Assassin's Creed Valhalla shifted more copies in its launch week than any other game in the long-running series to date.
It has also been Ubisoft's best PC launch ever, with an "all-time record" for sales directly from Ubisoft's own digital store.
Valhalla is the 12th mainline Assassin's Creed game, and the third since it shifted genres and adopted a biannual release schedule.
Assassin's Creed Valhalla contains an unexpected tribute to The Prodigy's Keith Flint.
Credit for this discovery goes to Rock Paper Shotgun guides editor Jake Green, who found the mission and posted its details on Twitter yesterday.
Head to Essex, The Prodigy's home county, and to the rough location of North End, the hamlet near Braintree where Flint passed away in March last year, aged just 49.
If you have Assassin's Creed Valhalla and you're already an Amazon Prime subscriber, it's worth flagging up the free pack of cosmetic items you can now unlock with a few clicks.
Link the game to your Amazon Prime Gaming account here and you can obtain a very shiny mythic-quality gear set, some bits and pieces for your boat, a kind of average-looking horse and, honestly, the true star of the pack... the pigeon.
Here is the pigeon:
Call of Duty has failed to top the UK physical games chart in its launch week for the first time in 13 years.
Instead, pole position went to Assassin's Creed Valhalla. Ubisoft's Viking game earned itself a massive first week physical sales total - double that of Assassin's Creed Odyssey two years ago (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz).
Of course, there are some caveats. Valhalla launched alongside the Series X/S last Tuesday, whereas Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War arrived on Friday with three days fewer on sale. We're also comparing boxed numbers here, so the full picture may well be different with digital sales mixed in.
After several days of contradictory statements, Ubisoft has now confirmed that standalone achievements will be available for PC players of Assassin's Ceed Valhalla after all.
It all kicked off a few days back when players noticed that while the recently-released Watch Dogs Legion had an achievement page on Ubisoft's refreshed Ubisoft Connect service, the page for Assassin's Creed Valhalla did not.
After querying the change on the Ubisoft official forum, a Ubisoft support rep responded to say they were chasing it up with the team, but came back to the thread a short while after to report that missing achievements "was unintended", and the team was "actively working to enable achievements".
Ravensthorpe is one of the many brilliant bits of Assassin's Creed Valhalla. It's your new Viking settlement, RPG hub, and home to a growing cast of characters who come and live along beside you.
Valhalla features plenty of real-world locations in their Viking-era forms, such as London (Lunden), York (Jorvik) and good old Norwic (Norwich).
Ravensthorpe, too, is a real place which can be found on any modern day map of England. Eurogamer editor Oli Welsh tells me he actually grew up just down the road from there, so already knew the name well.
Ahead of its release, there was confusion over Assassin's Creed Valhalla's default option which has you play as both male and female versions of main character Eivor at various points.
The choice to play Eivor solely as a woman or solely as a man are also present, of course, but Ubisoft said the game's "Animus decides" option would provide more clues to the game's wider story, and was therefore the default.
But when would you switch between the two options? How often would this happen? For story reasons, Ubisoft said, it would not elaborate further.
This will come as little surprise to those who struggled to access Xbox Live earlier this week, but Tuesday was a really busy day for games downloads - with the Xbox Series X/S launch, Call of Duty updates and Assassin's Creed: Valhalla release combining to create a record-breaking day for internet traffic in the UK. And, you know, there's a pandemic going on. People have to do something.
As detailed by the BBC, the list of companies that noted a spike on Tuesday includes BT, Virgin Media, Vodafone, City Fibre, TalkTalk and Zen Internet. A Virgin Media press release said Tuesday had been the provider's busiest day on record across its network, and listed the following as the main offenders:
If you want an idea of how that all adds up, a total of 108 petabytes of data was used on Virgin Media alone (a petabyte is 1000 terabytes, or 1m gigabytes). That's an average of over 20GB per customer, and at the peak of recorded traffic, "the equivalent of 48 Assassin's Creed Valhalla games were being downloaded every second".
Last month, Ubisoft announced it would be combining its long-running Uplay and the Ubisoft Club services into one free uber-service, called Ubisoft Connect; with the arrival of Assassin's Creed Valhalla, the service (with its flagship cross-play and cross-progression features) is now in full swing, and, in case it wasn't clear given Ubisoft's previous vagueness, cross-progression isn't restricted to a single console family, but works across all platforms - with caveats.
Cross-progression beyond a single platform ecosystem isn't a new thing, of course - the likes of Fortnite and Minecraft have been offering the feature for quite some time - but it's usually limited to games with significant multiplayer elements. That makes Ubisoft's implementation somewhat unusual insofar as it also enables players to resume their saves elsewhere for sprawling single-player-focussed offerings such as Assassin's Creed Valhalla.
There are, however, certain restrictions as to what can and can't follow on your cross-platform adventures, which Ubisoft has now detailed more thoroughly in a newly released FAQ. The short of it is that while progress can carry from Xbox to PlayStation or PlayStation to PC (or any other permutation of platform hop), paid content bought on one system mostly won't follow to another outside of the same console family.
Assassin's Creed Valhalla is off to a good start, it seems, judging by the enthusiastic Ubisoft press release which dropped into my email inbox.
We're still a little too early to hear about sales figures - Valhalla only turned up on PlayStation 5 today in countries where PS5 is actually available - but Ubisoft already has an impressive stat to share nonetheless.
Twice as many people played Valhalla at launch on Monday, 10th November, as played Ancient Greece-set Odyssey on its debut back in October 2018.