At the funeral of the Electronic Entertainment Expo, many developers and manufactures took it upon themselves to carry the sodden torch of the yearly gaming-conference out of the noble desire to complete this year's marketing schedule at a fraction of the cost. Trying to go through all of these events one by one is proving taxing, I'm going to be at this forever, but none more so than Ubisoft Forward which is airing at 9:00 PM European time! You're a European based company you bunch of headcases, why are you making us suffer so? But I'm an idiot who's agreed on this strangely convoluted order of writing blogs which means that I'm going to scramble to get this one out in under 3 hours. However, I do have one saving grace in that regard; all Ubisoft games are the exact same so I can just copy and paste my blogs from last year. (That's a joke. No need to check to make sure, though.)
So, having watched the whole reveal event I was struck by one prevailing thought; wow, even when they've put together the event and venue themselves they still decide to fill the air with aimless nattering about nothing in particular. I mean, what exactly will it take to have an event that is actually somewhat focused, Ubisoft? Did you really take time out of our day in order to give a show reel of 'Rainbow Six: Siege' in order to 'Thank the players'? (See: Advertise without any new content.) Was there honestly a prolonged CG trailer mash-up in order to tease 'Elite Squad', Ubisoft's crap-tier mobile crossover title that they revealed a lifetime ago? Where's the real content that we've been waiting for like 'Skull and Bones', 'Gods and Monsters' or, heck, what about 'Beyond Good and Evil 2'? Is BGE 2 still a game that's real? Maybe it would do everyone some good to set the record straight on some of these lingering titles that Ubisoft have dangled about recently. But alas, seems not as the Ubisoft's event, dubbed 'Forward', was as standard, predictable and generic as Ubisoft's games themselves. Still, I thought it was okay.
Am I a settler? I never really took myself as the type of person to forge my own concessions in order to confide to the reality but I find myself doing that more and more with Ubisoft. I think that may come from how early I was at noticing how repetitive their games were (something the rest of the world was slow to cotton-on to.) but I seem to have blown right past the anger and frustration where I'm now slumped into begrudging acceptance. Ubisoft have all the money, talent and scale they need to be trailblazers, just none of the drive and creative freedom. Phil Spencer made a brief appearance during the event to sniff their wind and call them "Industry leaders", but the whole message seemed so canned it only really highlighted what a joke they've become in that regard. At this point, you either get on board with Ubisoft's, mildly antiquated, way of making games or you settle into hating them completely. I want to land on the former. (And as soon as they start charging reasonable prices for their old videogames, that is. You guys aren't Nintendo, so stop pretending you have their value margins.)
I was also very interested by, but not entirely surprised by, the inherent lack of real-time reaction to anything happening on the larger stage. For example, despite the CEO himself popping up in order to wrap up the show, there was no mention made towards the very public resignations that have happened in recent weeks due to sexual harassment allegations. Don't get me wrong, I understand from a business perceptive why that makes sense in order to keep the presentation positive, but it really looks terrible for optics, especially in this age. I can just smell those articles of "Ubisoft ignore their sex-assault investigations during event!" And it's not like they've never taken time out to amend their image before; they straight up apologised for the absolute state of 'Assassin's Creed: Unity' back in the day. I suppose what I'm trying to say is that I would have preferred a section of sober condemnation over the waffle which made up roughly 50% of this showcase. (Does that make me a bad person? Probably.)
"What of the games, though? That was why you were there, wasn't it?" And indeed, we did get some rather substantial glimpses of Ubisoft's two bigboi's so I guess I can't complain too much. (A lot of gameplay does help to swallow the pill.) Firstly came the title that is set in my own backyard, 'Watch Dogs: Legion', and I have to say that I quite enjoyed what I've seen thusfar. Graphically it's encouraging to see how they've managed to keep up the quality from the reveal event as far as I can tell (I haven't gone back for a side-by-side comparison.) The writing is still superbly eye-rolling and the voice-acting raised my eyes at times. (They did hire English VO's for these recordings, right? I'm having a hard time telling...) All-in-all I think the game looked fine and will get more into it in a separate blog; 'Assassin's Creed: Valhalla', however, is a different story.
This is the game that feels like it's been through 3 complete reveal cycles, one time with it's own trailer, another during Xbox's conference and now a full gameplay reveal during Ubisoft's event; and I was not expecting my opinion to drop off this badly. After the Xbox conference I was left rather impressed by the fidelity of it all, but absolutely none of that was on display today; man, the title looked rough! The textures looked on par with 'Odyssey', (so nothing too bad) the combat animations looked decent, but the facial animations where honestly gross. I mean it was bad, to the point where I had to look about Assassins's Creed 2 footage to tell if it was always this rough. (And the result is: kinda, but given the age it was a lot more forgivable back then.)
When we talk about Ubisoft games that are drenched in generic-tropes, 'Valhalla' really takes the cake as a perfect example. The combat seemed recycled from 'Odyssey' which evolved it from 'Origins', the 'Build a settlement' feature is a holdover from Assassin's Creed 3 and they showed literally nothing in terms of it's depth, (So I'm guessing it's just as shallow as it was back in AC3) and the world's inhabitants look and feel totally devoid of life and vigour. The only points that stand out are- say it with me; the combat, world design and movement. God, it feels like I've been saying those exact same points about Assassin's Creed since birth; I must have come out of the womb critiquing Assassin's Creed fear of evolution. None of what I see from the footage looks like it has the potential to push the franchise forward apart from one moment which appeared to show active fire effects. (That was a holdover from 2008's Far Cry 2, but it was still kinda cool.) But will I get it? Not at full price, that's for sure...
But enough of all that transient garbage, I came for one thing and one thing alone; I wanted to see Giancarlo Esposito. And did we get that 'Far Cry' blowout we were promised? Yes- well no- well... we got a really cool cinematic. No gameplay. But, like, it was a really cool cinematic, though! Does that still count? The only rational explanation, in my mind, for Ubisoft's absolute reticence for showing off any gameplay for a title that is undoubtedly going to run exactly the same as their last game is because they have another 'Ubisoft Forward' that they're trying to drum up attention for. Sometime before the end of the year. (Be still my throbbing heart, I can't wait...) Instead all we got was a prolonged introduction to Giancarlo's dictator character making a very beleaguered point about how difficult it is to be a fascist or something. Okay look, script-wise it lacked the elegance perhaps of Vaas' soliloquy- but man, Giancarlo is such a great actor! I know I'm going to be watching that trailer over and over- it's really good! So somehow through the merit of showing me literally nothing, Ubisoft left me with a better taste in my mouth than they did with 'Valhalla'. (There's a lesson there somewhere.)
So overall I give Ubisoft a grand; "Should have just released the footage to Youtube" out of ten. Although I will commend the team for managing to capture all the pretentious pomp and grandstanding that we thought we'd lost with the cancellation of E3. (Great job, guys!) I may sound like I'm being supremely critical, and I am. Major publisher events get such a bad rap for the very reason that even when they have actual content to show, they still pad things out like their trying to impress the high-school football team. This time they had 30 minutes of commentary-tied 'Valhalla' gameplay, and they saved it for after the show; preferring, instead, to treat us all with CG trailers of a mobile game and a reminder that Brawlhalla exists. (Thanks?) Thank god there was actually content to the event or I don't know what I'd have done, likely eaten my own arm out of boredom. Still, I can't help but feel like something was missi- where was the 'Just Dance' trailer? Oh my god... there was none... I don't know how to- is this good, is thi- How do I react to this? I gonna need some time to process this, that's about it.
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