5d ago

Ubisoft scores a legendary ratio against Elon Musk on his own platform—which hopefully marks a final end to all the Assassin's Creed Shadows' culture war nonsense

www.pcgamer.com

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This game has been such a hard litmus test for "what would it take to get you to purchase another Assassins Creed game?" for me.
Like, "Would you buy it if it was just a genuienly good Assassins Creed game?" - Paid Ubisoft Reviewer
"No, I've played them during their heyday and I'm a bit over the formula" - Tired Inner gamer
"But what if it had Samurai, including the certified BAMF Yasuke?" - Ubi Devs
"hmm... I do love Samurai and Yasuke... but no, I don't think that would do it. I don't like Ubisoft's business practices and would rather not support it even if it speaks to my inner Chanbara nerd." - Inner Anti-corpo voice
"Not even if Ubisoft was taking a strong stance against the Anti-Woke nonsense culture wars? You couldn't even let their business practices go for just one game?" - Ubi Marketing team
"No no no, I know that businesses only take these stances when it's profitable. They would just as easily take the opposite opinion if that was where the money was at." - Inner cynic voice
"But what if we dunked on Elon, on his own platform no less?" - AC twiiter account
"okay...I'm in... but only when it goes on a good Steam sale" - Defeated sense of self
- Ubisoft doesn't get to earn "woke credits" for this game. Regardless of how they epic owned the racists and Elon on social media, they're still Ubisoft.
  
  You right.
- I'll buy another Ubisoft game when they get rid of microtransactions, pre orders of multiple different collector's editions and all the other anti-consumer monetization schemes. So, right after hell has frozen over.
  
  lol, fair enough.
- For me, it isn't even any of this stuff. It's almost totally that the games are too big and take too long to get any enjoyment. Most of the time spent playing the games isn't fun. It's just traveling and maybe collecting garbage that doesn't add anything to the enjoyment.
  The old games were fun for every moment with the traversal. I don't think that can carry a newer game, because it isn't as unique anymore, but it was always more fun than riding a horse from point to point.
  If they condensed the story and game down to tens of hours, I would consider it. I'm not going to play a typical Ubisoft game that takes hundreds. Even Elden Ring took me just about 100 and it was getting to the point of being too much, and it was far more interesting and fun.
  
  Couldn't agree more. When open worlds were new and shiney, I enjoyed the sense of freedom and exploration. Now though, it usually just feels like padding. Like I'm being told I need to eat 20 crackers for every bite of burger.
  Even worse when they are just big maps dotted with equally spaced event icons and way points that you are just expected to complete. Really makes me miss open world games that felt like they existed for their own sake like Morrowind.
  As much as I enjoyed Elden Ring, I definitely felt like the open world added so little ta the formula, but took so much when you could just casually run by most enemies.
  
  But you could always run past enemies in Dark Souls, and it was a much more relevant gameplay pattern in those games that didn't put a Stake of Marika right in front of the boss door. I think the open world adding nonlinearity to the Souls system was really elegant, since getting stuck on a boss meant you usually had something else interesting to do while improving your skills and/or grinding for stats. You still can bash your head into the boss over and over until you finally solve the skill issue, of course, and Stakes of Marika make that a lot less frustrating. But if you were in the situation in DS1-3 and decided "no, I want better numbers before I try again" you just had to go grind trash to level up and that's it. At least the "go fuck off and farm souls" option in Elden Ring is fun when doing so is clearing minidungeons and evergaols and maybe seeing new loot.
  
