To languish in the power-seat of a company like Ubisoft takes a tremendous amount of tact and intelligence as you deftly navigate between everything you can do to stay in that position and all that you should. With the livelihoods of hundreds to thousands relying on your word and the eyes of millions judging your output, there's a pressure few could even dream of personally facing that needs to overcome in order to perform with the manner of wit and skill that belies the hard talents of everyone working under you. Or at least that is the impression. Yet Ubisoft, with all of it's size and responsibility, prides itself in making the most pathetically pastiche decisions and wasting it's money on the same tired ideas that were dead before they left the pitch room, bloated development windows for underdelivered games, or just milked-out core franchises that meet increasingly diminishing interest. They believe they can rely on their core few series' to sustain them by just squeezing a little harder with each entry, but very soon they're going to learn that there's only so much air left in their money bags.
It starts with games that Ubisoft have had dancing in development hell for upwards of ten years, and yes I said games. Plural. Most studios have about one of those projects at any given time, but Ubisoft juggles about 2 in the public eye and who knows how many behind closed doors like they're shooting for the world record or something. We had the Black Flag spin-off which I've covered a little before and will touch on again later, but then there's 'Beyond Good and Evil 2'. Do you remember when that game was still exciting? When the proposition was this vast open world (unfortunately live service) space pirate game with all of these sprawling urban world spaces and stretched wide plains, all covering the surface of an in-game solar system? And then No Man's Sky came out with a game that rendered an entire gaggle of galaxies, Bethesda revealed their Star Field which is said to bring us dozens of solar systems. Even Star Citizen, with all of it's flaws and hang-ups, at least exists in some diminished form that players can pretend resembles a finished game.
But then it goes a step even further, to the games that Ubisoft conceived of in the worst possible haze of insanity and then, after brief spells of lucidity, have promptly cancelled: Wasting development time and money with their moronic propositions. Right now we have two VR titles that have been killed, Splinter Cell and Assassin's Creed VR; of course representing something slightly atypical to Ubisoft's typical line-up, and thus were canned. Their embarrassingly ill-conceived 'Ghost Recon: Frontline', a battle Royale with literally nothing unique to it's premise whatsoever, was cancelled. Their limp multiplayer game Roller Champions, which actually launched, is said to be close to shuttering before it's third season. And we haven't heard from XDefiant for a hot minute but with everyone's reaction to that, I'm expecting the announcement to filter through literally any day now. Ubisoft is becoming the Netflix of entertainment products right now, and given the state Netflix is currently in that is not company you want to be keeping.
And that's just touching on the games that Ubisoft have killed off, what about the ones it actually has coming? Well we've got Skull and Bones, a game which has failed to score even a fraction of the hype it had the years ago when it was revealed thanks to it utterly failing to capture the sparked dreams it nudged and being effectively leap-frogged by Rare's own pirate game. Then you have the Assassin's Creed games which have utterly shirked their identity and are rocketing towards a coming live service 'megagame' which will host all future entries akin to what COD is doing with it's games, only without a clue as to how to navigate such a set-up. And then there's the NFT future they've committed to. At this point, the only project on their slate which hasn't totally drummed up pitchforks and torches are their two remakes, Splinter Cell and Prince of Persia. Neither of which are developed enough to offer a trailer and neither of which have even been heard from in brief updates all this year. They could well be on their way to cancellation soon too.
You know as an outsider looking in that things are dire when the company themselves are scrambling to make some emergency measures just to keep the lights on. And they need it too; the only big upcoming game they've got is the Avatar game which is meant to coincide with the movie later this year, for all that's worth. (Maybe the movie will be a hit, but I have a feeling the game will let it down whatever the case. It is a Ubisoft product, afterall.) And what have the fivehead business masterminds at Ubisoft cooked up to try and finagle some quick sales between now and their next big hit? Anything interesting and exciting, like perhaps a slate of those indie games they used to publish which they might push forward to be headliners this year? A new Rayman perhaps? No, how about another Assassin's Creed. Wait...
Yes, these absolute Neanderthals have such an iron deficiency they have been struck utterly incapable of taking in new information or forming independent thought, so when the graph line starts pointing down they just panic and start repeat the exact same three phrases they've been drippling out for the past decade and a half. "AC", "Ghost Recon" and "Grope". I'd imagine it was the studio heads who had to step up and remind the higher-ups that the solution to them not having enough time to develop a new Assassin's Creed quick enough to fill their schedule is not to start a new Assassin's Creed project. After which they were promptly fired and their replacement was informed the plan would now be to make a smaller Assassin's Creed game that can leverage all the success of their flogged horse with but a fraction of the development costs- and where have I heard this one before?
Oh right, there was a whole 2.5d series of Assassin's Creed games that were supposed to spearhead a slew of ancillary smaller budget Assassin's Creed games and only managed to wrap up their trilogy. What went wrong? Well the games themselves relied on feeding intentionally developed gaps in the lore, such as the mystery gift given by movie Ezio to Shao Jun, only to find that such mysteries appealed more to the book and comic fans than the game fans. One of the biggest problems with Assassin's Creed is the chasm between the fans of their specific chunks of media, and how they don't intersect nearly as much as they should. At the time of these games release there was still a unifying narrative for Assassin's Creed that had the attention of the general fan more than these ancillary mysteries did, so all those game ultimately had to offer was their gameplay which was... alright. There was a rigidity to the gameplay which made them feel more like explicitly linear puzzle challenges than stealth games that give you tools and leave the execution in the players hands. Every Assassin's Creed does that, but those others are open world games where you can brute force your own solution. That's harder to do when squished into a couple dimensions.
Am I saying that the upcoming Assassin's Creed light title is going to utterly fail to satiate audiences and won't even make it's meagre budget back? No, but I think it's going to be a waste of a development process anyway. Although I'm only half saying it because it's a bad idea. Ubisoft is a studio far past it's prime with a legacy utterly burnt by mediocrity after mediocrity; it's safest to assume any project starting in their offices is going to be a generic disappointment because that's literally all they make nowadays. And as the disappointments become less and less profitable, investors are going to start realising exactly what we already know and jump ship, leaving Ubisoft to go around begging to be bought again as the last of their funds dry up. A grim future for a company with so many livelihoods wrapped up inside of it, but a prediction I make fairly confidently. It's up to Ubisoft main to prove me wrong in the coming year if they can brook even a single success.
No comments:
Post a Comment