Assassin's Creed Valhalla - The Siege of Paris (DLC)

The Siege of Paris drops Eivor into 9th-century Francia as the Viking Great Army presses toward the walls of Paris itself. If you bounced off the main Valhalla campaign's bloated county-by-county structure, fair warning: this DLC carries some of that same DNA. But if you stayed for the dark political undercurrents and the moments where the writing actually commits to something ugly, Paris gives you more of what worked. The central storyline leans into court conspiracy, a morally compromised Frankish king, and a resistance faction that forces you to make choices with real consequences for the people around you, not just flavor-text outcomes. For an AC game, that counts for something. The new Infiltration Missions are the mechanical headline here. Rather than charging through camp gates swinging a two-handed axe, you slip in disguised, gather intel, and assassinate targets with a patience the main game rarely demanded. These missions feel like a deliberate callback to older AC design, high-tension, route-planning, fail-state meaningful. They are the best reason to buy this DLC and also, frustratingly, the least frequent content type in it. The bulk of your hours will still be spent on open-world clearing: small bandit camps, collectible hunts, and side quests that range from genuinely atmospheric to obvious padding. The Frankish countryside is visually striking, Paris itself, under siege conditions, has an oppressive energy that Ubisoft's environment team renders well, but the quest design does not always match the setting's ambition. Combat builds from the base game carry over cleanly. If you arrived with a heavily invested Bear stance bruiser or a Raven stance stealth hybrid, both feel relevant here. The DLC introduces a new mechanic around Rebel Missions, working with the local Frankish resistance, which adds a light strategic layer to how you approach certain objectives. It is not deep enough to call it a faction system, but it creates more variety than the standard Valhalla loop. Boss encounters in the main story quest line are competent, occasionally exciting, and never the highlight. Where The Siege of Paris earns genuine respect is in its ending. Without spoiling specifics, the final act commits to a tonal choice that most Ubisoft products would sand down into something safer. It lingers. If you are playing Valhalla for Eivor's arc and the moments where Viking mythology brushes against brutal historical realism, the payoff here is worth the middling hours that precede it. If you are coming in purely for new build toys or mechanical innovation, you will feel the limitations more sharply. This is a story expansion first, a systems expansion second, and a content-volume expansion in the worst moments. Bottom line for RPG players specifically: the choice-and-consequence writing punches above the base game's average, the infiltration missions scratch an itch the main campaign mostly ignored, and the Frankish setting is distinct enough to feel like a real change of scenery. Just accept that you will clear some camps that have no business existing. Monika, Scout Team