The Fuck Happened To Ubisoft?

The PS4 version is currently £6 at CEX, if we're thinking of the same game.

I think you can hold out for even lower still though in a year or two.

Guess that means Microsoft will be buying them next.

I’m currently thinking Ubisoft have a serious game-naming problem. I thought Beyond Good and Evil was a terrible name at the time and still do, and I even went and bought the Zelda game they made today, but I still can’t remember what the fuck it’s called, it’s branding is just generic slopwords and surely plays a role in sales.

Say what you like about the Assassin’s Creed games, it’s a great name. Far Cry is a pretty good one too.

I'm somebody's dad

Get rid of the Tom Clancy novels and the tobacco smell and that actually sounds like a pretty sweet setup.

I never played a Splinter Cell, but it seemed to be a well-received series. They haven’t made one in forever, right?

I dunno. Part of it is going to be my own waning interest in following every beat of what’s happening in gaming, but I still think their main issue seems to be terrible marketing and branding. I just had to look up “Immortals Fenyx Rising” to get the name right again. I’ve been waving my hand over it at the shops for years, but until someone mentioned it in this thread I didn’t realise (or recall) that it was Ubisoft.

It’s been said, I think, but the timeline makes it look like the success of Assassin’s Creed 2 and Far Cry 3 made them settle on a formula and churn that out, at the expense of people like me who loved weirder stuff like Far Cry 2, until the company felt artistically hollow. I did get right into Child of Light, but that’s about it.

aubergine
In their defence it was originally going to be called God's and Monsters, which is a wee bit more memorable. The energy drink brand put a stop to that, so they seemingly picked one of the joke suggestions for alternative names out of a hat.

Played the 360 version first which was disappointing then seeing comments about how the older gen version was much better with missions cut from the next gen version and replaced with those lame hideout missions.

Fenyx Rising was the best Ubisoft game I've played in many years. Enjoyed it enough as an almost launch PS5 title to full on Platinum it.
After loving Creed Odyssey and being a Vikings fan I was looking forward to Valhalla. But man that game is a slog. Has no charm or depth and ever region is the same quest over and over. Creed is dead to me unless they revamp it.

I'll gladly take a sequel to Fenyx though that adds and improves upon the original. It didn't feel like a Ubisoft game as it was actually full of charm and wit. World design was pretty great as well.

Ubisoft used to be the shit though, not even that long ago.

Oh, and Splinter Cell was amazing back then. It still plays great imo. I guess the problem is that much like their other games, they kinda ran it to the ground, with four games in five years during the Xbox era. Double Agent in particular sucked, even the OG Xbox version pales in comparison to the previous games.

By the time Conviction came out, nobody really cared anymore, and even fans hated the actionized take on the series. Blacklist was too little, too late... besides, it couldn't decide whether it was action or stealth.


I keep thinking to the Immortals demo and how enemies seemed to take forever to die. And none of the difficulty levels seemed to have "reduced enemy health" (which really helped me complete Nier Automata). Is combat in the full game as much of a slog? It's pretty cheap nowadays, I might have to think about it eventually, assuming it's not given away for free at some point.

I kind of want to buy it (it's a tenner on Steam), but the reviews say it's a bit crashy.

I'm one of the people that have been talking about it, and:

1. I had no idea that it's an Ubi game.

2. I have to keep looking the name up myself, even though I'm playing it!

Now that you mention it, it really is a name that slips the mind. Generic word + generic word + Phoenix but written differen... never mind it's another generic word.

Blacklist was legitimately a return to form the for the Splinter Cell franchise IMO, really good missions, giving you chance to be the hunter as it were, essentially an evolution of the techno ninja that you were in Chaos Theory but with more options and manoeuvrability.

When you get abilities too the combat has a better flow. While it shares the same combat as say AC Odyssey, in that game it has to be grounded, but in Immortals you're air juggling enemies in the air, knocking them away to do mid air stingers to follow up and keep the combo going and knock back again to then grapple towards the enemy and keep it going again before finishing in a big hammer slam. They let the shackles off and you could have a degree of player expression in combat that you just couldn't in AC. It also has the right approach to seeking out new gear sets. You only get new swords, axes, bows and a head and chest armor piece. And they have fundamental skill upgrades too, none of this 3% slashing damage shite you see in these other games. Was a breath of fresh air after Dying Light 2.

Anyone remember the Assassins Creed multiplayer? I enjoyed it quite a bit, surprised they haven't brought it back as I remember it being quite popular.