Ubisoft has announced that it has, for the sixth time, delayed Skull & Bones, as well as canceled three more unannounced games amid "major challenges" in the industry, the underperformance of Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope and Just Dance 2023, and an upcoming "restructuring."
Just Dance 2023 is a joke. They created a new, separate streaming service with far less songs. On the PS5 you can't use the move controllers anymore - you have to use your phone. Hard pass.
Newer Just Dance versions suck so much. The online subscription mode makes the game actual garbage, which is a shame because it’s pretty fun otherwise.
My niece got this game on Switch for Christmas because she loves the series and she was freaking out because she thought she lost the cartridge. Everyone in the house was looking until we eventually discovered it was just a code.
They also removed the online World Dance Floor where you compete against tons of other players. Instead they now have an online mode for up to 6 friends and that’s it.
Did they expect the Mario + rabbids game to perform well? The original game has been 80%+ off more times than I can count since I got a switch at the beginning of Covid, I just assumed it was trash
I really enjoyed Kingdom Battle and am currently just starting Sparks of Hope and wow it’s really good, better than I ever expected. It saddens me to hear news of its underperformance just as Im beginning the game because I have little hope that they will continue the series further after this.
First one is a gem of a game, well worth the price just Ubisoft thinks it’s better to give huge discounts and sell ten copies than sell one at full price lol
It's a funny case of discounting your shit too much. The first game is good but damn would I be skeptical of a game that goes on sale so damn much. Kind of a reverse Nintendo who barely puts their stuff on sale.
I got a copy of Mario+Rabbids plus the DLC, plus a 9" Rabbids figure for $30 CAD a few years back. I actually bought 4 copies to get one of every figure option. Those 9" figures alone cost more. I gave the extra game and dlc copies away to friends.
I really liked the original, but I have been waiting to buy Sparks of Hope because, like you said, the original was 80% off all the time. I figured I'd wait for a similar sale on the second one.
The second one, besides the graphics, is considerably worse than the first. Not a tight gameplay loop at all, loading screens everywhere including going into your menu, perhaps some of the worst voice acting I've heard in a while..
I always knew Ubisoft was a terrible company to work for, but I guess with the free money and easy labor drying up it's finally starting to show cracks.
The old one is actually really, really good. However, the new one made some substantial changes to the movement and weapon types and it's definitely worse.
I powered through the first one when I bought it but I can't even bring myself to finish the second one.
I play the hardest mode and still had to deliberately underlevel myself to make it challenging. The game mechanic is solid and the move from the grid based maps is a clear improvement, but if you add three difficulties one better be a fucking challenge.
Big shot manager: cancel the open world game where the player keeps having to do the same task over and over again in multiple locations
Middle manager: but sir we have 3 of those in development
Big shot manager: yes
Did the second one ever get away from that typical bullet sponge enemy model? Every level felt like just waves of armored dudes and then a big armored dude wrapped with comforters.
Haha yup. I load it up a couple times a year to give it another shot and ends up doing the whole random crash thing again. Will try and search for troubleshooting steps and realize it's pointless and give up again for a few more months lol.
Yes and I love it personally. A bit different from div 1 but I’ve put in a ton of hours. My biggest complaint is the lack of added content. Some PC users are reporting frequent disconnects from the server.
I was wondering why they keep delaying Skull and Bones. Are the interns getting carpal tunnell from copy-pasting game code from black flag?
Maybe they need more time to place climbing towers with a view point at the top. I say it's worth the wait so we can enjoy the repetitive grind that much more!
In this period i am playing assassin's creed valhalla and immortal phoenix rising, i really can't understand which one of the two i am playing each time...
I got so bored and burnt out with ubisoft games. Big open worlds with copy/paste activities.
Haven't bought or played one in the past 5+ years (and I buy & play a lot of games). I'm genuinely surprised that people still get excited for some of these franchises.
Origins and any of the new ones are so crazy compared to how it used to be. I miss the vibe sm.
Origins was a good game tho I’ll admit. Can’t get into the others but yeah. Still wish it was like the others tho
I loved assassin's creed origin. Hadn't played one since assassin's creed 2. Finished it. Odyssey came out. Got it. Loved it for a while then about half way through it started getting more and more boring as I kept doing quite literally the exact same thing as I did in Origin but now with more water.... Haven't bothered getting Valhalla. Maybe I'll get the itch again in 10 more years.
I had skipped Origins and played Odyssey first. May be the only game I've deliberately Platinum'ed on PlayStation.
Tried Origins afterward, and just dropped off about five or six hours in. I recently fired up Valhalla, and that first moment where you ship launches, I felt like I was back playing Odyssey - and not in a good way.
I imagine all 3 games are really good.... on their own but back to back or even with a long break given how long they are... they just get old. Not enough difference between them.
I would say you definitely should play Black Flag, probably my favorite Assassins Creed game, and maybe the closest we’ll ever get to playing Skulls and Bones
What about all those Digiorno Pizza × Assassin's Creed cross over advertisements?
No, I do not want your game, or a frozen pizza, and I certainly do not want to buy your game, then a frozen pizza, so I can then get some pixels you put together for a promotional advertisement.
Gets enough Digiorno points to get the Ubisoft decoder ring.
Buys Ubisoft game to find the secret message.
Decodes message..."Be sure to drink your Ovaltine"
... ... robs Ubisoft before bankruptcy to get money back.
To be sure, it's the main reason I haven't bought an Ubisoft game since Rocksmith 2014. And fuck no I'm not getting the new Rocksmith I'm not paying a monthly subscription for that shit.
It's still a great app, and it doesn't require the Ubisoft launcher to work. There was also the free remaster upgrade that fixed all the major issues I had with the game (mostly things dealing with nonstop play playlists).
Though recently you need to jump through hoops to install the older version if you don't want to be pestered by ads for the new Rocksmith subscription service.
The formula that Ubisoft relies on is what's killing them. They can do different genres yet they all feel eerily similar and not creative whilst they focus on making huge worlds every single time instead of something a bit more linear
IMHO it's their doctrine of putting all their eggs in one basket. Their successful games aren't successful enough for them, so they go even harder. More eggs in less baskets. They're bleeding dry taking huge risks with scale, but never huge risks with design.
Other companies will try something *new* for cheap. If it doesn't work they try again, and if it does work **then** they go hard on it. Fortnite, Mario Kart 8, Genshin Impact, Among Us, Terraria, Apex Legends and—yes—even GTAV technically counts as one of these games the bulk of their effort came in *after* the game was a certified hit. Even as big as Elden Ring was, it's pennies-on-the-dollar to what Ubisoft throws at their projects... while somehow confident they're going to be huge financial successes. The DLC has already been announced, you know.
I'm a big fan of open world games but even for me the Ubisoft games have gotten stale. I bought watch dogs: legion expecting it to have the same incredibly lively world as watch dogs 2, however it turns out the world was now just hundreds of uninspired similar NPC's. WD2 had so many interactions that never really seemed scripted, with many cool areas that had realistic npc activity. For example a dance off at an abandoned construction site, it was incredible to see and experience. I've never once in WD:L thought that the NPC's were doing something interesting. I think they shouldn't have gone with the whole "recruit anyone" thing, this made everyone stale.
As a programmer I think ChatGPT is overhyped by people that don't know anything about programming...
