BulletPoints - Assassin's Greed: An Ubisoft Story

Watch_Dogs is coming to the WiiU this week. Ubisoft also had some PR problems with Assassin’s Creed Unity earlier this week… Yeah, I think that warrants a post. Also, yes, I'm revising a few things. Reloading will be the title for my (AJ's) reviews and BulletPoints will by my commentary series to discuss things in more depth or to rail against certain publishers or developers... 

... Like Ubisoft

I’m in an odd place with Watch_Dogs. On one hand, the game didn’t interest me in the slightest when it was first revealed in E3 (2013). Everyone was losing their mind over how good it looked or how unique the gameplay looked, but I just saw a game that looked very similar to GTA but with a mix of Assassin’s Creed style gameplay. And that didn’t really appeal to me, especially after having tried some Assassin’s Creed and just not really feeling it. I’m also on my anti-Ubisoft stake until they stop being (for lack of a better word) a collective asshole to consumers and Nintendo.

That being said, my unwillingness to purchase Watch_Dogs for the above valid reasons then validates Ubisoft’s position on the issue and continues to make me look like the idiot. Their position (as well as the position of many others) is that 3^rd-Party games do not sell on Nintendo Platforms (which is untrue). But if I (and others with a similar “Fuck Ubisoft” mindset) don’t buy Watch_Dogs WiiU, then we’re only given them more evidence to their claim and we really can’t disprove that logic. This goes back to an old post I wrote AGES ago on my old blog that the WiiU’s lack of sales, lack of games, and lack of consumers is a circular problem because each one is a fault of the other. No one party is to blame and all parties involved are at fault for something stupid.

Here’s my main response to Ubisoft on this matter. If you guys would release a new Prince of Persia on the WiiU, or Far Cry 4, or even Trials Fusion, I would buy ANY of those in a heartbeat because those are games I’m interested in and like. That’s really is what kills me the most is that Ubisoft does make games that are good and I would buy them. They just don’t release them on consoles I would play them on (or they’re on PC and I just wait for a Steam Sale because I’m not paying full price for an Ubisoft game).

OH WAIT! I can’t wait for a Steam Sale for Far Cry 4 to go on sale because Far Cry 4 will be a UPlay exclusive on PC. I don’t know how the UPLay store is for sales on their games, but I’m not expecting they’ll have a 75% off sale in the foreseeable future. And Assassin’s Creed Unity is under that same exclusionary banner (not that I care about Assassin’s Creed Unity). And while I’m not against healthy competition to Steam (because monopolies are bad), if the competition is inferior (and UPlay is INCREDIBLY inferior to both Steam and Origin) then I’m not going to buy from it. It’s not even on WiiU and Ubisoft has prevented my purchase of another one of their games.

But let’s get to the real heart of the issue because I know it’s the one bit everyone has heard about and probably is more interested in hearing my side of it. Assassin’s Creed Unity. Reports of bugs, glitches, and other problems at launch. While some colleagues of mine have said they haven’t seen any of these problems, it doesn’t mean they don’t exist. I’ve had colleagues say the same thing about Skyrim but we’ve seen enough glitch videos to know that the game was still buggy as hell upon release. Unity was no different, but the attitude that Ubisoft has about this nonsense is what really gets to me.

Review embargos prevented the game from being reviewed until launch day, with some not even getting review copies of the game. And while a smart person would look at the reports of all these glitches and bugs and draw the conclusion Ubisoft didn’t have confidence in their game’s quality, the reason Ubisoft gave is the final nail in the coffin for this game. An Ubisoft spokeswoman was quoted with the reason for the review embargo to be, "Having the online elements available and having populated worlds is essential to creating a representative and complete experience for reviewers. Achieving this prior to launch is incredibly complex, which is why some games are being reviewed much closer - or as was the case with Destiny, even after - the game launches."

To put it another way, Ubisoft is brushing off criticisms of their review embargos delaying reviews of the game by stating the reason was because of the online features. Similar to the way that EA defended the “online features” of their SimCity reboot by saying it wasn’t DRM, it was making SimCity and MMO. Call it whatever you want Ubisoft, but we can all see the truth behind the curtain. We can see you just wanted to hide a broken buggy game and, much like EA, will use whatever tactics you can in your PR to dance around the issue. And all this does is allow them to get away with taking the money of consumers before they know the state and quality of the game. They're forcing you to buy the game blind by pushing embargos for reviews to AFTER the release of the game. Ubisoft isn't the only company doing this (looking at you SEGA) but they are currently releasing higher profile games. 

The worst part is the online features are something I don’t even want in the game. Assassin’s Creed, to me, is a single-player experience in which you stealthily try to assassinate people. Much like how Dead Space was about traversing an alien infested space-craft to find survivors only to realize you’re the last one left. Or how FEAR was about you fighting off ghosts and psychic super soldiers in an attempt to scare the piss out of you. All of these concepts break the minute you try to mix in a pinch of multiplayer. Scary games like FEAR and Dead Space lose their scariness when you have another person t-bagging a corpse of a Unitologist.

And have you tried stealthing in a game with other people, ever? Someone else always cocks it up with little effort. And this is drop-in, drop-out co-op where you can imagine some little fucker will pop in to your game, ruin your stealth run, and the pop out knowing they trolled you good. But worst is that these single-player campaigns used to be about the story. That gets dropped when you introduce other people who will become a distracting and break the immersion of your world when they try to mess with the NPCs.

In short, Ubisoft is tripping over themselves with bad decision after bad decision this year and it’s all coming to a spectacular shitstorm here at the end of the year. We already had issues with Watch_Dogs not being released with the visuals as advertised. We already have nonsense about female characters being more difficult to make for their games. And now we have this nonsense regarding Unity’s horrible embargos and lies about why it happened as well as it and Far Cry 4 pushing the UPlay-exclusionary game release. Ubisoft needs to be careful because they will not be able to make friends with anyone if they keep up these negative ways of doing business.

That’s all for my jab at Ubisoft for today. If you want to see me make MORE jabs at Ubisoft or other companies who deserve it, please like, share, and subscribe. See you next time!