Ubisoft games have such a weird "design by committee" feel to it. Like they poll the internet every few weeks and make decisions off of that. New hot game has battle pass? WE HAVE BATTLE PASS.
They also seem to follow a checklist of mediocrity. Every game needs a dozen collectable items. Every game needs to have the same l types of quests that GTA3 had. Every game has to have a massive open world. Every game needs a online component and live service. Every game needs a incredible hook, which then they Marvel-safe it to avoid offending online babies.
Their games come off with 7/10 energy. Ubisoft games don't move the needle. They're pretty adequate as a game. But when I have thousands of games to choose from every year... Ill pass.
I think the problem is that they use the same open world formula that they started, but others have taken and improved it and they haven't kept up with the times. Shadow of Mordor/war scratch the same itsch as assassin's creed with more interesting mechanics. Those aren't even new games at this point. Horizon zero dawn and forbidden West offer a more action focused experience with a better open world, again not super modern games.
It's like Bethesda, they are still putting out games that are straight from 2010.
They CAN still be fun. General fact of the matter is that the games we find fun aren’t always necessarily innovating much. Sometimes it’s just a comfortable routine.
Absolutely not going to fault anyone that finds their games boring though.
I played the Division 2, Ac Valhalla and FarCry 6 for 100+ hours. They helped me during the worse times of the pandemic.
But if I was talking to friends or making recommendations, we'd be taking about games that are better than that. The Elden Rings or the Ghost of Tsushima
Assassins creed has been consistently disappointing me since Black Flag.
AC2 used to be my favourite game and the modern titles are unrecognisable. They’re all just a bunch of generic, drawn out, mass appeal, play it safe bollocks.
I enjoyed Origins, Odyssey just felt so... empty. I couldn't bring myself to do the post-game content I was so bored with it. I got to the Medusa and just... stopped. Have no desire to go back to it.
As in you didn't like Black Flag, or that was the last one you did? I'm currently replaying it for the first time since it came out and it's alright so far. I completely forgot everything from the story
And I’ll say it again, dumb “quotation” because it only referred to convincing people to try Ubisoft+; which is very explicitly a game rental system.
(Setting aside the change going in through California law where ALL retailers must stop referring to sales as ownership. That affects Assassin’s Creed just as much as your next indie Roguelike)
It will over time. They will notice that sales are going downhill so (hopefully) they will start to listen to community complains, maybe also firing some staff until that point because of "financial struggle".
If sales will stay the same (or be even better) then they will not try to change anything because "if it works, don't fix it"
You don't even need to go sailing, you can just stop at not buying their games. Ubisoft has not put out any game I'd really consider a must-play in over a decade. The last interesting Ubisoft open-world game was Black Flag in 2013. Even if you're an absolute glutton for open-world designed by committee slop, Sony basically ate Ubisoft's lunch with Ghosts of Tsushima, Horizon Zero Dawn, and Spiderman. Pirate those instead.
It seems like to me some of their games simply just need another two months in the oven.
There were lots of little bugs in Star Wars Outlaws, but I found that game to be really fun, and largely pretty solid. But then they dropped updates a month out or so that fixed a lot of those little bugs. I wonder if they had just had that extra month to polish it up if it'd have gotten slammed as hard. People may still have wanted different things storywise or whatever, but on a technical level just one extra month could have helped.
Polish isn't going to help change the Ubisoft reputation of churning same looking games filled with massive bloaty copy-paste open worlds where you do generic fetch quests, collect hundreds of feathers, and watch watered down PG-13 storytelling that's tamer than a Marvel movie.
Outlaws looked great, and had you go to interesting locations, and fly in space. There were no towers to open up maps. The outlaw system wasn't super amazing in the end, but it didn't detract from anything.
I don't disagree it has a reputation, but Outlaws was a fun break from the super boring Assassin's Creed games of late.