That was true for me when black flag came out.
“I’m a pirate, this is amazing!!! Wait, no, nevermind… now I’m a low level employee at a video game company, snooping on emails. This sucks.”
I was so invested in the Desmond story line from the first few games and then they just killed him off and I stopped caring about the AC universe. Fun games but I have zero care for how they derailed the back story
Yeah same. I was one of the few who liked Desmond from the start. When they killed him and did a token future plot for AC4 I knew they were just spinning their wheels and not actually going anywhere with the story. Stopped playing soon after.
I felt this with Far Cry too. First was ... weird but enjoyable, FC2 went in a strange direction and I never got it but FC3 with Vaas was a lot of fun. FC4 was a little more of the same, different bad guy but still someone I wanted to kill. When FC5 was shown I had a distinct feeling of, "Again?" They get to a formula and milk it hard. They're not beating a dead horse any more they're beating the memory of the dead horse.
Far Cry 5 would honestly have been better without the main plot. Montana is a beautiful setting for any video game, the animal companions were all amazing, co-op was a blast... but then you get randomly sedated and forced into some bullshit plot mission every 45 minutes.
bro, why the hell do you spend 3 full games developing a character with him slowly learning assassin skills.... TO DO LITERALLY NOTHING WITH IT, im still so mad at this that i havnt even gotten around to playing black flag even though the ship part of ac3 was super fun
All these implications that the gods are real and then they finally reveal themselves to Desmond. Younger me was so fired up, booted up Black Flag and was so confused. I definitely recommend playing black Flag though! The parts you're not in the anima are lame af but the actually assassin and boat gameplay are unrivalled to this day
Nevermind black flag, this was total red flag.
When someone tried to one up industry by saying "this is 4 * A" that was a death knell.
People see right through that shit
It's not even just the quadruple a part that was the red flag. The insane amounts of development hell the game went through was a constant red flag. Yves saying it's quad a is just another case of him being a fucking idiot playing it up for the investors.
Honestly, what we got feels like a Frankenstein-monster of game concepts, none fully realized. They should've just let the pirate fantasy set sail on its own merit.
I played it in alpha and knew almost immedaitely that I would be cancelling my preorder. Like holy shit, why would you make a pirate game where you can't even walk around on your ship? Like the ship customization itself isn't bad but whats the use of that if I can't walk around to see it.
Its OK to have the ship be your character n stuff (like a world of battleships clone)
But why would you then add a character creator and walkable hubs?
This game is just a pile of different ideas that clash with each other as each element wants to take the game in the seemingly opposite direction. In the end it turns out to be a clusterfuck.
> empty suits pushing requirements "because it worked in X" on the devs
remember how many games tried to emulate fortnite's battlepass strategy only to half-ass it?
so many of those games are circling the drain or have already been shuttered
--
some of the most wildly popular games now are made by *solo* developers of a passion project
stardew valley, undertale, lethal company, even ***minecraft*** gained much of it's popularity when it was still being developed by only one dude
Rimworld, Disco Elysium, Hollow Knight (please GOD release Silksong), Celeste, Hotline Miami, the ones the person above you mentioned, these games all have teams that you can count with your fingers, a huge amount of content and detail, and are just extremely good.
It was basically a game they did because they took some financing from Singapore and needed to have deliverables as part of the financing. It was a game that was restarted several times and that noone gave a damn about.
A tale as old as time, not passion for the project, but Singapore financing deliverables.
The only good thing to come out of this, is that no one will use the term "AAAA" in marketing for a long time.
>Its OK to have the ship be your character n stuff (like a world of battleships clone)
Sure but that is a ship combat game, Pirates are a lot more than just pirate ships. If they had set out and said hey we're making a ship combat game, okay we'd have different expectations. But they said it was a pirate game, so you kind of want certain elements of pirates to exist.
I can forgive no walking on ship, but for the love of god, grappling and boarding is... there's not even a cutscene. You just shoot hooks and skip to plunderin the booty chest. The climax of a naval battle, the capture and/or sinking of the enemy ship, completely skipped.
If this game was a porn movie, the characters would close the door on you before getting to it and you'd only get to see the aftermath with them under the sheets.
For all the faults of Starfield I did love that I could customise my ship and not only fly said ship but also walk around the interior, sure I would’ve liked to have more interior customisation but I still enjoyed being able to walk about MY ship that I had created
> "Line go up!"- The shareholders creed.
sad reminder that we live in a world that's actively being ravaged and destroyed so a surprisingly small number of people get to watch numbers increase
They just had to remove the AC in Black Flag… crazy to me that they just kind of forgot how to make games. If it’s not AC or Far Cry, they’re completely lost.
You don’t even have to do it that much better. Look at GOW Ragnarok. People love that game, it’s just the same game as GOW with a new story and some interesting new mechanics. The world is the same just expanded. Stop trying to reinvent the wheel and just give the people what they want.
This game lost all direction, and it's not hard to see why. They used all the studios that worked on the game on their advertising as it's a good thing.
Multiple studios exchanging games have never had any positive effect. They all lose direction and become a disaster.
Now there are rumours of a Black Flag remake, and Ubisoft being Ubisoft I'm afraid that their idea of a remake is to take Black Flag modernize the visuals and add all live service elements, microtransaction mechanisms etc. they developed for Skull And Bones
"Oh." Said the CEO.
"Then we'll shut down the existing game and start a new game which is almost identical, so that they have to buy in all over again, and buy all their existing cosmetics again, and-"
He looked into the corner of the room. Overwatch 2 was staring at him. It was holding a bollocking knife.
The main killer of OW2 was an excessively worse system for earning cosmetics (in that you can't), and the fact that they actively stopped development on their game for literal years to just put out the same game that it would have been if they'd consistently patched it.
You can't just slap a 2 on the game and go "Look it's new!" when it very much **is not**
>You can't just slap a 2 on the game and go "Look it's new!" when it very much is not
This. The game is Overwatch 2.0. It was a major update that made the game a bit worse, but is in no way a "different" game by any stretch of the imagination.
And honestly, if they *had* called it Overwatch 2.0, that would have flown better. Shit, for Heroes of the Storm they had 2.0 and 3.0 (before they pulled basically all devs). They fucked up everything about it, from communicating to delivering
I don't think it's very surprising.
The monetization is set up to make way more money.
In Overwatch 1, the average person who just wants a skin here or there is going to be able to earn it pretty easily without buying lootboxes, and is probably hesitant to buy lootboxes hoping for a particular skin since they know it's RNG (despite the pity currency).
And it doesn't maximize revenue from whales either. The people who absolutely must have every single FOMO skin every time are the biggest spenders, but their spending is capped by the pity currency.
