Thanks to VPN, many players are getting their hands on Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla early. While it isn’t scheduled to release until tomorrow in the US, the game can be downloaded by swapping your region to Australia, Japan or New Zealand — but that only matters if you’re trying to play on 11/9. And lots of players are experiencing an incredibly annoying issue today.
When reaching the selection screen — in the game, it’s called the Memory-Stream Select, as you’re choosing between one of two versions to play as — the game is locking up and making it impossible to progress. This isn’t a rare occurrence either. Lots of players are reporting this issue, and it isn’t caused by using a VPN or trying to play early. This is a very weird bug, but some fans believe they’ve found a workaround.
Here’s how the bug works. After starting the game, you’re forced to watch the intro cutscene. After the cutscene is complete, you’ll reach the Memory-Stream Select menu where you can choose to play as a masculine or feminine viking. When you attempt to select one of them, the cursor slightly moves but nothing happens. You’re stuck at the selection screen.
- NOTE: Always make sure your drivers are up-to-date. Here’s where you can manually download the latest Nvidia drivers for Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla.
This problem is specific to PC right now, and it’s very likely that a patch is incoming to fix it. This is a game-breaking bug right at the start, so even Ubisoft will have to address it very soon.
- To fix this issue, change the following settings and try again:
- Go to Settings
- Set V-Sync and Anti-Aliasing to “Adaptive“
- Set the game to FullScreen — NOT Borderless Fullscreen
After starting the game again, watch the cutscene and STOP when you reach the selection screen. Press [Ctrl+Alt+Del] and check the CPU load of Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla — for whatever reason, this game will use 100% CPU load. Wait for it to go down to 30%~ CPU Usage or so.
Now you can return to the game and select your character. Easy, right?
Unfortunately, Watch Dogs: Legion has the same problems. A buggy launch that’s yet to be fixed on PC — my version of Watch Dogs: Legion constantly locks up on the menu screen, for example. Please test your games more, Ubisoft!
Source: [1]
