Ubisoft released an update for Immortals Fenyx Rising today, resolving known issues, adding key stability improvements, and... blah, blah, blah. Forget about all that! The game is (finally!) getting loadouts!
Today’s 1.1.1 patch bakes an equipment loadout feature right into Fenyx Rising’s inventory screen, allowing players to curate up to three loadouts. Following the update, you should see three nodes on the left side of your inventory. Think of them as three separate inventory pages. Click on one; assign weapons and armor as you see fit. Each “page” will remember any gear you’ve equipped and any cosmetic modifications you’ve applied. Simple as that.
Of all the features Immortals could’ve used—from a deeper moveset to a fast travel network that isn’t as uselessly separated as the Washington, D.C. metro—customizable loadouts ranked at the top of the list. Say you’re really feeling the Athena’s Dash move. You’d want to put on the Piercing Wisdom helmet, which boosts its damage and gives you extra stamina, allowing you to use it over and over again. You might want to pair that with armor (say, the Brood of Typhon Breastplate) and weapons (the Challenger Sword) that also earn you more stamina. But if you’re going up against a boss, focusing on one move isn’t exactly a bright idea. You’d probably want to go in on equipment that boosts or restores your health. The ability to switch between this stuff on the fly, without having to sift through all of your gear each time, is an Olympian godsend.
In fact, customizable loadouts should become de rigueur for open-world games from the drawing board—the sort of item on a checklist that lives alongside enemy outposts, scalable viewpoints, and that one industry-standard design decision where you put question marks all over a map that seem interesting but don’t actually ever end up being anything out of the ordinary.
Take Ghost of Tsushima, for example. The open-world, samurai-themed action game released last July, showering players with, by my calculations, one metric bazillion pieces of gear. Mechanically, Ghost of Tsushima was close to perfect, but sorely missed a loadout feature to organize all those katanas, bows, charms, and—most importantly—armor dyes you’d earn. Lo and behold, in a surprise October update, developer Sucker Punch patched loadouts into the game. (That same update saw the “free” introduction of Ghost’s irresistibly compelling cooperative mode, Legends.)
Today’s Immortals patch also expanded haptic feedback for the PlayStation 5’s DualSense controller, and lifted the prerequisite for unlocking Nightmare difficulty. You no longer need to beat the game to activate that. But both are small potatoes compared to these bespoke loadouts. Okay, Ubisoft: Do Assassin’s Creed Valhalla next.