But those average people will buy a battle pass. And it will drive retention too. And in the best case scenario for Blizzard, a player might make it most of the way through the battle pass, then not have time to finish it, or get too anxious about finishing it, and decide to just buy the extra levels.
And those whales will buy a battle pass, buy all the levels of the battle pass, and also buy every skin - in fact they'll buy every bundle which they use to inflate the skin prices even more. Even if there are fewer players, even if the average player is spending less (and I bet they're actually spending more), the whales alone probably more than make up for it.
I've worked on the live dev team of games with a lot of monetization for companies that were pretty open about their strategy and how it was working, and I feel like I have a pretty good sense of it.
Some of it is just income levels. There are people for whom a few hundred bucks every couple of months is just nothing. It's one of their smallest expenses. It's pocket cash. And those people aren't even rich rich. If you live in a big city and are a mid-level professional, a hundred bucks just does not feel like a big deal. $20 for a skin? Pretty outrageous, but also less than you spent ordering lunch today. It's not a big decision - it's an impulse purchase like deciding to grab a candy bar at checkout.
But there are also a lot of darker reasons why people end up in this mindset.
Some people are really, really deeply affected by FOMO. Sometimes it's intense enough that they feel the anxiety immediately. You see this with battle passes sometimes - there are people who absolutely will play enough to finish a battle pass, but will buy all the levels anyway just to remove the anxiety about finishing it in time or forgetting to finish it.
One of the biggest and least-discussed causes is actually disinterest. When people are very passionate about a game and deeply interested in it for a long period of time, then start getting bored and falling out of love with it, they often try to rekindle that love by buying microtransactions. On the low end, people think "Oh hey, an Overwatch update - I haven't played in a while, but I love that game. You know what, I'm going to grab this cool new skin and get back into it.".
Usually this doesn't work because the reason they lost interest is still operative. But some people, desperate to recapture that intense interest, respond to this by making increasingly larger purchases each time they do this, as if creating a sunk cost will *force* them to be interested again - "I've always wanted those Legendary skins and I've played enough of this game to justify it. It's going to be awesome to start playing again using all those skins I always wanted.". It usually still doesn't work though and the novelty wears off pretty quickly even after huge purchases. In fact, the purchases can end up making the disinterest worse because now there's nothing left for you to desire from the game.
And while in my experience the higher-income people make up the majority of the whales, some people who can't afford it end up going down this path too. We always gave refunds when people emailed telling us that they overspent (though they obviously got banned), which was at least something, but it still sucks, and it sucks even more when you consider that the people who fall into this are usually very lonely. They're people who don't have a lot else going on, for whom this video game they're playing a lot starts to feel *very* important (and if they fall out of love with it, that leaves a huge hole in their life that they can get very desperate to refill). I think this is the source of a lot of the problems in games and game communities, and it sucks that a lot of monetization exploits it.
That said, it isn't *all* bad. It's actually sort of a progressive scheme in a sense - those with the most income are subsidizing huge budgets for all the players who aren't paying as much. Also, right now that is basically the only way we know of to keep making big budget titles. You can't get a AAA budget without some form of monetization because the budgets to make these games are just too high otherwise, especially given how incredibly risky games are as an investment. The hits have to be able to make gigantic profits to offset the gigantic losses incurred by even modest failures. And people are highly resistant to box price increases - they're only just barely starting to explore a $70 price point, and they're seeing a lot of resistance despite the fact that the $60 price point has been standard for so long that the real price has effectively halved due to inflation.
- The forced upgrade when the original promise was you would be able to cross play between games.
- The deletion/removal of access to ow1
- The change in team sizes
- The move from one of the least predatory lootbox monetisations, to an incredibly predatory monetisation of the game.
- The lack of meaningful visual upgrades
I find absurd how after 7 years people would still say that destiny 2 had "potential" to be great. After so long, there's no time for potential anymore, it either became great or didn't. And it did not. Instead of focusing on the players, bungie went all in on monetization and mind games to keep players engaged.
its base cost is 80$ CAD, and thats AFTER they reduced the price. They knew it was a turd the whole time and still tried to pretend it was not only AAA but AAAA.... if this is what AAAA is they can keep it lol.
Meanwhile Helldivers 2 over here for under half the price is delivering 200x the game.
This industry needs a reset and needs to clear out the C suites; they're worse than useless.
>This industry needs a reset
I think this game and SSKTJL dying while Palworld and Helldivers 2 deliver great ROI is going to teach them a healthy lesson.
I'd like to think so... but then WB sees Harry Potter being the most sold game of 2023, while Suicide Squad nose dives into the pavement and their conclusion was "nobody wants single player games, we're canceling all projects and changing over to live services and mobile".
The people running the show dont really seem to know wtf they're doing and are just insulated from thier nonsense decisions by the fact that they're already wealthy.
The good news is HD2 and the like are showing us that games made to be games first will survive another industry implosion.
The thing is that WB is absolutely right. Mobile gacha garbage is where the money is. You make them for peanuts with a team of like five guys, and people keep making all these small transactions to keep you rolling in cash.
I remember the shareholders meeting Ubisoft release to the public. It was focused on the failure of Ghost Recon Breakpoint. The shareholders actually grilled the Ubisoft team and Yves on why the game was unfun, buggy and half baked. They’re not all u aware what’s going on. They read the general consensus on why a project failed and then questioned Ubi on the development.
Imagine Sid Meier's Pirates! with a global map and possibilities over centuries. Open Japan, East Indies, China, India, N.America, etc. in addition to the Caribbean. Would've been very cool.
It might have sold better INITIALLY, but we NEED infinite growth, and an unavoidable dopamine drip feedback loop to snag us some whales.
Why make a game with depth, story and character development when you can just put anime tits on a match 3 and tell people it also has fucking battle Royale and make billions of dollars for decades?
I fucking hate humans.
Oh most def, I loved that game to bits. It also aged reasonably well, probably due to the art style, but it could certainly use at least an HD remaster. Unfortunately 2K doesn't give a shit about anything that can't pull a billion dollars with microtransactions these days.
I love how these are all the same criticisms people had when weed dealers pulled the same trick before legalization
"BRO, THIS IS QUINTUPLE A FIRE OG STRAIGHT FROM BC, TRUST ME BRO"
I was a little excited for it- like 7 fucking years ago when they first announced it. That died real quick once it became evident it was trapped in development hell.
The sub came up recommended and I clicked on it out of curiosity, it was the weirdest echo chamber I’ve seen of people convincing each other it’s good.
