It's entertaining to observe the overreactions to this: I played a few hours of the Series X version of the game last night, and it runs wonderfully; even after having watched the aforelinked video, I couldn't pick up on any issues with it.

I respect that YouTube channels such as "Digital Foundry" exist, but to a large degree they also feed into the negative feedback loop of pedantry, where software developers get harassed because their engine has some flaw which no one would have otherwise even noticed. Evidently, programmers have only had the official Series X and S development kits since June; it's amazing the games run as well as they do.

Growing up in the 80s and 90s, half the titles everyone played ran in the teens framerate-wise, and no one cared as long as a given game was holistically fun. I'm not sure when this obsession with performance "perfection" came to be, especially since the titles have much larger issues involving their tacky aesthetics and lack of originality.

The larger observation I have regarding "Valhalla" is how it's a copy and paste of "Odyssey", just dropped onto a new set of snowy wallpaper: the control scheme, the menus, the combat plus animation systems, the stealth implementation, and even the bird mechanic plus its animations are all lifted one hundred percent. It's as lazy as EA's annualized sports franchises! Yet I haven't heard anyone else bring this up-- perhaps because it's still a fun game, as was "Odyssey" before it.

Speaking of the Series X, the integrated video trim tool is broken: it crashes every time I try to use it. One of my favorite features of PlayStations 4 and 5 is the bundled "SHAREfactory" software, and it's a bummer Microsoft doesn't include some sort of equivalent. At least they let the user conveniently upload screenshots and videos directly to "OneDrive", so they can be easily transferred to a PC for editing.