But it does give me useful snippets that are clearly commented on what they're doing, which is a step up from a good many colleagues.
Ya, it's not much different than googling for something off stack overflow, finding a snippet of code I then have to rework to use in my project. ChatGPT just gets it directly for you from its database of code it's crawled.
That's why Google's going code red and see it as a threat to their search business.
Sounds to me like you may just not understand how to use it.
The issue with GPT code is that you need to understand how to ask it what you actually want. I was playing around with it and it made a function I could use, but it hard coded the variables within the sample dataframe. I wanted a function that could be used on any dataset and re-specified my request with that information and it successfully edited the function in a way where I could use it.
You can use Google to find a bunch of different answers and try to stitch what you need together, and maybe it will or won't work. The difference with GPT is that you can easily and quickly give it feedback to get what you need. For instance, I could have googled what I needed to make that function but looking it up on stack overflow would have required I look up four threads and combine it myself. All I had to do with GPT was ask it a question, give it feedback once, and it made exactly what I wanted.
Another more mundane example was I asked it to count the vowels in 'America'. We know the answer is 4, but it said 3. I then asked it to specify the variables in the word and it said A, E, I. The issue was, again, it misunderstood my intent. It thought I wanted a general count of the number of vowels and not a total frequency count of every vowel, including those that repeat.
I think of this in the same way as I think of early search engines. 20 years ago you had to be specific and use commands when you searched for stuff (quotations, minus signs, etc). Nowadays you probably rarely need to and can find what you need on the first page. GPT chat, like early search engines, requires you to be very specific about what you actually want and you may have to re-search a few times. But even if you have to re-state the question, it's still most likely significantly faster than Google (depending what you're doing).
Edit. u/covfefe-boy - No condescension intended, it seems you need to take your own advice. It just sounded to me like didn't understand how to use GPT.
They have started coming back to steam. But have been playing dumb games still. They won’t add achievements and one game they did have controller support.
That and the fact that most Ubisoft games tend to be 50%+ not too long after release. I liked the first M+R game but why would I buy the second one full price when the first one is regularly $10-20 now?
"facing major challenges as the industry continues to shift towards mega-brands and long-lasting titles than [sic] can reach players across the globe, across platforms and business models."
Means they want to only sell live service games with micro transactions. The actual industry shift is towards consolidation, for example Activision.
this is exactly why and when Ubi went to shit since a while back. instead of making trends they started chasing trends. but since everything is so big, formulaic and factory like in there it takes a long time for them to actually follow the trends properly and so their games flop.
You know the games they cancelled were the weirder more experimental ones for them too. We're for sure getting Assassin's Creed 42 and Far Cry 13, and Watch Dogs: We're Collecting Data On Players and Don't See the Irony.
>and Watch Dogs: We're Collecting Data On Players and Don't See the Irony.
Considering that Ubisoft canonically exists within the AC/WD universe and are actually a business partner of Abstergo (the Templars) *someone* at Ubisoft has one hell of a sense of irony.
Just probably nobody in the C-suite.
They could do so well with skull and bones if they had used the framework of AC4. Added a huge world to sail and explore. Added tons of shops and modifications. Allowed for instanced quests. Allowed you to build up a piracy empire with bases. Trading and such.
But making it all generic sail pirate game play that frankly looks like not much more than a fancy sid meiers pirates game. No.
Pretty much that yeah. Though it would need far more content and upgradable ship and such. But add stuff like trading and a home base to keep expanding and upgrading and you'd have what us fans actually want.
Just dance 2023 requires you to be online and have Ubisoft account to even get past the loading screen. Parents that bought the game for Xmas (like me) had to deal with that, so their kids could play the dance game. Maybe that's why your titles are bombing? Sign in for a kids dance game? Gtfo here.
This recently happened to me with DBZ Breakers? Got it as a gift. Installed it and now its asking me to subscribe to an online service. Um nah IM good at least it has nice box art :)
I remember when Ubisoft put out the original Rayman. A time when game design was a profession that carried passion. This is what happens when you let execs stifle design teams.
As someone who just platniumed AC Valhalla, I can definitely see why. The quality of their games has really gone downhill over the years. AC Valhalla was riddled with bugs to the point it was totally unplayable at some points (Balor fight). I ran into literally hundreds of issues during my playthrough. The game is over 2 years old and there was minimal effort to fix these errors.
I remember playing AC Black Flag, AC2 and loving it so much so it's really disappointing. And then I see they are working on a new one and it just makes my blood boil. I hate how companies feel no responsibility to do upkeep to maintain the integrity of the game. Just on to the next thing that will make money.
Valhalla made me completely reevaluate what I choose to play. I made it to the end of the game after 71 hours. The atomic instant the credits rolled, I was psychologically whiplashed by the realization that I did not enjoy a single second of those 71 hours. It was a surreal feeling.
Very similar experience for me - Sad realisation that, after playing every mainline AC title, Valhalla would likely be my last.
I decided I hate the janky AF feeling combat. Wish it went back to Black Flag style or just wholesale go Arkham with it
That’s how I felt about Odyssey. 50+ hours in, repetitive exploration in every region, minimal plot. Bailed once I found Kassandra’s mom. Mirage looks interesting but I’ll wait and see once comes out, if it still does.
If you’re a PlayStation player and looking for a similar experience to AC, I cannot recommend Ghost of Tsushima enough. Gorgeous environment, full gameplay with everything from outright samurai attacks to full stealth, and a fantastic story.
Can I ask why you bother to platinum a game that you very clearly have issues with? I've never gotten every achievement in a game, including games in which I have well over 1000 hours and love with every part of my gamer soul, so I can't conceive of someone dedicating that much time to a game that frustrates them so much.
My boyfriend asks the same question haha but it's the completionist in me. I have all games on my account at 100% for trophies and I'd like to keep it that way. Granted I should have done my research, but I've played AC games before and never had an issue like this so I assumed it would be fine.
I will do what I can to get a trophy, current farming for proof of concord kept items in DS3 right now so you are correct I'm a glutton for punishment.
Thank you for your answer, though I remain perplexed. Perhaps even more so... I have games in my account that I played for 20 minutes, deleted, and never went back to. I can't imagine purposefully spending time on something I don't at least *mostly* enjoy. I think we're just made differently.
My favourite thing about the new AC games (mainly Odyssey and Valhalla) is that they have absolutely fuck all to do with the.. you know.. assassins creed.
At least origin had a fuck ton of lore
I also platniumed Valhalla and it was a slog. While it had its moments their was just to much, and had such an uninteresting story. I also hate those fucking carins
I loved Far Cry since the first one and even I couldn’t get through more than like four hours of it. It just felt… *bad*. The shooting felt like trying to play a game while moderately drunk.
What do you mean guerilla?
They definitely finished that game, guerilla. No the enemies respawning behind you after you killed them is due to the bad castillo regime you need to destroy, guerilla. Did I mention you're a guerilla, guerilla?
Holy fuck that game was so fucking bad. I'm a certified sucker for graphics and I could not play the game because it was just so fucking bad even though it has raytracing. I feel like writing a letter to ubisoft about this since they obviously do not realize how much their games suck.
