Let's start from the basis that Assassin's Creed Unity is not a bad gameYou may like it more or less but we are not facing the worst Assassin's Creed or, as I say, a bad video game. Another thing is, of course, that we could have had a much better experience if certain decisions had been made in time.
Ubisoft, one of the largest and most important companies in the industry, has gone from linking the announcement of a spectacular Watch Dogs and launching a fantastic and renewed Far Cry 3 to chain downgrade after downgrade and have been widely criticized for launching a little optimized Assassin's Creed Unity. Why has a company of such importance made so many questionable decisions in such a short time?
Announcing a title showing a good portion of gameplay is something that very few studios usually carry out and in what Ubisoft differs, something worthy of praise. Problems come when said gameplay samples they're extremely sweetened and when launch day rolls around, months (and even years later), it's surprising that something that should look noticeably better due to that extra development time, is light years from what we saw one day.
Watch Dogs is still the bloodiest example. Announced at E3 2013, it surprised everyone with a striking playable approach and different from what we had seen in the sandbox genre that was accompanied by a truly luxurious technical aspect in which nothing was out of tune on what was seen on screen. Almost a year later it hit the market and it was found that not even a top-of-the-range PC could display on the screen what we had seen 12 months earlier in Los Angeles.
Why show a technical aspect that you know you will not even be able to match on € 1500 computers? Why call attention to yourself in the first place knowing that you will end up paying for this "misleading advertising"? The same thing has happened, again, with Assassin's Creed Unity, what has reached our consoles is far from what we saw in its first samples in video form. With Unity, despite the background, it was easy to get excited and believe that what we saw would not be very different from what we would end up playing as it is one of the first multiplatform titles that has been released exclusively on PC and next-generation consoles. We were wrong. Again, Ubisoft showed something very made up again that, in addition, has ended up in a premature state and with much to be polished in various aspects.
The most curious thing about this matter is that Just two days after launch, a couple of patches were available that fix some of the game's most serious bugs. and that, together with a rate of images per second that is too low and unstable, they have cost many points in the different analyzes of the specialized media and, consequently, caused a 10% drop in Ubisoft's shares on the stock market.
We all know it is not the programmers or the Game Designer Those who set the development deadlines, if not that they are gentlemen in suits and ties who, beyond polygons and pixels, know about commercial figures and dividends. They invest money and want it to be returned soon and with the maximum possible benefits, but Would it have been so dramatic to delay the release of Assassin's Creed Unity by a week or, at most, half a month?? It has become clear that either they had some of the work ahead or Ubisoft Montreal worked with praiseworthy speed to release the first patches. Why not have waited to fix these errors and launch the game a little later? It seems clear that the objective was not to skip the Christmas shopping season, whatever the cost, but considering what happened, perhaps they should have valued the opinion of the user and the press above the sales figures.
The background speaks for itself: Assassin's Creed II is the most valued title of the franchise in Metacritic and it is, for many (including myself), the best Assassin's Creed to date. What sets it apart from the remaining eight games? It is the only one not preceded by a release of another installment the year before. I mean, Assassin's Creed was released in 2007 and it wasn't until 2009, two years later, that we started the Ezio story.
The decision that Ubisoft should make regarding its star franchise, in the process of decline, seems logical. Why not let Assassin's Creed breathe? This would only lead to better ideas, better carried out and, above all, a final product that does not arrive full of errors and that deserves to be bought. In addition, better story and character development could have led to greater use of these and not have discarded characters or eras with potential so quickly. And no, the decision to switch developments from Ubisoft Quebec and Ubisoft Montreal is not the way to go; yes, they will have more development time but those dissonances between some titles and others will continue to exist. This feeling that with each delivery changes the way forward.
Be that as it may and despite the fact that the steps to follow seem really logical and sensible, from Ubisoft it seems that the calendar and the dividends rule over the user or the quality of the final product. In 2013, Ubisoft was a benchmark in terms of video game releases and treatment; the company will start 2015 with a very bad image that may cost too much to shake off. I think now the question that many of us ask ourselves is what awaits us with The Division. There Ubisoft will again have a lot to lose.