Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Valhalla has won the first gaming GRAMMY award for best score soundtrack with the Dawn of Ragnarok expansion.
For the 2023 awards, a new category was created to recognize cultural impact – the “Best Score Soundtrack for Video Games and Other Interactive Media” category. The winner of this new award? Composer Stephanie Economou for her work on the soundtrack of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla: Dawn Of Ragnarok. Other nominated in this category include Austin Wintory (“Aliens: Fireteam Elite”), S Bear McCreary (Call Of Duty: Vanguard”), Richard Jacques (“Marvel’s Guardians Of The Galaxy”), and Christopher Tin (“Old World”), and Stephanie Economou (Assassin’s Creed Valhalla: Dawn Of Ragnarok).
“Thank you for acknowledging and validating the power of video game music,” Economou said while receiving the GRAMMY award. You can watch the composer’s full acceptance speech in the link above.
Upon release, we reviewed the Dawn of Ragnarok expansion and praised its characters and story. Here’s what our very own Francesco De Meo had to say:
The expansion also features plenty of side activities which can be roughly divided into reskinned activities and brand new ones. To the latter category belong Mythical Memories which provide more info on Isu lore and the combat-focused Valkyrie Arena, while to the former the Sinmara’s Chosen, a new take on the Order of the Ancient’s mechanics that rewards players with a very nice weapon, World Events that lead to the meeting of some colorful characters, and the usual array of cosmetics blueprints, treasure, and extra abilities and raids that provide players with the items needed to upgrade the Hugr-Rip and other new times.
And it’s here that lies the most significant issue in Dawn of Ragnarok. Even with all the tweaks and light changes, Dawn of Ragnarok feels too much like the base Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, which is definitely not a good thing, a hundred hours and more into the game. Fatigue already started to set in with the Siege of Paris, and the new expansion not attempting anything bolder doesn’t help things. Additionally, there have been plenty of excellent open-world games released since late 2020, and many of them, like the newly released Elden Ring and Horizon Forbidden West, do a lot of things better than base Valhalla did, in my opinion, like exploration, sense of adventure, and combat.
