During the Q&A portion of its earnings call today, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot touched on Assassin’s Creed Unity’s disastrous launch by acknowledging it wasn’t “perfect”. That’s one way to put it.
His full explanation, in response to an analyst question about how the company thinks Unity’s problems could affect the future of the Assassin’s Creed brand:
Each time there’s a new transition of consoles, we try to create engines that take full advantage of the capacity of those consoles. In the case of Unity, we had to redo 100% of the engine. So when you do that, it’s painful for all the group…and everything has to be recalibrated. With this game, a few things were not perfect when the game was launched. But the engine has been created, and it’s going to help the brands to shine in the future.
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40 responses to “Ubisoft CEO: ‘A Few Things Were Not Perfect’ In Assassin’s Creed Unity”
Haha what a laugh. Every person and their dog knew the game wasn’t perfect.
“It wasn’t perfect… for an assassins creed game”
So they needed more bugs and glitches?
Thats like saying the only a few people died in WW2.
Understatement of the year.
They can’t all be zingers.
you mean, they cant all be Assassins Creed 2?
Brotherhood 😛
Pirates!
Yeah, I stopped caring about the assassin bit a long time ago.
Brotherhood for the Ezio Trilogy but Black Flag overall 😉 lol
yeah, agreed, i really like 2 and brotherhood, and dare i say, i enjoyed playing revelation all coz of Ezio.
how about i just say i like the Ezio games….
Needed to be more like Sea Dogs
the main issues had with unity had nothing to do with the bugs or crashes, the game itself felt like a chore compared to other game in the series, the story hop skipped and jumped all over the place with no explanation, the revolution was almost nonexistent.
Your missing the best bit though:
No. No it wont because you are going to struggle to sell any brands in the future. Anyone in their right mind will at least not preorder another ubisoft game.
That’s a funny way of spelling ‘amazingly busted’
What I find the strangest is that they had an artist spend 2 years sculpting out the model for the Notre Dame cathedral, in such intricate fine detail, and yet all that effort goes to waste when you don’t spend enough time on the core elements (i.e. to make a fun and enjoyable game).
The setting was confusing, and unless you had a degree in French history, made no sense and the game does a very poor job of explaining it to you, without having to read large chunks of a history textbook. The characters were slightly interesting, but because the overall story is just placed in a setting without a lot of context (i.e. Arno doesn’t have really any impact on the “revolution” at all, he is simply a spectator), then it loses its focus.
The worst part is more effort had been put in to put a ridiculous number of collectibles into the world, rather than fill the world with interesting things to do and be part of. The rewards for the collectibles is also a joke. If you have to spend so long going through solving Nostradamus riddles and then all you get is a new “skin” which has no impact on armour, etc, then it belittles the effort you went through to get it.
I’m hoping that for “victory” they can bring back some of the magic from AC2 and AC4. Both of those games are far more enjoyable experiences. AC2 because the story is more compelling and the setting is used to frame the story, rather than the other way. AC4 because it made the exploration interesting and filled the world with interesting things to do (it never gets old being the pirate and pillaging ships).
The problem is not with the engine… The whole problem was trying to force microtransaction into the game plus all the annoying companion chests.
Fairly sure the microtransactions didn’t cause people’s faces to fall off.
That face render is not the biggest issue imo. I feel they prioritise those microtransaction stuff too much and they have not enough time to polish the game. Those crap doesn’t even contribute much to the game
Oh, the game has absolutely terrible and fundamental design issues. Aside from microtransactions it’s also boring and the control changes they made are terrible.
The thing is, the microtransactions actually worked, even though they’re awful. What got people upset at Unity was the fact that, on a technical level, the game was utterly broken. No Faces was just a minor symptom of the game’s general lack of technical polish. The game was dragged through the dirt because of those massive technical problems, not because of their questionable design choices, which was the point I was trying to make.
🙁 I actually quite like the story. I like it more than AC3 🙁
People forgot that AC3 was a new engine too, and it also released a bit of a broken buggy mess. Also agree, the plot in that game is awful. Unity’s plot isn’t as bad.
I couldn’t even finish AC3 until I force myself to complete it before starting Black Flag. It was so boring I fell asleep few times playing it.