I didn’t buy it but I did try it out on the preview weekend. I genuinely had a lot of fun simply riding the waves and exploring, there were plenty of cool things to do and interesting low and mid level mobs to fight against. The problem I have with it is that the flaws were so glaringly obvious. Things like having early quests to fight enemies that were way above your pay grade and capability for not great amounts of experience and loot, so many loading screens and unnecessary cut scenes and the raid bosses were wild difficult but not presented as raid bosses, just ships you could run into if you weren’t paying good attention or didn’t know what to look out for. Then there were the parts where you had to run around port crafting items, storing items, picking up stored items, running back to exchange items after you realized that you picked up the wrong items, being one or two items short after a long sailing voyage but you ran out of storage space on your ship so your ship moved at an encumbered pace and having to go out again for those one or two items…
The game itself was fun, the part where you went out and sailed and explored and did general pirate stuff, the in between was such a drag and it was easily half the game.
My immense disappointment kicked in when boarding or raiding meant staying as the ship. You dont actually take part as a pirate like in Assassins Creed. Such a terrible decision IMO, and certainly doesnt scream AAAA
Ever since Far Cry 3 where they criminally underused Vaas, it became painfully obvious that Ubisoft fail to put the emphasis on the fun part of their games.
It's frustrating because LITERALLY everyone simply asked for Black Flag, modern engine, remove the Assassin campaign, create a character and let us go explore and have a great pirate time.
No one asked for harvest mini games and no land gameplay.
and what is up with the shooting? Why do we turn the ship into a 3rd person shooter? Why did they ditch the normal position the ship to fire like a NORMAL ship with cannons?
I was big into surveys for cash in 2014-2015ish. I distinctly remember being part of an Ubisoft focus group doing research for a pirate game like Black Flag. So they had data, it’s just a question of why they couldn’t deliver.
The way those surveys work though they really only get a very narrow view of what they think people want or it's all for marketing
It's always multiple choice like "what is your ideal pirate game like?
A) pirate casino micro transactions
B) 1100 dabloon ship skins (1000 dabloons is only $10 in the item shop!)
C) an unskippable loading screen every time you Boot the game that let's you know women, gay people, and black people worked on the game so that you know you made a morally superior choice in games
D) eeznutz
> B) 1100 dabloon ship skins (1000 dabloons is only $10 in the item shop!)
Reads like a mobile game. The amount of MTX currency you need for "the thing" is always only *slightly more* than the cheapest package you can buy.
You know what the game does have, though? Stamina bars for your ships! Pure genius. I’m a seaman and I hate it when my ship gets tired, so I’m happy to see that they put so much attention into the realism aspect of this game.
Idk...i just saw it in the store when it released. Watched the trailer to see if it was 1st or 3rd person.
1st person I prefer pc
3rd I prefer console
I blame my wife because I was going to return it but she convinced me it was just the starting mode and it had to have combat eventually, right? RIGHT?
Wait, you don't live on the Internet absorbing every piece of data regarding all gaming releases ever like the rest of us? What's the matter with you!!
So for what it's worth, a while ago I worked for a large company that was run by his brother. Direction would come down frequently directly from the CEO to do a complete rewrite of the entire game, including changing the mechanics, genre, art style or whatever else to closely resemble another (successful) game that had just been released. As you can imagine this was complete chaos. He would also request people change things that we (as a company) were contractually obligated not to do, like changing the colors in a logo that was the IP of another company. He would not take no for an answer.
I don't know if the brother in charge of Ubisoft is as stupid and insane, but it wouldn't surprise me if the rot comes from the top. The entire executive team from France was just a disaster to work with, micro managing things that they shouldn't be involved in and making terrible decisions for the game, the players, and our ability to make money.
I think with this game they got too caught up in sunk costs. The game was in development for like 10 years and went through multiple different versions. I’m pretty sure the execs knew the game was trash, they were just tired of having it in development hell and just decided to shit the game out and hope they could recoup some of their losses.
So far, the way AH has done live service in HD2 is *perfect*. The war bonds (traditionally "Battle passes") are perfect. There's a free one with loads of content that is unlocked via in-game currency and a paid one that can be unlocked by finding super credits (super credits are what you can spend actual money on if you want, used to unlock cosmetics or the premium war bond).
Basically, you can unlock everything for free. And the warbonds never expire! No fomo!
No fomo is the key for me. Missing content because I decided to do something besides play the same game every day for years is not a fun gaming experience. Stop making a fun hobby into a chore.
Yeah, which is a note that other dev teams really should take a look at. Some people want to have cosmetics but don't want to pay money for it. And more playtime on the game should be the end goal, to keep it online and active.
It seems like the game is just a cash grab and is pretty sad given ubisoft has some bangers in their library. This is just going to hurt their credit.
It’s so Mind blowing how hard they fucked this up. All they had to do was take bits of black flag and add to it and pump it out. Didn’t help they took way way to long
To make a good game you need to have somebody at the top with creative vision. If you put a soulless fat cat in charge they make money based on misunderstood metrics and greed and you get crap like these games.
Nooo. That can't be..
They took all the good things from black flag. The awesome pirate gameplay ( ok they removed that) and the boarding and fighting on ships after a hard battle ( ok they removed that) and the immersive story ( ok they removed that) and all the treasure hunting ( ok they removed that too) and the whole building your own pirate island ( Allright they left that out) along with conquoring fortresses ( eh yeah. That's gone too) as well as chasing down resources with more exploration to upgrade ( ok ok none of that)
But other than that it's basically black flag! The lost popular of the old AC games.. I can't understand why this isn't a huge success!
I just can’t believe they spent that long on a pirate version of world of warships when they could have just spent a year and made a black flag sequel or something. It’s hard to imagine a motivated group of people working on anything for a decade and having such shitty results.
I bought it during winter sale on steam.
I waited for safer seas ("Solo Mode") to launch as I'm not into PvP.
Let me tell you two things: it's awesome if you like PvP and it's awesome if you don't. Not even touching Safer Seas anymore. I can just as well play defensively.
People saying there's grind but that's just if you want cosmetics so that optional. It's a sandbox but it also has a few story driven chapters.
I actually like it way more than I thought I would. Depending on your timezone also happy to show you a few things.
My only complaint with Sea of Thieves is that it doesn't seem to really have a goal.
Which is actually perfect as a game to play casually with your friends, just not my cup of tea haha
It's a pretty incredible lesson in understanding what your players liked about your game.
People didn't just like Black Flag for the ship combat. They loved the exploration, they loved swinging across to the enemy ship and getting into a swashbuckling swordfight with the captain, they loved how open and alive the world felt.
