I hate Ubisoft for their business practices, and have for a long time. Everything Jim says is 100% true. That said I personally have to wonder if this sudden criticism is largely connected to them not including a playable female character in the upcoming Assassin's Creed sequel. A complaint which largely seems to stem from a sense of entitlement, which in turn stems from Ubisoft creating a female lead for "Assassin's Creed 3: Liberation", and of course non-white protagonists in both "Freedom Cry" and the original "Assassin's Creed". An issue which amounts to biting the hand that feeds you, as it's kind of ridiculous to basically attack a company for exercising creative freedom when it doesn't happen to match your particular political agenda, while otherwise praising it when it does. Ubisoft's defense of it's choices was fairly reasonable when you actually think about it (it's not just a matter of re-skinning a model to do it right, you pretty much need to animate it seperatly and adjust the entire play environment to match those animations... a few proportional inches in character height can make a huge difference, and we've seen this in other games like the problems with fitting both gender models onto vehicles in "The Old Republic Online"). At the end of the day though, no justification would have been accepted by those leading the attack.
I mean sure, by all means attack Ubisoft for it's business practices, but let's be honest, most of this is a giant re-hash/reminder of things Ubisoft has done wrong in the past, timed in accordance with a perceived political slight.
My basic attitude is that for all it's failings Ubisoft was one of the companies doing the right thing here. It was doing female and "minority" leads occasionally, when the writers felt it fit. A movement pushing for occasional variation should be lionizing Ubisoft's design choices, showing that you can see these things done every once in a while, without it basically changing all games. In short occasional variation won't "take the games you like away from you" so to speak. The problem here of course is that things are becoming exactly the kind of problem that these issues were not supposed to be. Having created something like this in the past, it's becoming viewed as a right that it be inserted into every game, and taken as an offense when it is not.
Perhaps the biggest irony of this entire sequence of events, is that gamers talk about how they want to keep corporate panels away from video game design and let creators have a free hand. On the other hand a lot of the people making these same claims are of demanding those panels insert political correctness (playable female options, minorities, homosexual relationships) into these games, and pretty much take the creative freedom away from the writers. I mean if the writers are straight for example and decide to write only hetero romance options and straight characters that's not all that unusual or weird. Demanding this guy re-write and re-characterize everything so it could all "go gay" seamlessly is exactly the kind of thing we're supposed to be getting away from. Ditto for inserting token characters, or trying to write everything in a gender-neutral fashion. The idea is to give writers the freedom to do what they want, and not have corporations quash people for saying want to write minority or female leads, not to force creators into a narrow alley of political correctness. Given that Ubisoft was the company that did a game featuring an Arab protagonist killing white guys during one of the most controversial periods of West-Middle East conflict (I myself commented on it), one can't exactly accuse them of cow-towing to some kind of mainstream demand. Heck at the time Franco-Muslim relations were in the gutter domestically (in their own country) as well.
Who knows, maybe I'm reading into this too much. The bottom line is that the timing of this week's Jimquisition and it's subject matter is uncanny. Everything said here is fair, and a separate episode does sort or present it as a separate set of issues, but basically if you decide to drag a company through the mud every time they do something you don't care for politically or socially, due to a feeling of entitlement. It discourages companies to want to work with you, and hurts what your supposed to be standing for.
Now, I do understand the whole issue with the "hidden E3" settings, however right now this seems like a "Jihad" against Ubisoft without enough information. Yes, there were things edited out in the game, but as modders will tell you, you find a lot of things like this with games all the time which is why modders dig. This news is comparatively speaking 15 minutes old, Ubisoft might be being honest. How many people have heavily played Watch Dogs with these settings (say doing all quests and playing the full game) and of course what kinds of computers were they using? All told these settings might work good with certain PCs, but not so well with others, and might actually do some damage under prolonged usage. It's possible that with certain PC configurations you might do damage after dozens of hours of play
or whatever.
I *HATE* defending Ubisoft of all companies (do not get this wrong), but honestly I think more information is needed here. This includes coming from Ubisoft itself which seems to be holding it's cards close to it's chest as much as it is lying (a problem with the gaming industry in general, it's hard to tell what is a lie when they generally won't tell you anything of substance). I can't help but wonder if anyone would be so... assertive... about this with so little information if it wasn't for these other issues.
In all likelihood Ubisoft is probably lying, but at the same time, at this stage in the game does anyone really know enough about the long term effects of these settings across a wide-range of PC types to be able to tell? Of course at the same time one can question Ubisoft's policies of showing what they knew were damaging graphics levels during E3 as a demo with a throw-away PC (or one perfectly tuned for it), but that's a slightly different flavor of slime, and is of course dependent on them knowing about this at the time they did the demos.
