So apparently you can just swap Eivor’s gender mid-game in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
It sounds weird, but Ubisoft promises it won’t be. Apparently, the DNA that you find on Eivor’s ax (or whatever) is damaged and the Animus system can’t really determine whether it’s male or female, so the simulation runs both in tandem. This means you can swap between them half-way through.
“You can go into the Animus layer of our game,” Valhalla narrative director Director Darby McDevitt told IGN in a recent interview. “There’s an option to change the memory stream. To explain why would spoil a long-running secret, but I will say that the whole reason for why you can switch [Eivor’s gender] back and forth fully embraces the often-overlooked science fiction nature of our series.
“We’ve got this thing that’s called genetic memory, and we’ve got this Animus. What are all the ways you can play with that? And how could we leverage that to make a character that you could choose male or female? We found a way that we think is pretty satisfying.”
Yeah, overlooked because it’s extremely complicated and often a mere footnote in an Assassin’s Creed game, but whatever. Now you can play as either male or female, depending on which model/voice actor you prefer. And if you get tired of one, then you can just swap to the other. In fact, you can keep swapping all throughout the game. Its 2020–gender is a fluid spectrum, so why can’t our video games show that more?
As incongruous as it might seem from a narrative perspective, Ubisoft has done a great job explaining why you can swap between male and female mid-game. And honestly, this is just a great feature in general. I know I’ve certainly played more than one game where I didn’t know the male or female model or voice actor would be better than the other, and I lamented making the wrong choice at the beginning of the game. Now, for the first time, you can just change it whenever you want.
If you want some story spoilers, go read the rest of the interview over at IGN. But as McDevitt said, you probably won’t because that stuff is kinda boring.
Source: IGN