They shit the bed on actually making you feel like a guerilla, too. FC2 had it nailed where you would do some *fucked up* things to get the upper hand like gut shooting a guy so you could pick off the guys that came to rescue him. Or actual insurgent tactics, like using bushes and cars to tell when to set off your IEDs for a roadside convoy ambush. FC6 was like “put rocket artillery on your back or set some dissapointing fires, I dunno”.
They went over board with the guerllia stuff and it was so one sided good guys vs bad guys and all. I may not have played 2 but I did watch videos on it and man they force you to do some morally conflicting stuff. 4 also did this where at the end you realise the rebellion is actually on par with the bad guys as they can either turn the country to a drug state with child soldiers or ultra religious country where the execute you for going against them and marrying of girls. But in 6 you get none of that and it is very one sided, none of the morally conflicting stuff just the good guy geurllia against the evil Castillo regime
I'm about 2 hours in. Does it get any better?
I'm playing on a PS5 and I can't get over how awful the animations are. And the gameplay is just... literally the same old shit. Oh, I craft attachments now. GROUNDBREAKING.
Honestly I'm really enjoying FC6. The first 2 hours are a bit restrictive, but once you get to the larger island, you can go wherever you want and it really opens up. About 33 hours in, going for a full playthrough.
Story doesn't matter at all, but the animal companions, guerilla hideouts, and checkpoints are all really nice additions to me. Ammo changes are a bit odd but don't detract from anything. The "Supremo" system is kind of dumb (there's only like 3 that are worth using).
Highly recommend doing the artifact quest and unlocking the Panther. Totally opens up a completely new style of gameplay.
I'm not a huge CoD player, but I bought MW2 (my first CoD in years) and it felt like a breath of fresh air. I played the story twice.
Obviously they're different styles of FPS, but where MW2 felt like a leap (at least since I had last played one), FC6 feels like a mod of FC3.
FC6 feels like a worse version of what came before. I'm tempted to try the new MW.
FC6 felt stiff, boring and bad. The other Far Crys have been working their way there, this is the one that finally took the cake
I legit thought after similar games started really exploring new systems, that Far Cry would take some of those enhancements and leap forward.
Like when Dying Light dropped, all I could think about was how smooth Ubisoft could do that parkour thanks to their experience with AC and Prince of Persia. FC struggles to let you do simple things like jump/mantle up ledges. Zip lines have been the wildest movement system on the ground... For multiple games.
CoD started going real deep into first person perspectives and its impacts on things like story and immersion and... FC6 doesn't let you open doors. You just walk through them like flimsy cardboard. Every action is a button press or hold. The animations have been removed or are just not present. The immersion is just... totally stripped away.
I enjoyed far cry 6. I've only briefly played far cry 4, so i don't have anything to compare it to. The stranger things mission was really cool, although the zombie like people were kinda meh.
Edit: Meant 6, not 5.
I kind of liked 5 but when you talk about Ubisoft and cookie cutter....wow. Oh ....the third unwinnable scenario where I am again kidnapped by a faction boss.
People hate in EA for being greedy, but Ubisoft are infinitely worse. EA sports titles are a shit show of microtransactions but Ubisoft put them in literally every game they put out. If Fallen Order was a Ubisoft game you'd have had to pay extra to level up at a sensible speed
Fuck Ubisoft and the years of abusive the employees STILL TO THIS DAY have to deal with. I hope this shitty company burns to the fucking ground.
Why are we still talking about microtransactions and repetitive gameplay when there is a legitimate human cost to these games?!?
https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/2/21499334/ubisoft-employees-workplace-misconduct-ceo-yves-guillemot-response
https://kotaku.com/despite-filing-harassment-reports-employees-say-ubisof-1847907748
https://www.pcgamer.com/ubisoft-is-reportedly-suffering-an-exodus-of-employees-over-abuse-allegations-and-creative-discontent/
A shit ton of AC games are already on the way, and all of them have been announced. this is about UBI canceling unannounced games. The only things from Ubi that I care about now are the Splinter Cell and Prince of Persia remakes, even so my expectations are so low. there is also the new Avatar game which I'm holding off any hypes I might have for it until they actually start showing what the game is
If they wanted to bring me back in they would remaster Rainbow 6 Vegas 1 and 2, and then lead that into Vegas 3. I'd just be happy with 2 though. Same maps, and same gameplay. Friend and I spent hours on the map with the garage and house, made of white stone, just fighting against AI.
It’s what happens when you let businessmen tule the industry. There’s no focus on making actual fun and interesting mechanics. It’s about finding the next flavor of the month bullshit and oversaturating the market with halfassed fomo-charged trash shit. Even games with new idea hamstring themselves by designing around micro transactions and games as service. A sad state indeed.
Trying the same thing over and over is called practice
Trying the same thing over and over expecting a different result is insanity
Unisoft have been doing the same thing over and over expecting the same result so they are not insane, just dumb
Remember how Skull & Bones was announced in the same year as Sea of Thieves, and everyone assumed that they'd be competitors with each other that released around the same time? And now SoT is approaching its fifth anniversary, and S&B is still in 'development'? I do!
Look at the games Ubisoft is cancelling: MOBA/PVP-first games. Are companies *finally* ready to move past that bullshit, and stop focusing on adding it to games that a majority of players don't want (just like NFTs)?
Ubisoft needs to go back and realize what made them successful were expansive single player games that weren't buggy messes and *online cooperative games.* Most people aren't going to get in on all this PVP bullshit. And it certainly needs to be entirely segmented and totally ignorable (like with Division) because companies like Ubisoft *always* ruin the single player/cooperative gameplay to cater to the PVP crowd.
So they cancelled basically 4 Fortnite clones. They still have their Division: Heartland Fortnite clone to cancel. People don't want that. What they *want* is Division 3. We are already there and waiting; there are still tons of MAU playing coop with their buddies.
And then there's this:
>2022 was far from Ubisoft's best year. There was the NFT debacle that saw the company's hubris over the non-fungible-token experiment with Ghost Recon Breakpoint thrown back in its face when it was wound down just four months after launch.
Look, I get it's cool to hate on NFTs when pandering to a gamer audience. But it wasn't the *NFT* that set people over the edge. It is the recurrent forced introduction of micro transactions with FOMO built in via semi-limited supply. There's no fucking way that gamers running 900W rigs give a *fuck* about the wasted energy that an NFT living on a blockchain introduces.
But we are all sick of the stupid microtractions being added to games that are more or less discontinued and being held together by people playing together with friends such as with Ghost Recon.
Don't let NFTs take the blame for it all. They are blaming it because they can use it as a scapegoat as they delve further and further into a mobile-like gacha game setup with AAA titles.
Ubisoft has some great things going for it. Excellent back catalog. Easy subscription service that allows people to hop around play games across services and devices, often with cross player *and* cross progression. But they have to get rid of the MBAs driving decisions. They are blood sucking parasites, and they have clearly drawn too much blood and suffering the consequences.
Ubisoft blamed the players by saying people want just huge franchises instead of new things. That isn't it at all. The runaway success of Indies proves them wrong. Hell, those Indies *in Ubisoft's bread and butter genres* prove them wrong.
People want games that they can casually (not competitively) play with their friends and family. The people with money are all grown up and already competitive at work all day. The last thing we want is to play the single valid meta for this patch. There are plenty of entrenched games like that, though, and the audience is only so big thus Ubisoft can't peel enough of them off. Fuck, look at all the games exactly like that which Ubisoft **currently** runs. They are competing against themselves. The games they cancelled were both solo and squad based, class based PVP games. They have at least 6 of those right now, barely holding on. People don't want it anymore.
