Now that Ubisoft has made not one but two pirate-themed games in the Assassin’s Creed universe, a survey being sent out to fans (and through them to IGN) wonders if players wouldn’t just be fine with a straight-up pirate game.
My main criticism of both Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag and the recently released mobile follow-up is all of that assassination and creeding getting in the way of my pirating. I am not alone in this reaction, and Ubisoft seems to have taken notice.
According to IGN, the survey puts forth a pirate-centric, non-AC franchise, asking players what sort of features they’d like to see in such an endeavour, including customisable ships, a deeper economy, more activities on sea and land and cooperative and competitive online multiplayer naval combat.
I wish I were playing that game right now.
Beyond the pirate main, the survey goes on to ask the same sort of questions about the inevitable Assassin’s Creed V that have been asked in surveys about past sequels — should there be a new modern protagonist, would you like to meet more historical figures, etc.
We’ve poked Ubisoft about the survey, and will update should they respond.
I’m fine with the whole franchise taking a breather to focus on a little booty plundering myself. How about you folks?
Comments
24 responses to “Ubisoft Survey Ponders An Assassin’s Creed-Free Pirate Franchise”
I actually thought to myself Id find the game alot more apealing if it was a pirate game and not an assasins creed one
I like Asscreed 2, Brotherhood and Blackflag. But the half arsed boringly written modern day story elements just ruined Ezios and Edwards stories.
Time for Ubisoft to just reboot the franchise with a gameplay and story overhaul
Oh Assassins Creed, how badly you’ve been ruined 🙁
How was it ruined? I just got off playing it and i can say its freaking epic! What didnt you like?
You’ve got to admit, ever since AC2 none of the games were as good, the animus storyline always felt really shoehorned in there too. The gameplay was never challenging and a few other things.
No Ubisoft, we didn’t like AC4 because it was pirates, we liked it because you finally did something different and interesting.
Jesus, why do publishers instantly think that because something new is successful that success lies in milking the absolute crap out of it? Keep trying to innovate and you’ll get massive critical success. You don’t fail by failing to find a decent formula; if you were successful at all in the first place, you’ve obviously succeeded in finding a decent formula. You fail by not changing the formula in any way shape or form.
You are the minority.
People like this game BECAUSE of the pirates, they were different yes but so is a sci fi setting or going back to pre historic times. I for one and many others agree that having a pirate stand alone game would be fantastic because it was the best part, not because it wasn’t a AC game but because having a ship/ crew and being able to board/capture and fight with all the rest is amazingly fun, if it was anything else I seriously doubt it would have been so successful.
They wouldn’t have asked this stuff in the first place if there wasn’t already extreme demand for a stand alone, enough that they think it could be a new franchise, which is great, at least then we would have something fun and innovative to play before they ruined that too.
The more money they can make with stuff like this hopefully new and unique Ip’s will arrive, franchise or not it doesn’t stop you from enjoying a few games.
‘you are the minority’
Have any hard stats to back that? Neckbeards whining on game site and forums don’t count, as they are the vocal, annoying, negative minority. The silent majority, based on the ratio of sales to internet whingeing, are happily playing the game.
The fact the franchise is still going strong says plenty about the attraction of AC.
I agree. I’d be all over a stand alone pirates franchise.
Who on earth *didn’t* think from the very announcement of the game that there was absolutely no need for them to shoehorn this cool pirate game they wanted to make into an Assassin’s Creed game? Worst case of it I can think of since Dinosaur Planet was forced into being a Star Fox game.
A Chinese Theme assassin’s Creed please!
[IMG]http://i.imgur.com/kPNvs07.jpg[/IMG]
like shenmue, that was great, learning fighting technique, wondering trough villages, citys, and the plot, great game to take to the other level nowadays
Wait, they’re asking their fans, exactly what they want from an Assassins Creed game? Then, AC has just been nothing but milk. They’ve never had a plan for the series if they’re just going to let their fans create the game for them.
A lot of the plan for the series disappeared with Patrice Desilets when he left after finishing up his work on Brotherhood (I believe he left due to Ubisoft pushing for yearly releases continuing to focus on Ezio rather than letting him continue with his original vision of a contained story across 3 games with 3 protagonists from different time periods). It’s why Revelations’ story was such a mess, and why AC3 basically killed off any story threads the series had been leading up to. Letting Patrice go was the biggest mistake Ubisoft has ever made in regards to Assassin’s Creed, and they’ve had no idea what to do with the overall series since.
That being said, Black Flag is definitely tops. Probably because it barely has anything to do with Assassin’s Creed. 😛
honestly I really want to play AC4 because I love pirates, but didn’t play 1-3 so have no back story. So I wouldn’t mind a AAA pirate game of a new franchise.
I didn’t play AC before either … and I love Black Flag. There are some story elements that had me a little confused, but the was fixed by reading the wikipedia entries on AC. As a game though, it’s awesome.
back story is entirely irrelevant. I have played 1 2 and brother hood and I still knew nothing about the “real world” story which is admit tingly about 1 hours total play time if you ignore hacking.
so you can enjoy the crap out of this game without caring, if it means that much you could google the synopsis from the previous games (only real world stuff in game stuff is self contained) and fill in the blanks. But otherwise the Pirate half of the game is still incredibly fun inspite of the assassins creed nonsense, I haven’t liked a game this much since Ni No Kuni.
I would have preferred they spent more time focusing on other cool points and periods in history for me to be an awesome assassin in and just make a completely different pirate game. I’ll buy both, i swear.. I just think that while as amazing as Black Flag was.. it wasn’t very .. AC-ish
I couldn’t get into Assassin’s Creed’s story but I’ve always liked pirate games so a full on pirate franchise would be awesome.
Instead of templars vs assassins they should do pirates vs ninjas 😛
It would make sense to be a stand alone series if they wanted to continue the pirate thing along. Despite AC4 managing the pull it off fairly well the assasian and pirate ethos’ don’t really go very well together. It would be good for Ubi to make a pirate game free from the Ac shackles and continue moving AC into different periods of history.
I don’t even think about assassins creed while playing black flag. It just feels like an awesome pirate game that assassins creed esque features. They could have just called it black flag and started a new franchise. They really have nailed the sailing and water battles.
Just Friday I was trawling the net searching for reviews on the best first person pirate games to play on the weekend. Ended up downloading Tropico 2 Pirates Cove from Steam to satisfy my cravings. Was somehow left wanting, a standalone FPS pirate game with open world and ship battles would weaken my knees and moisten my mizzen
As was said by others – I’d love a Pirate themed game. Open world, with character development, and upgrades etc. In fact, look at all the Elite clones/reboots in the works…piracy in space…
AND a S.T.O.R.Y. Something with a real story, not just cliches and tropes.
AND don’t just release the same tripe year after year.
AND don’t do half a dozen DLC
AND don’t do microtransactions
I could definitely go a pirate series without being chained to the AC series.