How long until I just start copy and pasting these blogs?
Imagine that you've been handed the franchise rights to a series that is defined, from it's very roots, to American military tactical action, and not the politically charged espionage of Metal Gear Solid, but something borne of genuine blue-blooded patriotism. Now imagine, if you can, that you're not American, but someone has given you this series that touts the American military and flaunts the efficiency of it's operational power, the scope of their technological advancement and the intricacies of it's duties. Wouldn't that get a little nauseating after a while? Wouldn't you at some point find yourself wanting to poke fun at the whole thing and turn it on it's head? These are all genuine questions, because I'm beginning to think that those are the only sets of circumstances to explain the seeming hardcoded disdain that Ubisoft has displayed their Tom Clancy properties of late.
I already told you about the team deathmatch game they announced which was laughed into oblivion. Well guess what: apparently that game didn't even hit with a release date so we all can just wait around on pins and needles for that impending trainwreck to roll into the station pretty much any day now. (Or maybe even next year, who even knows?) But that doesn't mean that Ubisoft have allowed themselves a spare second free from the had work of grinding their USP driven franchises into fine identical-looking dust. I don't know who the investors are over at Ubisoft, but they must have literally negative trust in leadership, because the amount of risks this company has taken over the past half decade have been amazingly small. A company of this size, you'd have thought they'd take some by accident. (Not even taking to account that they're literally making art, which invites risk) What if I told you that their latest title takes what I just said and blows it to the extreme?
Ghost Recon. The series defined by realistic tactical squad based operations that, entry after entry, tried to push the boundaries of AI capability and grounded military action. That is a Battle Royale now. And you may be already manufacturing some plausible deniability on Ubisoft's behalf right now, by doing stuff like assuming there's some really cool twist to BR that Ubisoft are cooking up, but you'd be wrong. They're so creatively bankrupt over there, that Frontline is designed to be as close to Fortnite as humanely possible, to the point where you get ridiculous sights like call-in helicopters dropping prefab constructs out of the sky in order for players to set up in. It's not as snappy and quick as Fortnite's building mechanics, but it'll keep an end-of-match fight going on for several minutes too long, don't you worry.
Do you remember a time when people were looking at Ghost Recon Wildlands with a slant and wondering if Ubisoft had lost the plot with this franchise yet? People were affronted by the idea of a gangly open-world setting where tactics sort of took a back seat to mediocre third person gunfights with gormless AI. People were worried about that. Then there was the sequel, Breakpoint, which implemented a detestably pathetic gear levelling system and enemy levels, implemented so poorly it makes you wonder if the people in the design room have ever actually played a game before. A system so bad that the developers had to invent a mode which removed this very levelling system, but they couldn't just patch it out of the main game because, of course, their monetisation routines were tied to it. People hated that. Yet somehow, Ubisoft keeps raising the ante. Self destruction is addictive, I guess.
I actually liked Wildlands, which I know makes me a bit of an anomaly. And even more than that, I liked the online competitive modes in that game which never blew up in the way that they deserved to. I mean sure, they seemed specifically designed to try and emulate the class based tactical team-based games of Rainbow Six Siege, because if there's one word that all of Ubisoft have tattooed in their skulls it's 'homogenisation', but there are much worse games to draw inspiration from for your multiplayer modes. (Take 'Fortnite', for instance) But it was always like the player was struggle against the game itself in order to get an experience which fit the promise of the series. I had to restrict myself to stealthy actions, despite the fact that the game supplied me with enough firepower to gun down an entire country if I so chose to. I forced myself to endure the endlessly choppy AI tactical options. I even did all the side content and seasonal missions because I was genuinely invested in the idea of experiencing that 'true' Ghost Recon that the team always seemed to be teasing. And then they just go ahead and announce a game that missed the point of the franchise entirely.
I'm going to go ahead and say the most obvious point again; why don't you make your own bloody series, Ubisoft? And no, XDefiant doesn't count as an original because it recycles ideas and assets from existing Tom Clancy properties. Why doesn't Ubisoft create, you know, in the manner one would expect from a company of supposed artists? Could it perhaps be because the last time they did that very thing the result was 'Hyper Scape'. A game I literally had to look up because I couldn't remember the title. A game which, as of writing this, has a single channel on Twitch playing it, and considering the screen is currently black while they're complaining about a surprise 20gb update, I can only guess that they aren't a regular. A game which, over a year since launch, doesn't have the promised crossplay. That's what happens when Ubisoft try to create, and so they resort to copying and bastardising.
And can you blame them? Yes. Yes I can and very much do. As one of the biggest European gaming companies in existence, Ubisoft must be capable of putting together something new, something worthy of their capabilities and size! And if they aren't willing then surely it falls to the audience to make them. Even with the release of Far Cry 6 I'm seeing articles with titles like 'The Ubisoft Formula is starting to grow stale.' "Starting to"!? Where the heck have you been for Far Cry 4, 5 and New Dawn? For Assassin's Creed Unity, Syndicate, Rogue, Origins, Odyssey and Valhalla? For Watch Dogs 1, 2 and Legion? It's been stale, man, it went rank; now the formula is straight decomposing! Fans are going around themselves in circles of chiding Ubisoft, then buying their next game, then being surprised that they feel like it's the same game they bought last year. So do something about it! Stop buying. Then maybe Ubisoft higher ups will actually have reason to pause when hitting that Ctrl-C for the five hundreth time...
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