I quite like how they added some love twist in Unity. If only they did a dual main character type of gameplay where at certain point you control Elise to go through her story. That would make the game much longer and more fun. But that is sort of not possible with how we can only play as one character due to Animus limitation.
That’s not a proper limitation though, since IIRC you play one short sequence as another character in one of either AC2 or Bros (it’s been a while) where you’re a different character, and Revelations switches between Altair and Ezio in the one game.
@negativezero
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That is true but that is also because Desmond was direct descendent of both Altair and Ezio. You can’t access memory from those that you do not have. At least that is how they have been explaining about animus in the whole finding the apple saga with Desmond.
@letrico: yeah, your particular example couldn’t happen, but there’s no reason they couldn’t shift perspective between characters as long as those characters could reasonably be related somehow. But more importantly, the conceit they used in these games recently was that your’re playing a game made from someone else’s Animus memories, right? No reason why they couldn’t have compiled the memories of multiple people and swap between those perspectives.
@negativezero You are right. I think we are still currently reading Desmond’s memory. It was mentioned in Black Flag that the memory that they were using is the DNA extracted from Desmond, it was still memories from Desmond. I am not too sure about Unity, they did well hiding it so far.
It would be fun if something like that could happen. Covering different perspective of the main characters one go. They need to make the story longer, AC2 had a good length of story but lately all the AC is about collectable.
@letrico: technically they almost did it in Unity, since the guy that kills Arno’s father at the start is
the main character in Rogue, and Rogue ends with you killing him. So that’s two overlapping perspectives there. You could argue that since Kenway’s first mate (I forget his name) in Black Flag got his own DLC where he was the protagonist that they’ve already dabbled with it a bit on that side as well, though I think the events of the DLC don’t overlap with the main game (I never played the DLC, so not sure).EDIT: Added spoiler tag.
@negativezero
You are right. That is why I mentioned about the unknown origin of the memory in Unity. One thing they could do, is to do it like Tales of Xillia. Choose between Jude or Milla with overlapping stories. To be honest I am very interested in Elise’s story. What happened after Arno’s father died and what she went through to join the templars.
@letrico: sounds like DLC!
Should have said “it was broken, but not MCC broken.”
If you had no intention of playing multiplayer then MCC worked pretty well…. I guess there’s that.
If you need to create a brand new engine, maybe give yourselves more than a year to develop, test and release.
They do. There are always multiple AC games in development simultaneously, that’s how they maintain a steady flow.
Ok, what he should have written was “don’t commit yourself to an annual release”.
It’s the same shit, they’re morons for pumping out a new game every year.
I have a transcript of a Unity dev meeting around here somewhere, yeah here we go…
“Develop. Test. Release.
Pick two. And one of them can’t be Test.”
This so much. AC: Rogue should have been 2014’s AC game (it’s a better game anyway) and Unity given the extra year to cook rather than rushed to market.
SERIOUSLY DID HE SAY THIS?” In the case of Unity, we had to redo 100% of the engine” what a complete and utter moron. yeah going from dx 9 to dx 11 engine requires a new effin engine doesn’t it. OMG how can this person even be a spokesperson from the company, do they think they are talking to children. wtf is going on at ubisoft……… but wait…. dx 11 engines have been around for a while and some very good ones out there…. oh that’s right that’s for pc….. and you would rather make your own engine that completely does not work on PCs as intended….. GG UBISOFT. first PC games are screwed by sub par graphics engines then we get screwed by the consoles UMA that pcs don’t have then suddenly our high end GPUS under 4gig ram are useless and cause stuttering and very bad GPU performance…. yeah GG UBISOFT, I hope you all go to hell.
Oh god…
“Video killed the radio star”, now that’s out of my system this child needs to stop mindlessly commenting and learn that his overemphasised opinion doesn’t matter. Eventually all particles will be one and the temperature the same, nothing will be possible, especially PC master race rants
Yeah, maybe developing the game on a hard drive made out of a piece of bread didn’t help.
The lynch mob is in!!
I never had a problem with the game. I think a few of you are just out to attack ubisoft…for shame!