| Title | If you see a white whale in Assassin's Creed IV, you can thank your friends |
| Author | Nick Diamon |
| Posted in | Games |
| When | July 18, 2013 |
Ubisoft loves open world connected gaming and thinks you should too..
Read the full articleCaptain Ahab needs all the help he can get. You can call me Ishmael and I only am escaped alone to tell thee.
What remorseless Emperor commands me... not to play this game?
I don't doubt that online, social aspects open new possibilities, but that's a dumb example. All they're doing is restricting the fun aspect of a game (finding a white whale!) in order to cajole their player base to adopt the social aspect of the game.
There's nothing inherent to searching for a white whale that has to involve an online component. After all, if developers decide players think finding a white whale is truly too rare, the programmers could simply increase the frequency in the code until it hits that optimal balance between challenge and fun.
I'm not against online, social aspects, per se. But this type of thing is what makes me leery of how developers will implement it. Give me online, social features that truly add value, and I'll happily use it. But don't nerf your single player game in a crass attempt to herd me onto your servers.
I play a lot of MMOs, so online "open world" stuff doesn't bother me in principle, but a lot of the things mentioned in upcoming next-gen games really bothers me. I do NOT want mandatory PvP access to my single player game. I would be willing to allow other players to wander around my game in a purely cooperative manner, but I don't want any part of Watch-Dog's or The Division's "random PvP" elements, and might not buy those games if those features cannot be disabled.
I also have no interest in "if your friends happen to be playing the exact same game at the exact same time then magic!" elements, because for the most part I play games at completely different times of day than my friends, and the odds of any of them playing the exact same game at the exact same time are infinitesimal. I would hate to have features of the game that I would have almost no chance of ever encountering purely because my friends are not acting in lockstep with my schedule.
Personally the only connectivity feature that means anything to me is drop-in drop-out coop, and that's a secondary priority compared to the game being accessible offline and without access to Ubisoft servers. To me, this smacks more of "we really want to force you to have a permanent connection to our servers to play our game, but since that didn't go over too well when it we tried it last time, we'll try and play up how valuable and fun social functions (that coincidentally force you to have a permanent connection to our servers) are!"
Why o why include such social crap? Cant i be immersed in the game without constant indications that i got an achievement or that someone is playing something else?
i need help whith whit whals.
I FOUND ONE BY THE SOUTH!