You aren't the only one that noticed Ubisoft is in a rut

Title You aren't the only one that noticed Ubisoft is in a rut
Author Nick Diamon
Posted in News
When January 20, 2020

Ubisoft is changing things up. The big joke among gamers that have played a lot of Ubisoft games lately is that they all tend to bleed together. They share mechanics, assets, and seem to come from similar open world molds..

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I kind of think the impression that Ubigames are all the same comes more from people who only play them a little. If you play them all, you pick up the differences which are less obvious than ‘look - drones’ etc.

I feel they just put out too many games. It’s like they have this art and production pipeline that keeps turning in beautiful worlds and they have to struggle to assemble games to get in there. If there weren’t as many Far Cry/Ghost Recon/Creed/Division games, seems plausible they’d be more distinctive.

Would be nice if they were able to do expansions instead of a new game. Then I wouldn’t play Division 2 and missing New York in the snow, for example, but able to do both.

I guess the economics is such that a new title is better for the Suits coke and hooker habbit than a DLC for a 2 year old game that they could still support. But surely they could upgrade the Hardware requirements etc with the DLC, or just add a new ‘render engine’ on top of the original so as to support both the new and the old customers and have a longer lifetime for the title

I dunno.

2019 Ubisoft releases:
Trials Rising, Far Cry: New Dawn, Anno 1800, Tom Clancy’s The Division 2, Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Breakpoint, Just Dance 2020

That’s 6 games, of which only 3 can be thought of as “ubigames”, and one of those is a lower budget mid-release cycle thingie. In 2018 the only 2 “ubigames” were Far Cry 5 and AC: Odyssey.

Of course, the games are designed to be played for hundreds of hours, so it feels like they were more than what they really are. But they are releasing way fewer games than they have historically.

I don’t buy most of their games because of their stupid launcher I have to use even when they sell a game on Steam. And then they didn’t even put the last Anno on Steam… (Well they did and then pulled it or something? Not interested in their games, metaphorically speaking.)

I mean, of COURSE they aren’t all literally the same thing - but the idea that they all tend to become a melange of shared mechanics and assets isn’t far off at all. Isn’t the idea that you have to play them all more than a little to “pick up on the differences”, as you say, kinda speaking to this problem?

They do indeed have a fairly remarkable production pipeline for cranking out these open-world games so regularly, but the trade-off of this pipeline where it seems like everyone touches every game, is a degree of “same-ness”, and a lot of recycling of code.

I still remember genuinely laughing my ass off when I realized The Crew had the equivalent of a “climb a tower to reveal the map” mechanic, haha.

Playing their games, its pretty easy to see the reuse of sounds, animations and other art assets. I see this as a strength to be honest. One wolf sounds the same as the next to me in real life anyways, and this just means they can focus more on their excellent world building and less on art assets, which I understand is one of the biggest time sinks in development anyways.

To a degree art is easier to scale. Need more art? Hire more artists. To change the story/plot or gameplay is not so easy unless it’s really simple or basic stuff to begin with.

Surprising me, their space shooter game Starlink also reuses this Ubisoft gameplay system.

I don’t care about the asset re-use, there’s a staggering amount of art assets in their open world games. It’s the systems re-use that bugs me. All the games start to feel the same, with a slightly different skin on them.

Maybe the IPs themselves are tired? I mean, turn-based overhead AC would involve vastly different systems, but it would still be an AC game…

I agree, within reason. The re-use of mechanics and systems across a ton of their games is what gives them that sense of “same-ness” - such as the whole “climb the tower, reveal the map” thing, which is basically a meme at this point.

I generally don’t touch Ubisoft games. Between the launcher on steam and the inability to buy steam versions from other sites, I never buy them unless they release older games on gog. Same thing for EA.

Ubisoft peaked with the Prince Of Persia:The Sands of Time on the Gamecube.
Fight me.

Six games is still an awful lot in one year. Damn, though, they’ve released 59 games in the last 5 years! That’s a ton.

And 110+ in the 5 years before that.

They are at an historic low.

AC Odyssey is one of the best games I’ve played in a long time, and I’ve never played an AC game before.

Yeah, maybe they are releasing a lot of games, but their gameplay is getting better and better. I love the direction the AC games are going and Ghost Recon: Wildlands was a hoot, and I had a lot of fun with the best squad mechanics of any shooter game in recent memory. I’m day one on AC: Vikings or whatever is next. I hope they add a little bit of base building if they do the whole “viking village sends out raiding parties” thing.

You’re not wrong, but that’s like saying Nintendo peaked with Super Mario Galaxy. Something’s got to be the peak, and one of the best games of all time is a pretty high peak.

Personally I thought Prince of Persia 2008 was even better, just comparing apples to apples. And outside the series, I think the original Assassin’s Creed was their most impressive achievement and leaped over other open world games. Visiting 11th Century Damascus, Acre and Jerusalem was amazing. From a story and character perspective I still think Prince of Persia 2008 was their peak.