  You bring up some good points. And I'm about to veer off into "personal opinion" territory, so take this for what it's worth.
  But when I think about "running past enemies" in Dark Souls, I think about the tightly designed levels, and how I had to learn the layout before running by was a viable option. And if I wanted to explore an area, I would have to be cautious and alert. Compare that to Elden Ring's open design, and I never felt like I had to "learn the map" nor be wary of my surroundings, I could just kind of run around without consequence and only deal with enemies when I wanted to on my terms.
  And I'm sure you could come up with exceptions to these generalizations for each game, but they would be exceptions. On the whole, it's a stark difference in "game feel". And for me personally, taking the fear and need for caution out of exploration was a large deviation from what made a Souls game feel like a Souls game. Not that it is necessarily worse mind you, just different, and shifts the formula to be something quite different. Elden Ring made me feel like I was playing something closer to an Ubisoft open world or even Breath of the Wild a little bit (obvious differences aside, just the "vibe" I got). A really good Ubisoft open world designed by far better developers mind you, but that kind of design philosophy.
  And as far as the "go fuck off and farm souls", I could definitely see how ER was a more fun game for that. If you were really in the mood to "grind some Elden Ring", having all that content would definitely be a huge benefit. I'm just not the target audience for it however, as I felt like the repetition of bosses and enemies just to fill the world with mini-dungeons and add content was largely "filler". I'm not much of a fan of grinding to be honest.
  This may largely come down to the evolution of my tastes as time has gone on, as I used to have a much more positive opinion on this type of design. For example, when I first played Fallout 2 I thought it was a huge improvement due to the massive dungeons you could find in random encounters, giving me days of content to play around with. Same with Daggerfall, the procedural generated quests and dungeons felt like an endless supply of content. But after replaying them, I couldn't get past the feeling that it was all "filler content" (which sounds more derogatory than I mean it to, I'm just struggling to find the best word choice for this). Same is true for the mini-dungeons and evergoals in ER.
  Compare that to DarkSouls, where if I wanted "more content", I would instead just choose to replay the game. And when I do wind up wanting to replay one of these games, I greatly appreciate the larger focus on "hand crafted and finely tuned" content over the "open world buffet" methodology. And when it comes to replaying Elden Ring, I find myself skipping a significant amount of content, and thinking to myself "what if the time they spent creating that repetitive content went into more unique content". Sure, there would be "less content" overall, but there would be "more real content". (Not that Dark Souls was immune to this kind of copy paste content mind you, the Demon Ruins come to mind.)
  Anyways, I let that rant get away from me, so thanks for sticking with it if you made it this far. Obviously my personal opinions on the changes Elden Ring made to the Souls formula are not overly common, as it is by far many many peoples favorite of the series. And to be honest, I absolutely loved the game as well, easily one of the best games ever made. My personal critiques are purely my own feelings on a very specific aspect of the series. Different strokes for different folks and all that.
  
  I do 100% see where you're coming from too. I just think that people shouldn't include Elden Ring when listing trend-chasing games that lazily slap "it's a big open wooooorld!" onto an existing linear franchise. Elden Ring's systems were designed really well around the bigness and openness of its world, unlike something like Sonic Frontiers or any of the MMO-single-player UE5 stuff coming out of AAA studios. And they even had the decency to build a whole IP around this new, distinct gameplay formula instead of making it Dark Souls 4: This Is What Dark Souls Is Now.
  Like, maybe you don't like red wine, fair enough, but at least Elden Ring is serving the red wine alongside a steak instead of alongside a bowl of Lucky Charms or fettuccine Alfredo.
  
  Completely agree. Elden Ring really is uniquely positioned to be "the game" to look at for game designers when seeing the advantages and disadvantages of the open world design. Compared to much of the rest of the industry, it really is the shining example of what an open world can be when the developers are passionate, competent, and truly wanting to make a genuinely great game, not just chasing trends.
  
  Unfortunately, "Elden-likes" will likely end up like 99% of "souls-likes" where all they do is copy the surface level stuff ("hard boss fights! Bonfires!") instead of actually iterating on what made From's games so well designed.
  
  Is what it is I guess. But at least Iron Pineapple won't be hurting for content anytime soon.
  
  Yep. Open world games usually feel like they can't have any blank spaces, and so they waste resources filling every inch with something, even if it's just a waste of time. You've always been able to run past enemies in FS games, but it took effort and you had to pay attention. The open world of ER wastes so many resources filling the open world, but also makes it trivial to not engage with. Even when there's a collectable you want, you just ride by on Torrent, grab it, and leave. You don't engage with it, but they expended time and money creating it.
  The open world gives you a lot of distinct options, but do you really have more real ones than DS1? At the start of DS1 you have three paths (4 with the master key). In ER at the start you have three obvious paths (Stormveil, Weeping Peninsula, and Cailid) and one less obvious (going around Stormveil). I'd argue the paths of DS1 are far more interesting to engage with. The Catacombs are a design mistake though because it's so hard to get out of. The reward for that path is very interesting for a new start (and it's balanced for a new player, which is why Pinwheel becomes a joke at the mid-game when most people fight him), but getting out without the Lord Vessel is a huge challenge. It needs to have a TP or jump or something at the bottom to get back when you're done.
  