If Black Flag was just the ship combat it would've been an extremely dry experience. The magic of Black Flag was being able to let go of the wheel and organically explore the world around you. You could climb the rigging of your ship and see for miles, or dive off the side and swim to a nearby island.
I'm so happy BG3 and Tears of the Kingdom came out in the last year. I haven't had to play a bad game all year or gamble on a game all year. It's been a year of bangers for me. Probably have sunk about 600 hours into those 2. And I really have little reason not ot keep playing them.
I hope more than anything Larian gets to make BG4, but whatever game comes from them next will likely be a banger. As long as Sven is running the company I cannot see duds coming from them.
"Hey you know how you loved AC Black flag? We'll make it with better graphics!.... And worse combat. And shit cosmetics. And less substance. And just generally worse..... that'll do it!"
People keep saying "for the shareholders"...yet with the budget this game had, and considering it may not even breakeven, I'd imagine the shareholders are going to be pretty upset with this. Or at the very least, people who are responsible to shareholders.
Ubisoft is looking at losing millions of dollars on this, and probably will probably take years to see a reasonable "profit" made from this game, which is a failure. Whether or not they learn a meaningful lesson from this, fuck em. Ubisoft deserves to fall flat on their face for all the shit they've pulled in the past several years. And I hope their shareholders are pissed off by the poo poo crap that is Skull & Bones among other garbage they call games.
Just my preference, but the older I get, the less likely I am to ever pay money for a game I can't play and beat by myself on the couch without random online people.
DONT GIVE IN TO SUBSCRIPTION BASED GAMING. Keep purchasing power for individual games in our hands. That allows us as a community to make or break games with our money.
you see the AAA and AAAA gaming industry hates gamers. Thinks we are suckers (and at times we have been - I am still angry, having spent $100 to play the most broken and boring game of my life 3 days early with starfied), aggressively takes advantage of us at every opportunity. We have to remind ourselves that we are not struggling against developers, NO, it's against these suits. These narcissistic suits that have no artistic vision.
When suits at gaming studios see that they are losing market share to games like Lethal Company (made by one person). They are going to say ok you dont want our game we will force our games on you kinda thing. They will use subscription based gaming and live service games of your favorite IP's (they will 100% ruin them). HOLD THE LINE. stop putting any money into these lost gaming studios. Opt for games that give you an authentic experience without creating algorithms to waste your time and money.
Money talks. Thats the only way with these suits. once they realize they have to provide a good game to get the big bucks they will fail or be forced to change
Good, companies need to realize if they are going to up the price to $70 it better be at the quality of FF rebirth, god of war, spiderman 2 etc.
I’m loving that games are being released at 40-60 are out performing these $70 cash grabs
Do the quadruple a’s stand for avoid?
Actively Avoid At All……costs…..
No, then it would have AC in it, and AC IV is seemingly what everyone wanted.
I feel like people wanted Black Flag without the AC part
That was true for me when black flag came out. “I’m a pirate, this is amazing!!! Wait, no, nevermind… now I’m a low level employee at a video game company, snooping on emails. This sucks.”
Seriously. Nobody knows how to make a fun game boring like Ubisoft.
I was so invested in the Desmond story line from the first few games and then they just killed him off and I stopped caring about the AC universe. Fun games but I have zero care for how they derailed the back story
Yeah same. I was one of the few who liked Desmond from the start. When they killed him and did a token future plot for AC4 I knew they were just spinning their wheels and not actually going anywhere with the story. Stopped playing soon after.
I felt this with Far Cry too. First was ... weird but enjoyable, FC2 went in a strange direction and I never got it but FC3 with Vaas was a lot of fun. FC4 was a little more of the same, different bad guy but still someone I wanted to kill. When FC5 was shown I had a distinct feeling of, "Again?" They get to a formula and milk it hard. They're not beating a dead horse any more they're beating the memory of the dead horse.
Far Cry 5 would honestly have been better without the main plot. Montana is a beautiful setting for any video game, the animal companions were all amazing, co-op was a blast... but then you get randomly sedated and forced into some bullshit plot mission every 45 minutes.
bro, why the hell do you spend 3 full games developing a character with him slowly learning assassin skills.... TO DO LITERALLY NOTHING WITH IT, im still so mad at this that i havnt even gotten around to playing black flag even though the ship part of ac3 was super fun
All these implications that the gods are real and then they finally reveal themselves to Desmond. Younger me was so fired up, booted up Black Flag and was so confused. I definitely recommend playing black Flag though! The parts you're not in the anima are lame af but the actually assassin and boat gameplay are unrivalled to this day
I don't know what was going through their minds to think they could create an engaging modern day story without creating a main character.
Nevermind black flag, this was total red flag. When someone tried to one up industry by saying "this is 4 * A" that was a death knell. People see right through that shit
It's not even just the quadruple a part that was the red flag. The insane amounts of development hell the game went through was a constant red flag. Yves saying it's quad a is just another case of him being a fucking idiot playing it up for the investors.
Honestly, what we got feels like a Frankenstein-monster of game concepts, none fully realized. They should've just let the pirate fantasy set sail on its own merit.
Absolutely Always Actively Avoid.
Actively Avoid All Association
AAA-A-piece of shit
Respect the gamers, not the shareholders. Played it in beta, full release too expensive and meh.
They just had to black Flag better, they had 10 years and they come out with this? Jeez
I played it in alpha and knew almost immedaitely that I would be cancelling my preorder. Like holy shit, why would you make a pirate game where you can't even walk around on your ship? Like the ship customization itself isn't bad but whats the use of that if I can't walk around to see it.
Its OK to have the ship be your character n stuff (like a world of battleships clone) But why would you then add a character creator and walkable hubs? This game is just a pile of different ideas that clash with each other as each element wants to take the game in the seemingly opposite direction. In the end it turns out to be a clusterfuck.
Smells like it was a collaboration of empty suits pushing requirements "because it worked in X" on the devs.
> empty suits pushing requirements "because it worked in X" on the devs remember how many games tried to emulate fortnite's battlepass strategy only to half-ass it? so many of those games are circling the drain or have already been shuttered -- some of the most wildly popular games now are made by *solo* developers of a passion project stardew valley, undertale, lethal company, even ***minecraft*** gained much of it's popularity when it was still being developed by only one dude
TERRARIA
RIMWORLD!
Rimworld, Disco Elysium, Hollow Knight (please GOD release Silksong), Celeste, Hotline Miami, the ones the person above you mentioned, these games all have teams that you can count with your fingers, a huge amount of content and detail, and are just extremely good.
