Ubisoft and the Stagnation of the Open World

Ubisoft is a studio which used to hold a very special place in my heart, releasing many of my favourite titles during my younger years. Despite this, as I grew up, it seems they didn’t grow with me, and their game design philosophy stagnated.

Assassin’s Creed II was my first true delve into Ubisoft’s games, aside from a few hours here and there in Splinter Cell, and I was in love. Although I was hooked, thanks to the story, characters and combat, the biggest thing for me was the world and locations. I was absolutely enamoured by Florence; exploring the rooftops, and climbing many of the towers and landmarks was an incredible feeling, there was genuine scale to the world, and the incredible art design helped carry this feeling event further. There is a magic to this world and it all feels purposefully designed with little bloat. The maps are relatively small, but they all feel very well linked together, going from view-point to view-point didn’t take all that long, allowing the map to be unlocked in a relatively quick time. Both Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood and Assassin’s Creed: Revelations were designed with just as much care, while utilising the newer mechanics to add some variety in exploration.

Far Cry 3 was another title I was in love with around the same time. The world was incredibly fun to explore, with a variety of outposts, enemies, animals, and Ubisoft’s signature… Towers. It has a fantastic story and themes, combining its gameplay with its primary story elements, such as desensitisation to violence and the lengths people will go to to save themselves and others, no matter how much of themself is lost. However, the game is noticeably aged in certain areas, the visuals are visibly outdated, and much of the gameplay is lacking the variety that later titles in the series have. Followed up by Far Cry 4 — my favourite in the series — which fell in similar areas as the previous entries. This game also manages to have the greatest visual design and art direction the series has seen to date. Thanks to the fictional setting of Kyrat, a small country in the Himalayas, it utilises the culture of the area to create an absolutely gorgeous environment.

In more recent years, Ubisoft has stuck to the same general philosophy behind their world design, merely inflating these worlds and filling them with meaningless bloat. This makes for very long and dull stretches of gameplay, which, combined with the need to hunt down all the towers across many of their titles, leads to an incredibly boring loop, heavily diluting the experience. This is only compounded by an incredibly high amount of side quests, which is especially apparent in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. Many of them are incredibly poor, consisting of the player clearing out enemy camps or killing set targets, and do little to vary themselves from all of the other quests. While there are definitely some entertaining missions hidden in the miasma of bland ones, these are unquestionably the exception, not the rule. Ubisoft also manages to badly balance the story progression, having large level gaps between each main story quest, essentially forcing the player to trudge through side quests before being able to make actual progress through the game. Placing these main missions far apart leads to a large amount of mindless sprinting from point A to point B due to there being a lack of genuinely interesting things to do across the open world.

Ubisoft has had a lot of success in the past with many of their titles, however, whether it's due to creative disputes, laziness, or simply stagnation, they seem to have hit somewhat of a wall with design philosophy. With so many new Ubisoft titles on the horizon, I am hoping they’ve made some fundamental changes to the way these games play, but I am incredibly doubtful.