  I agree woth everything you said but want to add that leaving big open spaces can be an effective design choice. Compare botw to totk and the ambiance changes drastically due to this.
- I have been a huge AC fan since AC 2. In fact, I am currently replaying AC 2 to recapture the good times. But, Valhalla was the last straw. AC games have become too bloated for their own good. I gave up on AC for good.
- Tired inner gamer. The original AC got boring for me. Just lots of repetitive uncreative climbing to complete collections. They they came out with Uplay with AC2 and i keep going back to “is this game worth creating an account and giving up my personal information to play, when there are multiple other games available with a better value proposition for my time, money, and privacy?”
  The answer (for ubisoft) is invariably no. So i’ve effectively been on an unintentional Ubisoft boycott since 2008 since i refuse to create an account.
  
  Good on ya! Fight the good fight!
  Personally, I dug the "social stealth" mechanics in the early AC games, especially as it was a interesting deviation from the more line of sight based formula of the MGS games, and the light/shadow based stealth of the Theif and Splinter Cell series (everything old is new again in that regards), but I've always been a fan of stealth games anyway. And I found the climbing and parkour to be fun and novel at the time, even if it is extremely "automated".
  Was fortunate enough to just rent AC 1&2 for the 360 at the time, so uPlay never really entered into my decision making.
  But yeah, if you were a completionist, I could see how that would get extremely boring. And Ubisoft's business practices are super shitty.
- "Who fucking cares? I dont play videogames to learn about history." - frustrated inner gamer that doesn't give two shits about what color the pixels are.
  
  lol, that's a fair take. Though I do love learning about history in games. And I enjoy when games allow me the chance to live out some childhood fantasy. So in that sense, I do care about the color of pixels, and shape, and implied fiction behind it all.
  But different strokes for different folks.
- I would like to add "stop with the marathon cutscenes!" - Maybe then I'd buy it on a deep sale
  
  Yeah, I've heard the story is... not a particularly strong aspect of the game to put it nicely. Maybe like, a 90% sale. I'd pay $7.99 for it! I bet I could get it down to a buck an hour at least at that price.
  
  You think you can finish the game in 8 hours? Or you think without all the blathering it would be 8? 😂
  
  Oh god, I hear people take 50+ hours on this one, if that turns out to be 42+ of cut scenes I'm out.
  But honestly, doubt I could finish the game at all. I think I'd lose interest in about 8 hours, maybe 12? I have a tendency to drop overly long open world games randomly, even when I'm actively enjoying them. It's a problem.
  But if they don't let me skip the overly long cut scenes... I would probably have a hard time coming back after the first night. You gotta be real good at your job to get me to watch a movie when I wanna be playing a game.
  
  🤣🤣🤣
  I have the same problem. When open world was new it was different but now open world just means generic and boring more often than not. The Zelda games kept me interested, Cyberpunk 2077 did as well but I used to play a pen and paper RPG a lot like it so I was going to like it no matter what. Otherwise I'd rather something unique and different.
  I put a ton of hours into Astroneer if that counts. A hundred hours on my own and about the with my son which was a blast!
  
  50+ hours
  No AC game should be that long, the formula gets old after ~20.
  
  have a tendency to drop overly long open world games randomly, even when I'm actively enjoying them. It's a problem.
  That's not a problem. That's a solution. If your game doesn't actively gain anything by being open world then it just makes it tedious. I have pretty much sworn off open world games at this point. Elden Ring did alright with it, but I honestly think it was a detriment to them compared to, for example, the world of Dark Souls, which still had a lot of options but the encounters were more controlled. It sold better though, but they have become increasingly more well known with significantly more marketing, so it doesn't mean it's the better design.

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