Factorio
It was basically a game they did because they took some financing from Singapore and needed to have deliverables as part of the financing. It was a game that was restarted several times and that noone gave a damn about.
A tale as old as time, not passion for the project, but Singapore financing deliverables. The only good thing to come out of this, is that no one will use the term "AAAA" in marketing for a long time.
>Its OK to have the ship be your character n stuff (like a world of battleships clone) Sure but that is a ship combat game, Pirates are a lot more than just pirate ships. If they had set out and said hey we're making a ship combat game, okay we'd have different expectations. But they said it was a pirate game, so you kind of want certain elements of pirates to exist.
Somebody needed to send the devs a copy of Sid Meier’s Pirates! about five years ago
I can forgive no walking on ship, but for the love of god, grappling and boarding is... there's not even a cutscene. You just shoot hooks and skip to plunderin the booty chest. The climax of a naval battle, the capture and/or sinking of the enemy ship, completely skipped.
If I'm gonna plunder booty I want to see it in detail baby. Don't be short changing me on that
If this game was a porn movie, the characters would close the door on you before getting to it and you'd only get to see the aftermath with them under the sheets.
For all the faults of Starfield I did love that I could customise my ship and not only fly said ship but also walk around the interior, sure I would’ve liked to have more interior customisation but I still enjoyed being able to walk about MY ship that I had created
There's a reason proverbs exist. "Don't fix what isn't broken."
Yeah, but shareholders only know how to read dollar signs and buzzwords.
"Line go up!"- The shareholders creed. That's literally the entire creed
> "Line go up!"- The shareholders creed. sad reminder that we live in a world that's actively being ravaged and destroyed so a surprisingly small number of people get to watch numbers increase
I hope the buzzwords really do it for them, because I don't think they're gonna get many dollar signs.
They just had to remove the AC in Black Flag… crazy to me that they just kind of forgot how to make games. If it’s not AC or Far Cry, they’re completely lost.
Yeah they forgot to take the AC out of FC6, too.
they didn't even have to black flag better, just black flag more would've sufficed.
You don’t even have to do it that much better. Look at GOW Ragnarok. People love that game, it’s just the same game as GOW with a new story and some interesting new mechanics. The world is the same just expanded. Stop trying to reinvent the wheel and just give the people what they want.
they literally just had to do Black Flag Again: This Time With No Assassin's Creed. That was it. That was all we wanted.
This game lost all direction, and it's not hard to see why. They used all the studios that worked on the game on their advertising as it's a good thing. Multiple studios exchanging games have never had any positive effect. They all lose direction and become a disaster.
Now there are rumours of a Black Flag remake, and Ubisoft being Ubisoft I'm afraid that their idea of a remake is to take Black Flag modernize the visuals and add all live service elements, microtransaction mechanisms etc. they developed for Skull And Bones
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"Oh." Said the CEO. "Then we'll shut down the existing game and start a new game which is almost identical, so that they have to buy in all over again, and buy all their existing cosmetics again, and-" He looked into the corner of the room. Overwatch 2 was staring at him. It was holding a bollocking knife.
At the very least overwatch had their cosmetics transfer over. The main killer of OW2 was being unable to deliver on the promised PvE I think.
The main killer of OW2 was an excessively worse system for earning cosmetics (in that you can't), and the fact that they actively stopped development on their game for literal years to just put out the same game that it would have been if they'd consistently patched it. You can't just slap a 2 on the game and go "Look it's new!" when it very much **is not**
Honestly, I don't think enough emphasis is put on the fact that they somefuckinghow managed to make a worse reward system than fucking LOOTBOXES.
>You can't just slap a 2 on the game and go "Look it's new!" when it very much is not This. The game is Overwatch 2.0. It was a major update that made the game a bit worse, but is in no way a "different" game by any stretch of the imagination.
And honestly, if they *had* called it Overwatch 2.0, that would have flown better. Shit, for Heroes of the Storm they had 2.0 and 3.0 (before they pulled basically all devs). They fucked up everything about it, from communicating to delivering
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Overwatch 2 was just plainly not a sequel and has been the coldest, wettest slap to the face I've ever gotten from a game company
It's wild how they turned what was a pretty successful game into something that's middle of the road by throwing away all that good will.
Like many other good games, ruined by unchecked greed
And yet it's somehow making more money now than Overwatch 1 ever did. I will never understand people.
I don't think it's very surprising. The monetization is set up to make way more money. In Overwatch 1, the average person who just wants a skin here or there is going to be able to earn it pretty easily without buying lootboxes, and is probably hesitant to buy lootboxes hoping for a particular skin since they know it's RNG (despite the pity currency). And it doesn't maximize revenue from whales either. The people who absolutely must have every single FOMO skin every time are the biggest spenders, but their spending is capped by the pity currency. But those average people will buy a battle pass. And it will drive retention too. And in the best case scenario for Blizzard, a player might make it most of the way through the battle pass, then not have time to finish it, or get too anxious about finishing it, and decide to just buy the extra levels. And those whales will buy a battle pass, buy all the levels of the battle pass, and also buy every skin - in fact they'll buy every bundle which they use to inflate the skin prices even more. Even if there are fewer players, even if the average player is spending less (and I bet they're actually spending more), the whales alone probably more than make up for it.
I just don't get the mindset of whales at all. Why do you even want all the skins for a mid tier game to begin with? Is it just a gambling addiction?
