I swear, EVERY time a Ubisoft game is revealed people go "OMG, it's gonna be amazing, GOTY, etc, etc!"
THEN, a couple of months before release, you find something wrong with the game and declare it a disaster.
THEN, people blame Ubisoft for seemingly overhyping the game, when in reality, Ubisoft was just doing their job and promoting the game like EVERY company does! Nintendo, EA, Sony, Microsoft, Activision, Bungie; they ALL release trailers to promote their game. It's YOUR fault for assuming that the game is going to be this phenomenal work of art. They're just normal, GOOD, triple AAA games. They are NOT all 10/10's, so stop getting overwhelmingly upset when you realize this!
EVERY SINGLE GAME that's been overhyped, then dismissed as a flop, has been good and even well received by the gaming community. Watch Dogs, Assassins Creed 3, and yes, I'm 99% sure this will happen with the Division.
Watch Dogs and Assassins Creed 3 are both good games. Two of my favorites. I enjoyed them both immensely. And yet AC3 was dismissed for glitches (Which personally I found funny. It was rare that they affected my mission, and it made for more side missions to track them down.) Assassins Creed 3 was a fun game, but I'll admit glitches are somewhat a good reason to boycott a game, depending on what the glitch does.
But Watch Dogs was dismissed by pessimists because of a graphical downgrade.... come here, I'm gonna tell you a secret. Come closer.... a little closer.....
WATCH DOGS LOOKS FINE!
It wasn't a graphical downgrade! You could tell even before E3 that the footage shown was ran off of a high end PC, and videos shown a month before release on a high end PC looked similar to that of the tech demo. And even if it WAS downgraded, it looks pretty good. It was pleasant to look at, and certainly better than a lot of next-gen exclusives. (But more on that in a later blog.)
So here we are with two well received, very fun games that YOU players boycotted because you expected more, and then blame Ubisoft when it' s YOUR fault. Granted, Ubisoft has been responsible at times, like with Far Cry 3, but you people have done this with Ubisoft games before, and I BEG you to please; PLEASE not do this with Assassins Creed Unity, Rainbow 6, and the Division.
PLEASE!
Between a larger industry trend toward risk-averse development and indie devs reporting that deals for the service are drying up, Game Pass is starting to feel potentially purposeless.
The whole thing started to stagnate a long time ago, it was the introduction of BC that kept it going with the odd release here and there.
Nothing like that to fall back on now.
3R Games is ready to launch Thief Simulator VR: Greenview Street onto PSVR 2 this week, following on from the Meta Quest release in 2022.
“Rainbow Cotton is the kind of game that series fans will happily add to their collection but it surely won't entice many folks outside of that player base with its dated gameplay that unfortunately hasn't held up all that well.” - A.J. Maciejewski from Video Chums.
Assassin's Creed 3 was fun? Are you sure you don't mean Black Flags?
How is this unique to Ubisoft and not modern "game journalism" in general? More often than not, I see articles almost going out of their way to hype up a game, with some getting pretty bad*. Considering this current system works in the "journalists" favor, I don't expect to ever see it change, unless it suddenly loses its power.
* Earlier today VGRHQ posted an article explaining how LittleBigPlanet 3 is the "statistical front-runner for GotY." Yes, we know next to nothing about LittleBigPlanet 3, but this game is the most likely GOTY winner because the series averages good scores.
Overly hyped titles are going to persist, and it's not because people are excited about games. I'm excited about video games, but I don't buy every single one of them. It's the folks that buy something based on a CGI trailer they saw.
The industry needs to focus more on the game instead of the hype, and the customers have to get better at seeing through the hype and seeing the games for what they are.... games.
I have to agree with you about AC 3. At the time I was a little behind the times when it came to the yearly installments of the AC series so I didn't play AC3 for at least a year after its release and I didn't follow any of the hype or following dissapointments upon its release. All that to say, I enjoyed it quite a bit. I understood peoples dissapointments, but in no way did I think it was a terrible game (although, maybe I'm just not demanding because I thouroughly enjoyed AC:Revelations while I keep hearing most people didn't). At some point I was thinking about getting Watch Dogs. I keep hearing that's it's not really innovative beyond hacking and hacking gets repetative and overall the game loses momentum. Also, I hear that Aiden is just awful and a stiff character. I'm curious what your thoughts are on the game?