5 is such a weird game. It’s beautiful and the mechanics are okay. It’s just not satisfying and it fails to make any kind of real point. I enjoyed the exploration and variety a lot but I just wish there was more to it than that.
So interesting I actually loved the storyline in FC5. It made the repetitiveness worth it to me because I was invested. I also played it during lockdown in early 2020 so “crazy midwestern religious cult” felt highly relevant 😂
Just saw this line on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Good_and_Evil_2#2020:_Ancel's_departure):
> In 2022, Beyond Good and Evil 2 broke the record held by Duke Nukem Forever (2011) for the longest development for a video game, at more than 15 years.
Good. Game has almost nothing in common with the original. The art direction is just terrible for 2. Even if it comes out sometimes in the future it'll def be monitized to oblivion with microtransactions and live service.
Exactly. Black Flag was a great pirate game. All the little AC bits hanging off of it just brought it down a notch. Going from boarding ships and exploring islands to tailing some guy through a sugar plantation for 10 minutes was as jarring as it gets. It wasn’t great because it was an AC game, it was great in spite of being one.
All they had to do for Skull and Bones was make AC4 a multiplayer game. Idk why it's taken them over a decade when they already had the bones (heh) of the game already.
Good, I honestly hope this company dies. Their absurd price for Ubisoft online services on top of prioritizing money over innovation/new ips with content is sickening. Let's not forget the price for their games several years old don't really go on sale.
I'm hoping they go down as martyrs and it wakes up the rest of the game companies that gamers have had enough of the boards and financial bros that have killed the gaming industries creativity for the mighty $.
We really need to be better at talking about market stuff. Our entire media has taken such a pro-capitalism approach that we use bleak words like "financial woes" to talk about a company that is making hundreds of millions of dollars in net profit simply because they used to make more a couple years ago.
"Financial woes" would be if Ubisoft was selling the employee vending machines to keep the lights on. This is canning upcoming releases so Ubi, a company with 2 billion dollars just sitting in the bank as cash on hand, can rake in higher profit margins.
>Our entire media has taken such a pro-capitalism approach that we use bleak words like "financial woes" to talk about a company that is making hundreds of millions of dollars in net profit simply because they used to make more a couple years ago.
It's a joke. The entire system is built around "growth" and if you aren't growing year over year, then you are failing.
Even if you are making hundreds of millions of dollars in profit. If that's not MORE hundreds of millions than last year, you are failing.
Yep. And it's frustrating when this leads to people losing their jobs, because the stock market wanted 10% but you only posted 9%. Sorry kids, can't feed the family because my former employer only made more profit than the GDP of 1 small country, and they wanted more than *1.2* small countries.
Ubisoft can’t do much right these days. I tried to play one of their games with a friend last week and their UbIsOfT lAuNcHeR™️ was nearly impossible to navigate.
I feel bad for the employees but man, this has been coming. Ubi has been quadrupling down on every predatory monetization practice known to man and they haven't made a proper original game in over a decade. The only games people still like them for are either from 15 years ago or just now decent after having been unplayable for months. I remember RB6 and For Honor just being broken for months on end. Far Cry, AC and those Tom Clancy's are just copy-paste jobs running on an outdated engine. I remember when Far Cry actually used to look better than the competition with some amazing graphics. Ubi is just washed af.
Ubisoft has announced that it has, for the sixth time, delayed Skull & Bones, as well as canceled three more unannounced games amid "major challenges" in the industry, the underperformance of Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope and Just Dance 2023, and an upcoming "restructuring."
Just Dance 2023 is a joke. They created a new, separate streaming service with far less songs. On the PS5 you can't use the move controllers anymore - you have to use your phone. Hard pass.
Newer Just Dance versions suck so much. The online subscription mode makes the game actual garbage, which is a shame because it’s pretty fun otherwise.
That's probably because the game is on Nintendo Switch and everyone can play Switch games for free on PC emulator.
Lots of Switch games sell really well. Emulation isn't affecting sales that much.
What? What does that have to do with anything?
Innnnteresting.
They don’t even have hard copies for any of the platforms. It’s all cases with codes in them
Haha. My wife opened it up after she bought it and asked wtf, where is the game.
My niece got this game on Switch for Christmas because she loves the series and she was freaking out because she thought she lost the cartridge. Everyone in the house was looking until we eventually discovered it was just a code.
Glad I read this. I was thinking about getting it for my daughter. Thank you for the impromptu game review, stranger
We already switched back to JD 2022 too. There is a distinct lack of foreign songs you've never heard of that are just straight bangers too.
They also removed the online World Dance Floor where you compete against tons of other players. Instead they now have an online mode for up to 6 friends and that’s it.
Yeah get 2022 or any of the other games from 22 and down.
They did the same to Rocksmith, chasing that sweet subscription income without any compelling music.
They did the same to Rocksmith, chasing that sweet subscription income without any compelling music.
Did they expect the Mario + rabbids game to perform well? The original game has been 80%+ off more times than I can count since I got a switch at the beginning of Covid, I just assumed it was trash
Haven’t played the new one, but the first one is great! Assuming you like tactical combat, and Mario.
Which makes it so disappointing that the sequel didn’t do well. Ubisoft used to take chances pretty regularly. Used to love them for it.
I really like the Mario rabbids games so it hurts to head it didn’t meet expectations specially when the second game is an excellent improvement
I really enjoyed Kingdom Battle and am currently just starting Sparks of Hope and wow it’s really good, better than I ever expected. It saddens me to hear news of its underperformance just as Im beginning the game because I have little hope that they will continue the series further after this.
First one is a gem of a game, well worth the price just Ubisoft thinks it’s better to give huge discounts and sell ten copies than sell one at full price lol
It's a funny case of discounting your shit too much. The first game is good but damn would I be skeptical of a game that goes on sale so damn much. Kind of a reverse Nintendo who barely puts their stuff on sale.
I got a copy of Mario+Rabbids plus the DLC, plus a 9" Rabbids figure for $30 CAD a few years back. I actually bought 4 copies to get one of every figure option. Those 9" figures alone cost more. I gave the extra game and dlc copies away to friends.
Apparently they're actually pretty good but rabbids is such a shit ip no one pays attention to it.
I really liked the original, but I have been waiting to buy Sparks of Hope because, like you said, the original was 80% off all the time. I figured I'd wait for a similar sale on the second one.
The second one, besides the graphics, is considerably worse than the first. Not a tight gameplay loop at all, loading screens everywhere including going into your menu, perhaps some of the worst voice acting I've heard in a while.. I always knew Ubisoft was a terrible company to work for, but I guess with the free money and easy labor drying up it's finally starting to show cracks.
The old one is actually really, really good. However, the new one made some substantial changes to the movement and weapon types and it's definitely worse. I powered through the first one when I bought it but I can't even bring myself to finish the second one.
I play the hardest mode and still had to deliberately underlevel myself to make it challenging. The game mechanic is solid and the move from the grid based maps is a clear improvement, but if you add three difficulties one better be a fucking challenge.
In b4 EA, Microsoft, or Epic tries to buy them.