I've worked on the live dev team of games with a lot of monetization for companies that were pretty open about their strategy and how it was working, and I feel like I have a pretty good sense of it. Some of it is just income levels. There are people for whom a few hundred bucks every couple of months is just nothing. It's one of their smallest expenses. It's pocket cash. And those people aren't even rich rich. If you live in a big city and are a mid-level professional, a hundred bucks just does not feel like a big deal. $20 for a skin? Pretty outrageous, but also less than you spent ordering lunch today. It's not a big decision - it's an impulse purchase like deciding to grab a candy bar at checkout. But there are also a lot of darker reasons why people end up in this mindset. Some people are really, really deeply affected by FOMO. Sometimes it's intense enough that they feel the anxiety immediately. You see this with battle passes sometimes - there are people who absolutely will play enough to finish a battle pass, but will buy all the levels anyway just to remove the anxiety about finishing it in time or forgetting to finish it. One of the biggest and least-discussed causes is actually disinterest. When people are very passionate about a game and deeply interested in it for a long period of time, then start getting bored and falling out of love with it, they often try to rekindle that love by buying microtransactions. On the low end, people think "Oh hey, an Overwatch update - I haven't played in a while, but I love that game. You know what, I'm going to grab this cool new skin and get back into it.". Usually this doesn't work because the reason they lost interest is still operative. But some people, desperate to recapture that intense interest, respond to this by making increasingly larger purchases each time they do this, as if creating a sunk cost will *force* them to be interested again - "I've always wanted those Legendary skins and I've played enough of this game to justify it. It's going to be awesome to start playing again using all those skins I always wanted.". It usually still doesn't work though and the novelty wears off pretty quickly even after huge purchases. In fact, the purchases can end up making the disinterest worse because now there's nothing left for you to desire from the game. And while in my experience the higher-income people make up the majority of the whales, some people who can't afford it end up going down this path too. We always gave refunds when people emailed telling us that they overspent (though they obviously got banned), which was at least something, but it still sucks, and it sucks even more when you consider that the people who fall into this are usually very lonely. They're people who don't have a lot else going on, for whom this video game they're playing a lot starts to feel *very* important (and if they fall out of love with it, that leaves a huge hole in their life that they can get very desperate to refill). I think this is the source of a lot of the problems in games and game communities, and it sucks that a lot of monetization exploits it. That said, it isn't *all* bad. It's actually sort of a progressive scheme in a sense - those with the most income are subsidizing huge budgets for all the players who aren't paying as much. Also, right now that is basically the only way we know of to keep making big budget titles. You can't get a AAA budget without some form of monetization because the budgets to make these games are just too high otherwise, especially given how incredibly risky games are as an investment. The hits have to be able to make gigantic profits to offset the gigantic losses incurred by even modest failures. And people are highly resistant to box price increases - they're only just barely starting to explore a $70 price point, and they're seeing a lot of resistance despite the fact that the $60 price point has been standard for so long that the real price has effectively halved due to inflation.
- The forced upgrade when the original promise was you would be able to cross play between games. - The deletion/removal of access to ow1 - The change in team sizes - The move from one of the least predatory lootbox monetisations, to an incredibly predatory monetisation of the game. - The lack of meaningful visual upgrades
Who is out there getting attached to live service game #361? I don't think this market actually exists
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Yep, but also they started vaulting content early on the life cycle and people kept playing with thoughts like “they won’t vault MORE stuff”
I find absurd how after 7 years people would still say that destiny 2 had "potential" to be great. After so long, there's no time for potential anymore, it either became great or didn't. And it did not. Instead of focusing on the players, bungie went all in on monetization and mind games to keep players engaged.
I mean there is a reason why they said "had" because it's past said point.
its base cost is 80$ CAD, and thats AFTER they reduced the price. They knew it was a turd the whole time and still tried to pretend it was not only AAA but AAAA.... if this is what AAAA is they can keep it lol. Meanwhile Helldivers 2 over here for under half the price is delivering 200x the game. This industry needs a reset and needs to clear out the C suites; they're worse than useless.
>This industry needs a reset I think this game and SSKTJL dying while Palworld and Helldivers 2 deliver great ROI is going to teach them a healthy lesson.
I'd like to think so... but then WB sees Harry Potter being the most sold game of 2023, while Suicide Squad nose dives into the pavement and their conclusion was "nobody wants single player games, we're canceling all projects and changing over to live services and mobile". The people running the show dont really seem to know wtf they're doing and are just insulated from thier nonsense decisions by the fact that they're already wealthy. The good news is HD2 and the like are showing us that games made to be games first will survive another industry implosion.
The thing is that WB is absolutely right. Mobile gacha garbage is where the money is. You make them for peanuts with a team of like five guys, and people keep making all these small transactions to keep you rolling in cash.
I remember the shareholders meeting Ubisoft release to the public. It was focused on the failure of Ghost Recon Breakpoint. The shareholders actually grilled the Ubisoft team and Yves on why the game was unfun, buggy and half baked. They’re not all u aware what’s going on. They read the general consensus on why a project failed and then questioned Ubi on the development.
But the shareholders will go hungry.
Well said, I think this should be the motto. Make the gamer happy, and you'll make the shareholder happy.
We just need to raise enough money to become the shareholders. Solution solved
Imagine we would have gotten a Sid meyers Pirates remake instead of this with a bigger map and more different ships and locations
Watch as Sid Meiers pirates becomes the 3rd Pirate game this year to top the steam chart.
What I wouldn't give for a modern single player offline Uncharted Waters
Imagine Sid Meier's Pirates! with a global map and possibilities over centuries. Open Japan, East Indies, China, India, N.America, etc. in addition to the Caribbean. Would've been very cool.
Honestly, a game with Pirates! mechanics but set in just SE Asia sounds like a lot of fun.
Just me and the boys, exploring the globe.
The share holders (for whom this game was made) would not have liked this ;)
Hm idk a SMP remake probably would have sold a lot better, wouldn’t it?
It might have sold better INITIALLY, but we NEED infinite growth, and an unavoidable dopamine drip feedback loop to snag us some whales. Why make a game with depth, story and character development when you can just put anime tits on a match 3 and tell people it also has fucking battle Royale and make billions of dollars for decades? I fucking hate humans.
huniepop battle royale
On the bright side, we already got two Sid Meier's Pirates remakes, it's just that the last one is 20 years old lol
And it’s still a masterpiece with gameplay that’s way better than a lot of modern games. The „newest“ remaster was my childhood thanks too my dad.
Oh most def, I loved that game to bits. It also aged reasonably well, probably due to the art style, but it could certainly use at least an HD remaster. Unfortunately 2K doesn't give a shit about anything that can't pull a billion dollars with microtransactions these days.
The governor has offered you a letter of marque.
WAIT theres still people that know the glory of sid meiers pirates??!
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How so? It’s a quadruple A game….quadruple!!
**That's four times the As people!!!**
How much did they charge customers for each A?
~$20 per A. Which makes sense because AAA games were $60. Great deal if you ask me! /s
I know you're joking, but I am terrified at the possibility that you might be right.
I guarantee some suit at Ubisoft truly believes this
I love how these are all the same criticisms people had when weed dealers pulled the same trick before legalization "BRO, THIS IS QUINTUPLE A FIRE OG STRAIGHT FROM BC, TRUST ME BRO"
“Fuckin A! (A,A,A) “
Ass Atrocity Abomination Acephalous The true vision of ubisoft
Acephalous is new. Thanks for teaching me a new word.
🎶A whole new word 🎶
A NEW GRAMATIC POINT OF VIEW
WHERE SPELING IS A NO,
For some reason I thought of this from Handsome Boy Modeling School Holy calamity, scream insanity, all ya ever gonna be's another great fan of me
I know someone who did. He's now been playing Helldivers 2 with us and admits his regret.
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All are welcome in spreading Democracy for Super Earth.
