Today the seventh main installment of the franchise reaches the European market Assassin's Creed. And we talk about main because since 2007 there are exactly 16 games in the saga that have been released. And far from slowing down this year we see how, in addition to Unity, Rogue, Chronicles of China and Birth of a New World arrive, a compilation that brings together Assassin's Creed III, Black Flag and Liberation.
If something has been criticized Ubisoft in all these years it has been the overexploitation to which the franchise has submitted, launching a main title per year and leaving little time to integrate important news and refresh a formula that, little by little, has ceased to surprise no matter how much the setting and historical context changed.
And it is that if one attends to the figures, these are devastating: 16 video games, 3 mini-movies, 7 novels and 8 graphic novelsAmong many other things, it is the material that Ubisoft has created around the IP. To give you an idea, if we put together great franchises like Grand Theft Auto, Uncharted and Gears of War we don't find so much content related to them.
Unity was, curiously, the title with which Ubisoft promised to renew the franchise, radically changing its three main pillars: parkour, combat and stealth. On paper they were logical changes and together with being the first exclusive title for a new generation and set in a context as rich as the French Revolution, it seemed that it was a winning move. But Nothing is further from reality.
Assassin's Creed Unity has ended up being a title whose freshness and novelty is conspicuous by its absence due to clone and repetitive missions: whose technical leap is demonstrated in better modeling and great lighting but also in dozens of bugs, crashes and a performance that leaves a lot to be desired with constant frame drops as something habitual and whose history remains in the background, completely wasting a great context and a very interesting city.
We could say that the latter is something that enters a more subjective plane and it is true, but why at this point, after seven years, we continue to find ourselves with uninspired missions and a deplorable performance in a launch of these characteristics? By Ubisoft's extreme commercial anxiety and the imperative to release not one, if not two or more Assassin's Creed per year.
We are talking about a delivery whose performance on PC leaves a lot to be desired on machines of around € 1500 with top-of-the-range components and that on consoles runs at 900p and a really unstable frame rate. Why not give the team a couple more months of development to clean up all these glitches? At what point does Ubisoft decide that it is better to release an incomplete and unpolished title?? How can you have the courage, knowing how bad your game is on all platforms, to say that "Assassin's Creed Unity pushes Playstation 4 and Xbox One to the limit"?
It is something that has been said for a long time but I think it is more than obvious that Ubisoft should allow more time between each installment of the franchise because overexploitation is increasingly influencing the quality of the final product. Assassin's Creed II and The Brotherhood were the excellence within the franchise and, since then, we have attended a unstoppable downhill which, it seems, continues steeply with Assassin's Creed Unity.
Why keep dirtying and worsening the image of a franchise that, if treated better, could be among the most successful sagas in video game history? Why not have a little more discretion and, above all, respect the user? Why not have the integrity from companies like Rockstar, Naughty Dog, Valve, Remedy Entertainment, CD Projekt and so many other companies that value and put end product quality a sales? Why in a generation start where we have already seen numerous delays to polish and smooth the rough edges of the games, Unity goes on sale with a pitiful performance?
And, as I said, beyond a huge amount of bugs and deplorable performance, a franchise is being blurred that, born from the hand of Patrice Désilets (how you feel your departure), could give much more. With Unity it is clear that from Ubisoft they have lost their way as far as the plot of the present is concerned and the many blurred stories and characters that have been chained in different deliveries make the general interest of the brand have fallen many integers.
Ultimately, Unity is the clear example of why Ubisoft should stop to reflect and change the commercial strategy that they have been carrying with Assassin's Creed Unity since its inception. The media and user notes make the discontent clear, now is when we have to talk to our money and show that, as users and buyers, we deserve a minimum level of quality.