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  Yes, you can pet the dog... in your village. You can kill the dogs in other people's villages. (All images in this article were captured from real-time preview gameplay.) [credit: Ubisoft ]

Last week, Ubisoft offered me an opportunity to play its upcoming open-world quest game Assassin's Creed Valhalla in an almost-retail state. This follows my 3.5 hours of preview gameplay in July , and honestly, the long and short of my combined tests is pretty simple: I like this game just fine. Ubisoft may very well have struck the right balance between new and familiar content in this follow-up to Assassin's Creed Odyssey , a game we very much liked . As a result, I'm optimistic.

However, I've yet to see exactly how the good bits fit together in the final retail experience or whether the solid momentum and pacing I've seen thus far falls apart under launch-version scrutiny. (Or, obviously, whether the game will buckle or crash under the load of a massive open-world engine, all while launching on a zillion old and new platforms on November 10.)

In the meantime, I'll take this moment to talk about some of the stuff I've noticed thus far while playing the PC version (as streamed to my home via Ubisoft's private cloud services), then open the floor up to questions in our comments section in case I missed anything (which I probably did).

At last year's E3, Ubisoft offered a vague teaser video about a new open-world gaming series: Gods and Monsters . While it was slated to launch earlier this year on various platforms, Ubisoft chose to delay the game, along with many others, to later in 2020. We wondered whether this month's deluge of E3-like streamed videos would include a look at how the game is shaping up.

Instead, our first look at the game comes from a different "video streaming" source: an accidental leak of a playable build, hosted by Google Stadia.

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  The Gods & Monsters prototype on Google Stadia, which loads with some clunky image interaction. [credit: YouTube / Regorsnas ]

Users across multiple Stadia territories reported finding a game in its store interface on Thursday simply named Orpheus , which could be claimed for "$0.00." Once claimed and bound to their accounts, users were greeted with a clear Gods and Monsters title screen, then dumped into a prototype interface with options for "Play" and "Play Dungeon." (The game has since disappeared for anyone who had claimed it.)