A few months after its release, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla has finally transmog, but not as some players originally envisioned it. The feature falls short of the way it has been implemented in previous games and comes with a 50 silver tax on every transaction to boot, leaving many of us, myself included, scratching heads.
Transmog, which allows players to combine the stats of one piece of gear with the appearance of another, was implemented shortly afterwards Assassin’s Creed Odyssey‘s launch. There it was a simple and easy to use option available right from the gear menu. Not so in Valhalla, which requires players to visit the blacksmith Gunnar, enter into a dialogue, and then pay him 50 silver to make the change. “Satisfied transmog has finally been added,” one player wrote in the patch notes thread over to the game’s subreddit“I don’t know why it needs silver and that is only possible at the settlement.”
The frustration has broken out in other discussions too, with quarrels between players that this potentially more immersive approach to changing the look of your armor is ultimately silly when it comes to a game about mythical gods and monsters that literally takes place in a simulation. A thread on the Ubisoft forums, meanwhile, has issues with 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 50 Silver, an in-game currency that can be collected around the world, but is also sold for real money in Ubisoft’s microtransaction shop. On the one hand, 50 silver won’t break the bank for most players, even if they change everything they own. Then again, why charge a nominal fee at all unless you think it could encourage some players to dip their toes into 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 on the game’s subreddit that players’ frustrations are passed on to the development team.
This week’s 1.2 update also came with a free “Godly Pack”, which allows players to use 300 Opals (one of Valhallaspecial currency) on the house, as well as access to the game’s recent Yuletide cosmetics and a new Altaïr armor set (the protagonist of the first Assassin’s CreedSuch as Eurogamer points out that the free gift resembles “a bit of a rewardFor some of the other ways ValhallaThe microtransactions have occasionally clouded some otherwise very good open-world single-player RPG. This includes the number of armor sets added to the game as paid DLC versus the ones included at launch as well as the later addition of stuff like the infamous paid XP Booster
Unsurprisingly, Ubisoft continues to try to walk this microtransaction rope, even if Valhalla stays at the top of the sales charts month after month. Microtransactions, or as the French publisher likes to call them, “Recurring investment of the player,” is a great money maker for the company, especially since it has released fewer gamers in recent years.
Still, I have my doubts ValhallaThe transmog tax will ultimately contribute a lot to Ubisoft’s bottom line, making its addition all the more bizarre. The company released another open-world RPG last year:Fenyx: Immortals Rising– and it had a brilliant transmog system that came with no strings attached. why would Valhalla differ?