A few months after launch, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla finally transmog, but not as some players had originally imagined. The feature falls short of how it was implemented in previous games and comes with a 50 silver fee on each transaction to initialize, leaving many of us, including me, scratching heads.
Transmog, which allows players to mix the statistics of one piece of equipment with the appearance of another, was implemented shortly after Assassin’s Creed Odysseylaunch of too. There, it was a simple and easy to use option, available in the gear menu. Not so in Valhalla, which requires players to visit Blacksmith Gunnar, talk and pay him 50 silver to make the move. “Pleased transmog has finally been added”, wrote a player on the topic of patch notes about the game subreddit. “I don’t know why it needs silver and it can only be done in the settlement.”
Frustration has spread to other topics as well, with players arguing that this potentially more engaging approach to changing the appearance of your armor is basically silly when it comes to a game about mythical gods and monsters that literally takes place within a simulation. A topic on the Ubisoft forums, meanwhile, has problems with the lack of transmog options, especially when it comes to seeing what your character will look like before you make the changes.
And then there’s the issue of silver 50, an in-game currency that you can collect around the world, but which is also sold for real money at the Ubisoft microtransaction store. On the one hand, 50 bucks won’t break the bank for most players, even if they go crazy transmogging everything they own. On the other hand, why charge a nominal fee, unless you think it might encourage some players to immerse themselves in the game’s expansive microtransaction economy?
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Ubisoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but the community manager domvgt wrote in the game’s subreddit that players’ frustrations are being relayed to the development team.
This week’s 1.2 update also came with a free Godly Pack, giving players 300 opals (one of Valhallaspecial coins of) on behalf of the house, as well as access to the game’s recent Yuletide cosmetics and a new Altaïr armor set (the main protagonist of the first Assassin’s Creed) How Eurogamer points out, the free gift looks like “a little reward”For some of the other ways ValhallaMicrotransactions have occasionally clouded what would be an open world RPG for a very good player. This includes the number of armor sets added to the game as paid DLC versus those included at launch, as well as the later addition of things like the infamous paid XP booster.
It’s not surprising that Ubisoft continues to try to walk this tightrope of microtransaction, even when Valhalla remains at the top of the sales charts month after month. Microtransactions, or as the French publisher likes to call them, “Recurring player investment,” it is a great money generator for the company, especially as it has been released to fewer players in recent years.
Still, I doubt it ValhallaUbisoft’s transmission fee will end up contributing a lot to Ubisoft’s financial results, which makes its addition even more bizarre. The company launched another open-world RPG last year –Fenyx: Immortals Rising– and had a brilliant transmog system that came without strings attached. Why should Valhalla be different?