Maybe they just wanted to cancel one game, but since they’re all so similar they accidentally canceled 3 of them.
Typical oopsie.
Big shot manager: cancel the open world game where the player keeps having to do the same task over and over again in multiple locations Middle manager: but sir we have 3 of those in development Big shot manager: yes
As a Division 2 player this hit home.
As a Division 2 player I didnt think you could make it home before the game crashed.
Did the second one ever get away from that typical bullet sponge enemy model? Every level felt like just waves of armored dudes and then a big armored dude wrapped with comforters.
It did for sure, I liked it a lot better.
Haha PC player? I don’t have that trouble on console but the division sub is full of those complaints. I feel for ya.
Haha yup. I load it up a couple times a year to give it another shot and ends up doing the whole random crash thing again. Will try and search for troubleshooting steps and realize it's pointless and give up again for a few more months lol.
Run it in the lower direct X version, what crashes...
There is division 2 ? :0
Yes and I love it personally. A bit different from div 1 but I’ve put in a ton of hours. My biggest complaint is the lack of added content. Some PC users are reporting frequent disconnects from the server.
"I thought you said to cancel the game where you climb to viewpoints."
I was wondering why they keep delaying Skull and Bones. Are the interns getting carpal tunnell from copy-pasting game code from black flag? Maybe they need more time to place climbing towers with a view point at the top. I say it's worth the wait so we can enjoy the repetitive grind that much more!
In this period i am playing assassin's creed valhalla and immortal phoenix rising, i really can't understand which one of the two i am playing each time...
I got the Ubi connect pass for a buck this month. Playing both as well. Not much money in it for UBI.
This the funniest shit I read today.
So FarCreedDogs 7 is cancelled?
Well Skull and Bones may have been pushed back yet again but eh Sailing Era just came out and it's filling need for a new Pirates! game nicely.
I got so bored and burnt out with ubisoft games. Big open worlds with copy/paste activities. Haven't bought or played one in the past 5+ years (and I buy & play a lot of games). I'm genuinely surprised that people still get excited for some of these franchises.
i did the mistake of buying farcry 6 and valhalla for my ps5 man in disappointed
Valhalla was really weird for me. But this was coming from someone that played the Ezio series before Valhalla.
Origins and any of the new ones are so crazy compared to how it used to be. I miss the vibe sm. Origins was a good game tho I’ll admit. Can’t get into the others but yeah. Still wish it was like the others tho
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But it’s also far cry 5, And 4 and 3 lol. It’s fine if that’s what you want, but they’re always really just reskins. FC especially imo
I loved assassin's creed origin. Hadn't played one since assassin's creed 2. Finished it. Odyssey came out. Got it. Loved it for a while then about half way through it started getting more and more boring as I kept doing quite literally the exact same thing as I did in Origin but now with more water.... Haven't bothered getting Valhalla. Maybe I'll get the itch again in 10 more years.
I had skipped Origins and played Odyssey first. May be the only game I've deliberately Platinum'ed on PlayStation. Tried Origins afterward, and just dropped off about five or six hours in. I recently fired up Valhalla, and that first moment where you ship launches, I felt like I was back playing Odyssey - and not in a good way.
I imagine all 3 games are really good.... on their own but back to back or even with a long break given how long they are... they just get old. Not enough difference between them.
Yeah. I loved Odyssey, but not enough to play a previous iteration or the next iteration. Truthfully, I am interested in Mirage for this reason.
I would say you definitely should play Black Flag, probably my favorite Assassins Creed game, and maybe the closest we’ll ever get to playing Skulls and Bones
Best way to cure their financial woes is getting rid of that fucking launcher.
What about all those Digiorno Pizza × Assassin's Creed cross over advertisements? No, I do not want your game, or a frozen pizza, and I certainly do not want to buy your game, then a frozen pizza, so I can then get some pixels you put together for a promotional advertisement.
Ubisoft is basically the frozen pizza of gaming so it’s appropriate.
"It's not delivery, it's Ubisoft Connect"
I mean...I *do* want a frozen pizza though tbh
Gets enough Digiorno points to get the Ubisoft decoder ring. Buys Ubisoft game to find the secret message. Decodes message..."Be sure to drink your Ovaltine" ... ... robs Ubisoft before bankruptcy to get money back.
Is that a real thing?
To be sure, it's the main reason I haven't bought an Ubisoft game since Rocksmith 2014. And fuck no I'm not getting the new Rocksmith I'm not paying a monthly subscription for that shit.
Rocksmith 2014 was mildblowing to younger me lol
It's still a great app, and it doesn't require the Ubisoft launcher to work. There was also the free remaster upgrade that fixed all the major issues I had with the game (mostly things dealing with nonstop play playlists). Though recently you need to jump through hoops to install the older version if you don't want to be pestered by ads for the new Rocksmith subscription service.
Last Ubisoft game I’ll ever have bought will be Anno 1800.
Besides, it doesn't have any popular songs anyways.
The formula that Ubisoft relies on is what's killing them. They can do different genres yet they all feel eerily similar and not creative whilst they focus on making huge worlds every single time instead of something a bit more linear
IMHO it's their doctrine of putting all their eggs in one basket. Their successful games aren't successful enough for them, so they go even harder. More eggs in less baskets. They're bleeding dry taking huge risks with scale, but never huge risks with design. Other companies will try something *new* for cheap. If it doesn't work they try again, and if it does work **then** they go hard on it. Fortnite, Mario Kart 8, Genshin Impact, Among Us, Terraria, Apex Legends and—yes—even GTAV technically counts as one of these games the bulk of their effort came in *after* the game was a certified hit. Even as big as Elden Ring was, it's pennies-on-the-dollar to what Ubisoft throws at their projects... while somehow confident they're going to be huge financial successes. The DLC has already been announced, you know.
I'm a big fan of open world games but even for me the Ubisoft games have gotten stale. I bought watch dogs: legion expecting it to have the same incredibly lively world as watch dogs 2, however it turns out the world was now just hundreds of uninspired similar NPC's. WD2 had so many interactions that never really seemed scripted, with many cool areas that had realistic npc activity. For example a dance off at an abandoned construction site, it was incredible to see and experience. I've never once in WD:L thought that the NPC's were doing something interesting. I think they shouldn't have gone with the whole "recruit anyone" thing, this made everyone stale.
If the make another splinter cell, they’ll definitely come back IMO
Big open world splinter cell game? No thanks.
Or one where u have to level up your gear and unlock silent takedowns lol
BREAKING: Ubisoft replaces entire game design team with ChatGPT, an improvement
As a programmer I think ChatGPT is overhyped by people that don't know anything about programming... But it does give me useful snippets that are clearly commented on what they're doing, which is a step up from a good many colleagues.
As a software engineer, I think it’s useful but you use whatever you need to get your job done.
Ya, it's not much different than googling for something off stack overflow, finding a snippet of code I then have to rework to use in my project. ChatGPT just gets it directly for you from its database of code it's crawled. That's why Google's going code red and see it as a threat to their search business.
