Tattoos in Assassin's Creed Valhalla are a great way to customize your protagonist, allowing for a memorable and unique in-game look. However, at one point, the tattoos were almost cut from the game due to historical accuracy being one of the pillars of the brand, Ubisoft revealed.
In a recent interview with GamesRadar, Valhalla art director for conception Nicolas Rivard said the tattoos almost didn't happen in the final product, as the game's historians were hard at work trying to find concrete examples of Viking warriors having their bodies painted. According to Rivard, Assassin's Creed games have to be "historically accurate as much as possible," so if there wasn't any proof of Vikings having tattoos, Ubisoft would have cut Assassin's Creed Valhalla tattoos completely.
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The art director admits there was a lot of stress because of the matter, not only for the potential follow-up explanation for the players on social media but for the entire branding plan for the game having to be redesigned. "I remember I was in one meeting, my head was shaking, because I was like, the tattoo graphics are going to be used across every touchpoint, every aspect of my rendering. If there are no tattoos, I gotta rethink my art direction for this," Rivard recalled.
Fortunately, everything worked out, and Valhalla was full of unique tattoos designs scattered across the vast open world of Britain. It turned out that the existence of Viking tattoos is something of a grey area, with a rare historian's account potentially confirming the warriors were indeed inked at the time.
Nicolas Rivard explained there's a story of a Muslim historian Ahmad ibn Fadlan who was traveling to Scandanavian countries and described a burial ritual of the clan's chief. The people were wearing markings on their bodies, and now the historians agreed that "those were Norse people, for sure." Assassin's Creed Valhalla tattoos got the green light after that.
The latest Assassin's Creed game is about to receive its second story expansion The Siege of Paris, arriving on August 12 across PlayStation and Xbox consoles, as well as PC. In the DLC, players will "infiltrate the fortified city of Paris, uncover enemy secrets, and form strategic alliances to safeguard the clan's future." It's likely that a lot more new tattoo designs will also be making an appearance.
Source: GamesRadar
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