Tabletop, DnD, board games, and minecraft. Also Animal Crossing.
Rules
i wonder why people are turning away from traditional releases which have become more expensive while nickel-and-diming you and turning to free to play games which are specifically designed to suck you in and drain your wallet by the exact same scumbags
it's a choice between paying $80 up front for a game that pushes you into buying $20+ of dlc to get "the full experience" (conveniently after the refund period) or paying $0 upfront for a similar experience
Maybe stop making the same game for the thousandth time, Ubisoft
Hey, remember when Assassin's Creed was good? Remember when The Division felt fresh? Remember when Ubisoft was known for making good games, and not for their logo, which is an aerial view of a pile of shit?
Remember when there wasn't a uplay store? Those were good times.
I remember trying to start Ubisoft games from the Steam store, it starting Uplay, and then needing to log in to some online service just to play a game I had the shortcut for on my desktop. So many middlemen.
And you can end up with games in your steam library tied to different Ubisoft accounts too. And despite what they tell you in the community forums, their customer support will waste hours of your time and can't actually help you with this.
I ran into this recently with Watch Dogs 2 which I never did finish. I finally got it installed on my linux machine, got it to actually start, and then got blasted with the Uplay garbage. Once I got that sorted out then it told me I was signed in with the wrong account and I had to go through a whole thing trying to reset the password for an account I had to guess the email for and wasn't even sure I had. Now every time I launch the game I have to go through a whole thing where it starts, tells me I'm on the wrong, account, then restarts and makes me sign in with that other account.
Absolute sheer stupidity.
I remember when there were 15 Assassin's Creed games in the first 15 years of the series' existence. I played maybe three of them and none of them except Black Flag stood out as especially good, and even Black Flag was mainly dragged down by the Assassin's Creed gameplay. Never played The Division because the premise seemed like one big fascist fantasy.
Yeah, typical Tom Clancy fascistic overtones, but I loved the gameplay.
Hey, remember when Assassin’s Creed was good?
What? When?
The story in the Ezio trilogy was at least intriguing, and I don't know if they ever continued it, finished it or just forgot. There was a whole story arc where the character accessing his genetic memories was caught between future assassins and the Abstergo corporation, who were future Knights Templar. After a certain point, all of the future parts of the games felt like B-stories that were tangential to the main future timeline.
The future thing was always a good idea but never well execute in the games. In the first one is better because you don't have much to do inside the Animus as Altair so the conspiracy thing reading e-mails and investigating your cell is at least intriguing. From AC2 onwards every time you are disconnected from Animus to play as Desmond is boring and distracting, I can't even remember the other characters.
After a certain point, all of the future parts of the games felt like B-stories that were tangential to the main future timeline.
After they killed Desmond they didn't have any linchpin to hold the plot line. It's a mess.
It felt like the first game and the Ezio trilogy were building to something in the future timeline and then they went “Oh wait fuck we can’t have a climax or we can’t keep making these forever!”
The first one was genuinely groundbreaking at the time. I remember playing it on PS3 and thinking "man I've never seen anything like this." I used to just do the parkour stuff for hours.
It gets very samey and grindy towards the end by today's standards. But AC2 was an all-time great for me. Assassinating the corrupt pope was a cool as hell moment. I stopped playing after AC3. Haven't had any desire to try anything new they've put out.
I remember the guy who created the series in the first place got fired by Ubisoft and he went and made a weird experimental indie game instead
Yaaaay gaslight us, Ubisoft!
No Ubisoft. Your "new games" are always the same game that you've released 14 times already with a new setting. The gameplay to them remains the exact same game people have played 14 times, so they are less interested.
You literally do absolutely nothing to change your "new games". New Tomb Raider? Same game. New Assassin's Creed? Same game. New Far Cry? Same fucking game.
There is fundamentally zero change between your new game and the last game you made besides the assets your art team has produced. That's not a new game, it's a full conversion mod.
If you did literally anything to the AC franchise you could revive it, but you're afraid of stepping outside the Ubisoft open world formula even one single bit. The AC style open world could be converted into an actual RPG instead of a themepark for parkour and stabbing random NPCs and it would be well received. The first thing a friend of mine said, whose first AC game was Shadows, was "you can't speak to the NPCs". Just make NPCs persistent, make it possible to walk up to them and start a conversation. Boom, completely different game to literally any other AC. It's now an RPG.
But nope. The company is unwilling to change anything at all. Every Ubisoft open world game is fundamentally the same, climb tower to reveal map, sneak around, parkour over stuff, stab dude stealthily or use overpowered counter attacks. Breath of the Wild is practically an Ubisoft open world but it has the fundamental difference of being a physics-based themepark for puzzles and the ability to actually speak to NPCs that aren't enemies. That's all there is between a critically acclaimed release and an Ubi game, but Ubi are stagnant and unable to try anything new.
The one time Assassin's Creed actually got anyone's attention again was when ship combat was added to it which was a refreshing and genuinely new gameplay experience.
New Assassin's Creed? Same game.
they did something new once and i hated it because it sucks and the level system means you can't assassinate people, then the next five games were all the same as the new thing
Ubisoft releasing a Tomb Raider game would be a pretty big change actually, since they don't own that franchise.
Brainfart. Obviously I meant Borderlands. Or Mario. Or some shit. I don't know what I was thinking tbh but the point stands that Ubi don't make new games. They remix the same shit they've been making since Assassin's Creed 2007, which was genuinely groundbreaking and impressive at the time, but also the game that has killed the company because they restructured the entire company around milking the fuck out of it and nothing within the company around actually making new games. Of course the talented people that were creative and could make new games would have moved on if asked to make the same thing 30 times.
They aren't a company geared towards making new games. They're a company that restructured to milk a highly successful formula at the expense of keeping any talent that wanted to do something creative. At least with Mario and all this other shit nobody will deny that Nintendo are consistently doing new things with him, even if it sticks to the "platformer" idea as a whole. Nintendo use the same art assets and characters over and over, but they make new games. Ubi use the same game over and over but change the art assets and characters.
Defender of Sex Crimes, Perpetuator of Orientalism, Hostage Holder of the Rayman series and DRM-lock-in-even-if-you-bought-the-game-on-Steam-because-fuck-you distributor Ubisoft states that "It's getting mighty difficult to sell games that don't shoehorn literal rent-seeking that go bust in under 10 years, if they even last that long", more at eleven.
Take2 admitted that linear story based game the Mafia old country performed way above their expectations on sales; on the other hand live service game borderlands 4 performed way under their expectations on sales.
Stop making a 80$ piece of shit and everyone will buy it.
Also $80 is fucking absurd and outside of a couple big flagships like GTA and maybe some Nintendo games I really struggle to see how an $80 price tag will make games make more money than $60.
The audience has grown soooo much since the $60 price tag became standard, far more than outpacing inflation. Add the fact of digital distribution and the profit margins should be waaaaaaay higher than when $60 became standard, and except for those big flagships I would expect that $20 increase to turn off enough people that you end up making less money in total.
And we just switched to $70 a couple years ago!
I have a couple of games on my mind that I'd buy immediately if they weren't tied to a Ubisoft account.