Ubisoft - Why?

Here’s a scenario I believe took place: A few years ago the CEO of Ubisoft was at a party. He was having a great time, his company was on the rise, things were looking good all round. After having a few too many drinks, he started feeling a bit cocky.

‘People love Ubisoft games so much, I believe we could act like total dicksbags and they will still buy them,’ he slurred. ‘Why, I bet we could release games so buggy they are virtually unplayable, implement a DRM system so draconian it would shock Stalin, showcase games at expo shows that barely resemble their release versions, utterly shit on PC owners with terrible console ports, put microtransactions into full price games, get into a greedy pissing contest with Steam over prices, and release a massively hyped game that’s so untested we fail to notice some characters resemble a Hellraiser Cenobite. I bet we could do all this and they’ll still come back, asking when the next installment of their favourite franchise will be released.’

Seems another CEO heard this drunken boast:

‘I’ll wager that isn’t possible! Any company that did so much to piss off their customers would never survive, no matter how good their games are. I bet you... one dollar... that it can’t be done.’

Analogies with Trading Places aside, it’s hard to think of another explanation how such a big company could balls things up so often. So why is it that despite all these acts of self sabotage, Ubisoft are still one of the biggest games companies in the world? A deal with Satan perhaps?

When I saw the footage of Watchdogs at E3 2012 I was entranced. The future was here, truly the next generation of games had arrived. As soon as the pre-order became available on Steam I splashed the cash (yes, I realise now that’s never a good idea). Eventually the release day finally arrived and I started the download. I’d read online about some performance issues, but with my monstrously overclocked GTX 770 I knew it wouldn’t be a problem for me. So I load it up, set the graphics options to my usual levels for AAA games and begin… hmmmm… I appeared to averaging 5 frames per second. Well, it is a next gen game, so I decide to knock the settings down a tad… now I average a much more pleasing 7 frames a second. I finally get the game running at a barely acceptable frame rate, but that meant putting the graphics settings down so low it was hard to distinguish it from GTA on my Xbox 360. So I’m pretty pissed off, naturally, and investigate online to see what’s being done to resolve the problem.

Apparently, Ubisoft are working on this issue and a patch will be out ‘soon’. I decide to play Watchdogs in its subpar state until the patch arrives, then I can enjoy it the way it looked at E3. Two weeks later and still no sign of the graphics patch, meanwhile I’m twenty hours into the game; I load up my save one day and… nothing, it won’t load my save anymore. Yup, another problem Ubisoft are ‘working on’. Their advice if you encounter it? restart the game from the beginning. It’s at this point I start searching for Ubisoft’s HQ address so I can post one of my turds to them.

The thing is, once Watchdogs was completely patched and had the E3 effects mod added to it, I really enjoyed the game. Still, that’s no excuse for Ubisoft making me wait almost a month after I bought the thing - and me having to add a mod to it - to be able to play the version I saw at E3. I was lucky enough to buy Black Flag a good while after its release, meaning I missed the terrible launch issues that it also suffered, and that turned out to be one of my most loved games of the last few years. FarCry 3 and Splinter Cell were big favourites of mine too; there’s no question that Ubisoft do make brilliant games - when they get them working. So is this the reason people keep forgiving the company and buying their games, because the final, patched versions are so good it’s worth suffering the shit Ubisoft dump upon us?

The Assassins Creed Unity release was an unmitigated disaster; though this didn’t come as much of a surprise to those who believe history repeats itself. Although Ubisoft did have one plus side from the hideous launch: it took the attention away from the games microtransactions. What was a bit more surprising was that even when ignoring the bugs, the actual game itself wasn’t universally well received. And while Far Cry 4 has garnered positive reviews, it too suffered from release day problems. All this negativity caused the companies share price to drop, about time Ubisoft themselves felt some consequences for their actions.

Yes, Ubisoft are the company a lot of people love to hate, but they bring it on themselves. They’ve bent me over the proverbial table plenty of times in the past, and yet I really do hope they finally learn their lesson from these last few weeks and start making changes. If this has all been a wake up call for them, then maybe we can expect to see some fresh, bug free, optimised, heavily tested, universally loved games in the future. Alas, the more likely outcome is that the next Assassins Creed and Far Cry 5 will be buggy as hell, people will keep buying their products, and Ubisoft's CEO will win his dollar.