Assassin's Creed Valhalla Director Addresses Gameplay Trailer Backlash

The big trailer reveal for Assassin's Creed Valhalla went off without a hitch, and fans were hyped after watching the first introduction to the new entry in the series. They got even more hyped after seeing that the first gameplay would be revealed at the upcoming Xbox Series X presentation, and that energy lasted all the way through the presentation right up until the actual trailer. Don't get us wrong, it was pretty cool, but the word gameplay was stretched, as only a few instances of actual gameplay seemed to be shown. Fans were a bit angry about that, and while Ubisoft did briefly address the backlash, Assassin's Creed Valhalla Creative Director Ashraf Ismail recently addressed it in expanded detail in an interview with Launcher Live, and you can read his comments in full below.

"So you know I'm a Creative Director. I'm a developer," Ismail said. "My focus is on building the game and building this experience, and kind of setting the vision and the intensions of this experience, and that's my primary focus. You know we have marketing teams that it's their job to market the games. People need to...again when I say have patience with us, people need to remember we just announced the game about two weeks ago. So there's a long road in front of us. I mean people should not at all doubt will they see a plethora of gameplay. Yes, it's coming."

He then spoke about what is at times misunderstand about game development and prepping a trailer or demo for public or press consumption, and how that affects the development of the game itself.

"The thing that I think most people don't realize let's say from a development standpoint is there is a need to pace that out, because at some point the team needs to be focused on building the game and focused on that," Ismail said. "And that's where my energy goes and my team's energy goes is into building that game and making sure we can reach moments where we can say 'hey, you know what, we're going to take a chunk of that game and show it to people', whether it's to be able to see a trailer or to be able to even have that hands-on with it. You know our focus on the development side is the game is No. 1. The first thing we need to focus on. We need to ship, and of course, knowing that at certain moments in the marketing campaign we're going to take a chunk of that and let people consume it and see it and give us feedback on it."

He then reiterated the earlier request of patience and kindness and assured fans that lots of gameplay is coming down the road.

"So these are, there's a lot of time in front of us and people will see quite a lot, I promise that before the game launches, and again, all I ask is for a bit of patience and some kindness," Ismail said. "We adore what we do. We're excited, absolutely excited to show off what we've been working on. We spend years on these projects. It means a lot to us to show off the game and have people feed off of, we feed off of that energy, but again, within due time. It'll come, don't worry about that."

We can't wait to see more from the game, but as he said, there's plenty of time for that to release. That said, here's hoping the next time we see gameplay trailer announced it will actually put a spotlight on the gameplay and not just cinematics.

What did you think of his comments? Let us know in the comments or hit me up on Twitter @MattAguilarCB for all things Assassin's Creed!