being shared online, it's likely we'll see further unreleased cosmetics posted to the internet in the coming days.

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Earlier this week, mid-way through one of my Valhalla sessions, I got a bit of a shock when one of my daily assassination targets popped up right next to me in Ravensthorpe. My blood ran cold. A dangerous thief in the settlement? Right here, next to the frolicking children? Things could be about to get messy.

I peeked out of the longhouse - expecting an armoured contingent of soldiers to be wreaking havoc - and instead spied a lone figure, which the game told me was the Duke of Burgundy. I summoned all my powers of stealth, and shot the target down from a distance.

It was at this point I realised my assassination target was actually a training dummy.

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The world of Assassin's Creed Valhalla is filled with varied and extravagant hairstyles - unless you're Eivor, in which case most of these are off limits. Valhalla gives you a fairly small selection of Viking-approved haircuts which you can unlock and purchase by expanding your settlement, and even if you want to try out some Anglo-Saxon styles 'dos inspired by your time in England, you're normally stuck with your Nordic hairstyles. Until now, that is, as the inevitable customisation mod has arrived.

Made by hypermorphic, who previously created a similar mod for Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Eivor Customiser is a PC mod that gives you access to a wide range of NPC haircuts from Valhalla. There are even a couple of haircuts from Odyssey in there, should you wish to run around as a Viking version of Kassandra.

You can also mess around with a range of hair colours and hairstyle variations. And yes, an immersion-shattering pink is available should you want it. Stranger things do happen in Valhalla.

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Ubisoft will today release its first post-launch patch for Assassin's Creed Valhalla, bringing the game to version 1.0.4.

It includes bug fixes, quality of life updates and, perhaps most importantly, options to manually choose between performance and visuals on Sony and Microsoft's new consoles.

These options, available on PlayStation 5 plus Xbox Series X and S, will "adapt the resolution and graphics settings to maintain 60FPS" for Performance mode, or "enable the game to run maximum resolution and graphic settings while maintaining 30FPS" for Quality mode.

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When you need a pause from clambering over mossy hillocks and skewering things with swords, Assassin's Creed Valhalla offers up Orlog - a game of beans, bowls, and dice-chucking that's now set to make the jump into the real-world with a physical version next year.

Throughout Valhalla, protagonist Eivor encounters characters only too happy to break out Orlog, and players that accept must attempt to whittle down their opponent's lives by rolling symbols on dice to either attack, block, or gain a God Favour - used to modify basic rolls at the end of each round. Dice can be thrown up to three times per round, and players can select which symbols they wish to keep between rolls, bringing a layer of strategy to proceedings.

Although there's evidence to suggest real-world vikings did enjoy dice games, Orlog is actually an original creation designed specifically for Assassin's Creed: Valhalla. As co-development game director Benoit Richer explained to Eurogamer's board-game-focussed sister site Dicebreaker, Ubisoft's research failed to uncover any authentic viking game rules, so the goal with Orlog was to create something "that would be 'credible' rather than historically accurate".

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You've probably seen some of the early-game Easter eggs in Assassin's Creed Valhalla by now: most notably the Harry Potter house in Lunden, and the tribute to Keith Flint and The Prodigy in Essex. But later in the game you may well stumble across a Lord of the Rings reference - and it's an Easter egg with a surprising amount of depth.

On the west side of the in-game version of Gloucester (or "Glowecestre"), you'll stumble upon a community of pagans living in moss-covered homes, and in one of these is a note of some significance. "One of the little folk asked me to make the door smaller, as he wants to keep unruly houseguests from his house," the note reads. "After the nonsense with the druid last fall, I can see his point."

Given the placement of the note in an area that looks like Hobbiton, I think it's safe to assume the druid mentioned in the letter is supposed to be Gandalf, the "little folk" hobbits, and the one complaining is Bilbo Baggins. Oh, and there's also a ring placed on top of the envelope - just in case you hadn't already cottoned on at that point. You can't pick the ring up, but frankly there's enough going on in Valhalla without the need for an epic quest to destroy the one ring.

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