A couple of months after the release, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla finally has transmog, but not as some players had originally anticipated. The feature doesn’t get in the way it has been implemented in previous games and includes a silver tax of 50 for every transaction that needs to be initiated, leaving many of us, myself included, scratching our heads.
Transmog, which allows players to mix stats from one piece of gear with the look of another, was implemented shortly after Assassin’s Creed Odysseylaunch as well. There, it was a simple, easy-to-use option available on the gear menu. Not so Valhalla, which requires players to visit the blacksmith Gunnar, dialogue, and pay him 50 silver to make the change. “Satisfied transmog is finally added,” one player wrote in the patch note thread on the subreddit of the game. “Confused why he needs silver and it can only be done in the settlement.”
Frustration has also erupted in other threads, with players arguing that this potentially more immersive approach to changing the look of your armor is ultimately nonsense when it comes to a game about mythical gods and monsters that takes place literally within a simulation. A thread on Ubisoft forumsmeanwhile, you worry about the lack of transmog options, especially when it comes to seeing what your character will look like before making the changes.
And there’s also the Silver 50 issue, a game coin that you can pick up around the world, but which is also sold for real money at Ubisoft’s microtransaction store. For one thing, the Silver 50 won’t break the bank for most players, even if they’re going crazy on transmogging everything they own. On the other hand, why charge a nominal fee, unless you think it might encourage some players to submerge their feet in the game’s expansive microtransaction economy?
G / O Media may receive a commission
Ubisoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but to community manager domvgt wrote about the subreddit of the game that the frustrations of the players are relayed to the development team.
This week’s 1.2 update also came with a free “Godly Pack,” which gave players 300 opals (one of the Valhallaspecial coins) in the house, as well as access to the game’s recent Yuletide cosmetics and a new set of Altaïr armor (the main protagonist of the first Assassin’s Creed). How Eurogamer points out, the free gift seems “a little reward”For some of the other ways ValhallaMicrotransactions have occasionally muddyed what is an open-world, single-player RPG, otherwise. This includes the number of armor sets added to the game as paid DLC versus those included in the release, as well as the subsequent addition of things like the famous paid XP Booster.
No wonder Ubisoft keeps trying to walk this tight microtransaction rope, even Valhalla continues to top the sales lists month after month. Microtransactions or, as the French publisher likes to call them, “Recurrent investment of the player,” it is a leading manufacturer of money for the company, mainly because fewer players have been posted in recent years.
Still, I doubt it ValhallaThe relocation tax will end up contributing a lot to Ubisoft’s end result, making its incorporation even stranger. The company launched another open world role-playing game last year—Fenyx: Immortals Rising“And I had.” a brilliant transmog system which came without any rope. Because I should Valhalla be different?