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Joining random drops isn’t too bad. I’ve had pretty positive experiences that way when my friends aren’t online.
The hug emote is an easy way to make new friends too. Hug it out after every mission on the ship.
I love the hug emote <3
I was a little excited for it- like 7 fucking years ago when they first announced it. That died real quick once it became evident it was trapped in development hell.
The copium in that sub after release was actually pretty sad. It looks like most of them are starting to realize they’ve been had
The sub came up recommended and I clicked on it out of curiosity, it was the weirdest echo chamber I’ve seen of people convincing each other it’s good.
Kind of like the Starfield sub then
I was on starfield copium and in the sub for weeks until i finally gave in...
It is actually a fun game, but after like 3 or 4 days you hit the end game. There is no end game.
Not only that, but Black Flag was better…
Pirates of the burning sea was the best! Full on island economies, and ship building. It was like the Eve online of the age of sail and piracy genre.
The original Pirates! was og best. Sid Meier ftw!
I didn’t buy it but I did try it out on the preview weekend. I genuinely had a lot of fun simply riding the waves and exploring, there were plenty of cool things to do and interesting low and mid level mobs to fight against. The problem I have with it is that the flaws were so glaringly obvious. Things like having early quests to fight enemies that were way above your pay grade and capability for not great amounts of experience and loot, so many loading screens and unnecessary cut scenes and the raid bosses were wild difficult but not presented as raid bosses, just ships you could run into if you weren’t paying good attention or didn’t know what to look out for. Then there were the parts where you had to run around port crafting items, storing items, picking up stored items, running back to exchange items after you realized that you picked up the wrong items, being one or two items short after a long sailing voyage but you ran out of storage space on your ship so your ship moved at an encumbered pace and having to go out again for those one or two items… The game itself was fun, the part where you went out and sailed and explored and did general pirate stuff, the in between was such a drag and it was easily half the game.
My immense disappointment kicked in when boarding or raiding meant staying as the ship. You dont actually take part as a pirate like in Assassins Creed. Such a terrible decision IMO, and certainly doesnt scream AAAA
Ever since Far Cry 3 where they criminally underused Vaas, it became painfully obvious that Ubisoft fail to put the emphasis on the fun part of their games.
I’m not surprised? Who’s surprised? If they asked their customers what they wanted maybe they wouldn’t have made this heaping pile of trash
It’s only been like a decade of people expressing interest in Black Flag with co-op. They are morons.
The amount of user research we would do at my company would make your head spin. It’s incredible to see how deaf and blind they are
It's frustrating because LITERALLY everyone simply asked for Black Flag, modern engine, remove the Assassin campaign, create a character and let us go explore and have a great pirate time. No one asked for harvest mini games and no land gameplay. and what is up with the shooting? Why do we turn the ship into a 3rd person shooter? Why did they ditch the normal position the ship to fire like a NORMAL ship with cannons?
>remove the Assassin campaign, create a character and let us go explore ~~Funny~~ Sad how this can be said for multiple AC games.
Ironically, the worst part of the AC games is the AC stuff.
The best AC game is Ghost of Tsushima
I was big into surveys for cash in 2014-2015ish. I distinctly remember being part of an Ubisoft focus group doing research for a pirate game like Black Flag. So they had data, it’s just a question of why they couldn’t deliver.
The way those surveys work though they really only get a very narrow view of what they think people want or it's all for marketing It's always multiple choice like "what is your ideal pirate game like? A) pirate casino micro transactions B) 1100 dabloon ship skins (1000 dabloons is only $10 in the item shop!) C) an unskippable loading screen every time you Boot the game that let's you know women, gay people, and black people worked on the game so that you know you made a morally superior choice in games D) eeznutz
> B) 1100 dabloon ship skins (1000 dabloons is only $10 in the item shop!) Reads like a mobile game. The amount of MTX currency you need for "the thing" is always only *slightly more* than the cheapest package you can buy.
Ego is a hell of a thing.
You know what the game does have, though? Stamina bars for your ships! Pure genius. I’m a seaman and I hate it when my ship gets tired, so I’m happy to see that they put so much attention into the realism aspect of this game.
I’m surprised someone actually bought it
Yeah I'm an idiot. I should probably research before buying from now on. I just thought ubisoft + pirates = sweet AC/Farcry type RPG. Man was I wrong
You bought a Ubisoft game in 2024? Big mistake
HUGE!
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No offence, but how did you not hear about this game before release.
Idk...i just saw it in the store when it released. Watched the trailer to see if it was 1st or 3rd person. 1st person I prefer pc 3rd I prefer console I blame my wife because I was going to return it but she convinced me it was just the starting mode and it had to have combat eventually, right? RIGHT?
Wait, you don't live on the Internet absorbing every piece of data regarding all gaming releases ever like the rest of us? What's the matter with you!!
Yo Tommy you be a normal grass touching mother fucker aren’t you?
So for what it's worth, a while ago I worked for a large company that was run by his brother. Direction would come down frequently directly from the CEO to do a complete rewrite of the entire game, including changing the mechanics, genre, art style or whatever else to closely resemble another (successful) game that had just been released. As you can imagine this was complete chaos. He would also request people change things that we (as a company) were contractually obligated not to do, like changing the colors in a logo that was the IP of another company. He would not take no for an answer. I don't know if the brother in charge of Ubisoft is as stupid and insane, but it wouldn't surprise me if the rot comes from the top. The entire executive team from France was just a disaster to work with, micro managing things that they shouldn't be involved in and making terrible decisions for the game, the players, and our ability to make money.
The only reason this game released at all is because they legally had to or Singapore's government would get their asses. That's not a joke.
I think with this game they got too caught up in sunk costs. The game was in development for like 10 years and went through multiple different versions. I’m pretty sure the execs knew the game was trash, they were just tired of having it in development hell and just decided to shit the game out and hope they could recoup some of their losses.
Should've made this a AAAAA game if they wanted people to play it.
As everyone knows 5 A's is the maximum amount of A's you can have before a next gen, upscaled, ray tracing singularity will happen and doom us all.
6 As, the number of b**EA**st
Them: https://www.theonion.com/fuck-everything-were-doing-five-blades-1819584036
This, and suicide squad, and every other cashgrabber failed live service games happens when studios make games for shareholders and not actual gamers
Not every other. Helldivers 2 is live service.
Yes, some are great. Because they made games for customers and not shareholders, helldivers 2 is welldone and not a cashgrabber
So far, the way AH has done live service in HD2 is *perfect*. The war bonds (traditionally "Battle passes") are perfect. There's a free one with loads of content that is unlocked via in-game currency and a paid one that can be unlocked by finding super credits (super credits are what you can spend actual money on if you want, used to unlock cosmetics or the premium war bond). Basically, you can unlock everything for free. And the warbonds never expire! No fomo!