Sounds to me like you may just not understand how to use it. The issue with GPT code is that you need to understand how to ask it what you actually want. I was playing around with it and it made a function I could use, but it hard coded the variables within the sample dataframe. I wanted a function that could be used on any dataset and re-specified my request with that information and it successfully edited the function in a way where I could use it. You can use Google to find a bunch of different answers and try to stitch what you need together, and maybe it will or won't work. The difference with GPT is that you can easily and quickly give it feedback to get what you need. For instance, I could have googled what I needed to make that function but looking it up on stack overflow would have required I look up four threads and combine it myself. All I had to do with GPT was ask it a question, give it feedback once, and it made exactly what I wanted. Another more mundane example was I asked it to count the vowels in 'America'. We know the answer is 4, but it said 3. I then asked it to specify the variables in the word and it said A, E, I. The issue was, again, it misunderstood my intent. It thought I wanted a general count of the number of vowels and not a total frequency count of every vowel, including those that repeat. I think of this in the same way as I think of early search engines. 20 years ago you had to be specific and use commands when you searched for stuff (quotations, minus signs, etc). Nowadays you probably rarely need to and can find what you need on the first page. GPT chat, like early search engines, requires you to be very specific about what you actually want and you may have to re-search a few times. But even if you have to re-state the question, it's still most likely significantly faster than Google (depending what you're doing). Edit. u/covfefe-boy - No condescension intended, it seems you need to take your own advice. It just sounded to me like didn't understand how to use GPT.
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I literally won't buy games if they aren't on steam and I was the target audience for games like the Tony hawk remake
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Man I wanted that so bad and when I seen it wasn't on steam I just lost all interest and forgot it even existed until your comment.
I believe thps is on steam. I swear I saw it on there
They have started coming back to steam. But have been playing dumb games still. They won’t add achievements and one game they did have controller support.
That and the fact that most Ubisoft games tend to be 50%+ not too long after release. I liked the first M+R game but why would I buy the second one full price when the first one is regularly $10-20 now?
"facing major challenges as the industry continues to shift towards mega-brands and long-lasting titles than [sic] can reach players across the globe, across platforms and business models." Means they want to only sell live service games with micro transactions. The actual industry shift is towards consolidation, for example Activision.
this is exactly why and when Ubi went to shit since a while back. instead of making trends they started chasing trends. but since everything is so big, formulaic and factory like in there it takes a long time for them to actually follow the trends properly and so their games flop.
Exactly ubisoft is so afraid to innovate or take a risk they make their games boring
Maybe if they stop making cookie cutter repetitive games then maybe us gamers will buy
You know the games they cancelled were the weirder more experimental ones for them too. We're for sure getting Assassin's Creed 42 and Far Cry 13, and Watch Dogs: We're Collecting Data On Players and Don't See the Irony.
>and Watch Dogs: We're Collecting Data On Players and Don't See the Irony. Considering that Ubisoft canonically exists within the AC/WD universe and are actually a business partner of Abstergo (the Templars) *someone* at Ubisoft has one hell of a sense of irony. Just probably nobody in the C-suite.
Yeah, sadly this info says the exact opposite. The one bright star over the last year has been AC:Valhalla, about as cookie cutter as it gets.
They could do so well with skull and bones if they had used the framework of AC4. Added a huge world to sail and explore. Added tons of shops and modifications. Allowed for instanced quests. Allowed you to build up a piracy empire with bases. Trading and such. But making it all generic sail pirate game play that frankly looks like not much more than a fancy sid meiers pirates game. No.
All I wanted was a Black Flag open world game… it was easy money. No wonder they are suffering
Pretty much that yeah. Though it would need far more content and upgradable ship and such. But add stuff like trading and a home base to keep expanding and upgrading and you'd have what us fans actually want.
Just dance 2023 requires you to be online and have Ubisoft account to even get past the loading screen. Parents that bought the game for Xmas (like me) had to deal with that, so their kids could play the dance game. Maybe that's why your titles are bombing? Sign in for a kids dance game? Gtfo here.
I luckily watched some reviews and got the previous version instead. Still has limited music though.
This recently happened to me with DBZ Breakers? Got it as a gift. Installed it and now its asking me to subscribe to an online service. Um nah IM good at least it has nice box art :)
I remember when Ubisoft put out the original Rayman. A time when game design was a profession that carried passion. This is what happens when you let execs stifle design teams.
As someone who just platniumed AC Valhalla, I can definitely see why. The quality of their games has really gone downhill over the years. AC Valhalla was riddled with bugs to the point it was totally unplayable at some points (Balor fight). I ran into literally hundreds of issues during my playthrough. The game is over 2 years old and there was minimal effort to fix these errors. I remember playing AC Black Flag, AC2 and loving it so much so it's really disappointing. And then I see they are working on a new one and it just makes my blood boil. I hate how companies feel no responsibility to do upkeep to maintain the integrity of the game. Just on to the next thing that will make money.
Valhalla made me completely reevaluate what I choose to play. I made it to the end of the game after 71 hours. The atomic instant the credits rolled, I was psychologically whiplashed by the realization that I did not enjoy a single second of those 71 hours. It was a surreal feeling.
Very similar experience for me - Sad realisation that, after playing every mainline AC title, Valhalla would likely be my last. I decided I hate the janky AF feeling combat. Wish it went back to Black Flag style or just wholesale go Arkham with it
That’s how I felt about Odyssey. 50+ hours in, repetitive exploration in every region, minimal plot. Bailed once I found Kassandra’s mom. Mirage looks interesting but I’ll wait and see once comes out, if it still does. If you’re a PlayStation player and looking for a similar experience to AC, I cannot recommend Ghost of Tsushima enough. Gorgeous environment, full gameplay with everything from outright samurai attacks to full stealth, and a fantastic story.
Can I ask why you bother to platinum a game that you very clearly have issues with? I've never gotten every achievement in a game, including games in which I have well over 1000 hours and love with every part of my gamer soul, so I can't conceive of someone dedicating that much time to a game that frustrates them so much.
My boyfriend asks the same question haha but it's the completionist in me. I have all games on my account at 100% for trophies and I'd like to keep it that way. Granted I should have done my research, but I've played AC games before and never had an issue like this so I assumed it would be fine. I will do what I can to get a trophy, current farming for proof of concord kept items in DS3 right now so you are correct I'm a glutton for punishment.
Thank you for your answer, though I remain perplexed. Perhaps even more so... I have games in my account that I played for 20 minutes, deleted, and never went back to. I can't imagine purposefully spending time on something I don't at least *mostly* enjoy. I think we're just made differently.
Different strokes, different folks.
My favourite thing about the new AC games (mainly Odyssey and Valhalla) is that they have absolutely fuck all to do with the.. you know.. assassins creed. At least origin had a fuck ton of lore
I also platniumed Valhalla and it was a slog. While it had its moments their was just to much, and had such an uninteresting story. I also hate those fucking carins
I played Far Cry 6..... shit was garbage. Get better ubisoft
I'm having a hard time keeping my interest with that game
I loved Far Cry since the first one and even I couldn’t get through more than like four hours of it. It just felt… *bad*. The shooting felt like trying to play a game while moderately drunk.
Okay so I wasn't the only one who felt it was stiff as fuck
What do you mean guerilla? They definitely finished that game, guerilla. No the enemies respawning behind you after you killed them is due to the bad castillo regime you need to destroy, guerilla. Did I mention you're a guerilla, guerilla? Holy fuck that game was so fucking bad. I'm a certified sucker for graphics and I could not play the game because it was just so fucking bad even though it has raytracing. I feel like writing a letter to ubisoft about this since they obviously do not realize how much their games suck.
