A few months after release, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla finally transmog, but not as some players originally suggested. The feature does not lag behind the way it has been implemented in previous games, and has a tax of 50 silver on each transaction to start, and many of us, myself included, let it out.
Transmog, which allows players to mix the stats of one piece of equipment with the appearance of another, was implemented shortly thereafter. Assassin’s Creed Odyssey‘s launch as well. There it was a simple and easy option available right in the gear menu. Not so in Valhalla, which requires players to visit the blacksmith Gunnar, have a dialogue and then pay him 50 silver to make the change. ‘Happy transmog is finally added’, wrote one player in the rag notes over on the game’s subreddit. “Confuse why it needs silver and can only be done at the settlement.”
The frustration also broke out in other threads, with players arguing that this potentially most enthralling approach to changing your armor is ultimately stupid when it comes to a game about mythical gods and monsters that literally takes place within a simulation. A thread on Ubisoft forumsmeanwhile, make a case for the lack of transmog options, especially when it comes to seeing what your character will look like before making the changes.
And then there is the issue of the 50 silver, a currency in the game that you can collect around the world, but which is also sold for real money in Ubisoft’s microtransaction store. On the one hand, 50 silver is not going to break the bank for most players, even if they want to defeat everything they own. On the other hand, why charge a nominal fee at all, unless you think it can encourage some players to stick their toes in the game’s extensive microtransaction economy?
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Ubisoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but community manager domvgt wrote about the game’s subedit that players’ frustrations are passed on to the development team again.
This week’s 1.2 update also got a free ‘Godly Pack’ featuring 300 Opals (one of Valhallaspecial currencies) at home, as well as access to the recent Yuletide cosmetics and a new armor from Altai (the protagonist of the first Assassin’s Creed). As Eurogamer point out, the free gift looks like ‘a little compensationFor some of the other ways Valhalla‘s microtransactions have occasionally made a muddy thing out of an otherwise good single-player open-world RPG. It contains the number of armor sets added to the game as paid DLC versus those included during launch, as well as the subsequent addition of items like the infamous paid XP Booster.
It’s not surprising that Ubisoft keeps trying to run this microtransaction queue, even if Valhalla goes month after month still at the top of the sales charts. Microtransactions, or as the French publisher likes to call it, “Player Recurring Investment, ”Is a big money maker for the company, especially since fewer players have been released in recent years.
Yet I also doubt ValhallaThe transmog load will ultimately contribute a lot to Ubisoft’s core, making the addition all the more bizarre. The company released another open world RPG last year –Fenyx: Immortals Rise—And it had a brilliant transmog system it got no strings attached. Why should Valhalla be different?