author: Damian Strozek
AC Valhalla - Romances Will Not be Restricted by Gender
In the latest installment of Assassin's Creed, romances will not be restricted by gender. It has to do with the game mechanics, which will enable us to turn our male hero into a woman (or vice versa) at any time during the game. As we found out, it will be explained in the story.
As we wrote yesterday, Assassin's Creed: Valhalla will let us change the main character's gender at any time. It turns out that this is a broader mechanic, which is linked to another one, namely - romances in the game will not be limited by the hero's gender (via IGN). This was confirmed by Youssef Maguid (scriptwriter at Ubisoft), explaining that:
“There are multiple people you can romance in the game, and you can romance all of them as either gender.”
We've already seen an gender-based romance options in Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, but Alexios and Kassandra acted as two separate characters, which made narrative difficulties pop up at certain points in the plot. Eivor, on the other hand, is the same character, both as a woman and a man, so all the romance paths are open to us.
The ability to change gender is justified by the improvements in Animus, the machine that enables the hero to follow the story of their ancestors. Darby McDevitt, AC Valhalla's chief scriptwriter, has told more about this mechanic in the upcoming Ubisoft game for IGN:
“You can go into the Animus layer of our game. 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 - editorial note] back and forth fully embraces the often overlooked science fiction nature of our series.”
Assassin's Creed: Valhalla will debut on PC, Google Stadia and PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on November 17, this year. Later on the title will also be released on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X.