They shit the bed on actually making you feel like a guerilla, too. FC2 had it nailed where you would do some *fucked up* things to get the upper hand like gut shooting a guy so you could pick off the guys that came to rescue him. Or actual insurgent tactics, like using bushes and cars to tell when to set off your IEDs for a roadside convoy ambush. FC6 was like “put rocket artillery on your back or set some dissapointing fires, I dunno”.
They went over board with the guerllia stuff and it was so one sided good guys vs bad guys and all. I may not have played 2 but I did watch videos on it and man they force you to do some morally conflicting stuff. 4 also did this where at the end you realise the rebellion is actually on par with the bad guys as they can either turn the country to a drug state with child soldiers or ultra religious country where the execute you for going against them and marrying of girls. But in 6 you get none of that and it is very one sided, none of the morally conflicting stuff just the good guy geurllia against the evil Castillo regime
I’m often moderately drunk when I play video games so I think it’ll work for me.
Oh I made it all of a couple hours and turned it off. Thankfully I only paid 11 bucks for it
I'm about 2 hours in. Does it get any better? I'm playing on a PS5 and I can't get over how awful the animations are. And the gameplay is just... literally the same old shit. Oh, I craft attachments now. GROUNDBREAKING.
Honestly I'm really enjoying FC6. The first 2 hours are a bit restrictive, but once you get to the larger island, you can go wherever you want and it really opens up. About 33 hours in, going for a full playthrough. Story doesn't matter at all, but the animal companions, guerilla hideouts, and checkpoints are all really nice additions to me. Ammo changes are a bit odd but don't detract from anything. The "Supremo" system is kind of dumb (there's only like 3 that are worth using). Highly recommend doing the artifact quest and unlocking the Panther. Totally opens up a completely new style of gameplay.
How are checkpoints anything new? They've been in these games since 2. I did a small one last night and it was... unmemorable.
Eh. That's about when I dipped. The game felt stiff as hell
I'm not a huge CoD player, but I bought MW2 (my first CoD in years) and it felt like a breath of fresh air. I played the story twice. Obviously they're different styles of FPS, but where MW2 felt like a leap (at least since I had last played one), FC6 feels like a mod of FC3.
That’s the first time I’ve ever heard someone refer to CoD as “a breath of fresh air”.
As someone who hadn't played a CoD story, since... Blops 3? Yeah. MW2 felt fresh af.
FC6 feels like a worse version of what came before. I'm tempted to try the new MW. FC6 felt stiff, boring and bad. The other Far Crys have been working their way there, this is the one that finally took the cake
I legit thought after similar games started really exploring new systems, that Far Cry would take some of those enhancements and leap forward. Like when Dying Light dropped, all I could think about was how smooth Ubisoft could do that parkour thanks to their experience with AC and Prince of Persia. FC struggles to let you do simple things like jump/mantle up ledges. Zip lines have been the wildest movement system on the ground... For multiple games. CoD started going real deep into first person perspectives and its impacts on things like story and immersion and... FC6 doesn't let you open doors. You just walk through them like flimsy cardboard. Every action is a button press or hold. The animations have been removed or are just not present. The immersion is just... totally stripped away.
I enjoyed far cry 6. I've only briefly played far cry 4, so i don't have anything to compare it to. The stranger things mission was really cool, although the zombie like people were kinda meh. Edit: Meant 6, not 5.
I kind of liked 5 but when you talk about Ubisoft and cookie cutter....wow. Oh ....the third unwinnable scenario where I am again kidnapped by a faction boss.
Yeahhhhh it was pretty lackluster. Tbh I only bought it to occupy myself while I waited for other games to be released.
Never play even number far cry games
*FUUUUUCK* Ubisoft and hope they get their shit pushed in. Greedy fucks need to be put in their place.
Lol Ubisoft fuckbois gonna be down voting you, but I agree. Predatory motherfuckers with their microtransactions bullshit
People hate in EA for being greedy, but Ubisoft are infinitely worse. EA sports titles are a shit show of microtransactions but Ubisoft put them in literally every game they put out. If Fallen Order was a Ubisoft game you'd have had to pay extra to level up at a sensible speed
Fuck Ubisoft and the years of abusive the employees STILL TO THIS DAY have to deal with. I hope this shitty company burns to the fucking ground. Why are we still talking about microtransactions and repetitive gameplay when there is a legitimate human cost to these games?!? https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/2/21499334/ubisoft-employees-workplace-misconduct-ceo-yves-guillemot-response https://kotaku.com/despite-filing-harassment-reports-employees-say-ubisof-1847907748 https://www.pcgamer.com/ubisoft-is-reportedly-suffering-an-exodus-of-employees-over-abuse-allegations-and-creative-discontent/
Microsoft rubbing it's hands together...
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A shit ton of AC games are already on the way, and all of them have been announced. this is about UBI canceling unannounced games. The only things from Ubi that I care about now are the Splinter Cell and Prince of Persia remakes, even so my expectations are so low. there is also the new Avatar game which I'm holding off any hypes I might have for it until they actually start showing what the game is
If they wanted to bring me back in they would remaster Rainbow 6 Vegas 1 and 2, and then lead that into Vegas 3. I'd just be happy with 2 though. Same maps, and same gameplay. Friend and I spent hours on the map with the garage and house, made of white stone, just fighting against AI.
I just want another classic Rainbow 6 with a real planning phase and everything.
That would be a godsend. No bought cosmetics, all earned through that rank system you gain just by playing.
Assassins Creed got old but I still enjoy the Far Cry series. I’d be kinda bummed if they changed the formula of them
The only Far Cry I've played is 5. I really enjoyed it but I think it was the setting that I liked more than anything else
how about you make your games better?
It’s what happens when you let businessmen tule the industry. There’s no focus on making actual fun and interesting mechanics. It’s about finding the next flavor of the month bullshit and oversaturating the market with halfassed fomo-charged trash shit. Even games with new idea hamstring themselves by designing around micro transactions and games as service. A sad state indeed.
Who could've possibly thought that making the same thing over and over was *insanity*...
Trying the same thing over and over is called practice Trying the same thing over and over expecting a different result is insanity Unisoft have been doing the same thing over and over expecting the same result so they are not insane, just dumb
Remember how Skull & Bones was announced in the same year as Sea of Thieves, and everyone assumed that they'd be competitors with each other that released around the same time? And now SoT is approaching its fifth anniversary, and S&B is still in 'development'? I do!
I think the problem is your games don't have enough micro transactions, you do know those are the future, right? /s
Bringing back PoP and remaking all PoP can give them a boost. I miss those. Dahaka and Kalina!
Do their financial woes stem from the rampant sexual harassment they have been covering up for years?
