Last week, Ubisoft offered me an opportunity to play its upcoming open-world quest game Assassin’s Creed Valhalla in an almost-retail state. This follows my 3.5 hours of preview gameplay in July, and honestly, the long and short of my combined tests is pretty simple: I like this game just fine. Ubisoft may very well have struck the right balance between new and familiar content in this follow-up to Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, a game we very much liked. As a result, I’m optimistic.

However, I’ve yet to see exactly how the good bits fit together in the final retail experience or whether the solid momentum and pacing I’ve seen thus far falls apart under launch-version scrutiny. (Or, obviously, whether the game will buckle or crash under the load of a massive open-world engine, all while launching on a zillion old and new platforms on November 10.)

In the meantime, I’ll take this moment to talk about some of the stuff I’ve noticed thus far while playing the PC version (as streamed to my home via Ubisoft’s private cloud services), then open the floor up to questions in our comments section in case I missed anything (which I probably did).