In brief: Are you still playing through the behemoth that is Assassin's Creed Valhalla? There's some good news from developer Ubisoft: an update is on its way to improve the game's performance and prepare it for future DLCs and expansions. The bad news is that you will need to reinstall the entire game, all 77GB of it.

Ubisoft writes that the upcoming Assassin's Creed Valhalla update 1.4.1 will bring a series of optimizations to the game that will "deliver faster loading screens, improved world data streaming, and overall runtime performance." It will also get AC Valhalla ready for all "future content and game updates."

While that sounds exciting for fans of the Viking saga, it does come at a cost. The update will require the entire base game to be reinstalled. But Ubisoft notes how the "data restructuring" means that instead of adding 34GB onto the total size of the game, owners will instead be slashing its current installation size by one gigabyte to 77GB---the actual download itself is 78GB.

Thankfully, only the base game will need to be reinstalled, not the Wrath of the Druids or Siege of Paris DLC packs, which are both massive.

Check out our Best PC Games (You Should Be Playing), which includes Assassin's Creed Valhalla

There's plenty of new content coming to Assassin's Creed Valhalla next year, including what is claimed to be an enormous "God of War-style" expansion, possibly called Dawn of Ragnarök, which offers an extra 40 hours to the single-player campaign.

Intel still lists Valhalla as one of the games that encounter DRM issues when running on Alder Lake PCs, though this writer has been playing it problem-free on a Core i7-12700K system without using the workaround since the weekend.