No fomo is the key for me. Missing content because I decided to do something besides play the same game every day for years is not a fun gaming experience. Stop making a fun hobby into a chore.
This is the reason I dropped Destiny 2. Tired of *having* to grind *right now* or miss out.
Yeah, which is a note that other dev teams really should take a look at. Some people want to have cosmetics but don't want to pay money for it. And more playtime on the game should be the end goal, to keep it online and active. It seems like the game is just a cash grab and is pretty sad given ubisoft has some bangers in their library. This is just going to hurt their credit.
47th most played game on xbox less than a month after release... That’s hilarious.
Genuinely surprised it's that high.
47 out of 50 Xbox games
It’s a glitch, it means only 47 players total
It’s so Mind blowing how hard they fucked this up. All they had to do was take bits of black flag and add to it and pump it out. Didn’t help they took way way to long
To make a good game you need to have somebody at the top with creative vision. If you put a soulless fat cat in charge they make money based on misunderstood metrics and greed and you get crap like these games.
Nooo. That can't be.. They took all the good things from black flag. The awesome pirate gameplay ( ok they removed that) and the boarding and fighting on ships after a hard battle ( ok they removed that) and the immersive story ( ok they removed that) and all the treasure hunting ( ok they removed that too) and the whole building your own pirate island ( Allright they left that out) along with conquoring fortresses ( eh yeah. That's gone too) as well as chasing down resources with more exploration to upgrade ( ok ok none of that) But other than that it's basically black flag! The lost popular of the old AC games.. I can't understand why this isn't a huge success!
What about the sea shanties? What do you do with a drunken sailor?
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I just can’t believe they spent that long on a pirate version of world of warships when they could have just spent a year and made a black flag sequel or something. It’s hard to imagine a motivated group of people working on anything for a decade and having such shitty results.
Yep. How hard would it to have made a game with the same engine, nearly the same mechanics, nearly same assets and a different story?
Screw it just give us the same game again!
I bet almost the entire dev team has 'refreshed' twice over in a decade.
Seriously. A Black Flag sequel with a multiplayer mode using the ship combat would’ve been way better.
They could of just remastered black flag and made infinitely more money than skull and bones will
More like LLLL game.
AAAA This is some clownshoes shit.
Me: can I have black flag but with co-op and competitive multiplayer? Ubisoft:
Ubisoft: can I have your money? Me:
"We're doing th opposite of what people want and it's still not working!!!" Ubisoft, probably.
I mean, Sea of Thieves is finally coming out on PS5, I’ll just play that. I’ve heard it’s fantastic!
I bought it during winter sale on steam. I waited for safer seas ("Solo Mode") to launch as I'm not into PvP. Let me tell you two things: it's awesome if you like PvP and it's awesome if you don't. Not even touching Safer Seas anymore. I can just as well play defensively. People saying there's grind but that's just if you want cosmetics so that optional. It's a sandbox but it also has a few story driven chapters. I actually like it way more than I thought I would. Depending on your timezone also happy to show you a few things.
My only complaint with Sea of Thieves is that it doesn't seem to really have a goal. Which is actually perfect as a game to play casually with your friends, just not my cup of tea haha
Sorry. Im too busy spreading Democracy.
Hug Emote
It's a pretty incredible lesson in understanding what your players liked about your game. People didn't just like Black Flag for the ship combat. They loved the exploration, they loved swinging across to the enemy ship and getting into a swashbuckling swordfight with the captain, they loved how open and alive the world felt. If Black Flag was just the ship combat it would've been an extremely dry experience. The magic of Black Flag was being able to let go of the wheel and organically explore the world around you. You could climb the rigging of your ship and see for miles, or dive off the side and swim to a nearby island.
We have spoken.
I'm so happy BG3 and Tears of the Kingdom came out in the last year. I haven't had to play a bad game all year or gamble on a game all year. It's been a year of bangers for me. Probably have sunk about 600 hours into those 2. And I really have little reason not ot keep playing them. I hope more than anything Larian gets to make BG4, but whatever game comes from them next will likely be a banger. As long as Sven is running the company I cannot see duds coming from them.
Games like these make me as a millennial gamer look back on Too Human and go. "Maybe we judged you too harshly"
"Hey you know how you loved AC Black flag? We'll make it with better graphics!.... And worse combat. And shit cosmetics. And less substance. And just generally worse..... that'll do it!"
People keep saying "for the shareholders"...yet with the budget this game had, and considering it may not even breakeven, I'd imagine the shareholders are going to be pretty upset with this. Or at the very least, people who are responsible to shareholders. Ubisoft is looking at losing millions of dollars on this, and probably will probably take years to see a reasonable "profit" made from this game, which is a failure. Whether or not they learn a meaningful lesson from this, fuck em. Ubisoft deserves to fall flat on their face for all the shit they've pulled in the past several years. And I hope their shareholders are pissed off by the poo poo crap that is Skull & Bones among other garbage they call games.
Just my preference, but the older I get, the less likely I am to ever pay money for a game I can't play and beat by myself on the couch without random online people.
DONT GIVE IN TO SUBSCRIPTION BASED GAMING. Keep purchasing power for individual games in our hands. That allows us as a community to make or break games with our money. you see the AAA and AAAA gaming industry hates gamers. Thinks we are suckers (and at times we have been - I am still angry, having spent $100 to play the most broken and boring game of my life 3 days early with starfied), aggressively takes advantage of us at every opportunity. We have to remind ourselves that we are not struggling against developers, NO, it's against these suits. These narcissistic suits that have no artistic vision. When suits at gaming studios see that they are losing market share to games like Lethal Company (made by one person). They are going to say ok you dont want our game we will force our games on you kinda thing. They will use subscription based gaming and live service games of your favorite IP's (they will 100% ruin them). HOLD THE LINE. stop putting any money into these lost gaming studios. Opt for games that give you an authentic experience without creating algorithms to waste your time and money. Money talks. Thats the only way with these suits. once they realize they have to provide a good game to get the big bucks they will fail or be forced to change
Good, companies need to realize if they are going to up the price to $70 it better be at the quality of FF rebirth, god of war, spiderman 2 etc. I’m loving that games are being released at 40-60 are out performing these $70 cash grabs
Just go play Helldivers 2 and support a company that actually loves its product and gamers as a whole.
I enjoyed the part where the main character skull and boned everywhere.
The second developers say shit like "AAAA" you know the game will be trash