OnlySP: Franchises have been a very hot topic in the gaming scene over the last few years. There are those who zealously stand by their favorite franchises, such as the Call of Duty and Battlefield communities, and there are those who would rather have a greater investment by publishers into new games which bring more novel, innovative concepts. But what do the writers at OnlySP think? Eoin, Nathan and Mike give their opinions below.
Prototype footage from several of Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed titles has leaked, revealing early stages of their development.
BY JASON MONROE: The very best pirate-themed video games that you should play instead of the disappointment that is Skull and Bones.
PoE: Deadfire, Unless you have a or PS5 or an SSD don't bother, loading times are insane. A minute and a half to go into a room to investigate a desk in an inn and then an additional 1 1/2 minutes to leave the room and then load to leave the inn???
And they never fixed it.
Ubisoft has just released Skull and Bones on PC and consoles. And, from the looks of it, the game wasn’t received well by some gamers. Not only that but it appears that Skull and Bones can be worse than Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag, a game that came out a decade ago.
I wanted a Black Flag sequel so bad. It's still my favorite AC entry. The fact that they ignored everything that we loved about that game in this "spiritual successor" is making me enjoy watching this game crash and burn quite a bit. Either do it right or don't do it at all. (I understand the legal binding they got themselves into with the Singapore government to release this game at all costs)
/grabs popcorn
My thing is, if the Singapore govt was forcing you to do it at all cost, why not make what people wanted? How did ubi delay it for 5yrs, then again for 1yr and not just make a similar experience to black flag? How do you spend so much time and make so little?
Ubisoft did make a sequel, Assassin's Creed: Rogue. It has a short campaign, and its packed with filler side quests for upgrades, but it's still a decent time.
It released on the same day as Assassin's Creed: Unity, so it was mostly forgotten.
11 years of development. Multiple restarts. All the while people have been saying they don't want some pirate game where you can't even get off your ship. 11 years of people telling Ubisoft all they want is a pirate game that's basically Black Flag without any of the assassin or animus stuff. Yet they still served up this trash that no one wanted, charged $70 for it, and had the balls to call it AAAA.
The Guillemot family honestly needs to be forced out of Ubisoft. They've doubled down on everything players don't like about their games, they want AI to create "rough drafts" of their stories rather than letting their writers do their jobs, and they literally do not give a shit what their playerbase actually wants. 5-6 years ago their stock was worth more than 4x what it's currently worth. The company is dying.
What has happened to developers? How can you possible make a worse looking game 11 years later? It’s honestly mind boggling.
It's because the older developers were better at it. The new generation pass most of their exams by copying code from around the web so are not nearly as good at understanding what they are developing.
No, here's the truth:
https://www.channelnewsasia...
This was made in Singapore and it's the first game of this scale to be made there. Ubisoft would probably cancel it normally since it clearly wasn't shaping up well but they were getting government grants to try build up the industry there.
Do you really think game developers are radically different than just 10 years ago? And this game has been development since Black Flag released.
Using one crap game to trash a whole industry of developers is stupid. It's like saying "Alien Colonial Marines proves that game developers suck now."
It's the multiplayer aspect of the world. MP games look worse than single player games, period. Every comparison we keep seeing are for games like Gotham Knights, Suicide Squad and Skull and Bones. They all have multiplayer focusses.
Enough has been said about this game already. The gaming world shrugged when it was announced so many years ago, and instead of listening to all the criticisms from the community back then, Ubi just sailed on and kept making a game nobody really wanted. What a waste of money and effort.
anything after 3 is a milkyway just like anime and their 200+ episodes they will try to milk as much as they can even if it doesn't make sense.
god of war ascension,gears of war judgement,dead space 3 and crysis 3 all of them sequels or prequels they did poorly in sales.
i hope call of duty is next.
I think some games can get away with it. As mentioned, Assassin's Creed offers something different with each release. Assassin's Creed III's story wasn't the best, but I loved exploring the world and doing everything there was to do. Ezio's story was by far the best though and I don't mind them doing trilogies within trilogies as long as the story is well done, and Ezio's was really fun to go through.
also i believe that sometimes just rest the IP for 2-3 years than reboot if the IP has a huge following like gears or god of war,
there are 40 games planed for ps4 exclusives wise and only 12-15 are new IP's so publishers are willing to take chances but its a business after all so they have to make their money back and that's where established franchisees do well
UBI is on a mission with all the new IP's they are introducing so let's give them props
also sony and ms have said they have 12-15 new Ip's in development so credit goes to both for that too
They don't NEED to, no. But often, when we have great experiences with a game that's a one-off(like The Last of Us), we want to go back and revisit that world.
Most games don't need to. But bigger games, with sky high budgets and so much marketing going into creating a brand name need to franchise in order to pay back the initial investment.
For example, with the amount of effort Ubisoft is putting in Watch Dogs, from the game development itself (which has taken a few years of development) to everything around the game, and I'd be very surprised if we don't end up with one or more sequels over the next generation.
And quite frankly, the publishers are not to blame for the creation of all these franchises and the milking of their IPs, the consumers are. When new IPs are created, a whole lot of people don't buy these games. And like I said, the reason why publishers can afford to spend so much on developing and marketing some of their biggest games, is because this will pay for itself over the lifetime of the brand; doing so much effort for one game wouldn't be profitable.
There are a few exceptions, but for the most part, a new IP won't go and sell millions of copies. Which usually means one of 2 things, either we create a high budget franchise, or a smaller budget game (with no intention of a follow-up).