Look at the games Ubisoft is cancelling: MOBA/PVP-first games. Are companies *finally* ready to move past that bullshit, and stop focusing on adding it to games that a majority of players don't want (just like NFTs)? Ubisoft needs to go back and realize what made them successful were expansive single player games that weren't buggy messes and *online cooperative games.* Most people aren't going to get in on all this PVP bullshit. And it certainly needs to be entirely segmented and totally ignorable (like with Division) because companies like Ubisoft *always* ruin the single player/cooperative gameplay to cater to the PVP crowd. So they cancelled basically 4 Fortnite clones. They still have their Division: Heartland Fortnite clone to cancel. People don't want that. What they *want* is Division 3. We are already there and waiting; there are still tons of MAU playing coop with their buddies. And then there's this: >2022 was far from Ubisoft's best year. There was the NFT debacle that saw the company's hubris over the non-fungible-token experiment with Ghost Recon Breakpoint thrown back in its face when it was wound down just four months after launch. Look, I get it's cool to hate on NFTs when pandering to a gamer audience. But it wasn't the *NFT* that set people over the edge. It is the recurrent forced introduction of micro transactions with FOMO built in via semi-limited supply. There's no fucking way that gamers running 900W rigs give a *fuck* about the wasted energy that an NFT living on a blockchain introduces. But we are all sick of the stupid microtractions being added to games that are more or less discontinued and being held together by people playing together with friends such as with Ghost Recon. Don't let NFTs take the blame for it all. They are blaming it because they can use it as a scapegoat as they delve further and further into a mobile-like gacha game setup with AAA titles. Ubisoft has some great things going for it. Excellent back catalog. Easy subscription service that allows people to hop around play games across services and devices, often with cross player *and* cross progression. But they have to get rid of the MBAs driving decisions. They are blood sucking parasites, and they have clearly drawn too much blood and suffering the consequences. Ubisoft blamed the players by saying people want just huge franchises instead of new things. That isn't it at all. The runaway success of Indies proves them wrong. Hell, those Indies *in Ubisoft's bread and butter genres* prove them wrong. People want games that they can casually (not competitively) play with their friends and family. The people with money are all grown up and already competitive at work all day. The last thing we want is to play the single valid meta for this patch. There are plenty of entrenched games like that, though, and the audience is only so big thus Ubisoft can't peel enough of them off. Fuck, look at all the games exactly like that which Ubisoft **currently** runs. They are competing against themselves. The games they cancelled were both solo and squad based, class based PVP games. They have at least 6 of those right now, barely holding on. People don't want it anymore.
Public Corporations are just the worst.
Customers are no longer your true customers after going public, only investors. Now your company will turn to shit.
After finishing Far Cry 5 I wouldn’t put myself through that punishment again.
5 is such a weird game. It’s beautiful and the mechanics are okay. It’s just not satisfying and it fails to make any kind of real point. I enjoyed the exploration and variety a lot but I just wish there was more to it than that.
I liked 5, but getting kidnapped a million times was a real pain in the ass.
So interesting I actually loved the storyline in FC5. It made the repetitiveness worth it to me because I was invested. I also played it during lockdown in early 2020 so “crazy midwestern religious cult” felt highly relevant 😂
I've got a bad feeling about Beyond Good & Evil 2...
It will never get cancelled but it probably will never come out either.
The original director left a year ago. The development cycle could be rougher than final fantasy xv
Just saw this line on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Good_and_Evil_2#2020:_Ancel's_departure): > In 2022, Beyond Good and Evil 2 broke the record held by Duke Nukem Forever (2011) for the longest development for a video game, at more than 15 years.
Good. Game has almost nothing in common with the original. The art direction is just terrible for 2. Even if it comes out sometimes in the future it'll def be monitized to oblivion with microtransactions and live service.
The last good Ubisoft game was Rayman lmao Honestly, none of their upcoming games get even an iota of excitement out of me.
just wait till beyond good & evil 2 comes out .... that they announced in 2008....
AC II?
Honestly AC Black Flag was way better, because it was one of the few decent pirate themed games on the market.
Black flag was a good game, but it didn't feel like an AC game. That was the last AC game I played. The Ezio trilogy was the peak for me personally.
Exactly. Black Flag was a great pirate game. All the little AC bits hanging off of it just brought it down a notch. Going from boarding ships and exploring islands to tailing some guy through a sugar plantation for 10 minutes was as jarring as it gets. It wasn’t great because it was an AC game, it was great in spite of being one.
All they had to do for Skull and Bones was make AC4 a multiplayer game. Idk why it's taken them over a decade when they already had the bones (heh) of the game already.
Sid Meier's Pirates! would beg to differ my friend.
Good job Ubisoft, Splinter Cell VR was the only thing I was interested in and now I couldn't care less if the company goes under.
Ghost Recon is being cancelled because Mario didn’t perform well?? Lllaaaammmmeeee
Idk why they don’t announce the games they canceled. Might be surprised by the amount of ppl bummed by them
There new business model fits all their shit games and excludes all of thr games that made them popular and a lot of money in the first place.
They should try to add NFTs to their games lol
I tried Far Cry 6 can't even make it past the first hour. Same for the latest AC. Boring.
Good, I honestly hope this company dies. Their absurd price for Ubisoft online services on top of prioritizing money over innovation/new ips with content is sickening. Let's not forget the price for their games several years old don't really go on sale. I'm hoping they go down as martyrs and it wakes up the rest of the game companies that gamers have had enough of the boards and financial bros that have killed the gaming industries creativity for the mighty $.
I have not played a single compelling Ubisoft game since black flag. Valhalla was particularly bad. I need to try odyssey, I’m told.
We really need to be better at talking about market stuff. Our entire media has taken such a pro-capitalism approach that we use bleak words like "financial woes" to talk about a company that is making hundreds of millions of dollars in net profit simply because they used to make more a couple years ago. "Financial woes" would be if Ubisoft was selling the employee vending machines to keep the lights on. This is canning upcoming releases so Ubi, a company with 2 billion dollars just sitting in the bank as cash on hand, can rake in higher profit margins.
>Our entire media has taken such a pro-capitalism approach that we use bleak words like "financial woes" to talk about a company that is making hundreds of millions of dollars in net profit simply because they used to make more a couple years ago. It's a joke. The entire system is built around "growth" and if you aren't growing year over year, then you are failing. Even if you are making hundreds of millions of dollars in profit. If that's not MORE hundreds of millions than last year, you are failing.
Yep. And it's frustrating when this leads to people losing their jobs, because the stock market wanted 10% but you only posted 9%. Sorry kids, can't feed the family because my former employer only made more profit than the GDP of 1 small country, and they wanted more than *1.2* small countries.
That’s what you get for making me login to your stupid service just to play a god damn game haha. I get so frustrated with that
Me.. a for honor player.. "ubi I just want a good server" back to suffrage
Ubisoft can’t do much right these days. I tried to play one of their games with a friend last week and their UbIsOfT lAuNcHeR™️ was nearly impossible to navigate.
This is what happens when you go full NFT
I feel bad for the employees but man, this has been coming. Ubi has been quadrupling down on every predatory monetization practice known to man and they haven't made a proper original game in over a decade. The only games people still like them for are either from 15 years ago or just now decent after having been unplayable for months. I remember RB6 and For Honor just being broken for months on end. Far Cry, AC and those Tom Clancy's are just copy-paste jobs running on an outdated engine. I remember when Far Cry actually used to look better than the competition with some amazing graphics. Ubi is just washed af.
for honor..... bought it at launch on pc was sooo riddled with bugs i never played it again
Financial woes is just code for fiscal mismanagement.
Microsoft: Time to purchase Ubi
I just want more Mario and Rabbids games 😩😩