A general rule that I like to follow before posting these blog posts is, and this might not appease everybody, but to post a bit of disclaimer before I go off expressing possibly unpopular opinions, so here it is. I personally am a huge fan of the Assassin's Creed franchise and Ubisoft as a whole, and have been for some time. Ubisoft has made some of the more unique experiences to ever grace gaming such as sands of time, AC, and Far Cry, to name a few, and I love them for this. You're entitled to enjoy the games that I criticize here just as I am entitled not to, it's a buyers market after all, and I'm not trying to personally attack anybody who plays or enjoys these games, their just my opinions. That said, let's dive in.
So, if you're a Ubisoft fan such as myself, or just a fan of games in general, you've likely heard of or experienced the notable decline in Ubisoft games over the past few years, a trend that has taken me and many others by surprise. Ubisoft, a company that was once at the forefront of gaming innovation, has recently seemed to have lagged behind in production, releasing multiple broken and sloppily produced titles over the last 3-4 years. This all started, in my opinion, with the release of AC Revelations, a game that has often been credited as the catalyst in Ubisoft's fall from grace. While many may contribute this to a yearly release issue, a problem which I somewhat agree with but will get into later, it's important to remember that 2 and brotherhood, games which I believe were of a very high quality, were all also yearly releases, being pushed out in 2009 and 2010 respectively. None the less, I still attempted to keep an open mind as to the quality of the series, being a fan of it after all, thinking to myself, "hey, it's only one game, a rough patch in an overall great series, it won't be like this forever, right?". Unfortunately for me, AC 3 only worsened my fears, launching with countless bugs, a bland protagonist, and strange and reworked gameplay. Ac Black Flag would eventually go on to suspend some of my fears, and was easily one of my favorite games of 2013, though most of my praise came for the games sailing portions rather than the the games land exploration, which I again found rather boring overall. Black Flag gave me hope for the future, but, as I would soon learn, my faith was wrongly placed. It was soon announced that not only would the AC series be sticking to their now seemingly stale yearly release schedule, but that they would now be releasing two games at once. i don't want to sound like a snobby idiot here, but my first thought in this situation was that they were doing this for profit and that neither of the games would be very enjoyable. Unfortunately for me and other fans, this prediction proved to be true, as both games were widely renowned as critical failures on release, one being a buggy and disjointed experience, and the other being a literal copy and paste of a previous game.
I was still holding on to hope for Ubisoft overall, and I would often cite the fact that Far Cry 3 was one of the best games 2012 when people would bring these types of accusations against Ubisoft. That said, while I did enjoy Far Cry 4, I can see it for what it is, again essentially a copy and paste of Far Cry 3 with shiny new textures and some minor additions like elephants and gyrocopters. So what is the issue with Ubisoft in its current state? i personally believe, and this is a theory that has been propose by others, that its decline is directly tied to its financial policy. I've said it before and i'll say it again. Games can not bring innovation and originality when your primary concern is profit. Over the years, i've seen Ubisoft shift from a developer and publisher who praised and championed the idea of quality over quantity, hosting multiple studios with each bringing unique experiences to the gaming world. While Ubisoft still does host and support many game studios, there has been a notable shift in policy over these past few years, with the publisher seeming to lean more on the side of financial quantity over the usual product quality that they are known for. games that before took multiple years to develop and held individual styles, such as the Far Cry series, are beginning to have smaller and smaller release date gaps, one need only look at the time between the releases of 2-3 and 3-4 to understand that, a release window that was cut down by half and may only be decreasing. The developer is even proved to have created separate E3 specific graphical files for their game Watchdogs simply in an attempt to awe users by its graphical prowess likely in an attempt to elicit more buys. These issues are only worsened by perhaps one of the worst parts of Ubisofts distribution policies, the infamous U Play system, The U Play system has been plagued by poor latency and bandwidth from the start of its launch, and its necessity to play Ubisoft games has often been criticized, as it typically faces errors in downloading and playing games at launch, and issue not typically found in other services like Steam. And now, with the recent announcement of AC Syndicate. I like many other fans, am wondering to myself, "Is it too late?". The state of Ubisoft, as far as i'm concerned, is pretty deplorable. Their yearly AC release schedule has seemingly backfired, despite the implementation of multiple development teams, and forced DRM and third party hosting have left many users and fans chaffed by current Ubisoft policy. As a standing fan of the series and company as a whole, I sincerely hope that they can pull themselves out of this apparent rut that they've fallen into, and they eventually may. Who know's, maybe Syndicate will be the kick in the rear that thae company needs to get back on track, or maybe it will be another disappointment in a long line of apparent failures for the company, but, as far as I can tell however, it's really not a great time to be a Ubisoft supporter
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